Dazedly they looked around. What had once been mountains were now desks and chairs. They were back again in the laboratory. Several agonizing minutes pa.s.sed before either could grasp the startling change in things. The horror of the electronic disaster still filled their minds to overflowing.

Carruthers recovered first. He stepped from the railed inclosure marking the spot where the atomic beam had restored them after their s.p.a.ce flight, and guided the girl to a chair. Karl's face was drawn and white as his eyes rested on the two pitiful figures that had materialized out of the ether.

"Don't ask us any questions yet," spoke Carruthers in a tired voice.

"We've pa.s.sed through too many horrors. What was the matter, Karl?

Couldn't you get the rays to work sooner?"

"Sooner?" Danzig's eyes were wide with wonder. He glanced at his watch. "It was a little difficult to control both machines all alone, but I switched off the ray from the inverse dimensional tubes and turned on the other immediately. All in all it must have taken me fifteen seconds."

"Fifteen seconds," repeated Carruthers, dazedly. "It's unbelievable."

He dropped wearily into a chair and rested his forehead in the palms of his hands. "How long have we been gone, Nan?"

Nanette pulled the ragged remnants of a dress around her knees and attempted a smile. "Almost four months, according to the pa.s.sage of time on the electron."

"Impossible!" whispered Danzig, shutting his eyes to the truth.

Aaron Carruthers pointed to his clothes, now ragged and torn. "Look, Karl! Everything I have on is worn out completely. Observe my hair and beard, and the soles of my shoes. Human reason to the contrary, Nanette and I have lived like two animals for four months, and all in the s.p.a.ce of fifteen seconds earth time. How can you account for it?

We figured it out on paper. And we've proved it with our bodies. What it will mean to future civilization I can't foretell. It's beyond imagination."

And the laboratory became silent as a tomb as the three people tried with all the strength of their minds to grasp the miracle of the strange and unfathomable atomic rays.

PRODUCING HEAT BY ARCTIC COLD

Producing heat by means of Arctic cold is a fantastic but none the less quite practicable idea evolved by Dr. H. Barjou of the French Academy of Science. Dr. Barjou says the water under the ice in the Arctic region is about 70 degrees Fahrenheit. While the air is many degrees less, there may even be a difference of 50 degrees. The unfrozen water could be pumped into a tank and permitted to freeze, thus generating heat, as freezing a cubic meter of ice liberates about as much heat as burning twenty-two pounds of coal. The heat produced would vaporize a volatile hydrocarbon which would drive a turbine.

For condensing the hydrocarbon again, Dr. Barjou says great blocks of brine could be used.

Not only would the Arctic regions become comfortably habitable by means of this utilization of energy, contends Dr. Barjou, but heat also could be furnished for the rest of the world.

Now if some one only can discover how to make the Sahara Desert send forth cooling waves, the world will be perfect, temperaturally.

Jetta of the Lowlands

PART TWO OF A THREE-PART NOVEL

_By Ray c.u.mmings_

[Ill.u.s.tration: We were invisible!]

[Sidenote: Into remote Lowlands, in an invisible flyer, go Grant and Jetta--prisoners of a scientific depth bandit.]

WHAT HAS GONE BEFORE

In the year 2020 the oceans have long since drained from the surface of the earth, leaving bared to sun and wind the one-time sea floor.

Much of it is flat, caked ooze, cracked and hardened, with, here and there, small sc.u.m-covered lakes, bordered by slimy rocks. It is hot, down in the depth of the great Lowland areas, and it is chiefly adventurers and outcasts of human kind who can endure life in what few towns there are.

Into Nareda, the capital village of the tiny Lowland Republic of Nareda, goes Philip Grant, an operative of the United States Customs Department, on a dangerous a.s.signment--to ferret out the men who are smuggling mercury into the United States from that place.

Grant falls in love with Jetta, the daughter of Jacob Sp.a.w.n, a big mercury mine owner of Nareda, only to learn that Sp.a.w.n has promised her in marriage to Greko Perona, the country's Minister of Internal Affairs.

Grant follows Perona to a midnight Lowland rendezvous with mysterious strangers and eavesdrops on them, sending their indistinct voice murmurs to his chief, Hanley, in Washington, who relays them back to him, amplified. He learns several important things: that Sp.a.w.n and Perona and a depth bandit named De Boer are together involved in the smuggling; that they have planned a fake robbery of a fortune in radiumized mercury stored at Sp.a.w.n's mine, to collect the insurance on it and escape paying the Government export fee: and that they, plan to kidnap Grant for ransom.

The plotters learn of Grant's absence from Nareda, and suspect that he may be nearby. They start to search for him. Grant barely escapes, with the bandits and conspirators in hot pursuit. He flees to Jetta, hoping that they will be able to get away together: but he finds her tied hand and foot in her room.

The door is tightly sealed.

And close behind him are his pursuers!

CHAPTER VIII

_Jetta's Defiance_

I must go back now to picture what befell Jetta that afternoon while I was at Sp.a.w.n's mine. It is not my purpose to becloud this narrative with mystery. There was very little mystery about it to Jetta, and I can reconstruct her viewpoint of the events from what she afterward told me.

Jetta's room was in a wing of the house on the side near the pergola.

Her window and door looked out upon the patio. When I had retired--that first night in Nareda--Sp.a.w.n had gone to his daughter and upbraided her for showing herself while he was giving me that first midnight meal.

"You stay in your room: you have nothing to do with him. Hear me?"

"Yes, Father."

From her infancy he had dominated her; it never occurred to either of them that she could disobey. And yet, this time she did; for no sooner was he asleep that night than she came to my window as I have told.

This next day Jetta dutifully had kept herself secluded. She cooked her own breakfast while I was at the Government House, and was again out of sight by noon.

Jetta was nearly always alone. I can picture her sitting there within the narrow walls of her little room. Boy's ragged garb. All possible femininity stripped from her. Yet, within her, the woman's instincts were struggling. She sewed a great deal, she since has told me, there in the cloistered dimness. Making little dresses of silk and bits of finery given her surrept.i.tiously by the neighbor women. Gazing at herself in them with the aid of a tiny mirror. Hiding them away, never daring to wear them openly; until at intervals her father would raid the room, find them and burn them in the kitchen incinerator.

"Instincts of Satan! By d.a.m.n but I will get these woman's instincts out of you, Jetta!"

And there were hours when she would try to read hidden books, and look at pictures of the strange fairy world of the Highlands. She could read and write a little: she had gone for a few years to the small Nareda government school, and then been s.n.a.t.c.hed from it by her father.

When Sp.a.w.n and I had finished that noonday meal, I recall that he left me for a moment. He had gone to Jetta.

"I am taking that young American to the mine. I will return presently.

Stay close, Jetta."

"Yes, Father."