EYES THAT WATCH

                         by RAYMOND Z. GALLUN

             _The Guardians of Space Keep Constant Vigil._

           [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
                          Comet December 40.
         Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
         the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]


He, Sam Conway, was back from Mars now. Back from red, ferric deserts
no Earthly boot had ever touched before. Back from bitter cold
and aching dryness. Back from dazzling yellow hazes of dust and
suspended ice crystals. No more need to wear oxygen armor in a thin,
ozone-tainted atmosphere now. Back from solitude, and the endless
fight to keep alive out there. Back from the enigma of Martian
civilization's extinction, uncounted ages ago.... Back, back, back....

Home, now! From the window Sam Conway could see a row of maples, orange
and golden in the autumn warmth. Kids were playing football in the
street. Sam's oxy-hydrogen rocket ship, blued and battered and burnt,
was suspended for all time from massive girders in the Smithsonian
Institution. But even that was far away from Bryton, here. It should
have been finished, now--the adventure. Sam Conway should have relaxed.
Even Ellen Varney was beside him now. That should have helped. It did,
a little. Yet only for moments at a time.

Those twenty months of exploration on another world, had become like
a phantom in Sam's thoughts. Faded, distant, contrasting; yet starkly
vivid too. Every hour had been a struggle. Extracting food substances
from the tissues and juices of strange plants. Roasting native
potassium chlorate in a small sun-furnace to extract oxygen from it,
and compressing the precious gas into steel flasks. All this had been
necessary, the dying Martian atmosphere contained only a low percentage
of oxygen.

It had been a strange hand-to-mouth existence out there--a kind of
game in which a fellow tried always to keep one small jump ahead of
Death.

Hauling a crude little metal wagon, in which his supplies were packed,
across the sand for miles and miles at a time, until his brain had
reeled. Sleeping in a tiny airtight tent, when afield from his
rocket.... Sam had never expected to survive those experiences. But
he had, somehow; and it had done something to his soul--hardened it,
and maybe killed part of it; and maybe beautified another part. For
in spite of everything, those vast, ghostly solitudes of Mars _were_
beautiful--

And there was more. Climbing the steep wall of an ancient artificial
gorge not far from the south polar cap; gripping at odd prickly vines
to keep from falling into the hardy thickets below, where tough-shelled
worms crawled sluggishly, he had found something in a small,
sand-drifted cell that was part of a ruin. Something that meant power.

What kind of power? All kinds, perhaps. Scientific learning greater
than that of Earth. Power like that of gold and jewels, but far
exceeding it. Power to wreck and to create, power to destroy worlds.
Power, maybe, to sway minds. Sam still could not guess how far it might
extend, or how deep--

No the adventure was not over, yet. It was just beginning. It wasn't
just nostalgia that tied the consciousness of Sam Conway to a planet,
millions of miles away, whose people had perished in a strange travail
ages ago--a catastrophe whose marks lay in fused, glassy ruins, and in
machines melted and rusted beyond recognition.

Sam had that secret of power hidden away now in a little aluminum box
that had once contained concentrated food rations. And having that
secret--though it thrilled him--still made him wish nervously that he
also had eyes in the back of his head....

Ellen Varney's slim fingers tightened on his arm.

"Sam!" she said almost sharply. "You're dreaming again. What is it?"

He looked at her almost furtively, conscious of the familiar room
around him, the old bookcase, the piano with a shaft of sunlight
touching it gently; the radio and television cabinet. The colonial rag
rugs, bright colored and homey....

Sam wondered wistfully if sometime soon his power would enable him to
preserve in timeless youth the fragile beauty of Ellen Varney. Dark
wavy hair, and an earnest face whose wisdom one could never forget.
Maybe now even immortality would be possible.

Sam was nervous. Haste and preoccupation pressed him. But he put on a
good show for the girl's sake. The lines of worry dissolved around his
grey, deep-set eyes. He ran stubby fingers through his stiff mop of
ash-blond hair, and the tightness of his lips and jaw relaxed into a
sheepish grin.

