The Master lifted the instrument toward his eyes, and as he did so, saw on the southern horizon a small cloud, intensely black, and from some forgotten saying there flashed uneasily through his mind the phrase "no larger than a man's hand." But through the eye piece there was no cloud, but a dawn-cleared sky into which the haphazard towers of the now almost legendary Manhattan lifted their pinnacles, softened by plumes of drifting smoke and flattered by slanting bars of golden sunlight. Long the Master looked, and at length turned the visor directly downward, to look through half a mile of empty space at a village sprawled toylike on a green hill sloping upward from the river. Interested in the town which had once occupied the land where the Serene Tower now soared aloft, the Master increased the magnification. He had a nightmare sensation of falling with rocket speed, snatched his eyes away, and saw that in the south the cloud towered over a third of the horizon, black and ominous. He barked to the watchful image in the visiscreen, "Tell those fools in the weather department to stop that storm!" and again looked down thru the visor. He seemed now to be a few feet above a green lawn fronting a trim white house, roofed with wooden shingles. On the gravel path stood a girl whose pure young beauty made him catch his breath. She threw back her golden hair and looked directly toward him, her blue eyes wide and fearless. But suddenly the Master was jerked back to the present as the floor swayed beneath him, and a fearful crash of thunder entered his eyrie, where no outside sound had ever come unbidden. He looked up and saw the great cloud, now overhead, pouring forth torrents of rain which made the campanulet seem like a diving bell in a cataract. On the outer surface of the glass was an incessant race of lightning, flashing over the surface in zigzags and spirals, seeking angrily to penetrate the Room of Power. The visiscreen was blank and rimmed with fire, blue flames and crackling sparks flickered from the machines and the robots, and it seemed to the Master that at last his defenses had failed. Now the secret fear which lay hidden at the Master's heart grew in power, and he shrank back into his chair, while the great Negro guards stood like statues of fear, their hair erect and snapping. The elements, then, were not wholly under control of the Master's mighty science! Nature had broken the chains with which he had thought to bind her. And if the weather control could fail, could not something go wrong, too, with all the Master's power and authority?