In spite of this triumphant success of their medical science, I could see that depression prevailed in the community. Not even what appeared to me to be the almost supernatural power of drawing the life back seemed to console them. For they had often seen still more wonderful displays of medical skill. Men who had been for months to all appearance dead were restored to full vital power, even when the microscopic transformers of dead matter had begun to batten on their tissues. No body that still retained the human form was beyond their skill; the soul could be enticed back after it had accomplished its flight from earth, for it still kept its affinities to its terrene companions, though cosmic distances should separate them. That was the most difficult task, not the recrudescence of life, but the re-enticement of the spirit that had grown happy in its release. When I observed that the meteorological families were the nearest of all to dejection, even though they had recovered their loved member, I came to the right conclusion. It was the accident that had unmanned them. That they should be taken unawares in a sphere they had mastered preyed on their minds. For one of the immediate objects of their science was to take command of their future, to eliminate the unexpected from life. What was the value of their progress, if they did not see more clearly and farther into the sphere of darkness that bounded life like a horizon? True, the cosmic was still infinite in its night for them, and in the cosmic lay ambushed countless alarms. But they had driven their outposts far into the twilight. The age they were in had seen such an expansion of science that the veil seemed lifted from the face of boundless night. Their sarmolan pioneered before them into space, and foretold them the dire catastrophes that might lie in wait for them. And yet they were at the mercy of accident. What was the use of such an influx of suggestion from the unknown? What was their power over nature, if thus they allowed the fortuitous to drift in upon them? They had not suffered such discomfiture for ages. They abhorred the thought that they should again be the slaves of mere hazard. But they rebelled against even the appearance of impotence, and would not allow any mood approaching despair to settle on their spirits. At once the Piramo set about the repair of their defences against accident. The pirakno was found to be fused into one mass of metal by the force of magnetism which had gathered into it from the space around. Another, larger and more effective, was produced and in it there was a new arrangement by which the storage was automatically governed; any increase in the magnetism it received was at once provided for; and if at any time the inflow should surpass the capacity for storage, there was a governor which automatically switched the surplusage into the sea, or back again into the air.