opening a view to the far horizon, although a little weather, kept electronically at bay for the symchromy, was beginning to drift in—thin streamers of cloud. He felt as never before a poignancy in the beauty of utopia, because he knew as never before how near it might be to disaster, how closely it was pressed upon by alien infinities. There was something spectral about the grandeur of the lonely, softly-glowing skylons, lofty and distant as mountains, thrusting up from the dark rolling countryside. Those vertical, one-building cities of his people, focuses of communal activity, gleaming pegs sparsely studding the whole earth—the Mauve Z peering over the next hill, seeming to top it but actually miles away; beyond it the Gray Twins, linked by a fantastically delicate aerial bridge; off to the left the pearly finger of the Opal Cross; last, farther left, thirty miles away but jutting boldly above the curve of the earth, the mountainous Blue Lorraine—all these majestic skylons seemed to Thorn like the last pinnacles of some fairy city engulfed by a rising black tide. And the streams of flying men and women, with their softly winking identification lights, no more than fireflies doomed to drown.

His fingers adjusted the last fastening of his togs, paused there. Clawly only said, "Well?" but there was in that one word the sense of a leave-taking from all this beauty and comfort and safety—an ultimate embarkation.

They pulled down their visors. From their feelings, it might have been Mars toward which they launched themselves—a sullen ember halfway up the sky, even now being tentatively probed by the First Interplanetary Expedition. But their actual destination was the Opal Cross.

II.

Never before had the screams of nightmare been such a public problem; now the wise men almost wished they could forbid sleep in the small hours, that the shrieks of cities might less horribly disturb the pale, pitying moon as it glimmered on green waters.

Nyarlathotep, H. P. Lovecraft.

Suppressing the fatigue that surged up in him disconcertingly, Clawly rose to address the World Executive Committee. He found it less easy to suppress the feeling that had in part caused the surge of fatigue: the illusion that he was a charlatan seeking to persuade sane men of the truth of fabricated legends of the supernatural. His smile was characteristic of him—friendly, but faintly diabolic, mocking himself as well as others. Then the smile faded.

He 

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