ad attended that achievement, as death often does accompany
great forward steps; James Quade had gone to a death more hideous than
that he devised for the others. But, in spite of the justice of it, a
moment of silence fell on the three survivors as they came to the spot
where his fate at last had caught up to him.

But it was only a moment. It was relieved by Professor Guinness's
picking up the chunk of radium ore his former partner had hewn from
the cavern's wall. He held it up for all to see, and smiled.

"Here it is," he said simply.

Then he led the way into his earth-borer, and the little door closed
quietly and firmly into place.

For a few minutes slight tappings came from within, as if a wrench or
a screwdriver were being used. Then the tappings stopped, and all was
silence.

A choke, a starting cough, came from beneath the sphere. A torrent of
rushing sound burst out, and spears of orange flame spurted from the
bottom and splashed up its sides, bathing it in fierce, brilliant
light. It stirred. Then, slowly and smoothly, the great ball of metal
raised up.

It hit the edge of the hole in the ceiling, and hung there,
hesitating. Side-rockets flared, and the sphere angled over. Then it
slid, roaring, through the hole.

Swiftly the spots of orange from its rocket-tube exhausts died to
pin-points. There were now almost twenty of them. And soon these
pin-points wavered, and vanished utterly.

Then there was only blackness in the hole that went up to the surface.
Blackness in the hole, calm night on the desert above--and silence, as
if the cavern were brooding on the puny figures and strange machines
that had for the first time dared invade its solitude, in the realms
four miles within the earth....

The Lake of Light

_By Jack Williamson_

[Illustration: _The monster emanated power, sinister, malevolent
power._]

[Sidenote: In the frozen wastes at the bottom of the world two
explorers find a strange pool of white fire--and have a strange
adventure.]

The roar of the motor rang loud in the frosty air above a desert of
ice. The sky above us was a deep purple-blue; the red sun hung like a
crimson eye low in the north. Three thousand feet below, through a
hazy blue mist of wind-whipped, frozen vapor, was the rugged
wilderness of black ice-peaks and blizzard-carved hummocks of snow--a
grim, undulating waste, black and yellow, splotched with crystal
white. The icy wind howled dismally through th