But only for a moment--he straightened and cursed blackly, stepped forward and slapped Rhine across the face, hurling her back into the hands of the others by the force of the blow. Then he turned quickly for Carroll had recovered. But instead of going to Rhine's rescue Carroll turned and raced madly across the floor. He hurled his good shoulder against the master switch, driving it home. Relays slapped home-- And light itself was tortured. The very walls of the laboratory seemed to shake and waver because of the mighty electrostatic stresses set up in the continuum of space. The square, precision-machined equipment warped into non-mechanical distortions. Vastnesses of energy flowed in a mad vortex. Steep gradients of electrostatic charge flowed back and forth like the surface of a stormy sea, and corona discharge hissed and trickled out of all sharp corners. The nerves tingled and muscles twitched; normal senses produced abnormal stimuli. In one man's hand one of the weapons discharged into the floor and he tried to hurl it from him with a cry of pain. He could not open his clenched hand. Twitching with every erratic reversal of the charged field that surrounded the area, James Forrest Carroll painfully pulled himself to his feet and looked across the shimmering room. Pride and self-confidence added to his will-power. He stood there as his tingling brain considered the facts of the matter. Regardless of what happened now--regardless of himself or of anybody--he had won this battle. He laughed and in the tortured continuum of the place his laugh sounded like a mad cackle. Fear was painfully slow in coming to the faces of Kingallis and his cohorts. Then it came--fear and the realization of danger. King gave an angry, wordless cry and tried to cross the laboratory floor. He could not quite make it. * * * * * Carroll turned his back on them and watched the viewplate on the far wall. It was wavering and distorted but it showed the sky and the sphere of negative mass. Out in the parabolic reflector, the tiny compressed sphere of energy disappeared into a hole of blackness, from which expanded an exploding shell of sheer light-energy. Against the reflector it poured in a howling torrent and into the sky it went--and disappeared. Faster than the light it created it went, on and out into space. Gone--unseen--undetectable--save for the black circle on the wall of Carroll's laboratory. There it was evident as a column, a cylinder that blazed like the fury it was. How long it lasted is beyond guesswork. Its duration was several seconds in the making, its velocity the speed of light multiplied by an unknown quantity that registered in the thousands. It was--the Lawson Radiation--the Lawson Radiation multiplied and increased as the light from the sun is greater than the pale ineffective illumination coming from a Will O' the Wisp.