to discover--the Norheimans had not yet succeeded in perfecting any
device by the use of which a living man could bail out of a super-sonic
plane.

Phryges waited--and waited--until the second hand of his watch marked
the arrival of zero time. He curled up into one half of the ball; the
other half closed over him and locked. The hatch opened. Ball and
closely-prisoned man plummeted downward; slowing abruptly, with a
horrible deceleration, to terminal velocity. Had the air been any trifle
thicker the Atlantean captain would have died then and there; but that,
too, had been computed accurately and Phryges lived.

And as the ball bulleted downward on a screaming slant, it _shrank_!

This, too, the Atlanteans hoped, was new--a synthetic which air-friction
would erode away, molecule by molecule, so rapidly that no perceptible
fragment of it would reach ground.

The casing disappeared, and the yielding porous lining. And Phryges,
still at an altitude of over thirty thousand feet, kicked away the
remaining fragments of his cocoon and, by judicious planning, turned
himself so that he could see the ground, now dimly visible in the first
dull gray of dawn. There was the highway, paralleling his line of
flight; he wouldn't miss it more than a hundred yards.

He fought down an almost overwhelming urge to pull his rip-cord too
soon. He had to wait--wait until the last possible second--because
parachutes were big and Norheiman radar practically swept the ground.

Low enough at last, he pulled the ring. Z-r-r-e-e-k--WHAP! The chute
banged open; his harness tightened with a savage jerk, mere seconds
before his hard-sprung knees took the shock of landing.

That was close--too close! He was white and shaking, but unhurt, as he
gathered in the billowing, fighting sheet and rolled it, together with
his harness, into a wad. He broke open a tiny ampoule, and as the drops
of liquid touched it the stout fabric began to disappear. It did not
burn; it simply disintegrated and vanished. In less than a minute there
remained only a few steel snaps and rings, which the Atlantean buried
under a meticulously-replaced circle of sod.

He was still on schedule. In less than three minutes the signals would
be on the air and he would know where he was--unless the Norsks had
succeeded in finding and eliminating the whole Atlantean under-cover
group. He pressed a stud on a small instrument; held it down. A line
burned green across the dial--flared re