"Sure I'm dreamin', Honey," he chuckled. "What man in my shoes
wouldn't? Three years back I was nobody, working my way as a student
engineer. Then Joe Nichols and his experts found out that my reflexes
were better than those of anybody they'd tested. And that my brains
and my emotional stability were okay. So pretty soon I was flying out
there toward Mars--all for the glory of giving the Joe Nichols Food
Products a publicity splurge. And now--well don't get the wrong idea
of how I feel about it, Ellen--they've made a big-shot out of me. The
newspapers, the radio, the scientists. I've got a lot to do. I--you
know!"

Ellen Varney was perhaps sure she did know. She smiled faintly, like
the Mona Lisa smiling at the naïveté of men, and their little-boy
vanities. But there was a shadow of worry in her eyes, too.

"You won't stay here for supper, then, with the folks and me, Sam," she
said wistfully. "Like old times...."

Sam couldn't think of anything nicer. But the pull of something else
was much more strong.

"No, Honey," he said. "I--"

"Don't stumble, Sam," the girl returned. "Tomorrow night, then?"

"Maybe. I hope...."

He kissed her. A moment later he was out in the golden afternoon. He
avoided the kids playing football out there in the street just as he
used to play. He would have liked to talk to them. But--not now.

He climbed into his car. There he sat quietly for a moment, thinking.
The autumn shadows, cast by the houses and trees, were long and blue.
They reminded him of the shadows on Mars; and he felt a slight, not
unpleasant, chill of loneliness and mystery plucking at his nerves. The
sound of the wind wasn't so very different here either! Only out there
it was shriller and much fainter and more sad, in the thin air, and
through the muffling fabric of his oxygen suit.

Not so long ago Sam had seen those Martian winds shredding plumes of
rusty red dust from the desert. He'd seen them blow balled masses of
dried, prickly vegetation, like tumbleweeds, across the undulating red
plain, and into the deep machine-dug gorges, all but waterless now,
that on Earth were called the "canals."

He'd seen those dried bundles of weeds collected in rows against
the granite masonry of walls that were cold and crumbled in their
ancientness but which looked fused along their low crests, like old
lava, telling a story of violent and enigmatic calamity.

Thus Sam Conway's reveries became unpleasant once more. He wanted to
hurry again. He started the car, and drove swiftly out of the village.
The tires crunched in dead leaves as he swung into the driveway that
led down by the lake. Premonition must have been working in him,
accentuating his caution and his haste.

There was a fair-sized brick building there, an old garage. He unlocked
the heavy door and went inside. The large main room of the structure
was to be his laboratory; the office, his living quarters.

He surveyed the dingy interior critically. Everything, so far as he
could see, was exactly as he had left it except for a small smear of
ash on the floor in the office room. Driveway ash. Part of a man's
footprint. His own? With the panic of a disturbed miser, Sam Conway
thought back carefully. It could be his own footprint; but he couldn't
remember--couldn't be sure!

His heart began to throb in mounting anxiety at the thought that the
lair of his secret might have been entered during his absence. He
pulled the shades carefully. Then he clawed his way through the clutter
of paraphernalia in the little room--mostly boxes of new laboratory
equipment, as yet unpacked. And a few glass jars containing plant
samples, and specimens of odd Martian fauna--souvenirs he hadn't been
required to turn over to the scientists.

He was sweating profusely from panic when he reached the carefully
fitted mopboard in the corner after pulling aside a small desk. He
pressed part of the wooden ornamentation, and a section of the mopboard
turned on hinges. Feverishly he drew his precious aluminum box from the
hiding place he had contrived, and unfastened its lid. From within came
a reassuring, cryptic gleam; and Sam Conway almost wilted with relief.

But he wasn't satisfied yet. His fear of possible burglary wasn't the
result of miserliness alone. He was afraid to have so gigantic a secret
as he possessed get beyond himself--yet. And he was well aware that man
would kill to own what he owned--and distrusted, withholding it from
Nichols and his scientists.

