ay bells came faintly to the room.

The President--to all but the other actors in the morning's
drama--leaned far back in his chair. The room was suddenly deathly
still. The faint ticking of the desk clock was loud and rasping. There
was heavy breathing audible in the room beyond. The last noonday chime
had died away....

The man at the desk was waiting--waiting. And he thought he was
prepared, nerves steeled, for the expected. But he jerked back, to
fall with the overturned chair upon the soft, thick-padded rug, at the
ripping, crackling hiss that tore through the silent room.

* * * * *

From a point above the desk a blue arc flamed and wavered. Its unseen
terminal moved erratically in the air, but the other end of the deadly
flame held steady upon a glowing, copper disc.

Delamater, prone on the floor, saw the wavering point that marked the
end of the invisible carrier of the current--saw it drift aside till
the blue arc was broken. It returned, and the arc crashed again into
blinding flame. Then, as abruptly, the blue menace vanished.

The man on the floor waited, waited, and tried to hold fast to some
sense of time.

Then: "Contact!" he shouted. "The switch! Close the switch!"

"Closed!" came the answer from a distant room. There was a shouted
warning to unseen men: "Stand back there--back--there's twenty
thousand volts on that line--"

Again the silence....

"Would it work? Would it?" Delamater's mind was full of delirious,
half-thought hopes. That fiend in some far-off room had cut the
current meant as a death-bolt to the Nation's' head. He would leave
the ray on--look along it to gloat over his easy victory. His
generator must be insulated: would he touch it with his hand, now that
his own current was off?--make of himself a conductor?

In the air overhead formed a terrible arc.

From the floor, Delamater saw it rip crashingly into life as twenty
thousand volts bridged the gap of a foot or less to the invisible ray.
It hissed tremendously in the stillness....

And Delamater suddenly buried his face in his hands. For in his mind
he was seeing a rigid, searing body, and in his nostrils, acrid,
distinct, was the smell of burning flesh.

"Don't be a fool," he told himself fiercely. "Don't be a fool!
Imagination!"

The light was out.

"Switch off!" a voice was calling. There was a rush of swift feet from
the distant doors; friendly hands were under him--lifting him-