your assailants," I asked, "and why were you attacked?"

Her assailants, she told me, were members of an outlaw gang, referred to
as "Bad Bloods," a group which for several generations had been under
the domination of conscienceless leaders who tried to advance the
interests of their clan by tactics which their neighbors had come to
regard as unfair, and who in consequence had been virtually boycotted.
Their purpose had been to slay her near the Delaware frontier, making it
appear that the crime had been committed by Delaware scouts and thus
embroil the Delawares and Wyomings in acts of reprisal against each
other, or at least cause suspicions.

Fortunately they had not succeeded in surprising her, and she had been
successful in dodging them for some two hours before the shooting began,
at the moment when I arrived on the scene.

"But we must not stay here talking," Wilma concluded. "I have to take
you in, and besides I must report this attack right away. I think we had
better slip over to the other side of the mountain. Whoever is on that
post will have a phone, and I can make a direct report. But you'll have
to have a belt. Mine alone won't help much against our combined weights,
and there's little to be gained by jumping heavy. It's almost as bad as
walking."

After a little search, we found one of the men I had killed, who had
floated down among the trees some distance away and whose belt was not
badly damaged. In detaching it from his body, it nearly got away from me
and shot up in the air. Wilma caught it, however, and though it
reinforced the lift of her own belt so that she had to hook her knee
around a branch to hold herself down, she saved it. I climbed the tree
and, with my weight added to hers, we floated down easily.

CHAPTER III

Life in the 25th Century

We were delayed in starting for quite a while since I had to acquire a
few crude ideas about the technique of using these belts. I had been
sitting down, for instance, with the belt strapped about me, enjoying an
ease similar to that of a comfortable armchair; when I stood up with a
natural exertion of muscular effort, I shot ten feet into the air, with
a wild instinctive thrashing of arms and legs that amused Wilma greatly.

But after some practice, I began to get the trick of gauging muscular
effort to a minimum of vertical and a maximum of horizontal. The correct
form, I found, was in a measure comparable to that of skating. I found,
a