e obtained by addressing the
CMTC Officer at the U.S. Army post nearest your home.

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The Atom-Smasher

_By Victor Rousseau_

[Illustration: _It was sublime and terrible, and on the result of that
conflict depended--what?_]

[Sidenote: Four destinies rocket through the strange Time-Space of the
Fourth Dimension in Tode's marvelous Atom-Smasher.]

CHAPTER I

_The "Vanishing Place"_

"Look at that plane! That fellow's crazy! Took off with the wind
behind him! He'll nose dive before he clears the clubhouse! He'll
crash into those trees along the edge of the golf course!"

The group on the field at Westbury, Long Island, held their breaths as
they watched James Dent take off in the wildest, most erratic flight
that they had ever seen. Under lowering storm clouds, with the wind
roaring half a hurricane behind him, Dent spiraled upward as if
unconscious of the laws of Earthly gravity.

"I told you so! You ought to have stopped him, even if it is his
private plane! A feller's got no business trying to break his neck!
Look there! He's cleared those trees after all!"

James Dent had cleared them, and the clubhouse too, and was already
disappearing across the Hempstead Plains, looking like a leaf whirling
up in a winter storm. At a height of five hundred feet he sped
eastward.

"Didn't tell you where he was going?"

"Nope, acted like a crazy man. Something on his mind sure. Wherever
he's bound for, he'll never get there!"

* * * * *

But James Dent was already out of sight, and the little group
dispersed. And Dent, winging his way due east, over the oak barrens of
central Long Island, was conscious neither of the storm that howled
about him nor of the excitement that his rash take-off had occasioned.

The rain lashed him in the open cockpit, the ground fog swirled about
him, and, though it was still afternoon, there brooded a somber
twilight over the wastes. But in his mind Dent was already
anticipating his descent at the "Vanishing Place," as the natives
called it near Peconic Bay.

The "Vanishing Place" was so called because of the terrible and
inexplicable catastrophe that had occurred there five years
previously. In the two-century-old farmhouse, Miles Parrish, the
world's greatest authority on physical chemistry, had been conducting
investigations into the structure of the atom.

James Dent and Lucius Tode had been associated with old Parrish in