Carefully he put the aluminum container back, and searched the
premises. The windows. The doors. Everything. But he found no telltale
marks of intrusion. The footprints, then, in the office room must have
been his own. But he'd bar the windows tomorrow. He'd put alarms on the
entrances, and he'd find a safer place for his aluminum box.

Now he prepared to work, getting his notebooks ready, putting a little
collapsible table in the center of the office room, securing the heavy
wood shutters of the windows, turning on the lights, and taking the
aluminum box, which was his storehouse of miracles, once more from
hiding.

As he sat down at the table, he placed a loaded pistol within easy
reach at his elbow. Thus prepared, he lifted his treasure from its
homely metal container, and set it lovingly before him. A cube, perhaps
four inches square. Like glass. Almost crystal in its transparency,
except for a dim misting of pearl. Crowning the cube was a metal
pyramid, much tarnished with age, and a dial. That was all. But Sam's
gaze was almost gloating, as his mind filled with mighty visions of his
own future. He was no different from any other man in this respect, for
the touch of power was on him.

He turned the dial of the Martian apparatus. Within the cube spots
of fire began to move, around and around a glowing center that
was composed of myriad parts. It was all like a three-dimensional
cinema--illustrating, in this instance, some mystery of the atom--its
revolving planetary electrons, its nucleus of neutrons, positrons....

In a strange eight-fingered hand, which left the rest of its eon-dead
owner's anatomy unpictured, a metal pointer was lifted, indicating this
and that. It was like being in school on old Mars, whose people had
been extinct for untold millions of years.... Maybe this apparatus,
which held, in pictured, illustrated form, all the scientific lore of
another time and world, had been a kind of school book.

Sam didn't understand much of this first lesson--yet. There were soft
clinking noises--perhaps speech--which accompanied the fading, waxing,
moving illustrations; but those music-box notes were perhaps forever
beyond him as far as meaning went.

The atomic structure views were replaced at last by pictures of
machines and apparatus--and that was a little better. Before his eyes
Sam saw complicated pieces of apparatus taken apart and reassembled. He
saw complicated processes actually carried out step by step.

Sam Conway's concentration was like a frozen hypnosis, and his brain
was quick. But in the corners of the room there were faint shadows,
and he was conscious of them. Still he took notes, and made drawings
feverishly until the strain began to tell. Of course he could always
refer back to the machine, repeating the views if necessary.

It was a month before he began to build. And then his first effort was
only to produce a furnace and an alloy; the latter a product of the
former. It was harder and more flexible than any steel yet produced.
And it was worth money, providing the means to carry on his study and
his work.

Work.... Sam seldom saw Ellen Varney now. He saw little of anybody. He
told lies to be alone, and to continue his solitary efforts. His sense
of struggle was like being on Mars again fighting for life, plodding
through a thin feathery fall of snow there, in the dazing cold, close
to the polar regions. And he dreamed of gigantic altruisms--the
remaking of civilization.

In four months after his beginning, he had achieved things. Under a
beam of specialized vibrations he saw a mouse do amazing tricks, its
brain stimulated temporarily to an intelligence far beyond normal.
It was awesome, and frightening too, watching that tiny animal
turn--without error, and after it had been shown how only once--the
complicated combination lock of a small door beyond which lay food.

Sam thrilled to the spectacle of the rodent laboring so keenly with its
teeth and forepaws. What if the same waves were applied to the brain of
a man? He would have tried those waves on himself, but his enthusiasm
changed to dread when, with the removal of the beam, the mouse
shuddered into a convulsion and died, its nervous system exhausted.

Biology revealed further mysteries and possibilities. In a glass
flask, packed in a radioactive compound, and filled with water to
which food substances had been added, Sam grew huge amoebae, whose
ancestors had been microscopic. But these creatures were translucent
globules, almost a quarter-inch in diameter. Somewhere here, perhaps,
lay hidden the secret of life itself. But the amoebae died of a strange
disease, the germs of which were perhaps generated out of those same
life processes.... To be sure of safety, Sam poured sulphuric acid into
the culture flask.

