fulness; sat up and stared. Where the devil was he? The
laboratory--Shelton's--Lina. He jumped to his feet. Dawn was breaking
and its first faint radiance lighted the robot with eery shifting
colors. He berated himself: he'd passed out.

He dashed through the door and made a wild circuit of the grounds.
Empty! No--there was his automatic, where it had fallen. Blood stains
on the grass showed where the encounter had taken place last night.
Must have smashed the Dutchman's nose. But he was gone. Everybody was
gone. He rushed into the house and from room to room, upstairs and
down. The place was deserted.

This was something to think about. Not an automobile around, no
neighbors, not even a telephone. When Shelton went into seclusion, he
did it thoroughly. Eddie returned to the laboratory and hunched
himself in the scientist's chair. Maybe he could think better here.

They had Shelton and his daughter, all right. Kidnapped them. There
was probably some detail of his discovery they couldn't dope out, and
had decided to force him into telling them. The devils would use
Lina's safety as a threat to force him into anything. Horrible, that
thought. And Carlos already had made advances to her.

Startled by a sharp click, he turned around. The robot was whirring
into life. Fast workers, whoever Shelton's enemies were, and up early!
He found the pinch bar with which he had wrecked the television
apparatus and, with a few mighty blows, destroyed the antenna and
headpiece of the mechanical man. They'd not pull off any devilment
with this one, anyway.

A wave meter on one of the benches attracted his attention and he
twirled its knob. It gave strong indication at one and a half meters.
The wave length of their control transmitter! If only he could
find--but there it was: a direction finder. Hastily, he lighted its
tubes and tuned to the frequency shown by the meter. He rotated the
loop over the compass dial and carefully noted maximum and minimum
signals. He had a line on the transmitter! And it must be close by,
for the intensity of the carrier wave was tremendous.

* * * * *

Slipping the automatic into his pocket, he left the laboratory and
struck out through the underbrush in the direction Carlos had taken
the day before. Fighting his way through the tangled shrubbery, he
kept his eyes constantly on the needle of the magnetic compass he had
wrenched from the direction finder. It was tough go