suddenly as it had been formed the vacuum was filled by a cyclonic rush
of air. There was a detonation as of a hundred vicious thunderclaps made
one, and through the howling, shrieking blasts of wind there rained down
upon valley, plain, and metaled mountain a veritable avalanche of
debris; bent, twisted, and broken rails and beams, splintered timbers,
masses of concrete, and thousands of cubic yards of soil and rock. For
the atomic-powered "Rodebush-Cleveland" neutralizers were more powerful
by far, and had a vastly greater radius of action, than the calculations
of their designers had shown; and for a moment everything within a
hundred yards or so of the _Boise_ behaved as though it were an integral
part of the vessel. Then, left behind immediately by the super-ship's
almost infinite velocity, all this material had again become subject to
all of Nature's every-day laws and had crashed back to the ground.

"Could you hold your beam, Randolph?" Samms' voice cut sharply through
the daze of stupefaction which held spellbound most of the denizens of
the Hill. But all were not so held--no conceivable emergency could take
the attention of the chief ultra-wave operator from his instruments.

"No, sir," Radio Center shot back. "It faded out and I couldn't recover
it. I put everything I've got behind a tracer on that beam, but haven't
been able to lift a single needle off the pin."

"And no wreckage of the vessel itself," Samms went on, half audibly.
"Either they have succeeded far beyond their wildest hopes or else ...
more probably...." He fell silent and switched off the plate. Were his
two friends, those intrepid scientists, alive and triumphant, or had
they gone to lengthen the list of victims of that man-killing
space-ship? Reason told him that they were gone. They _must_ be gone, or
else the ultra-beams--energies of such unthinkable velocity of
propagation that man's most sensitive instruments had never been able
even to estimate it--would have held the ship's transmitter in spite of
any velocity attainable by matter under any conceivable conditions. The
ship must have been disintegrated as soon as Rodebush released his
forces. And yet, had not the physicist dimly foreseen the possibility of
such an actual velocity--or had he? However, individuals could come and
go, but the Service went on. Samms squared his shoulders unconsciously;
and slowly, grimly, made his way back to his private office.

"Mr. Fairchild would li