19

function

automatically

when

something

I was impressed enough to hang my doesn’t look right.”

mouth open and not say anything. He had an Doc Savage said: “There was no magic effective way of saying what he said, and I about it. I saw Gross change the place-cards, didn’t doubt for a minute that he knew what and Miss Fenisong was fairly transparent—he was talking about, my thought being that she claimed to be a lunar expert, but what all those scientists tonight wouldn’t have all she didn’t know about it was considerable. I but fallen on their knees if he was an ordinary saw McGraff signal her to bring me out on guy.

the terrace. That was fairly obvious. I had the He gave us a piece of his philosophy.

four of them spotted—I’d noticed that they “It’s unfortunate that the moral enlightenment went through a mumbo-jumbo introducing of the human race isn’t keeping pace with its each other to me—and so, without attracting scientific discoveries. It’s frightening to think any more attention than necessary, I asked that a crook might someday get hold of Monk to trail Gross, and Ham the girl. I was something as effective as the gadget they going to do my best with the other two. As it dropped on Hiroshima.”

turned out, my best wasn’t good.”

“What makes you think that thing in the “Whooeeee!” I said. “You had your sky was man-made?”

eyes open.”

“They had it timed. . . . Miss Fenisong “I think the whole arrangement was de-seemed to know to within a few minutes of signed to get me out on the terrace when the the time it was going to come,” he said.

chromospheric eruption occurred,” Savage He was right. And he had me scared.

added.

He had the little cold-footed things scuttling “The chromo—the what?”

up and down my spine. If anybody had said He hesitated. “There was a rather boo! right then. I would have made a good try unique luminance in the sky—”

at jumping right through the side of that ar-

“I saw that,” I said. “You mean you’ve mored car. They had me frightened stiff of got a name for what we saw?”

something I didn’t know what was, and they He shook his head. “I wouldn’t want to didn’t know what was.

be quoted, but it seemed to be in the nature of what scientists call chromospheric eruptions, although certainly I know of no re-Chapter IV

corded instance of such magnitude and purely localized nature. Apparently, too, it HE was dying when he came down the occurred far short of the Appleton stratum, street. Not yet dead of course, but well on his but without the aid of an electronic multiplier, way to it—enough of his life had leaked out it’s hard to say—”

of him that he probably had no very clear “You’ve gone off and left me in the idea where he was going or what he would bushes already,” I said. “Negative and posi-do if he got there.

tive electricity is as far as I go, and all I know Savage saw him first and pointed, said, about them is that they’re marked plus and “Look at that!” Then, when Monk started to minus on a battery. . . . Tell me this—is it get out, he added, “Could be a trap. Stay in bad?”

the car. We’ll drive up beside him.”

He hesitated over that one, too.

This was a fine street of tall modern “It might not be good,” he said.

buildings with no basement entryways and “How do you figure that?”

no iron picket fences to give a staggering “I haven’t figured it. If what happened man trouble. That was probably why he had up there in the sky tonight is what I think it gotten this far. Maybe he had not come a was, it stepped off into the field of advanced great distance, but even a few feet would be science, and when you do that these days, a great distance for him. He kept against the it’s not safe to predict what might be done.

buildings, kept his feet under him somehow, Let me put it this way—if that manifestation in and moved by skidding a shoulder against the sky we saw tonight was man-made, and the buildings.

there are indications it was, we’re up against Our car came up with him as warily as knowledge reaching beyond that necessary a kitten stalking a cricket. We sat there a to create the atom bomb.”

moment. “It looks clear,” Doc Savage said.