* * * * *

A splash of rain. He awoke, and found himself lying by the barbed-wire
fence in the graying light of dawn. His muscles were stiff and sore, but
he felt a strange sense of exhilaration. A mist was driving across the
valley and enshrouding the scene of the night's debacle. Through the
rain gusts he could see, still standing, the wreck of the tower, with a
fragment of melted inductor drooping from its apex--and a long way off
the Ring. The base of the tower and its surroundings were lost in mist.
He crawled to his knees and looked about him for Marc and Edouard, but
they had disappeared. His field glasses lay beside him, and he picked
them up and raised himself to his feet. Like stout Cortes, silent upon
his peak in Darien, he surveyed the Pacific of his dreams. For the Ring
was still there! Pax might be annihilated, his machinery destroyed, but
the secret remained--and it was his, Bennie Hooker's, of Appian Way,
Cambridge, Massachusetts! In his excitement, in getting over the fence
he tore a jagged hole in what was left of his sporting suit, but in a
moment more he was scrambling down the ridge into the ravine.

He found it no easy task to climb down the jagged face of the cliff, but
twenty minutes of stiff work landed him in the valley and within a
thousand yards of the stark remains of the tower. Between where he stood
and the devastation caused by the culminating explosion of the night
before, the surface of the earth showed the customary ledges of barren
rock, the scraggy scattering of firs, and stretches of moss with which
he had become so familiar. Behind him the monorail, springing into space
from the crest of the hill, ended in the dangling wreckage of a trestle
which evidently had terminated in a station, now vanished, near the
tower. From his point of observation little of the results of the
upheaval was noticeable except the debris, which lay in a film of
shattered rock and gravel over the surface of the ground, but as he ran
toward the tower the damage caused by the Ray quickly became apparent.

At the distance of two hundred yards from the base he paused astounded.
Why anything of the tower remained at all was a mystery, explicable only
by reason of the skeleton-like character of its construction. All about
it the surface had been rent as by an earthquake, and save for a
fragment of the dome or bombproof all trace of buildings had
disappeared. A glistening lake of