You have not mentioned this affair to anyone, Shiro?"

"No, sir. It wasn't anything you'd be likely to tell: nobody would
believe you. I went at once to have my arm attended to, and then
reported here according to orders."

"Very good, Shiro. Keep the entire affair to yourself. I will make all
the necessary reports. That is an order--understand?"

"Yes, sir."

"Then that will be all. Take good care of your arm."

He saluted with his good hand and left me.

* * * * *

Later in the day I wrote in the log-book of the Ertak the report I
mentioned at the beginning of this tale:

"Just before departure, discovered stowaway, apparently
demented, and ejected him."

That was a perfectly truthful statement, and it served its purpose. I
have given the whole story in detail just to prove what I have so
often contended: that these owlish laboratory men whom this age
reveres so much are not nearly so wise and omnipotent as they think
they are.

I am quite sure that they would have discredited, or attempted to
discredit, my story, had I told it at the time. They would have
resented the idea that someone so much ahead of them had discovered a
principle that still baffles this age of ours, and I would have had no
evidence to present.

Perhaps even now the story will be discredited; if so, I do not care.
I am much too old, and too near the portals of that impenetrable
mystery, in the shadow of which I have stood so many times, to concern
myself with what others may think or say.

I know that what I have related here is the truth, and in my mind I
have a vivid and rather pitiful picture of a mangled body, bloody and
alone, in the barn-like structure the ancient paper had described; a
body, broken and motionless, lying athwart the striated metal disc,
like a sacrificial victim--a victim and a sacrifice of science.

There have been many such.

Manape the Mighty

A COMPLETE NOVELETTE

_By Arthur J. Burks_

CHAPTER I

_Castaway_

[Illustration: _There, the words were written._]

[Sidenote: High in jungle treetops swings young Bentley--his human
brain imprisoned in a mighty ape.]

Lee Bentley never knew how many others, if any, lived on after the
_Bengal Queen_ struck the hidden reef and sank like a stone. He had
only a hazy memory of the catastrophe, and recalled that when she had
struck and the alarm had gone rocketing through the great passenger
boat--though n