this isn't
one of them."

_(The End.)_

The Meteor Girl

_By Jack Williamson_

[Illustration: _She seemed to scream, though we could hear nothing._]

[Sidenote: Through the complicated space-time of the fourth dimension
goes Charlie King in an attempt to rescue the Meteor Girl.]

"What's the good in Einstein, anyhow?"

I shot the question at lean young Charlie King. In a moment he looked
up at me; I thought there was pain in the back of his clear brown
eyes. Lips closed in a thin white line across his wind-tanned face;
nervously he tapped his pipe on the metal cowling of the _Golden
Gull's_ cockpit.

"I know that space is curved, that there is really no space or time,
but only space-time, that electricity and gravitation and magnetism
are all the same. But how is that going to pay my grocery bill--or
yours?"

"That's what Virginia wants to know."

"Virginia Randall!" I was astonished. "Why, I thought--"

"I know. We've been engaged a year. But she's called it off."

Charlie looked into my eyes for a long minute, his lips still
compressed. We were leaning on the freshly painted, streamline
fuselage of the _Golden Gull_, as neat a little amphibian monoplane as
ever made three hundred miles an hour. She stood on the glistening
white sand of our private landing field on the eastern Florida coast.
Below us the green Atlantic was running in white foam on the rocks.

In the year that Charlie King and I had been out of the Institute of
Technology, we had built the nucleus of a commercial airplane
business. We had designed and built here in our own shops several very
successful seaplanes and amphibians. Charlie's brilliant mathematical
mind was of the greatest aid, except when he was too far lost in his
abstruse speculations to descend to things commercial. Mathematics is
painful enough to me when it is used in calculating the camber of an
airplane wing. And pure mathematics, such as the theories of
relativity and equivalence, I simply abhor.

I was amazed. Virginia Randall was a girl trim and beautiful as our
shining _Golden Gull_. I had thought them devotedly in love, and had
been looking forward to the wedding.

"But it isn't two weeks, since Virginia was out here! You took her up
in our _Western Gull IV_!"

* * * * *

Nervously Charlie lit his pipe, drew quickly on it. His face, lean and
drawn beneath the flying goggles pushed up on his forehead, sought
mine anx