married, if Rob Torren hadn't made charges disgracing him utterly. And tomorrow she would be buried alive in the helpless little yacht, while he was unable to lift a finger to her aid.

He was talking to her desperately when there was a vast, labored tumult to the west. It was the product of ten thousand creakings. He turned, and in the starlight he saw great flat plates—they were fifty feet by a hundred and more—turning slowly. An area a mile square changed its appearance. Each of the flat plates in a hundred rows of fifty plates turned sidewise, to dump its load of settled sand. A square mile of plates turned edges to the sky—and turned back again. Creakings and groanings filled the air, together with the soft roaring noise of the falling sand. A pause. Another great section of a mile each way performed the same senseless motion. Pure desperation made Stan say sharply:

"Esther! Cut off for half an hour! I'll call back! I see the slimmest possible chance, and I've got to take it! Half an hour, understand?"

He heard her unsteady assent. He scrambled fiercely to the nearest of the huge plates. It was, of course, insane to think of such a thing. The plates had no purpose save to gather loads of sand and then to turn and dump them. But there were swellings at one end of each—where the girders to which they clung united to form this preposterous elevated grid. Those swellings might be motors. He dragged a small cutting-torch from the tool kit. He snapped its end. A tiny, savage, blue-white flame appeared in midair half an inch from the torch's metal tip.

He turned that flame upon the rounded swelling at the end of a monster slab. Something made the slabs turn. By reason, it should be a motor. The swellings might be housings for motors. He made a cut across such a swelling. At the first touch of the flame something smoked luridly and frizzled before the metal grew white-hot and flowed aside before the flame. There had been a coating on the iron.

Even as he cut, Stan realized that the columns and the plates were merely iron. But the sand blast of the daily storms should erode the thickest of iron away in a matter of weeks, at most. So the grid was coated with a tough, elastic stuff—a plastic of some sort—which was not abraded by the wind. It did not scratch because it was not hard. It yielded, and bounced sand particles away instead of resisting them. It would outwear iron, in the daily sand blast, by a million times, on the principle by which land vehicles on Earth use rubber tires instead of metal, for greater wear.

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