nt. He was lying with Milton
and Lanier in another chamber whose force beat upon them. He saw a
yellow-lit room instead of the great cone--saw the tense, anxious face
of Nelson at the switch beside them. He strove to move, made to Nelson
a gesture with his arm that seemed to drain all strength and life from
him; and then, as in answer to it Nelson drove up the switch and
turned off the force of the matter-receiver in which they lay, the
black curtain descended on Randall's brain once more.

* * * * *

Two hours later it was when Milton and Randall and Lanier and Nelson
turned to the laboratory's door. They paused to glance behind them. Of
the great matter-transmitter and receiver, of the apparatus that had
crowded the laboratory, there remained now but wreckage.

For that had been their first thought, their first task, when the
astounded Nelson had brought the three back to consciousness and had
heard their amazing tale. They had wrecked so completely the
matter-station and its actuating apparatus that none could ever have
guessed what a mechanism of wonder the laboratory a short time before
had held.

The cubical chambers had been smashed beyond all recognition, the
dynamos were masses of split metal and fused wiring, the batteries of
tubes were shattered, the condensers and transformers and wiring
demolished. And it had only been when the last written plans and
blue-prints of the mechanism had been burned that Milton and Randall
and Lanier had stopped to allow their exhausted bodies a moment of
rest.

* * * * *

Now as they paused at the laboratory's door, Lanier reached and swung
it open. Together, silent, they gazed out.

It all seemed to Randall exactly as upon the night before. The shadowy
masses in the darkness, the heaving, dim-lit sea stretching far away
before them, the curtain of summer stars stretched across the heavens.
And, sinking westward amid those stars, the red spark of Mars toward
which as though toward a magnet all their eyes had turned.

Milton was speaking. "Up there it has shone for centuries--ages--a
crimson spot of light. And up there the Martians have been watching,
watching--until at last we opened to them the gate."

Randall's hand was on his shoulder. "But we closed that gate, too, in
the end."

Milton nodded slowly. "We--or the fate that rules our worlds. But the
gate is closed, and God grant, shall never again be o