ground with an unnatural assortment of reflected and re-reflected light-beams from the twin landing-lamps. There were four clumps of skit-trees sharing the prison with the flier and the men.

Silence. Stillness. Nothing. Every ten minutes Wentworth called the Galloping Cow. It was an hour and a half before there came an answer to Wentworth's call.

"—llo!" came McRae's voice through the crackling static. "Down in—gain—no sign—sort anywhere—"

"Get a directional on me!" snapped Wentworth. "Can you hear me above the static?"

"What sta—voice perfectly clear—" came McRae's booming. "Keep—talking...."

Wentworth blinked. No static at the Galloping Cow? When his ears were practically deafened? Then it made sense. All of it!

"I'll keep talking!" he said fervently. "Use the directional and locate me! But don't try to help me direct! Take a bearing from where you find me to where a fifty-foot dirt embankment sticks out from a mountain-spur to the north. Get on that line and you'll hear the static, all right.

"It's in a beam coming right here at me. Follow that static back to the mountains, and when you find where it's being projected from, you'll find some skit-tree planters with all the artifacts your little heart desires. Only maybe you'll have to blast them."

He swallowed.

"It works out to sense," he went on more calmly. "They built up a civilization based on generating instead of building the things they wanted to use. Our force-fields are globular, because the generator's inside. If you want a force-field to have a definite shape, you have to generate it differently. Their cities and their machines weren't substance, though they were solid enough. They were force-fields!

"The generators were off at a distance, throwing the force-field they wanted where they needed it. They projected solidities like we projected pictures on a screen. They projected their cities. Their tools. Probably their spaceships too! That's why we never found artifacts. We looked where installations had been, instead of where they were generated and flung to the spot where they were wanted. There's a beam full of static coming from those mountains."

Light! With all the blinding suddenness of an atomic explosion, there was light. Wentworth had a moment's awareness of sunshine on 

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