EARTH'S MAGINOT LINE by ROY PAETZKE [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Comet May 41. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Jimmy Lorre saw the Earth spinning away from under him. It was odd, this sensation of having nothing under you, nothing to keep you from falling back upon the world from which the sleek grey space ship had lifted you. Lorre felt uneasy. He had traveled in rockets hundreds of times, of course; but this was his first flight into space. Rockets had already been in use for nearly a century; but none had ever before ventured into outer space since the first one had met a horrible end in the Heaviside Layer. As a result of that incident, small rockets had been developed for flight between cities, and, unhappily, for war. Finally a large space cruiser, equipped with the Lorre polari-neutralizer, set out in a second attempt to pierce the H-layer. Appropriately named the _New Hope_, it had just left Earth on its way to the Moon. Lorre felt that some weird, alien menace confronted them. The details of the outcome of the first attempted flight to the moon lingered in his mind. He had looked forward to this day with eagerness; yet now he wished that he hadn't come along. Crushed down into the pneumatic cushions by the acceleration, his vision was so restricted that he could see nothing but the Earth falling away from the ship, down, down. The Lorre polari-neutralizer had been designed to send out a powerful field of polarized force that neutralized the energy charge of the Layer, and so shield the ship from the raging storm of ions that compose the ionosphere. James "Jimmy" Lorre, the inventor, had made sure of that. But the ionoscreen, which was to keep cosmic rays and other harmful radiations from the vessel's occupants beyond the Layer, had been impossible to test. Math, however, had proved that it would function correctly. "Dr. Lorre!" The ship had stopped accelerating, so that the pilot might have the fullest co-operation from his reflexes while passing the ionosphere. "Call me Jimmy," Lorre said succinctly. "Everybody does. What is it?" The pilot motioned toward the complex mechanism that stood between them and annihilation in the turbulent ionic sea they were swiftly approaching. "I wanted you to be on hand in case anything goes wrong. Even without the polari-neutralizer, the hull will stand up a few minutes, in case a wire comes loose in your machine, or something." Lorre nodded. The pilot, always a thorough man, was taking no chances. Hammond, at the controls of the _New Hope_, watched the chronometer like a hawk. If the shield were applied too soon, the power would not last; if too late, the ship would be destroyed.