reddish light, and little solidifications were appearing in it!
Eagerly the men looked, as the solidifications spread slowly, like
crystals growing in an evaporating solution.

Twelve o'clock came and went, and one o'clock and two o'clock. Still the
slow crystallization went on. Buck Kendall was casting furtive glances
at the kilowatt-hour meter. It stood at a figure that represented
twenty-seven thousand dollars' worth of power. Long since the power rate
had been increased to the maximum available, as the power plant's normal
load reduced as the morning hours came. Surely, this time something
would start, but Buck had two worries. If all the enormous amount of
energy they had poured in there decided to release itself at once--

And at any rate, Buck saw they'd never dare to let a generator stop,
once it was started!

The men were a tense group around the machine at three-fifteen A.M.
There remained only a tiny, dancing globule of silvery mercury
skittering around on the sharp, needle-like crystals of the dull red
metal that had resulted. Slowly that skittering drop was shrinking--

Three twenty-two and a half A.M. saw the last fraction of it vanish.
Tensely the men stared into the machine--backing off slowly--watching
the meters on the board. At nearly eighty thousand volts the power had
been fed into it.

The power continued to flow, and a growing halo of intense violet light
appeared suddenly on those red, needle-like crystals, a swiftly
expanding halo--

Without a sound, without the slightest disturbance, the halo vanished,
and softly, gently, the needle-like crystals relapsed, melted away, and
a dull pool of metallic mercury rested in the receiver.

At eighty thousand volts, power was flowing in--

And it didn't even sparkle.

V

The apparatus of the magnetic shield had been completed two days later,
and set up in Buck's own laboratory. On the bench was the powerful, but
small, little projector of the straight magnetic field, simply a
specially designed accumulator, a super-condenser, and the peculiar
apparatus Devin had designed to distort the electric field through
ninety degrees to a magnetic field. Behind this was a curious,
paraboloid projector made up of hundreds of tiny, carefully orientated
coils. This was Buck's own contribution. They were ready for the tests.

"I would invite McLaurin in to see this," said Kendall looking at them,
and then across the room bitterly toward the alleged