"It's Manning!" shrieked Pete. "He's watching us!" Chizzy's hand whipped out like a striking snake toward the controls and, as he grasped them, his face went deathly white. For the controls were locked! They resisted all the strength he threw against them and the ship still bore on toward that mocking face that hung above the Earth. "Do something!" screamed Max. "You damn fool, do something!" "I can't," moaned Chizzy. "The ship is out of control." It seemed impossible. That ship was fast and tricky and it had reserve power far beyond any possible need. It handled like a dream ... it was tops in aircraft. But there was no doubt that some force more powerful than the engines and controls of the ship itself had taken over. "Manning's got us!" squealed Pete. "We came out to get him and now he has us instead!" The craft was gaining speed. The whining shriek of the air against its plates grew thinner and higher. Listening, one could almost feel and hear the sucking of the mighty power that pulled it at an ever greater pace through the tenuous atmosphere. The face was gone from the sky now. Only the Moon remained, the Moon and the brush-stroke mountains far below. Then, suddenly, the speed was slowing and the ship glided downward, down into the saw-teeth of the mountains. "We're falling!" yelled Max, and Chizzy growled at him. But they weren't falling. The ship leveled off and floated, suspended above a sprawling laboratory upon a mountain top. "That's Manning's laboratory," whispered Pete in terror-stricken tones. The levers yielded unexpectedly. Chizzy flung the power control over, drove the power of the accumulator bank, all the reserve, into the engines. The ship lurched, but did not move. The engines whined and screamed in torture. The cabin's interior was filled with a blast of heat, the choking odor of smoke and hot rubber. The heavy girders of the frame creaked under the mighty forward thrust of the engines ... but the ship stood still, frozen above that laboratory in the hills. Chizzy, hauling back the lever, turned around, pale. His hand began clawing for his heat gun. Then he staggered back. For there were only two men in the cabin with him--Reg and Max. Pete had gone! "He just disappeared," Max jabbered. "He was standing there in front of us. Then all at once he seemed to fade, as if he was turning into smoke. Then he was gone." * * * * * Something had descended about Pete. There was no sound, no light, no heat. He had no sense of weight. It was as if, suddenly, his mind had become disembodied. Seeing and hearing and awareness came back to him as one might turn on a light. From the blackness and the eventless existence of a split second before, he was catapulted into a world of light and sound.