Issued monthly by Publishers' Fiscal Corporation, 80 Lafayette St., New York. N. Y. W. M. Clayton, President; Francis P. Pace, Secretary. Entered as second-class matter December 7, 1929, at the Post Office at New York, N. Y., under Act of March 3, 1879. Title registered as a Trade Mark in the U. S. Patent Office. Member Newsstand Group--Men's List. For advertising rates address E. R. Crowe & Co., Inc., 25 Vanderbilt Ave., New York: or 225 North Michigan Ave., Chicago. * * * * * The Wall of Death _By Victor Rousseau_ [Illustration: And then Kay had broken through and was hewing madly with great sweeps of the ax.] [Sidenote: Out of the Antarctic it came--a wall of viscid, grey, half-human jelly, absorbing and destroying all life that it encountered.] "This news," said Cliff Hynes, pointing to the newspaper, "means the end of _homo Americanus_." The newspaper in question was the hour-sheet of the International Broadcast Association, just delivered by pneumatic tube at the laboratory. It was stamped 1961, Month 13, Day 7, Horometer 3, and the headlines on the front page confirmed the news of the decisive defeat of the American military and naval forces at the hands of the Chinese Republic. A gallant fight for days against hopeless odds; failure of the army dynamos; airships cut off from ground guidance; battleships ripped to pieces by the Chinese disintegrators; and, finally, the great wave of black death that had wiped out two hundred thousand men. Kay Bevan--to use the old-fashioned names which still persisted, despite the official numerical nomenclature--glanced through the account. He threw the sheet away. "We deserved it, Cliff," he said. Cliff nodded. "You saw that bit about the new Chinese disintegrator? If the Government had seriously considered our Crumbler--" Kay glanced at the huge, humming top that filled the center of the laboratory. It spun so fast that it appeared as nothing but a spherical shadow, through which one could see the sparse furnishings, the table, the apparatus ranged upon it, and the window over-looking the upper streets of New York. "Yes--_if!_" he answered bitterly. "And I'm willing to bet the Chinese have an inferior machine, built upon the plans that Chinese servant stole from us last year." "We deserved it, Cliff," said Kay again. "For ten years we've harried and enslaved the yellow man, and taken a hundred thousand of his men and women to sacrifice to the Earth Giants. What would we have done, if conditions had been reversed?" "Self-preservation," Cliff suggested. "Exactly. The law of the survival of the fittest. They thought that they were fitter to survive. I tell you they had right on their side, Cliff, and that's what's beaten us. Now--a hundred thousand of our _own_ boys and girls must be fed into the maw of these monsters every year. God, suppose it were Ruth!" "Or you or I," said Cliff. "If only we could perfect the Crumbler!"