our wrecked ship.

No sooner, though, did I tense myself for a second leap than I felt a
nerveless sensation in my knees, as though the bones had turned to
butter, and knew that my high hopes had budded too soon. Instead of
leaping, I staggered on for two short steps, then stopped because I
could stagger no farther. Looking back at the cruiser, I saw that
LeConte, still on the gangway, had stopped also. Captain Crane and Koto
were making weak, despairing signs at me from the entrance to the
control room. Both of them looked as sick as cats. I heard a laugh, a
shrill, rasping sort of laugh, from the forward end of the bright
cruiser, and I looked in that direction.

I saw a short man, bald headed, with frog eyes peering at us from behind
thick prismatic glasses. He was clad in baggy green overalls, and was
slowly waving in our direction a glistening metal tube which he held in
both hands. From the end of the tube emanated a purplish light.

"You were clever, my good young friends," he chortled, "to think of
fighting with your hands, but you were not quite quick enough. Not
to-day goes anyone in my cruiser! What do you think of the enervating
ray, heh? Ingenious, not? Ludwig Leider discovered it. I am Ludwig
Leider. You shall come with me and with your own eyes watch the
de-energizing of New York and Paris and Berlin. For I am ready to do
away with your paltry Earth now!"

I felt the last energy ooze out of me and I sunk, all in a heap, on the
floor of Ludwig Leider's cavern.

CHAPTER V

_Death in a Box_

New York. We did see it with our own eyes. The instrument through which
we gazed was like a metal box with a ground-glass top and a mesh of
slender wires leading away from the table on which the box rested.
Leider touched a button amidst a long row of buttons on the table. All
we had to do after that was to look at the ground-glass plate, and the
picture was there.

We, in Leider's private laboratory on Orcon, saw the crowds of a mass
meeting of some sort in Union Square, saw a boy and a girl kissing each
other in the shadow of bushes in Central Park, saw a little fox terrier
watching with only one eye open.

We could not speak, any of the four of us, as we stared at that very
simple box which wrought miracles. I stood still, thinking of the things
which had happened after our capture, when the cruiser had already
seemed to be in our grasp.

First of all, Leider had restored our energy to us by the s