his equipment, and watched the receiver with a sinking heart. As the transmitting plane passed through the clock, it alternately puffed in a billow of bright glowing smoke, collapsed in dull dimming flame, erupted again, and—Peter thought that it must have been when the plane passed through the mainspring—hurled a streamer of bright burning carbon and iron colored flame around and around in a tiny circle like a firework pinwheel. Something should have gone 'spang!' when a shapeless blob of scintillation arched through the air like a miniature skyrocket, to die before it hit the floor.

There was copper in the clock, alloyed as brass, that burned bright green. There was carbon and there was iron and there was nickel and there was a chromium colored flame as the trim hit the air. It was a fine pyrotechnic display, and that which did not burn as a monatomic element in air powdered the receiver plate as the same mixed powder. The powder had lumps this time when elements with an affinity for one another combined on the plate.

Higgins strode down the length of the room, picked up a small handfull of the mixed dust and turned to Mr. Harrison. He hurled the dust at the man and snarled, "I suppose this pile of garbage is an alarm clock?"

Harrison wiped his face. "It was once," he said.

"Carthage was a city before the Romans burned it," snarled Higgins angrily. "And this—" he hurled the butt of his cigar on the laboratory floor, "—was once a cigar. Bah! Matter transmitter!"

Harrison shook his head. "Don't blame me for Mansfield's failure," he said slowly. "He's missed something, somewhere. The fact remains that Mansfield has succeeded in transmitting matter, no matter how it comes out."

"Yeah," sneered Higgins scornfully. "But this pile of original dust isn't what we were paying for. So what's he missed but the main point of the whole experiment? All Mansfield's done is to do on a large scale what they did fifty years ago. Reduced an atom to radiation and then caused the radiation to reduce back into the original atom. Mansfield just did it with a pound of matter instead of a millimicrogram in a cloud chamber."

"But Mr. Higgins," said Peter hopefully, "doesn't the fact that I did transmit matter prove that the project is feasible? All I have to do now is to discover the way of transmitting whatever field of force or basic energy is required to maintain the original form of the object. Whatever binding energy holds the atoms together, 

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