hulking figure. Finally he said, "I think this will be slightly more difficult than picking Elizabeth out of a museum case, Dead-Eye."

Earth below them now, its diadem of clouds winking in the reflected shafts of light from the moon. What danger lay there? What danger so great that they must let a victory become a might-have-been. What catastrophe so important that a fight for interplanetary life was dismissed casually with the signal.

Curt Wing shrugged his shoulders, heard that incessant signal boring monotonously into his ears. Then the breaking rockets were kicking, the high thin wail as the thickening atmosphere scratched along the black ship's bulk was deepening, and the deceleration was pushing lazy hands against him, urging him against the duralloy bulwark at his back.

"Gosh," Dead-Eye said, gaping open-mouthed into the visaplate. "Cap, looky here, the whole city is blue."

It was blue--this White City which in the long ago had been New York. A blue visible with an inner light of its own that absorbed the white moon beams and made even black shadows turn blue.

The city was like some huge blue flower, sunset blue for stamen and pistil, its hue lightening to aquamarine, cerulean, and pastel as its petals stretched farther out over the city. It was pulsing and each pulsation swelled its circumference.

Then the visaplate was flickering and the tiny red bulb centered in its plastic base began to blink, signaling power trouble. Then the screen went blank.

"What is it?" Packer exclaimed. His voice was loud and harsh in the plotting room now. The incessant signal six-two ... signal six-two ... had ceased. The instrument panel lights went dark, the rockets cut off abruptly, the only sound was the scrabbling fingers of the outside....

"Force field," Curt Wing said. "Something we've never been able to develop. But there it is. That's the catastrophe. It's swallowing White City, and if there's an intelligence behind it or not, mankind is done if we can't stop it."

"Force field?" Packer asked. "But didn't you...?"

"Yes," Wing said. "I created one once. A little thing less than an inch square. Balanced one magnetic field against another by firing four atomic guns at a coincident point. But a funny thing, the longer the field held the more power I had to shove into it. Then I didn't have any more power to give, and Dead-Eye says, 

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