aced the Earth; and this time, Herman
was somehow convinced, it was not going to hold him up.

"Let go!" he shouted, struggling. "Ouch!" He had struck Four-eyes
squarely on the flat nose, and it felt as if he had slugged an anvil.

Paying no attention, Four-eyes turned Herman over, pinned his arms to
his sides, and dropped him neatly through the larger of the two
circles.

Herman shut his eyes tightly and despairingly repeated the
multiplication table up to 14 x 14. When he opened them again, he was
apparently hanging in mid-space, with Hairy to his left and Four-eyes
to his right. The visible globe around them was so curiously tinted
and mottled that it took Herman a long time to puzzle it out. Ahead of
them was the darkest area--the void he had seen before. This was oval
in shape, and in places the stars shone through it clearly. In others,
they were blocked off entirely or dimmed by a sort of haze.

Surrounding this, and forming the rest of the sphere, was an area that
shaded from gold shot with violet at the borders, to an unbearable
blaze of glory at the center, back the way they had come and a little
to the right. Within this lighted section were other amorphous areas
which were much darker, almost opaque; and still others where the
light shone through diluted to a ruddy ghost of itself, like
candlelight through parchment.

Gradually Herman realized that the shapes and colors he saw were the
lighted and dark hemispheres of Earth. The dark areas were the oceans,
deep enough in most places to shut out the light altogether, and those
parts of the continents, North and South America behind him, Europe
and Asia ahead, Africa down to the right, which were heavily forested.

Herman's earlier conviction returned. Things like this just did not
happen. _Physician, heal thyself!_

"You're not real," he said bitterly to Four-eyes.

"Not very," Four-eyes agreed. "I'm twice as real as that jerk,
though," he insisted, pointing to Hairy.

Ahead of them, or "below," a point of orange light was slowly
swelling. Herman watched it without much interest.

Hairy broke out into a torrent of cursing. "I this and that in the
milk of your this!" he said. "I this, that and the other in the this
of your that. Your sister! Your cousin! Your grandmother's uncle!"

Four-eyes listened with awed approval. "Them was good books, hah?" he
asked happily.

"Better than those scratchings in the caves," Hairy said.

"Something to think a