He changed his direction now, back to the atom. Eight weeks more, and
he was ready for another test. The main room of the old garage was
crowded with apparatus. Then, one night, Sam closed a switch cautiously.

The result was not much different than the shorting of a high-tension
electric current across a broad arc. A snap. An avalanche of rattling
blue flame, whose glare made everything look sharp and unreal. Then
wires glowed to white heat and crumpled. A huge vacuum tube exploded
into an incandescent puff of metallic vapors, superheated. The current
was dead now--cut off. The experiment was a failure.

There were perhaps ten seconds like this--a sort of unsuspected
bang--like that of a rifle cartridge whose defective primer cap fails
to ignite the powder immediately when the firing pin strikes it.
The garage interior was still illuminated, for the lights were on a
different circuit. Smoke was blue along the raftered roof, and the red
glow had faded from heated metal.

Then, at a moment beyond all expectation, a searing glare leaped out
from between two close-pressed copper electrodes which had been the
center of Sam's experiment. A wave of rays and heat, and stunning
electrical emanations. Sam Conway's mind was far too slow for him to
grasp just what happened. He only remembered a little when, battered
and scorched, he picked himself up from the concrete pavement after a
minute or more.

The points of the electrodes were shattered, but they still glared,
incandescent, providing the only light now, for the light bulbs were
shattered. Staring from aching, ray-reddened eyes, Sam saw only
that glow, for he was temporarily all but blinded. But there were
little pits in that hot copper--pits out of which the metal must have
literally exploded.

[Illustration: _The crackling continued--like a delayed explosion. His
numbed brain sensed that something was terribly wrong._]

He wasn't afraid right away. Not until his brain recalled did he
realize. That bang, after his apparatus had burnt itself out, then that
flash, or whatever you wanted to call it, was atoms breaking down more
violently than they had ever done in the crude experimental atomic
engines so far developed on earth.

Now there was another flash from one of those electrodes--just a tiny,
incredibly brilliant speck--like a spark that flares and dies, failing
to ignite tinder. Almost though. Almost an inconceivable conflagration,
that might have spread and spread, from one atom to others.

Sam's sore eyes could see the broken roof now, and the springtime stars
shining calmly through its splintered rifts. The sky itself was dimly
luminous as with diffused light. Suddenly he was afraid of those stars,
for they were like watching eyes; watching and inscrutable. And there
was ozone--triatomic oxygen--metallically tanging in the atmosphere,
mingled with the odor of burnt insulation. Sam wanted to leave the
building, to go out into the night and cool his dizzied senses and his
blistered body. Yet he had to keep guard to be sure to note anything
further that might happen, for he knew what had just taken place.

Yes, he knew all right! Nature had been probed in its darkest lair by
a clumsy hand. Nature had growled back threateningly. It had almost
bitten. Almost...? Sam Conway's ribs seemed to shrink about his wildly
pounding heart.

He leaned against the cracked brick wall, trembling. In memory he was
on Mars again seeing those ruined buildings, sheered off, buried by the
dust--smelling the metallic reek of ozone that had seeped back through
the breath-vent of his oxygen helmet. Even as here, now. Ozone built up
from the commoner form of oxygen by electrical discharges!

And by swift suggestion, Sam's thoughts went beyond Mars itself.
Outside of the Martian orbit was the Path of Minor Planets--the
asteroids. Broken up fragments. Perhaps a single world, once, that had
been caught in catastrophe....

There was more, too. What were the rings of Saturn? What cataclysmic
circumstance had made them? Atlantis and Mu, the lost continents.
Why had they sunk beneath the sea, taking with them their splendid
civilizations? And there were the novae far out in interstellar space;
normal stars suddenly blazing forth in spectacular ruin. Yes there must
be many other inhabited worlds in the universe, other folk, studying,
learning to control and curb matter and energy. Sometimes knowledge
must get dangerously ahead of itself, lacking a sound foundation of
understanding. And then?

