ahead. He stopped and sat still, sweating. He heard somebody stirring heavily inside the house before him.

Then he heard a splashing sound off in the mist. Voices. Bud Gregory loomed up in the radiance of the headlights.

"Who's that?" he demanded uneasily. "What you want? Who you lookin' for?"

Murfree got out stiffly. Bud Gregory greeted him with unfeigned warmth and hospitality—because Murfree was paying him ten dollars a day to do nothing. But Murfree was hopelessly uneasy until there were sounds nearby and two children appeared. One was Bud's eight-year-old daughter, and the other was his fifteen-year-old son. The boy carried a string of fish. He looked distinctly uneasy. The little girl grinned shyly at Murfree.

"Thanks, Mistuh Murfree," she said bashfully. "We was gettin' scared."

Then Murfree swallowed a huge lump in his throat and shook hands with Bud Gregory.

CHAPTER II

A Problem of Inertia

Next morning Murfree drove the four miles to the town nearest Bud Gregory's shack. Bud had found an abandoned building on a patch of cut-over land, moved in happily, and thrived while waiting for the owner to put him out. Murfree had made other arrangements. The shack was in an impossibly bad condition, but it suited Bud and his family, and there was only so much that could be done about that. In other matters, though, things were different.

Murfree went after the newspapers, and found the beginning of what he had been afraid of. Radars kept constant watch on the seven newly-discovered satellites of Earth. Some fourteen hours before the newspapers closed their forms, the nearest of the seven had dived down from its normal height of 1500 miles to a bare 500, hardly beyond the thinnest part of the earth's atmosphere.

It went hurtling across the North Atlantic at that height. Then, simultaneously, a Newfoundland-to-Eire transatlantic plane ceased to communicate, and the radars reported that some object was rising from the earth's surface as if to join the nearest satellite. It did not, of course. To have done so would have required an impossible acceleration which would have burned up any earthly object. But the rising object plummeted up beyond the air, wavered, and then rose 

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