t act as though something really important were there.
See?"

"Uh-huh," assented Margaret, doubtfully, just as Crane finished the
final adjustments and moved toward them. A safe distance away from
Seaton, he turned and waved his hand.

Instantly Seaton disappeared from view, and around the place where he
had stood there appeared a shimmering globe some twenty feet in
diameter--a globe apparently a perfect spherical mirror, which darted
upward and toward the south. After a moment the globe disappeared and
Seaton was again seen. He was now standing upon a hemispherical mass of
earth. He darted back toward the group upon the ground, while the mass
of earth fell with a crash a quarter of a mile away. High above their
heads the mirror again encompassed Seaton, and again shot upward and
southward. Five times this maneuver was repeated before Seaton came
down, landing easily in front of them and opening his helmet.

"It's just what we thought it was, only worse," he reported tersely.
"Can't do a thing with it. Gravitation won't work through it--bars
won't--nothing will. And dark? _Dark!_ Folks, you ain't never seen no
darkness, nor heard no silence. It scared me stiff!"

"Poor little boy--afraid of the dark!" exclaimed Dorothy. "We saw
absolute blackness in space."

"Not like this, you didn't. I just saw absolute darkness and heard
absolute silence for the first time in my life. I never imagined
anything like it--come on up with me and I'll show it to you."

"No you won't!" his wife shrieked as she retreated toward Crane. "Some
other time, perhaps."

Seaton removed the harness and glanced at the spot from which he had
taken off, where now appeared a hemispherical hole in the ground.

"Let's see what kind of tracks I left, Mart," and the two men bent over
the depression. They saw with astonishment that the cut surface was
perfectly smooth, with not even the slightest roughness or irregularity
visible. Even the smallest loose grains of sand had been sheared in two
along a mathematically exact hemispherical surface by the inconceivable
force of the disintegrating copper bar.

"Well, that sure wins the----"

An alarm bell sounded. Without a glance around, Seaton seized Dorothy
and leaped into the testing shed. Dropping her unceremoniously to the
floor he stared through the telescope sight of an enormous ray-generator
which had automatically aligned itself upon the distant point of
liberation of intra-atomic energy whic