the lights down there he saw lights on a queer steel tower. He'd seen pictures of a tower like that somewhere. It wasn't an oil-rig, but something he couldn't remember.

And then, suddenly, he remembered, and a terrible coldness choked him and his flesh flinched as he saw a door into nightmare opening.

That tower, and the announcement of a new H-bomb test, and the distance he was from Vegas, and the way those frantic jets had drawn back....

"Oh, no," said Price. "Oh, no, oh no, oh no--"

He was still saying it when the bomb went off and the universe cracked wide open under his racing plane.

CHAPTER II

The cataclysm that hit Price was without light or sound. That, when he thought of it later, was the most awful feature of it.

He felt a shock, but not the shock of ultimate annihilation he expected. This was a shuddering impact as of the plane, himself, hitting some barrier and forcing through, a rending, tearing, dizzying thing that was like no sensation he had ever experienced.

He yelled, naked terror forcing the air from his lungs. His weight flung against the straps, and he knew from that that the plane was in a spin. Mechanically, his hands reached to the controls. He levelled off....

But he wasn't dead. He was alive, undestroyed, and how could that be if the raving energies of a hydrogen bomb had been unloosed beneath him?

Price's mind was a mad turmoil. What had happened?

He had blundered right over the bomb test-area, right over the bomb-tower. And the jets guarding the area had tried to stop him. Probably, if his radio hadn't been off, he would have heard them screaming frantic warnings to him.

But had the bomb really gone off? If it had, he would surely have been instantly annihilated.

He hadn't been. He was alive. The plane was ticking along through the night. The instruments functioned.

But something terrific had happened. That ghastly, wrenching shock that had seemed to outrage the very atoms of his body--his flesh still crawled with the memory of it. Something had happened. But what?

Price couldn't think. The mind just could not 

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