There was silence outside the building. So the crunch of hurrying
footsteps in the cinders of the driveway penetrated easily to Sam's
eardrums and excited nerves. A loud knock sounded at the outside door
of Sam's sleeping room.

He staggered back from his ruined laboratory. From a small chemical
cabinet he procured a flashlight. And he drew the pistol he always
carried now, from his pocket, before he unfastened the heavy bar of the
door.

It was Ellen Varney out there in the dark. Sam hadn't seen her in
almost a week. He had never permitted her to come here when he was
busy. To the rear, down the driveway, the headlamps of the girl's car
made a white lantern-glimmer through the bushes.

For one frightening instant Ellen saw the pistol muzzle levelled toward
her before Sam was able to recognize her and lower the weapon. But she
didn't ask the reason for the gun at all.

"Sam," she stammered. "I couldn't sleep and I heard a funny, sharp
explosion. It seemed to be in this direction. And when I looked out
of the window I saw a glow in the sky--very faint. But it was in this
direction too. I guess I had a hunch, so I drove out here. All the way
I could smell ozone in the air. You can hardly see the phosphorescence
in the sky from up close at all. But it's right over. What's wrong,
Sam? What have you _really_ been doing?"

The girl's tense fears, strong enough to make her come here, after
midnight, to his laboratory, emphasized Sam's own private anxieties.

"I haven't been doing much, Honey," he told her hesitantly, and not too
convincingly. "You'd better just run along home to bed. Research causes
accidents once in a while. I'll get everything straightened out all
right."

But in the reflected rays of the flashlight, the girl's face and eyes
were determined.

"I won't go, Sam," she said very definitely, "until I find out that
everything is all right. First place, you're hurt, and I'd be stubborn
for your sake. But there's more. That glow in the sky. That smell of
ozone--not only here, but everywhere here.... What does it all mean,
Sam?"

Conway looked nervously toward the heavens. Yes, he could see a halo
of light, sure enough. He had thought it was only the diffusion of
starshine by the moisture in the atmosphere. Now he knew better. It was
a little too bright and too low to be an aurora. It could be _like_ an
aurora, of course, something electrical and yet not quite the real,
normal thing.

The breeze outside bore a slight yet unmistakable pungence of ozone
too. It was just as Ellen had said. The gas was not only in the lab.
It was here, too, as though all the atmosphere in the neighborhood had
been affected by some electrical process.

"Listen!" Ellen said suddenly.

Sam strained his ears. At first he could detect nothing at all. Then he
noticed a dim, lonely humming, that seemed to emanate from the ground,
and from the bricks of the laboratory.

The sound seemed to be getting gradually louder. It made Sam shudder
with the mystery of hidden things. And he began to feel, too, a sharp
ache in his muscles, quite distinct from the soreness of his minor
injury.

Suspicion grew on him again; suspicion that his latest experiment had
been not entirely without lasting effect. Something _had_ happened!
Something had been started after all!

Sam grasped Ellen by the arm. "Come inside, Ellen," he said. "I've got
to make a few tests."

He did this very quickly, working in the beam of his flashlight, which
the girl held for him. Meanwhile he made a complete confession, telling
her what he'd found on Mars and what he'd been doing.

He found now that he couldn't keep an electroscope charged. This
meant that the air was ionized--that it would promptly conduct away
any electrical charge that the instrument might hold. And atmospheric
ionization meant, or could mean, the presence of radioactivity--of
atomic disturbances.

He tried exposing a bit of photographic film in the dark. In the
developing fluids it turned entirely black. There were strong invisible
rays then, to affect it; rays coming from the walls, the ground,
the very air itself perhaps. Rays probably from bursting atoms. The
sound--the humming--must be some incidental phenomenon of their
breakdown.

Dully Sam felt of the walls. Their temperature was already higher than
that of the air and they vibrated distinctly with that steady hum.
Sam's whole body felt hot, as though a strange flame was blazing in his
own flesh.

