a low tone. "Our information is that France will drop atomic bombs on Spain's principal cities at three a.m. one week from today. Suppose—just suppose—that some other nation—some nation powerful enough to do so—should be in a position to warn France at two-thirty that France would not be permitted to attack. Suppose this warning were backed up with a show of force to prove the warning meant business."

"Isn't that the job of the U.N.?"

The man's face was only inches now from Dale's. The Bryd shivered in its figurative boots. This man was a master hypnotist. Only they wouldn't call him a hypnotist in these days. They'd call him a psyche-man. Psyche-control was much more powerful than hypnosis. Psyche-control touched the moral inhibitions, which hypnosis never had been able to do.

Dale was lost. In the end he agreed, for a cash-on-delivery fee of one hundred thousand dollars, to concentrate his sodium mirror beam on Paris at two-thirty of the morning designated, and thereby, with a smoking path of fire and ruin, help the other nation to warn France that she must keep hands off Spain.

Perhaps Dale's jealousy of Georges Raoul Dumont had a bearing on the agreement.

Dale had been so much under the foreign agent's influence that he had not considered the ethics of the idea at all until time to press the button that would concentrate the sun-energy into a consuming column of fire. The time was now ... and it was only now, with the hypnosis just beginning to wear off at the edges, that he found himself wondering vaguely about angles of the situation that previously had not occurred to him.

Who was the man who had talked to him? Whom did he represent? Why hadn't he gone to the U. N. if he knew so much?

But then it was true, as the man had said—if France planned to start dropping atomic bombs at three o'clock, it would be too late to appeal to the U.N. Dale didn't like Frenchmen anyway.

Altogether, the Bryd concluded, Dale Stevenson was pretty muddled up in his mind. The man needed a rest, but that could be worked out later. Right now his finger was on the firing-button, and the psyche-control, though weakened, was pushing him to finish the job.

Dale Stevenson's finger was just starting to move the button....

Oh dear, these humans certainly could muddle things.

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