Sandra's mind was good, in spite of her inferiority complex. It was sharp, retentive, and above all, imaginative. It is a point for speculation whether the imaginative qualities might not have been responsible for her antics; certainly her escapades were the result of some imaginative desire to excel. At any rate, she fastened her eyes on the spot of light, and concentrated herself into a partial self-hypnosis. The train of thought went on before her unseeing eyes with the vividness of a color moving picture, and she was not living the scene, but seeing herself live through a train of events that seemed to jump the unimportant parts like a well-planned motion picture. Her semihypnotized mind seemed to know the right track, though Sandra's wide-awake mind either ignored the key to the problem or was not certain of the right path to follow. She was in a room of steel. Steel and machinery and gleaming silver bars. There was some chaos there, too. The silver busbars had lost their die-straightness, and in one place, a single lamination of the main bus hung down askew. It was about a foot wide and one inch thick, and the nine-foot section that hung from the ceiling was slightly lower than the top of her head. There was blood on the sharp corner, and Sandra looked down to see the red splotch on the floor. She shuddered. Cables ran in wriggly tangles across the floor. Some were still smoking from some overload, and others, still new from their reels, were obviously part of a jury-rigged circuit. Boxes of equipment were broken open and their contents missing, though the spare parts in the boxes were intact. The whole scene spelled-- Trouble! The floor was not level; a slight tilt made standing difficult, until a man from some other room shouted: "The mechanograv is working--hold on!" And the floor rotated until it was the usual, level platform. The huge busbar swung gently on its loose mooring like a ponderous, irresistible mass. And there was a man who came striding in. His contempt for her still hurt, and Sandra winced. Even in that motion-picture dreaming, wherein the girl in the picture seemed apart from Sandra Drake, the ire vented upon the red-headed image made Sandra writhe in sympathy. And then she heard the words come from the man's lips. They were clear and concise, and seemed to come from the man himself instead of from within her own memory: "The electronic charge is great enough to force an inert element--xenon--to accept an additional electron in its ring-system. This permits combination with active elements such as bromine. When xenon-bromide forms, we know that our intrinsic charge is highly electro-negative. See?" * * * * * The scene within Sandra's mind dissolved, and she shook her head. It cleared, but the words remained. "Orfall," she called. "Theodi! Thuni--bring them here!" They returned. "McBride," she said. "He can do it!" "How?" asked Theodi skeptically.