"Maybe--probably--I don't know. I don't imagine they can see us, but since we cannot understand anything about them, it's quite possible that they may have other senses that we know nothing about. They'll have to spot us mighty quick, though, if they expect to do themselves any good." The hypermen could not see them, but it was soon made evident that the weird beings had indeed, in some unknown fashion, been warned of their coming. Mighty searchlights projected great beams of livid blue light, beams which sought eagerly the human beings--probing, questing, searching. As he perceived the beams Seaton knew that the hypermen could not see without lights any better than he could; and, knowing what to expect, he grinned savagely into the darkness as he threw an arm around Margaret and spoke--or thought--to her. "One of those beams'll find us pretty quick, and they may send something along it. If so, and if I yell jump, do it quick. Straight up; high, wide, and handsome--jump!" * * * * * For even as he spoke, one of the stabbing beams of light had found them and had stopped full upon them. And almost instantly had come flashing along that beam a horde of hypermen, armed with peculiar weapons at whose use the Terrestrials could not even guess. But also almost instantly had Seaton and Margaret jumped--jumped with the full power of Earthly muscles which, opposed by only the feeble gravity of hyperland, had given their bodies such a velocity that to the eyes of the hypermen their intended captives had simply and instantly disappeared. "They knew we were there, all right, some way or other--maybe our mass jarred the ground--but they apparently can't see us without lights, and that gives us a break," Seaton remarked conversationally, as they soared interminably upward. "We ought to come down just about where that tallest derrick is--right where we can go to work on them." But the scientist was mistaken in thinking that the hypermen had discovered them through tremors of the ground. For the searching cones of light were baffled only for seconds; then, guided by some sense or by some mechanism unknown and unknowable to any three-dimensional intelligence, they darted aloft and were once more outlining the fleeing Terrestrials in the bluish glare of their livid radiance. And upward, along those illuminated ways, darted those living airplanes, the hypermen; and this time the man and the woman, with all their incredible physical strength, could not leap aside. "Not so good," said Seaton, "better we'd stayed on the ground, maybe. They _could_ trace us, after all; and of course this air is their natural element. But now that we're up here, we'll just have to fight them off; back to back, until we land." "But how can we stay back to back?" asked Margaret sharply. "We'll drift apart at our first effort. Then they'll be able to get behind us and they'll have us again!"