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.