on. Then with a jolt he became
aware of new surroundings.

He blinked his eyes and looked around. He was in a great laboratory that
hummed faintly with the suggestion of terrific power, that smelled of
ozone and seemed filled with gigantic apparatus.

Two men stood in front of him.

He staggered back.

"Manning!" he gasped.

Manning grinned savagely at him. "Sit down, Scorio. You won't have long
to wait. Your boys will be along any minute now."

* * * * *

Chizzy crouched over the controls, his eyes on the navigation chart.
Only the thin screech of parted air disturbed the silence of the ship.
The high scream and the slow, precise snack-snack of cards as Reg and
Max played a game of double solitaire with a cold, emotionless
precision.

The plane was near the stratosphere, well off the traveled air lanes. It
was running without lights, but the cabin bulbs were on, carefully
shielded.

Pete sat in the co-pilot's chair beside Chizzy. His blank,
expressionless eyes stared straight ahead.

"I don't like this job," he complained.

"Why not?" asked Chizzy.

"Page and Manning aren't the kind of guys a fellow had ought to be
fooling around with. They ain't just chumps. You fool with characters
like them and you got trouble."

Chizzy growled at him disgustedly, bent to his controls.

Straight ahead was a thin sliver of a dying Moon that gave barely
enough illumination to make out the great, rugged blocks of the
mountains, like dark, shadowy brush-strokes on a newly started canvas.

Pete shuddered. There was something about the thin, watery moonlight,
and those brush-stroke hills....

"It seems funny up here," he said.

"Hell," growled Chizzy, "you're going soft in your old age."

Silence fell between the two. The snack-snack of the cards continued.

"You ain't got nothing to be afraid of," Chizzy told Pete. "This tub is
the safest place in the world. She's overpowered a dozen times. She can
outfly anything in the air. She's rayproof and bulletproof and
bombproof. Nothing can hurt us."

But Pete wasn't listening. "That moonlight makes a man see things. Funny
things. Like pictures in the night."

"You're balmy," declared Chizzy.

Pete started out of his seat. His voice gurgled in his throat. He
pointed with a shaking finger out into the night.

"Look!" he yelled "Look!"

Chizzy rose out of his seat ... and froze in sudden terror.

Straight ahead of the ship, etched in