on, perhaps, this we have
seen--an ignition of gasses in the upper air--who knows? But don't
connect this with your mysterious ship. If the ship is a menace, if it
means war, that is your field of action, not mine. And you will be
fighting with someone on Earth. It must be that some country has
gained a big lead in aeronautics. Now I must get to work."

"I'll not wait," said McGuire. "I will start for the field; get there
by daylight, if I can find my way down that road in the dark."

"Thanks a lot." He paused a moment before concluding slowly: "And in
spite of what you say, Professor, I believe that we will have
something to get together on again in this matter."

The scientist, he saw, had turned again to his instrument. McGuire
picked his way carefully along the narrow path that led where he had
parked his car. "Good scout, this Sykes!" he was thinking, and he
stopped to look overhead in the quick-gathering dark at that
laboratory of the heavens, where Sykes and his kind delved and probed,
measured and weighed, and gathered painstakingly the messages from
suns beyond counting, from universe out there in space that added
their bit of enlightenment to the great story of the mystery of
creation.

He was humbly aware of his own deep ignorance as he backed his car,
slipped it into second, and began the long drive down the tortuous
grade. He would have liked to talk more with Sykes. But he had no
thought as he wound round the curves how soon that wish was to be
gratified.

* * * * *

Part way down the mountainside he again checked his car where he had
stopped on the upward climb and reasoned with himself about his
errand. Once more he looked out over the level ground below, a vast
glowing expanse of electric lights now, that stretched to the ocean
beyond. He was suddenly unthrilled by this man-made illumination, and
he got out of his car to stare again at the blackness above and its
myriad of stars that gathered and multiplied as he watched.

One brighter than the rest winked suddenly out. There was a
constellation of twinkling lights that clustered nearby, and they too
vanished. The eyes of the watcher strained themselves to see more
clearly a dim-lit outline. There were no lights: it was a black
shape, lost in the blackness of the mountain sky, that was blocking
out the stars. But it was a shape, and from near the horizon the pale
gleams of the rising moon picked it out in softest