grapple with a thing like this. He sat, mechanically touching the controls, and the Beechcraft roared on and on.Gradually, his mind came alive. He shakily swung the plane around. He was going back to Las Vegas. Right now, arrest and prison looked good to him compared to what had happened, or nearly happened. If he hadn't been so tensely trying to escape, he thought, he would have remembered about the bomb-tests coming up. There had been newspaper stories. Guarded stories about a radical physical effect detected during explosions of the new-type H-bombs, and mention of elaborate preparations being made to study these unusual effects.

Price's thoughts leaped suddenly. He recalled a scientist's statement that the center of explosion of the new-type bomb might be like the eye of a hurricane, a focus of inconceivable forces but affected in a radically different way by those forces. Had the bomb gone off under him, then? Had his plane and himself, at the "eye" of the tremendous explosion, been hurled somehow through spatial barriers into safety before the light and sound and destruction could even reach him?

It seemed an insane speculation. Yet everything about this was insane. He would be himself, if he didn't get down to Earth soon.

He could not see the glow of Las Vegas anywhere in the night. He cut his radio in and spoke hoarsely into it.

"Beechcraft 4556 calling Las Vegas Airport! Come in, Las Vegas!"

There was no answer. The radio seemed operative--but when he turned the receiver dials, not a sound came out.

"Knocked out," Price muttered. "And no wonder, if--"

He couldn't finish the thought, it was too soul-shaking a thing to speculate on, the thing that might have happened to him.

He curved the plane around, looking for highway lights, for an airways beacon, anything.

Nothing. Nothing but the darkness and the stars.

A little frantically, he swung the plane around and started eastward again. He must have missed Las Vegas. But if he kept going east, he'd surely cut the main highways. There were always lots of cars on them at night, in the summer.

He flew on and on. And the darkness continued. No lights at all, not even the glimmer from a lonely ranch.

Nothing.

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