this work, which, carried to a successful issue, would revolutionize
the social organization of the world. The energy locked up in the atom
is so stupendous that, as Eddington indicated, a thimbleful of coal,
disintegrated, would carry the _Mauretania_ from England to America
and back again. To unlock this energy would be to set man free from
bondage, to restore the pristine leisure and happiness of Eden.

* * * * *

And because the three men were playing with deadly forces, of
incalculable power, this deserted spot had been selected for the
carrying on of the investigations. The old farmhouse had been
converted into a laboratory. For days together the three had bent over
their tubes and laboratory apparatus, hardly eating or sleeping. And
the day had come when success had seemed almost within their grasp.

Dent had received six months' leave of absence from his duties at
Columbia University in order to prosecute the experiments. As the
weeks went by, and the blind track that the three were following
opened into a clear road, a sort of madness settled upon every one of
them.

The Planck-Bohr quantum theory that the energy of a body cannot vary
continuously, but only by a certain finite amount, or exact multiples
of this amount, had been the key that unlocked the door. But always it
had been Lucius Tode who led the way. Tode was a graduate of the
University of Virginia, and accounted one of the most brilliant minds
of his generation. At thirty, he stood head and shoulders above his
contemporaries.

Dark, handsome, fearless, with a will power that nothing seemed able
to subdue, he had taken the leadership away from old Miles Parrish,
who eagerly and without thought of his own reputation followed in his
assistant's footsteps.

There were the three men--and there was the girl, Lucille Parrish, the
child of Miles's old age. Seventeen, when the catastrophe occurred,
she had come out to the deserted spot sometimes of a Sunday from her
boarding school at Garden City.

And Tode had found time to make love to her when he rushed her back to
her school in his high-powered foreign car!

Jim Dent had known nothing of that until after the catastrophe.
Lucille had been afraid of him, afraid to open her mouth upon the
subject even to her father. And she had been fascinated too, as a
young girl may well be, when a fascinating man of thirty uses his arts
to win her.

* * *