s
not to be found.

Anita and Venza were gone. I had seen Molo and Meka plunge away with
them as the light-beam burst forth. They were gone, and Snap was gone.

There was, by now, a turmoil unprecedented throughout all the
metropolitan area. The motionless light-beam itself had done little
damage, but its appearance brought instant chaos. Within a radius of
five miles of its base, the city was plunged into darkness. All power
was cut off. Every vehicle, even the aeros passing overhead, and, the
ventilating system stopped. Audiphones were wrecked; it subsided
within an hour, though, and after that, lights and instruments brought
into the area were not affected.

But during that hour, south Manhattan was in panic. A multitude of
terrified people awakened in the night to find blackness and that
screaming sound. The streets and corridors and traffic levels were
jammed with throngs trampling and killing one another in their efforts
to escape.

This was in the stricken area; but everywhere else the panic was
spreading. Transportation systems were almost all out of commission.
The panic spread until by dawn there was a wild exodus of refugees
jamming the bridges and viaducts and tunnels, streaming from all the
city exits.

This was Greater New York. But from Venus and Mars came similar
reports. In Grebhar and in Ferrok-Shahn, doubtless almost simultaneous
with Greater New York, similar light-beams appeared.

"But what can it be?" I demanded of Grantline. "Something Molo
contacted there? He did it. That was what he was working for, and he
accomplished his purpose. But what will the beam do to us?"

"It's doing plenty," said Grantline grimly.

"He didn't intend that. There was something else."

But what? As yet, no one knew. I had already told the authorities what
I had seen. I was the only eye-witness to Molo's activities; and
heaven knows I had but a brief, confused glimpse.

The beam remained; it streamed upward from the rock. They thought,
this night, that Molo's strange current had set up a disintegration of
the atoms, and that electronic particles from them were streaming into
space.

The light-beam seemed impervious to attack. Within a few hours the
authorities were attacking its base with various vibratory weapons but
without success.

From where Grantline and I sat, we saw the dawn coming. But the
radiance-beam remained unaffected. "Gregg, look there at Venus!"

To the east of us there was a distant li