"Well, I talked with McIlvaine for quite a while. He told me all about
their civilization and about his friend, Guru. You might have thought he
was talking about a neighbor of his I had only to step outside to meet.

"Later on, I dropped around at Bixby's and had a talk with the boys
there. Richardson let me in on a secret. He had decided to rig up a
connection to McIlvaine's machine and do a little talking to the old
fellow, making him believe Guru was coming through in English. He meant
to give McIlvaine a harder time than ever, and once he had him believing
everything he planned to say, they would wait for him at Bixby's and let
him make a fool of himself.

"It didn't work out quite that way, however...."

* * * * *

"McIlvaine, can you hear me?"

McIlvaine started with astonishment. His mental impression of Guru
became confused; the voice speaking English came clear as a bell, as if
from no distance at all.

"Yes," he said hesitantly.

"Well, then, listen to me, listen to Guru. We have now had enough
information from you to suit our ends. Within twenty-four hours, we, the
inhabitants of Ahli, will begin a war of extermination against
Earth...."

"But, why?" cried McIlvaine, astounded.

The image before his mind's eye cleared. The cold, precise features of
Guru betrayed anger.

"There is interference," the thought-image informed him. "Leave the
machine for a few moments, while we use the disintegrators."

Before he left the machine, McIlvaine had the impression of a greater
machine being attached to the means of communication which the
inhabitants of his star were using to communicate with him.

* * * * *

"McIlvaine's story was that a few moments later there was a blinding
flash just outside his window," continued Harrigan. "There was also a
run of instantaneous fire from the window to his machine. When he had
collected his wits sufficiently, he ran outside to look. There was
nothing there but a kind of grayish dust in a little mound--as if, as he
put it, 'somebody had cleaned out a vacuum bag'. He went back in and
examined the space from the window to the machine; there were two thin
lines of dust there, hardly perceptible, just as if something had been
attached to the machine and led outside.

"Now the obvious supposition is naturally that it was Richardson out
there, and that the lines of dust from the window to the machine
represent