anything about this affair or these men who've got
us--you don't know who they are, do you?"

"No. Do you?" Lee asked.

Franklin jumped to his feet. "Don't fence with me. By God, if I was
bigger I'd smash your head in. They abducted us, because they wanted
you. That fellow said as much near the start of this damned trip. They
won't talk--afraid I'll find out. And you can't guess what it's all
about! The hell you can't."

Lee said nothing. But there was a little truth in what Franklin was
saying, of course.... Those things that the dying old Anna Green had
told him--surely this weird voyage had some connection.

He turned away; went back to the window. There was a sheen now. A vague
outline of something vast, as though the darkness were ending at a great
wall that glowed a little.

It seemed, during the next time-interval, as though the globe might have
turned over, so that now it was dropping down upon something tangible.
Dropping--floating down--with steadily decreasing velocity, descending
to a Surface. The sheen of glow had expanded until now it filled all the
lower hemisphere of darkness--a great spread of surface visually coming
up. Then there were things to see, illumined by a faint half-light to
which color was coming; a faint, pastel color that seemed a rose-glow.

"Why--why," Vivian murmured, "say, it's beautiful, ain't it? It looks
like fairyland--or Heaven. It does--don't it, Lee?"

"Yes," Lee murmured. "Like--like--"

The wall-slide rasped. The voice of one of their captors said, "We will
arrive soon. We can trust you--there must be no fighting?"

"You can trust us," Lee said.

It was dark in the little curving corridor of the globe, where with
silent robed figures around them, they stood while the globe gently
landed. Then they were pushed forward, out through the exit port.

The new realm. The World Beyond. What was it? To Lee Anthony then came
the feeling that there was a precise scientific explanation of it, of
course. And yet, beyond all that pedantry of science, he seemed to know
that it was something else, perhaps a place that a man might mould by
his dreams. A place that would be what a man made of it, from that which
was within himself.

Solemn with awe he went with his companions slowly down the incline.

CHAPTER III

_Realm of Mystery_

"We wish nothing of you," the man said, "save that you accept from us
what we have to offer. You are hungry. You will let us bring you f