and
therefore the seasons were being lengthened; hence the winters would be
unendurably severe. As we drifted ever farther into space, an unlifting
frost would settle over every portion of the globe, including the
tropics; and life, frozen and starved, would disappear.

It was on July 15 that the world was electrified by an announcement
appearing in newspapers throughout the world. A celebrated firm of
construction engineers, Hogarth, Wiley and Malvine, had not only
discovered the root of the trouble but had contrived a way to cure it.
However, they would need the cooperation of every man, woman and child
on earth; they must be given control of all the world's resources, of
all mines, power-plants, factories, and systems of transportation, in
order to throw everything that mankind possessed into the battle.

At any other time, such a proposal would have been laughed to scorn. But
now, when the world's nerves were stretched taut with terror, men were
eager to clutch at any straw. A committee of alleged experts (who, it
subsequently turned out, were in the pay of Hogarth and Company)
endorsed the claims of the self-styled saviors of the world; legislative
groups, likewise in their pay, voted them unlimited power; dictators and
presidents, in despair, gave them the right of way over great nations.
But what did this matter? What did anything matter, except that Earth be
saved from destruction?

* * * * *

In a concrete-walled, electrically lighted basement chamber, originally
intended as a storeroom, a prisoner stalked restlessly. Up and down, up
and down, up and down the ten-by-twelve windowless space he wandered.
His eyes were bloodshot; his fingers twitched uneasily; his rumpled
clothes bore the signs of a recent struggle. At one side of the room, on
a rude work-bench, some food and water stood untouched. From outside the
closed doors, he could hear the obscene jests exchanged by two armed
guards.

His mind reeled as he recalled the events of the past few hours; how
three men, amid the fogs of twilight, had surrounded him as he emerged
from the apartment house to go for the police; how one of them had
clapped a gag over his mouth, and the other two had forced him into a
waiting sedan.... So swiftly had it all happened that he could hardly
piece together the successive steps of the crime in logical order.

Yet that the deed had been ordered by his former employers was manifest.
His ho