y; had he been alive he
couldn't possibly have maneuvered his chute to land him on such a small
place.

The partners stared at each other. It seemed strange to them indeed that
Kress should have come back to land on the roof of the two who had
promised to follow him into the stratosphere if he didn't return.

Very strange indeed.

He had returned, though, releasing Jeter and Eyer from their promise.
Strangely enough that fact made them all the more determined to go. And
while the newspaper reporters went wild over Kress' return, the partners
started making additional plans.

CHAPTER III

_Strange Levitation_

"In two days we'll be ready, Tema," said Lucian Jeter quietly. "And make
no mistake about it; when we take off for the stratosphere we're going
to encounter strange things. Nobody can tell me that Kress' plane
actually flew three weeks! And where did it come down? Why didn't Kress
use the parachute ball? Where is it? I'll wager we'll find answers to
plenty of those questions--if we live!"

"If we live?" repeated Eyer. "You mean--?"

"You know what happened to Kress? Or rather you know the result of what
happened to him?"

"Sure."

"Why should we be immune? I tell you, Eyer, we're on the eve of
something colossal, awe-inspiring--perhaps catastrophic."

Eyer grinned. Jeter grinned back at him. If they knew they flew
inescapably to death they still would have grinned. They had plenty of
courage.

"We'd better go into town for a meeting with newspaper people," went on
Jeter. "You know how things go in the news; there are probably plenty of
stories which for one reason or another have not been published. Maybe
the law has clamped down on some of them. I've a feeling that if
everything were told, the whole world would be frightened stiff. And you
notice how quickly the papers finished with the Kress' thing."

Eyer knew, all right. The papers had broken the story of the return in
flaming scareheads. Then the thing had come to a full stop. It was
significant that no real satisfactory explanation had been offered by
any one. The papers had, on their own initiative, tried to communicate
with Sitsumi, and the three Chinese scientists, and had failed all
around. Sitsumi did not answer, denied himself to representatives of the
American press in Japan, and crawled into an impenetrable Oriental
shell. The three Chinese could not answer, according to advices from
Peking, because they could not be located.