He was sure, then. He had started a slow, progressive form of atomic
disintegration in all the materials around him. In his own body too!
It hadn't been the sudden fire of violent incandescence. That _might_
have come. It had just been missed. The igniting spark hadn't been
quite strong enough. Instead there was only a sort of smouldering.
But, undeniably, atomic power was being released in a deadly, and
uncontrollable if gradual, form.

The flashlight lay on the table shedding its white beam. Sam saw that
Ellen's face was pale and her eyes glassy.

Sam had not the faintest idea of what he might do to check what he had
started. "Get out of here, Ellen," he growled thickly. "Beat it! I've
gone and tried to play God. And now hell's broken loose! Tell everybody
to scram away from here!"

Very unsteadily the girl arose from the chair where she had seated
herself. "I don't want to go, Sam," she stammered. "I can't leave you
now."

He had to stumble forward then, to catch her before she fell. Her face
was hot and damp with a weird fever. Her body had been affected too,
by coming into the zone of influence. Sam Conway winced with an awful
anguish as he picked Ellen up and tried to carry her toward the open
door, and the safer night air outside.

It was only then that he realized how weak and sick he was himself.
Strange rays were tearing at his nerves and brain. His very flesh
was slowly--very slowly--giving up its atomic power, in a gradual
radioactive decay!

He stumbled at his first step and fell crashing to the floor. Paralysis
rushed over him, and that droning sound was like a death-dirge in his
ears. He tried to drag Ellen's unconscious form toward the door, but
the effort was useless. He couldn't even crawl. He just lay there,
panting torturedly, his hot brain working in a chaos of fever. He
understood now.

The death of Mars all over again. The fused walls. The melted machines.
The ozone in the air. A slow, creeping smouldering destruction had
burnt itself out at last; perhaps when a new balance had been reached
in the atoms of the Martian crust. A crust. A cancerous disease moving
in an irregular path, depleting air and water. But there still must be
a tiny part of the old process of atomic breakdown continuing on Mars
today, maintaining, by electrical disturbances, the ozone in the air.

And he, Sam Conway, had started that same creeping horror here on
Earth. It would go along now, spreading and spreading. The walls around
him would soon be melting. And there was nothing a man could do to stop
it. Not even the science of Mars had been able to save the world that
had given it birth. Only in scattered places where the erratic horror
had not reached, perhaps in deep crevices in the rocks, had a few
plants and low animals been able to survive for a new beginning after
most of the fires had died.

Sam Conway cursed himself for his eagerness and lust for power. He'd
been like an old gold miner, he thought savagely, ready almost to
kill his own brother to preserve his secret until he could use it for
himself. There were too many men like that. And now Ellen and all the
rest of the world had to suffer.

Mu. Atlantis. The asteroids that had perhaps once been a plant,
destroyed, maybe, by a much more violent form of atomic breakdown.
But who knew just what accidents might have caused these respective
catastrophes? Science must sometimes get ahead of itself, without even
outside influence. There was always a risk.

       *       *       *       *       *

Sam's mind began to fade out, toward the nothingness of oblivion.

Then the real miracle began to happen. The violence of it jarred his
brain swiftly back toward a semblance of awareness. Suddenly everything
around him was spouting blue electric flame. The table, the chairs, the
walls, even the grass and trees beyond the open doorway rippled with a
sort of aura. The phenomenon lasted for only two seconds. It snapped
and growled like the first dash of some gigantic code signal. Then it
broke off. Then it began again.

Once more it stopped. And started.

Sam, even had his mind been clear, could not have guessed how
widespread the phenomenon was. He could not have known that, within a
twenty mile radius fuses were blowing out, transformers were smoking in
their oil-baths and generators were groaning under a terrific overload,
as though their armatures had been gripped by an invisible colossus.

But Sam could guess some of the might of the new phenomenon. His body
convulsed like the body of a condemned culprit in an electric chair as
shocks ripped through him. He could not imagine the origin of what was
happening now, unless the forces he had unleashed had entered a new
phase of destruction.

