ly
remembered hearing his car motor start. He found his car missing. He
swore, then, and grimly began to hunt for a telephone in the house.
But before he had raised central he heard the deep-toned purring of
the motor again. His car was coming swiftly back to the house. And he
saw, through a window, that Von Holtz was driving it.

The lean young man got out of it, his face white with passion. He
started for the laboratory. Tommy intercepted him.

"I--went to get materials for making the metal," said Von Holtz
hoarsely, repressing his rage with a great effort. "I shall begin at
once, Herr Reames."

Tommy said nothing whatever. Von Holtz was lying. Of course. He
carried nothing in the way of materials. But he had gone away from the
house, and Tommy knew as definitely as if Von Holtz had told him, that
Von Holtz had gone off to communicate in safety with someone who
signed his correspondence with a J.

Von Holtz went into the laboratory. The four-cylinder motor began to
throb at once. The whine of the dynamo arose almost immediately after.
Von Holtz came out of the laboratory and dived into a shed that
adjoined the brick building. He remained in there.

Tommy looked at the trip register on his speedometer. Like most people
with methodical minds, he had noted the reading on arriving at a new
destination. Now he knew how far Von Holtz had gone. He had been to
the village and back.

"Meaning," said Tommy grimly to himself, "that the J who wants plans
and calculations is either in the village or at the end of a
long-distance wire. And Von Holtz said he was on the way. He'll
probably turn up and try to bribe me."

* * * * *

He went back into the laboratory and put his eye to the eyepiece of
the dimensoscope. Smithers had his blow-torch going and was busily
accumulating an apparently unrelated series of discordant bits of
queerly-shaped metal. Tommy looked through at the strange mad world he
could see through the eyepiece.

The tree-fern forest was still. The encampment of the Ragged Men was
nearly quiet. Sunset seemed to be approaching in this other world,
though it was still bright outside the laboratory. The hours of day
and night were obviously not the same in the two worlds, so close
together that a man could be flung from one to the other by a
mechanical contrivance.

The sun seemed larger, too, than the orb which lights our normal
earth. When Tommy swung the vision instrument