"Our haywire battery connections are gone," shouted McCready. "Say your prayers." The wind tossed the plane about like a feather. Rapidly it lost altitude. A building loomed up before them. As a crash seemed imminent, a gust of wind caught the plane and tossed it up into the air again. For several minutes the ground could not be seen through the rain. Suddenly the plane hit an airpocket and dropped like a stone. With a splash it fell into the sea. A rift came for a moment in the curtain of rain. "Look!" cried Carnes. A hundred yards away, the _Denver_ rode at anchor. "I'm only sorry about one thing," said Carnes ten minutes later as they changed to dry clothes aboard the battle cruiser, "and that is that Saranoff wasn't in the factory when that salvo fell on it." "I'm glad he was away," replied Dr. Bird. "With him absent, we succeeded in destroying it. If he had been there, our task would have been more difficult and perhaps impossible. I am an enemy of Saranoff's, but I don't underrate his colossal genius." End of Project Gutenberg's The Solar Magnet, by Sterner St. Paul Meek