ing their damnedest over all kinds
of preparations. This Wyoming business this summer does not mean a thing
Tao will quit it any minute. You'll see. Some morning we'll wake up and
find them gone. Probably they'll destroy their apparatus, and not bother
to take it back.

"And then, in a year or two, they'll be here again. Not one vehicle next
time, but a hundred. They'll land all over the earth at once, not on a
desert--Tao probably only picked that this time to avoid
complications--but in our big cities, New York, Paris, London, all of them
at once. That's what we've got to face.

"If Tao comes back as he plans, we have not got a chance. That's why Miela
stole this little vehicle and, without it being publicly known in Mercury,
came here to warn us. That's what she was after, to help us, risked her
life to warn us people of another world."

Alan stopped abruptly, and, dropping to the floor of the porch beside
Miela, laid his arm across her lap, looking up into her face as though she
were a goddess. She stroked his hair tenderly, and I could see her eyes
were wet with tears.

There was a moment's silence. I could not have known what Professor
Newland and Beth were thinking, but a moment later I understood.

Then I realized the sorrow that was oppressing them both.

"What can be done?" I asked finally.

Alan jumped to his feet. He began pacing up and down the porch before us;
evidently he was laboring under a great nervous excitement.

"There's nothing to be done," he said--"nothing at all--here on earth. We
have not got a chance. It's up there the thing has got to be fought
out--up there on Mercury--to keep them from returning."

Alan paused again. When he resumed his voice was pitched lower, but was
very tense.

"I'm going there, Bob--with Miela."

I heard Professor Newland's sharply indrawn breath, and saw Beth's dear
face suddenly whiten.

"I'm going there to fight it out with them. I may come back; I may not.
But if I am successful, _they_ never will--which is all that matters.

"Miela's mother gave her up to come down here and help us. It is a little
thing to go back there to help us, also. If I can help her people with
their own problems, so much the better."

He pulled Miela to her feet beside him and put his arm protectingly about
her shoulders.

"And Miela is going back to her world as my wife--her body
unmutilated--the first married woman in Mercury with wings as God gave
them to her!"