'Glass of water, please,' said Takahira to a helmeted shape that leaped
forward. 'He is a little faint.'

The lights switched off, and the darkness stunned like an avalanche. We
could hear Dragomiroff's teeth on the glass edge.

Pirolo was comforting him.

'All right, all ra-ight,' he repeated. 'Come and lie down. Come below
and take off your mask. I give you my word, old friend, it is all right.
They are my siege-lights. Little Victor Pirolo's leetle lights. You know
_me_! I do not hurt people.'

'Pardon!' Dragomiroff moaned. 'I have never seen Death. I have never
seen the Board take action. Shall we go down and burn them alive, or is
that already done?'

'Oh, hush,' said Pirolo, and I think he rocked him in his arms.

'Do we repeat, sir?' Arnott asked De Forest.

'Give 'em a minute's break,' De Forest replied. 'They may need it.'

We waited a minute, and then MacDonough's Song, broken but defiant, rose
from undefeated Chicago.

'They seem fond of that tune,' said De Forest. 'I should let 'em have
it, Arnott.'

'Very good, sir,' said Arnott, and felt his way to the Communicator
keys.

No lights broke forth, but the hollow of the skies made herself the
mouth for one note that touched the raw fibre of the brain. Men hear
such sounds in delirium, advancing like tides from horizons beyond the
ruled foreshores of space.

'That's our pitch-pipe,' said Arnott. 'We may be a bit ragged. I've
never conducted two hundred and fifty performers before.' He pulled out
the couplers, and struck a full chord on the Service Communicators.

The beams of light leaped down again, and danced, solemnly and awfully,
a stilt-dance, sweeping thirty or forty miles left and right at each
stiff-legged kick, while the darkness delivered itself--there is no
scale to measure against that utterance--of the tune to which they kept
time. Certain notes--one learnt to expect them with terror--cut through
one's marrow, but, after three minutes, thought and emotion passed in
indescribable agony.

We saw, we heard, but I think we were in some sort swooning. The two
hundred and fifty beams shifted, re-formed, straddled and split,
narrowed, widened, rippled in ribbons, broke into a thousand white-hot
parallel lines, melted and revolved in interwoven rings like
old-fashioned engine-turning, flung up to the zenith, made as if to
descend and renew the torment, halted at the last instant, twizzled
insanely round the horizon, and vanished, to b