ticularly
vigorously with Cleveland.

"Congratulations on that camera, Lyman!" he exclaimed. "You did a
wonderful piece of work on that. Help yourselves to smokes and sit
down--there are a lot of things we want to talk over. Your pictures
carried most of the story, but they would have left us pretty much at
sea without Costigan's reports. But as it was, Fred here and his crew
worked out most of the answers from the dope the two of you got; and
what few they haven't got yet they soon will have."

"Nothing new on Conway?" Cleveland was almost afraid to ask the
question.

"No." A shadow came over Samms' face. "I'm afraid ... but I'm hoping
it's only that those creatures, whatever they are, have taken him so far
away he can't reach us."

"They certainly are so far away that we can't reach them," Rodebush
volunteered. "We can't even get their ultra-wave interference any more."

"Yes, that's a hopeful sign," Samms went on. "I hate to think of Conway
Costigan checking out. There, fellows, was a real observer. He was the
only man I have ever known who combined the two qualities of the perfect
witness. He could actually see everything he looked at, and could report
it truly, to the last, least detail. Take all this stuff, for instance;
especially their ability to transform iron into a fluid allotrope, and
in that form to use its atomic--nuclear?--energy as power. Something
brand new, and yet he described their converters and projectors so
minutely that Fred was able to work out the underlying theory in three
days, and to tie it in with our own super-ship. My first thought was
that we'd have to rebuild it iron-free, but Fred showed me my error--you
found it first yourself, of course."

"It wouldn't do any good to make the ship non-ferrous unless you could
so change our blood chemistry that we could get along without
hemoglobin, and that would be quite a feat," Cleveland agreed. "Then,
too, our most vital electrical machinery is built around iron cores.
We'll also have to develop a screen for those forces--screens, rather,
so powerful that they can't drive anything through them."

"We've been working along those lines ever since you reported," Rodebush
said, "and we're beginning to see light. And in that same connection
it's no wonder that we couldn't handle our super-ship. We had some good
ideas, but they were wrongly applied. However, things look quite
promising now. We have the transformation of iron all worked out in