y reapplied the power, and by careful adjustment
brought us again to a dead stop.

"Ready to go," he remarked looking at his watch, "and just on time, too.
Take a glass and watch the ground. I am going to have the heat turned
on."

I took the binoculars he indicated and turned them toward the ground
while he gave a few crisp orders into his telephone. Presently from the
ground beneath us burst out a circle of red dots from which long beams
stabbed up into the heavens. The beams converged as they mounted until
at a point slightly below us, and a half-mile away they became one solid
beam of red. One peculiarity I noticed was that, while they were plainly
visible near the ground, they faded out, and it was not until they were
a few miles below us that they again became apparent. I followed their
path upward into the heavens.

"Look here, Jim!" I cried as I did so. "Something's happening!"

He sprang to my side and glanced at the beam.

"Hurrah!" he shouted, pounding me on the back. "I was right! Look! And
the fools called it a magnetic field!"

Upward the beam was boring its way, but it was almost concealed by a
rain of fine particles of black which were falling around it.

"It's even more spectacular than I had hoped," he chortled. "I had
expected to reduce the layer to such fluidity that we could penetrate
it or even to vaporize it, but we are actually destroying it! That stuff
is soot and is proof, if proof be needed, that the layer is an organic
liquid."

* * * * *

He turned to his telephone and communicated the momentous news to the
earth and then rejoined me at the window. For ten minutes we watched and
a slight diminution of the black cloud became apparent.

"They're through the layer," exclaimed Carpenter. "Now watch, and you'll
see something. I'm going to start spreading the beam."

He turned again to his telephone, and presently the beam began to widen
and spread out. As it did so the dark cloud became more dense than it
had been before. The earth below us was hidden and we could see the red
only as a dim murky glow through the falling soot. Carpenter inquired of
the laboratory and found that we were completely invisible to the
ground, half the heavens being hidden by the black pall. For an hour the
beam worked its way toward us.

"The hole is about four hundred yards in diameter right now," said
Carpenter as he turned from the telephone. "I have told them to stop the