invisibility's gone!" cried Friday.

* * * * *

A score of miles away the body lay, fully revealed, its starboard half
gleaming hard and sharp in the sunlight. Cautiously the _Sandra_ drew
closer. Carse gave the controls to Ban and examined it carefully
through the electelscope, after removing the infra-red attachment.

He saw that the keel of the _Sandra_ had torn a great, mangled rent in
the dome and through this the air had rushed out. Space had taken
possession. The disintegrating rays which had been burning at the
_Sandra_ had been snapped off with the sheathing of invisibility; in
that one wild second of impact, all the asteroid's functioning
mechanism had been destroyed. Lar Tantril had not thought quite far
enough: he had not sealed the buildings air-tight against a possible
crashing of the dome, and for that reason alone he and his men had
gone down in full defeat under the drive of the Hawk.

Shreds of flotsam drifting and turning in space around the dome now
became visible--bits of wreckage hurled out from the tear, and also a
number of white, bloated things which once had been the bodies of men.
The outrushing tide of air had taken them along, and now they drifted,
shapeless, all of a kind, in the lifelessness of space.

"Merciful heaven!" whispered Eliot Leithgow, staring at the
desolation. "Gone! Just snuffed out!"

The Hawk took over again and brought and held the _Sandra_ in a
position a quarter of a mile above the now rapidly falling asteroid.

"They're all dead, I'm sure," he said in a voice hard and emotionless
as his graven face. "They must be, for the asteroid is now visible,
and that means that the doors of the power building were open. Inside
and out, all there is dead, machinery and men.... Still, it had to be
done. It was they or we. A variation of the trick we used to escape
from the dome before, Eliot; and Tantril of course didn't expect it
and protect himself as Ku Sui did that other time. It's all done
now--yes, its gravity-plates too, for see, it's turning."

"And fast!" murmured Friday.

The body was rotating around its longer axis at about twice the speed
of an Earth-watch's second hand. Now the dome was sliding under, out
of their sight, the craggy rock belly coming up to take its place.
Nine hundred miles away was Earth--rather, less than that, for the
body was now free to accept the tremendous gravity pull of the planet
so near. Soon it would p