will show you how to use the katonator," I said weakly.

Silently I adjusted it, slipped the belt off and handed it to him. He led me outside to where stars blazed in a black night. He looked upward hesitantly, pointed to a brilliant blue planet.

"Is that it?" he asked one of his companions. The man nodded. Carefully he took aim, pressed the trigger as I had showed him.

Lightnings roared again! The twin violet beams leaped from the muzzle of the weapon, howled up into the heavens. In a fraction of a second the photon-pack was drained and the pyrotechnic display died away. All was silent.

One of the officers raced back into the building, pounded the keys of a calculator. He returned almost at once.

"At this distance it will take just under nine minutes for light to make the round trip," he said.

The officer who had fired the katonator whirled to confront me.

"Suppose I missed?" he cried in sudden alarm. "It is so far—a fraction of a second of arc would make the beam miss entirely."

I shook my head. "The beam fans out," I explained. "And a planet has mass and the photons are attracted by gravity. Even if they should miss, the attraction of the planet would draw them into it."

He nodded and was silent. Silence cloaked us all—a hundred ancients and myself, all staring up into a mysterious night.

Nine minutes passed as slowly as nine terrible years. But by and by the hands of my chronometer completed their revolutions.

Suddenly we saw the katonator-beams strike.

Above us a new sun blazed forth, kindling like the striking of a cosmic match. Night fled around us, and day came flaring up into noonday brilliance, and beyond. Heat poured down upon us, brilliant rays of sunlight more intense than I had ever seen. The dome behind me sparkled and glistened in the incredible radiations from the stricken planet millions of miles away, and for a moment I could almost feel the fierce actinic waves of ultra-violet, cosmics and a thousand other super-spectral radiations.

Then the peak was reached, and the light began to fade as all the hydrogen was transmuted and consumed. In a moment the flare of energies was gone, and the pale blue 

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