hey're killed. More of them bolt for the jungle.
The city loses better than one per cent of its population a year to
the jungle. And then they're Ragged Men, half mad at all times and
wholly mad as far as the city and its machines are concerned."

Evelyn linked her arm in his.

"Somehow," she told him, smiling, "I think one Thomas Reames is
working out ways and means to help a city named Yugna."

"Not yet," said Tommy grimly. "We have to think of Earth. Not
everybody in the Council approved of us. Aten told me one chap argued
that we ought to be shoved out into the jungle again as compatriots of
Jacaro. And the machines were especially short-handed to-day because
of a diversion of labor to get ready something monstrous and really
deadly to send down the Tube to Earth. We've got to find out what that
is, and stop it."

* * * * *

But on the second day afterward, when he and Evelyn were summoned
before the Council again, he still had not found out. During those two
days he learned many other things, to be sure: that Aten for instance,
was relieved from duty at the machines only because he was wounded;
that the power of the main machines came from a deep bore which
brought up superheated steam from the source of boiling springs long
since built over; that iron was a rare metal, and consequently there
was no dynamo in the city and magnetism was practically an unknown
force; that electrokinetics was a laboratory puzzle--or had been, when
there was leisure for research--while the science of electrostatics
had progressed far past its state on Earth. The little truncheonlike
weapons carried a stored-up static charge measurable only in hundreds
of thousands of volts, which could be released in flashes which were
effective up to a hundred feet or more.

And he learned that the thermit-throwers actually spat out in normal
operation tiny droplets of matter Aten could not describe clearly, but
which seemed to be radioactive with a period of five minutes or less;
that in Rahn, the nearest other city, _cuyal_ was taken openly, and
the jungle was growing into the town with no one to hold it back; that
two generations since there had been twenty cities like this one, but
that a bare dozen still survived; that there was a tradition that
human beings had come upon this planet from another world where other
human beings had harried them, and that in that other world there were
divers races of humanity,