The world, wholly at a loss to understand the thing that had come upon
it, was listening to reports from the straggling Azores fleet as it
staggered into various ports. Every continent already was buzzing with
alarm and rage. In less than eighteen hours the calm and peaceful ways
of civilization had received an epoch-making jar. All civilization was
by the ears--it had become a hornet's nest prodded by a pole no one
could understand or parry.

And the Master, sitting at his desk with reports and messages piling
up before him, with all controls at his finger-tips, smiled very
grimly to himself.

"If they show such hysteria at just the initial stages of the game,"
he murmured, "what will they show when--"

The Legion had already begun to fall into well-disciplined routine,
each man at his post, each doing duty to the full, whether that
duty lay in pilot-house or cooks' galley, in engine-room or pit, in
sick-bay or chartroom. The gloom caused by the death and burial at
sea of Travers, the New Zealander, soon passed. This was a company
of fighting men, inured to death in every form. And death they had
reckoned as part of the payment to be made for their adventuring.
This, too, helped knit the fine mass-spirit already binding them
together into a coherent, battling group.

A little after two in the afternoon, _Nissr_ passed within far sight
of the Azores, visible in cloud-rifts as little black spots sown
on the waters like sparse seeds on a burnished plate of metal. This
habitation of man soon slipped away to westward, and once more nothing
remained but the clear, cold severity of space, with now and then a