fiery vapor.

Quickly I dropped the shield of my conductor screen. Trusting that my luck would hold, and the men around me would be too dazed to fire their weapons again, I drew my katonator, set it at drain, focused it on the atomic warhead.

Drawing my katonator, I focused the twin violet beams on the warhead of the atomic bomb.

The twin violet beams sprang out and impinged on the silvery metal, pierced it and sucked the heart from the seething mass of erupting matter within. Blinding energies were drawn from those toppling atomic structures, surging through the carrier-beam of the katonator into the photon-pack cartridges at my waist. I had an instant's fear as I wondered if the storage pack would hold all the mighty energies of the warhead, far greater than the maximum load for which it was designed.

But lightnings of static electricity played about my head, dissipating brilliantly but harmlessly into the air, and in an instant the danger was over. The bursting energies of the warhead had been drawn out, and the mass of matter inside it was inert.

Before me lay the atom-rocket, harmless, dead.

I had destroyed Earth's most potent weapon!

I give those ancients credit for bravery. Dangerous though I must have seemed, they closed in on me without firing their weapons. Meekly I raised my arms over my head.

The white-haired general blazed hatred at me from his pale eyes.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

I shrugged. Carefully I phrased my words in their outlandish tongue.

"I am a—a visitor from the future," I said. "I regret the accident that just happened more than I can say."

"Regret it?" he blazed. "Hah! You'll regret it twice as much when you face the firing squad!"

I spread my hands helplessly. In truth, death had no terrors for me now. A firing squad would seem almost a blessing—for I had destroyed the bomb that would have blasted Venus. Whatever happened now, the future before me was changed—and in a changed future I had no place, and my Elren would not exist!

"Take him out and shoot him," the general cried.

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