by means of the Atom Smasher. But he's never managed to
enter. He's made himself a god in the eyes of the Drilgoes, the
savages who inhabit these forests. He's planning to lead them against
the city, and he's got an army of thousands from all parts of the
interior, who worship him as divine.

* * * * *

"The Atlanteans are unwarlike. They've forgotten how to fight in their
thousands of years of peace. But they've got a Ray ten times as strong
as Tode's, that brings instant death to everything it touches. It
shrivels it up. It's a different principle. I don't understand it, but
it's this Ray that keeps the Drilgoes from capturing the city.

"Tode's got a laboratory inside the cave, fitted up with apparatus
that he brought from Chicago, the world capital of the year 3000 A.
D., after disintegrating the atoms and recombining them. But he hasn't
succeeded altogether. He hasn't learned everything. The future isn't
quite clear, like the past. There's a dark cloud moves across the
spectral lines and blurs them. I think it's the element of free
will--or God!"

"I know," Jim answered. "He can't hold that boat steady in
four-dimensional space, as he pretends he can. If he could, it would
mean that man was wholly master of his destiny. He can't and he never
will.

"There's an unknown quantity comes in, Parrish. It is God, and that's
what's going to beat him in the end."

"I've not been as idle as Tode thinks," said Parrish, with a senile
leer. "I know more about the Atom Smasher than he dreams of. He thinks
me just an old fool, the remnants of whose brains are useful to him in
his laboratory. That's why he's kept me alive so far. He'll find out
his mistake," he chuckled. "I have something Tode doesn't dream of."

Suddenly Parrish's air of intense seriousness vanished. He chuckled
and fumbled in his rags. Jim felt a small object like a lever pressed
into his hand and then withdrawn.

"It's death, Dent," chuckled old Parrish. "The concentrated essence of
the destructive principle. It's a lever I fitted into a concealed
groove in the Atom Smasher unknown to Tode. This lever has a universal
joint and connects with a hidden chamber, and when pulled will
catapult the annihilated components of a small quantity of uranium in
any direction we desire. The release of the slumbering energy of this
uranium will produce an explosion of proportions beyond the wildest
dreams of engineers--perhaps, one gre