ater, CONCENTRATE, it
struck--straight out toward the face of the sun.

It thrust up with the speed of light--the speed of light? A thought came
to me; incredible I believed it even as I reacted to it. My pulse is
uniformly seventy to the minute. I sought my wrist, found the artery,
made allowance for its possible acceleration, began to count.

"What's the matter?" asked Drake.

"Take my glasses," I muttered, trying to keep up, while speaking, my
tally. "Matches in my pocket. Smoke the lenses. I want to look at sun."

With a look of stupefied amazement which, at another time I would have
found laughable, he obeyed.

"Hold them to my eyes," I ordered.

Three minutes had gone by.

There it was--that for which I sought. Clear through the darkened lenses
I could see the sun spot, high up on the northern-most limb of the
sun. An unimaginable cyclone of incandescent gases; an unthinkably huge
dynamo pouring its floods of electro-magnetism upon all the circling
planets; that solar crater which we now know was, when at its maximum,
all of one hundred and fifty thousand miles across; the great sun spot
of the summer of 1919--the most enormous ever recorded by astronomical
science.

Five minutes had gone by.

Common sense whispered to me. There was no use keeping my eyes fixed
to the glasses. Even if that thought were true--even if that pillar
of radiance were a MESSENGER, an earth-hurled bolt flying to the sun
through atmosphere and outer space with the speed of light, even if it
were this stupendous creation of these Things, still between eight and
nine minutes must elapse before it could reach the orb; and as many
minutes must go by before the image of whatever its impact might produce
upon the sun could pass back over the bridge of light spanning the
ninety millions of miles between it and us.

And after all did not that hypothesis belong to the utterly impossible?
Even were it so--what was it that the Metal Monster expected to follow?
This radiant shaft, colossal as it was to us, was infinitesimal compared
to the target at which it was aimed.

What possible effect could that spear have upon the solar forces?

And yet--and yet--a gnat's bite can drive an elephant mad. And Nature's
balance is delicate; and what great happenings may follow the slightest
disturbance of her infinitely sensitive, her complex, equilibrium? It
might be--it might be--

Eight minutes had passed.

"Take the glasses," I bade Drake. "Lo