barn. He closed the double doors behind
him, and barred them from within. Then he went to the rear wall of the
barn, which was much closer the front than the outside dimensions of the
barn would have indicated.

He took from his pocket a black object like an automatic pencil.
Hunting over the rough plank wall, he found a small hole and inserted
the pointed end of the pseudo-pencil, pressing on the other end. For an
instant, nothing happened. Then a ten-foot-square section of the wall
receded two feet and slid noiselessly to one side. The section which
had slid inward had been built of three-inch steel, masked by a thin
covering of boards; the wall around it was two-foot concrete, similarly
camouflaged. He stepped quickly inside.

Fumbling at the right side of the opening, he found a switch and flicked
it. Instantly, the massive steel plate slid back into place with a soft,
oily click. As it did, lights came on within the hidden room,
disclosing a great semiglobe of some fine metallic mesh, thirty feet in
diameter and fifteen in height. There was a sliding door at one side of
this; the man called Richard Lee opened and entered through it, closing
it behind him. Then he turned to the center of the hollow dome, where
an armchair was placed in front of a small desk below a large instrument
panel. The gauges and dials on the panel, and the levers and switches
and buttons on the desk control board, were all lettered and numbered
with characters not of the Roman alphabet or the Arabic notation, and,
within instant reach of the occupant of the chair, a pistollike weapon
lay on the desk. It had a conventional index-finger trigger and a
hand-fit grip, but, instead of a tubular barrel, two slender parallel
metal rods extended about four inches forward of the receiver, joined
together at what would correspond to the muzzle by a streamlined knob
of some light blue ceramic or plastic substance.

The man with the handsome immobile face deposited his rifle and musette
on the floor beside the chair and sat down. First, he picked up the
pistollike weapon and checked it, and then he examined the many
instruments on the panel in front of him. Finally, he flicked a switch
on the control board.

At once, a small humming began, from some point overhead. It wavered and
shrilled and mounted in intensity, and then fell to a steady monotone.
The dome about him flickered with a queer, cold iridescence, and slowly
vanished. The hidden room vani