f their smallest space
ships escaped destruction.

* * * * *

"Planning a new and decisive assault, the Shining Ones planted atomic
mines throughout the foundations of Atlantis. But the Atlanteans struck
first by a matter of hours. At a set moment every volcanic vent on the
Earth's surface belched forth colossal volumes of a green gas. Though
that gas was harmless to creatures of Earth, it meant slow but certain
death to all Rikorians. Furiously the Shining Ones struck their own
blow, setting off the cataclysmic explosion that sank Atlantis forever
beneath the waters of the Atlantic. Scarcely a handful of Atlanteans
escaped, but Rikor's victory was a hollow one. Earth's air was so
thoroughly poisoned that it would require centuries of slow ionization
by sunlight to again make it fit for Rikorian breathing. The Shining
Ones had at most three months before the slow poison would weaken their
bodies to the danger point."

"Why didn't they go back to their own planet, then, where they
belonged?" broke in the truculent voice of Garrigan again.

"That was impossible," Layroh answered impatiently. "The few space ships
they had left would carry barely a score, and Rikor's sun was already so
far advanced in its swing away from Earth that there would be time for
only one trip. There was only one chance for survival remaining to them.
They knew of a process of suspended animation in which their bodies
could survive almost indefinitely without being harmed by the Atlantean
gas. They would require outside aid to be awakened from that dormant
state, so a small group of them must remain active and embark for Rikor,
to try to survive there until Rikor returned near enough to the Earth
for them to again cross the void.

* * * * *

"The dormant ones must have a retreat so well hidden that they would not
be disturbed during the thousand centuries that must elapse before they
could be awakened. The Shining Ones sped back to their base on the North
American continent and in the three months remaining to them they
prepared this cavern here in the heart of the mountain. Radium bulbs
supplied its light. For the unfailing source of electrical energy needed
to course through the dormant bodies and keep them alive they tapped the
magnetic field of the planet itself, the force produced as the Earth
rotates in the sun's electrical field like an armature spinning within
the coils of