Yet this did not seem to be true, for after the first spurt of unknown
power had passed, that sonorous hum of doom had been completely
strangled. Before the second spurt stopped there was a violent ripping
explosion and the tinkling of broken window panes in the adjoining
laboratory room. And that constricting paralysis and heat were gone
from Sam's body. There were five bursts of strange energy, in all. Then
it was over.

Prodded by sheer startlement Sam got to his feet and found that, in
spite of weakness, he could stand. His brain was clearer, too. Ellen
Varney, unconscious before, was trying to rise. He helped her up and
supported her against him.

They stared out of the doorway at the sky. The auroral glow was gone.
But they saw, for just an instant, a huge phosphorescent shape, hanging
high against the stars. It was a little like a colossal image of a man,
but it couldn't have been solid. It was like the aurora itself--as
tenuous, as luminous--a kind of gigantic photograph projected in the
air. The arm of the vapory figure extended; then the whole image
vanished, as if at a speed far exceeding that of light, to some
colossal distance.

Sam didn't even speak of the being right away. He helped the girl out
of the building into the open.

"Wait here for a few seconds, Ellen," he said in a tone that trembled
with awe.

Then he stumbled back into the old garage. All electrical devices were
dead, even his flashlight. He had to find his way to the laboratory by
burning matches. Every bit of apparatus was in fused ruins now, faintly
reddened with heat. But there was no ominous hum in the hot, black
stillness. Something deadly had been burned out of diseased substances
by counter fire. Even Sam's own flesh had submitted to a curative force.

He found his way to one corner of the room, where, beneath a heavy
block of concrete, he had prepared a new hiding place for his aluminum
box, and the Martian demonstration apparatus it contained. Tugging
the block of concrete free, he looked below it, lighting another
match. Somehow the lid of the box had been blown off. Within, the
Martian machine was the same as before, except that the crystal cube
was no longer clear. Instead it was blackened all the way through,
like a black diamond. And there were cracks in it that destroyed its
usefulness forever. It, too, had been touched by those counter waves
of energy. Touching the cube with his fingers, Sam found that it was
hot.

He left the thing in its hole and returned to Ellen, his mind full of
colossal realizations.

The girl's voice quavered with awe as she spoke there under the quiet
stars.

"We had help, didn't we, Sam?" she stammered, remembering the cloud
in the sky, and what Sam had told her about his work. "Somebody from
another world. But who? Where...?"

"I don't know, Honey," Sam answered raggedly. "It wasn't Martian help.
As far as I know, all Martians are dead. Besides, I've seen their
bones. Manlike, but very slender. The being--pictured in the sky was
heavily built."

Sam nodded significantly toward the sky.

"Lots of planets up there," he continued. "In other solar systems. Lots
of different kinds of beings. I suppose some of those races, on planets
of the older stars, have really grown up mentally and scientifically,
till they know all about time and space and dimensions and energy,
and how to handle and conquer them. And I suppose that somehow they
keep careful watch across the awful distance because they've learned
by experience that it may be safer. It's not just to save the necks
of lesser beings but to guard themselves, too. I was messing around
with something pretty big, Ellen. You can't tell how far a danger may
sometimes go. A whole universe may be thrown into chaos--"

Sam's fists were clenching and unclenching absently. It was better for
science to develop gradually, with a race. And even then there would
sometimes be mistakes. Atlantis. Mu. The asteroids. Maybe some of the
novae--

"We'd better get back into town, Sam," Ellen offered practically.
"There may be damage done there--with all that's been happening. We'd
better see."

A chuckle found its way through Sam Conway's awe. "Yeah," he said.
"Like your car. I see the headlights have gone out. Good thing it's
a diesel, with no electrical ignition to blow, and with a cartridge
starter on the motor."

But Sam was too grateful over the miraculous escape from final tragedy
he'd just witnessed, to worry much about damage suits over ruined
electrical equipment.

And he was very grateful for Ellen, too. He might fly out to Mars
some time again, or even farther. But when he touched the girl's warm
shoulder he knew that he was truly home at last.