e earth without years of gradual
acclimation, and even if it did, it would be practically immobile. In a
few years the layer will flow enough to plug the hole I have made, but
even so, I'll build a couple of space flyers equipped with
disintegrating rays as soon as we get down and station them alongside
the hole to wipe out any of that space vermin which tries to come
through. Let's go home. We've put in a good day's work."

Hundreds of the purple amoeba have been destroyed by the guarding ships
during the past five years. The hole is filling in as Jim predicted, and
in another ten years the earth will be as securely walled in as it ever
was. But in the mean time, no one knows what unrevealed horrors space
holds, and the world will never rest entirely easy until the slow
process of time again heals the broken protective layer.

* * * * *

Everyone Is Invited

_To_ "_Come Over in_

'THE READERS' CORNER'"!

* * * * *

[Illustration: _The men of Cleric were surrounding Jaska._]

Earth, the Marauder

BEGINNING A THREE-PART NOVEL

_By Arthur J. Burks_

FOREWORD

_Despite the fact that for centuries the Secret of Life had been the
possession of children of men, the Earth was dying. She was dying
because the warmth of the sun was fading; because, with the obliteration
of the oceans in order to find new land upon which men might live, her
seasons had become stormy, unbearably cold and dreary: and the very fact
of her knowledge of the Secret of Life, in which men numbered their ages
by centuries instead of by years, was her undoing._

[Sidenote: Out of her orbit sped
the teeming Earth--a
marauding planet bent on starry
conquest.]

[Illustration]

_For when men did not die, they multiplied beyond all counting, beyond
all possibility of securing permanent abiding places. One man, in the
days when the earth was young, and man lived at best to the age of three
score years and ten, could have, given time and opportunity, populated a
nation. Now, when men lived for centuries, eternally youthful, their
living descendants ran into incalculable numbers._

_The earth--strange paradox--was dying because it had learned the Secret
of Life. Twenty centuries before, the last war of aggression had been
fought, in order that an over-populated nation might find room in which
to live. Now all the earth was one nation, speaking one tongue--and
there were