e was the magnet that drew the eyes of
whatever crew was manning the big craft.

It was dark where the two men stood. Others had come running at their
call, but their forms, too, were lost in the shadows of the towering
pines. The light from an open door struck across an open space beyond
which McGuire and Professor Sykes stood alone, stood silent and
spellbound, their heads craned back at a neck-wrenching angle. They
were oblivious to all discomforts; their eyes and their whole minds
were on the unbelievable thing in the sky.

Beyond the fact that no lights were showing along the hull, there was
no effort at concealment. The moon was up now to illumine the scene,
and it showed plainly the gleaming cylinder with its long body and
blunt, shining ends, dropping, slowly, inexorably down.

"Like a dirigible," said McGuire huskily. "But the size, man--the
size! And its shape is not right; it isn't streamlined correctly; the
air--" He stopped his half-unconscious analysis abruptly. "The air!"
What had this craft to do with the air? A thin layer of gas that hung
close to the earth--the skin on an apple! And beyond--space! There was
the ethereal ocean in which this great shape swam!

The reality of the big ship, the very substance of it, made the space
ship idea the harder to grasp. Lieutenant McGuire found that it was
easier to see an imaginary craft taking off into space than to
conceive of this monstrous shape, many hundreds of tons in weight,
being thrown through vast emptiness. Yet he knew; he knew!

And his mind was a chaos of grim threats and forebodings as he looked
at the unbelievable reality and tried to picture what manner of men
were watching, peering, from those rows of ports.

* * * * *

At last it was motionless. It hung soundless and silent except for a
soft roar, a scant thousand feet in the air. And its huge bulk was
dwarfing the giant pines, the rounded buildings; it threw the men's
familiar surroundings into a new and smaller scale.

He had many times flown over these mountains, and Lieutenant McGuire
had seen the silvery domes of the observatories shining among the
trees. Like fortresses for aerial defense, he had thought, and the
memory returned to him now. What did these new-comers think of them?
Had they, too, found them suggestive of forts on the frontier of a
world, defenses against invasion from out there? Or did they know them
for what they were? Did they wish