ld to Jim's wrist while it emitted a coarse vibratory hum that
whined slowly up in pitch until it passed the range of hearing. He did
the same thing to Clee, and then he quietly left.

But the two Earthlings knew nothing of this. Limp on the floor,
oblivious to everything, they slept....

* * * * *

Some hours later found the kidnapped men well recovered and sitting on
the floor of their cell talking over their situation. As usual, Wilson
was thinking out loud.

"What can they be?--or who?" he asked, frowning with his thought.
"They can't be from Earth, for no one there could invent such a ship
as this and keep it a secret; and even if someone had, he could never
have done the equally astounding thing of inventing a way to render
living bodies invisible. I doubt if the thing that caught us was
human, by what I was able to feel in my short struggle with it. There
was something that might have been a hand; but the strength and the
weight of its body was enormous!"

"Well, we'll probably soon see," commented Clee with philosophic
resignation and pulling out of a hip pocket a package of tobacco and
his corn-cob pipe. "Or, rather, we may soon know. Our captors may keep
themselves invisible; and of course it's barely possible that it's
their natural state to be invisible, so that we may never hope to see
them. What I'm chiefly afraid of, is that they are from some other
planet, and that that's where we are being taken--though heaven knows
what any creatures so infinitely far ahead of us Earthlings
scientifically could want with a pair of young Earth lawyers!"

He offered the package to Jim. "Here, have a smoke; you'll feel
better," he said. "While there's tobacco there's hope."

"At least they don't seem disposed to kill us right off," returned
Jim, handing back the tobacco after lighting his own pipe. "Later--if
there's to _be_ any 'later' for us--we may be able to find a way to
get out of this room; though how we'd run the ship, to get back home,
is another hard brick wall.... Maybe the controls are invisible, too!"
he suggested with a wry grin. "Ever take any pre-law courses on how
to work the invisible controls of a space ship?"

* * * * *

Clee's reply was spoken low, and was entirely irrelevant.

"That's funny," he said.

He was looking at the face of the watch on his left wrist. For the
first time since they had been abducted, its abnormal brigh