"My shoulder--a trifle. I have a dozen such burns. But my feet still hurt from the twenty-foot drop I took out of the _Scorpion_. I had to get out: the shock of the crash would have killed me. "But I've been looking for the asteroid," he went on--and interrupted himself. "By the horn of the phanti!" he exclaimed in amazement. "Look, Eliot! That explains it all!" His whole body was tilted back to allow him to look upward. Friday and the Master Scientist followed his startled gaze, and they too gaped in wonder. For there was nothing above or around them--no dwindling fragment of rock--no sign of any asteroid: only the eternal stars. "Yes," said Eliot Leithgow slowly, "that explains it all...." "It explains what?" asked Friday, staring. "And where is the asteroid?" "It's up there," the Hawk replied. "Don't you see now, Eclipse, why no one's ever found it; why we could hunt forever for it and hunt in vain? Ku Sui made his whole asteroid invisible!" End of Project Gutenberg's The Affair of the Brains, by Anthony Gilmore