"Better get aboard. Well be starting in a few minutes." It had seemed an interminable delayevery lost moment an eternity vv?th that Mercurian vehicle fading into the unknown.

Grenfell smiled gently, l can imagine the shock of it to you three." The scientist hastened away and boarded the Cube, mounting to the second of its three interior tiers, to stand at one of the bulls-eye windows of its narrow, corridor-like enclosed deck.

And Guy burst out, "If they'd only let us help them-l Do something. God, this delay" The dawn was just coming when we left the Earth, pursuing the silver ball into space.

II AN UNKNOWN VOICE FBOM WHAT Jimmy afterward told me, I can construct a picture of what happened to him from the time he left us that noon of March 15. From our secluded camp he flew his dragon directly back to Boston. His little monoplane the fleetest, most agile type of flyer of its daymounted high into the clouds. Jimmy was taking no chances that a newscaster's plane might be on the lockout for him, guess that he bad been visiting us, and thus reveal our vicinity.

The dragon had its own insignia in chameleon letters on its underwing surface, but Jimmy could light the wings to show other official insignia.

When he left our cottage his wings bore a naval device.

His plane, constructed for instant camouflage, dangled a false landing gear, and wore wide, spreading false upper wings. No observer at a distance could have guessed it was Jimmy's dragon.

He mounted to high altitudes, changed the angles of incidence of his wing surfaces, switched the pressure air into bis carburator for rarified flying, and kept mounting. At sixty thousand feet he swung southeast toward Boston.

"Coming," he told the chief over the ether-phone. "Be there in an hour." Over Boston he nosed down. The false plane-shape ribs were folded. The camouflaged landing gear had been drawn "~ up. His wing surfaces carried his own familiar device.