"This fellow, who used to tinker with radio on the side, decided that any man who could grab a couple of hundred volts and not quiver a muscle because a sudden motion would be as deadly, would be displaying a nervous control seldom realized. Now I'd guess his idea to have been impossible. But it gives me to think. "Do you suppose you could stand a mild electrocution? Say a hundred volts at twenty cycles? Not enough to kill, for we'll insert a current-limiting resistance to prevent electrocution, but enough to make life most uncomfortable. The torture of the condemned will have nothing on what you will suffer, Kingston." Kingston smiled wearily. "It will do you no good," he said. "The thing is set up like the time lock on a safety vault. No one can breach it." "Big talk," snorted Bronson. He turned from the bound man and rummaged in a bench drawer for wire and parts. A variable-voltage transformer, some alternating current meters and a few lengths of wire were strewn over the table top. Bronson began to connect them into a circuit. "We'll find out how your resistance is," he told Kingston over his shoulder. Kingston laughed nastily, Virginia screamed. Bronson whirled--and Kingston was gone! Bronson leaped to the viewer controls and spun the dial to Kingston's official quarters. The viewer showed a technician just in the act of spinning the steering dials in a random whirl like a man locking a combination safe. Kingston fell a-sprawl, still bound, against Maddox, who had come with him. Maddox removed the bonds and Kingston fingered the amulet on his wrist with pride. "That was quick," he said. "Had to be," said Maddox. "I knew that the instant you disappeared from Bronson's laboratory he'd leap to the viewer to see your laboratory. So once you arrived, we both came here and Tony spun the dials so that Bronson can't follow us by reading the calibration." "That isn't all," chuckled Kingston. "Now we know how to reach Bronson!" * * * * * Bronson turned from the controls unhappily. "How did he do that?" he asked plaintively. Virginia shook her head. "Wrong culture or no," she said, "Earth Three seems to take all the tricks." Bronson nodded wearily. He put head in hands and worried visibly--and was taken out of it when a bell tinkled on the wall. Bronson leaped to his feet with a shout. "Maybe we're not licked yet," he said. "That was the automatic mass spectro-analyzer." He left the room and returned quickly with a sheaf of papers. "They call 'em space-resonant," he said with a wry chuckle, "but I call 'em symbiotic." "Meaning?" "Why, it seems as though we have a closed system of radioactivity here," he said. "But the space-resonant elements are only faintly radioactive," objected Virginia. "According to outside detectors," he said. "But this is an internally closed system. There are two basic elements and two isotopes of each, all operating in a closed system." "How?"