ce where the slave ship had gone down.

But one of them--Jim--had something to say, and at last it came out.

"Well, I _told_ you I'd drive you safely back!"

Clee, his arm around the waist of the exhausted Vivian, smiled and
answered:

"But I don't see Vivian's front door."

"We're close enough!" Jim snorted. "After all, I _did_ hit the Earth!"

[Illustration: Advertisement]

The Revolt of the Machines

_By Nat Schachner and Arthur L. Zagat_

[Illustration: "Look!" he gasped. Out on the floor was a shambles.]

[Sidenote: Something in the many-faceted mind of the master machine
spurs it to diabolical revolt against the authority of its human
masters.]

PROLOGUE

_For five thousand years, since that nigh legendary figure Einstein
wrote and thought in the far-off mists of time, the scientists
endeavored to reduce life and the universe to terms of a mathematical
formula. And they thought they had succeeded. Throughout the world,
machines did the work of man, and the aristos, owners of the machines,
played in soft idleness in their crystal and gold pleasure cities.
Even the prolat hordes, relieved of all but an hour or two per day of
toil, were content in their warrens--content with the crumbs of their
masters._

_Then the ice began to move, down from the north and up from the
south. Slowly, inexorably, the jaws of the great vise closed, till all
that was left of the wide empire of man was a narrow belt about the
equator. Everywhere else was a vast tumbled waste of cold and glaring
whiteness, a frozen desert. In the narrow habitable belt were
compacted the teeming millions of earth's peoples._

_In spite of the best efforts of the scientists among them, the
crowding together of the myriads of earth's inhabitants brought in its
train the inevitable plagues of famine and disease. Even with the most
intensive methods of cultivation, even with the synthetic food
factories running day and night, there could not be produced enough to
sustain life in the hordes of prolats. And with the lowering of
resistance and the lack of sufficient sanitary arrangements, disease
began to spread with ever increasing rapidity and virulence._

* * * * *

_The aristos trembled, for they were few, and the prolats many.
Already were arising loud and disheveled orators, inciting the
millions to arise against their masters. The aristos were few, but
they were not helpless. In the blackness o