s through one of them, the barring current struck
you like a wall, with darting sparks when it was touched. As Wolfgar had
said, we had access to the upper balcony; the waist-high rail there,
with its needle-points of electrodes, sent up a visible stream of the
Nth Electrons--a dull glow by daylight; at night a riot of colors and
snapping sparks.

Through this barrage an inner vista of the city was visible; towers,
arcades, landing-stages and spider bridges a hundred feet or so above
us; the lower levels beneath, and through a canyon of walls we could
just make out a corner of the ground-plaza, with its trees and beds of
flowers.

A queerly flat little city--tropical with banana trees and vivid foliage
in every corner plot of the viaducts. At night it was beautiful with its
romantic spreading lights of soft rose and violet tubes, and there was a
fair patch of open sky above us--a deep purple at night, star-strewn.

Under other circumstances our imprisonment would not have been irksome.
But these hours, most critical of any in the history of the nations of
Earth, Venus and Mars, unfolded their momentous events while we were
forced there to helpless idleness. All sending apparatus of our
instrument room was permanently disconnected. But the news came in to us
from a hundred sources--rolled out for us in the announcer's droning
words; printed for permanent record upon the tapes and visible images of
it all constantly were flashing upon the mirrors.

We spent hours in that instrument room--one or the other of us was
almost always there. Save that we were ourselves isolated from
communication, we were in touch with everything. A whim of this Tarrano;
perhaps a strain of vanity that Elza should see and hear of these
events.

So much had occurred already during those hours of our trip over the
Polar ocean and back that we scarce could fathom it. But gradually we
pieced it together. Underlying it all, Tarrano's dream of universal
conquest was plain. In the Venus Cold Country he had started his
wide-flung plans. Years of planning, with plans maturing slowly,
secretly, and bursting now like a spreading ray-bomb upon the three
worlds at once.

In Venus, the Cold Country had conquered its governing Central State.
Tarrano's army there was in full control. The helio station in the Great
City was now reinstated. The Tarrano officials had already set up their
new government. With notification to the Earth and Mars that they
dem