shed. Captain Blake was staring at him as
one who beholds a fellow-man suddenly insane. But the look in his eyes
changed slowly, and his lips that had been opened in remonstrance came
gradually in a firm, straight line.

"Crazy!" he said, but it was apparent that he was speaking as much to
himself as to McGuire. "Plumb, raving crazy!... Yet that ship _did_ go
straight up out of sight--an acceleration in the upper air beyond
anything we know. It might be--" And he, too, stopped at the actual
voicing of the wild surmise. He shook his head sharply as if to rid it
of intruding, unwelcome thoughts.

"Forget that!" he told McGuire, and repeated it in a less commanding
tone. "Forget it, Mac: we've got to render a report to sane men, you
and I. What we know will be hard enough for them to believe without
any wild guesses.

"That new craft is real. It has got it all over us for size and speed
and potential offensive action. Who made it? Who mans it? Red Russia?
Japan? That's what the brass hats will be wondering; that's what they
will want to find out.

"Not a word!" he repeated to the radio man. "You will keep mum on
this."

He took McGuire with him as he left to seek out his colonel. But it
was a disturbed and shaken man, instead of the cool, methodical
Captain Blake of ordinary days, who went in search of his commanding
officer. And he clung to McGuire for corroboration of his impossible
story.

* * * * *

There was a group of officers to whom Blake made his full report.
Colonel Boynton had heard but little when he halted his subordinate
curtly and reached for a phone. And his words over that instrument
brought a quick conference of officers and a quiet man whom McGuire
did not recognize. The "brass hats," as Blake had foreseen, were avid
for details.

The pilot of the incoming plane was there, too, and the radio man.
Their stories were told in a disconcerting silence, broken only by
some officer's abrupt and skeptical question on one point and another.

"Now, for heaven's sake, shut up about Venus," McGuire had been told.
But he did not need Captain Blake's warning to hold himself strictly
to what he had seen and let the others draw their own conclusions.

Lieutenant McGuire was the last one to speak. There was silence in the
office of Colonel Boynton as he finished, a silence that almost echoed
from the grim walls. And the faces of the men who gathered there were
carefully masked