d his mind about ditching the girls.

"But where are they now?" I demanded.

"You," said Grantline sternly, "are out of it. Do you think that
Halsey, under Brayley's orders, will neglect any chance to find out
where Molo is hiding? Something is about to happen. This conference is
wrestling with it. In Grebhar and Ferrok-Shahn they're striving to
find out what it is. Something impending _now_. Helios are pouring in
here from Venus and Mars. They're mobilizing their spaceships, just as
we are."

Grantline at last was letting out all his apprehensions on us, with
this burst. "Halsey didn't tell you that the entire resources of his
organization are out upon this thing tonight. Here at this conclave
there's a room of information-sorters. That's just where I came from a
moment ago. Every country on our Earth is making ready--for what,
nobody knows!

"He's had two fragmentary calls from Anita. He has a hundred men ready
to rush to their aid, and to capture Molo's lair. He expects another
message from Anita any moment. This conference here knows every
movement that is being made, within ten or twenty seconds of its
making. Perhaps upon Anita and Venza the whole outcome of this thing
may hang."

We had no answer to that. "Do you know who Molo is? He's an
interplanetary pirate; his ship is the _Star-Streak_."

"Good Lord!"

We had heard of him. For five years past, a gray spaceship, with a
base supposedly hidden in the Polar deserts of Mars, had been
terrorizing interplanetary shipping.

"They think," Grantline went on, "that Molo was cruising with his
pirate ship. He has, as you know, a band of criminals drawn from all
the three worlds. There are about fifty of them, commanded by his
sister and himself. We think that Molo encountered the three ships
which that new planet sent out. The _Star-Streak_ was captured,
perhaps destroyed. Molo and his band, joined with this new enemy, to
save themselves, and because they have been promised rewards."

"But why should these brains want their help?" Snap demanded.

"Wouldn't you say it was because, in Ferrok-Shahn, Grebhar and here in
Greater New York, simultaneously tonight, something has to be
accomplished, something the brains themselves could not do? Molo and
his band know all three cities. How they landed here in Greater New
York nobody knows; the enemy spaceship is 200,000 miles out. Obviously
they came from it, landed secretly with some smaller ship somewhere on
Earth