'Very good, sir,' said Arnott, and felt his way to the Communicator
keys.

No lights broke forth, but the hollow of the skies made herself the
mouth for one note that touched the raw fibre of the brain. Men hear
such sounds in delirium, advancing like tides from horizons beyond the
ruled foreshores of space.

'That's our pitch-pipe,' said Arnott. 'We may be a bit ragged. I've
never conducted two hundred and fifty performers before.' He pulled out
the couplers, and struck a full chord on the Service Communicators.

The beams of light leaped down again, and danced, solemnly and awfully,
a stilt-dance, sweeping thirty or forty miles left and right at each
stiff-legged kick, while the darkness delivered itself--there is no
scale to measure against that utterance--of the tune to which they kept
time. Certain notes--one learnt to expect them with terror--cut through
one's marrow, but, after three minutes, thought and emotion passed in
indescribable agony.

We saw, we heard, but I think we were in some sort swooning. The two
hundred and fifty beams shifted, re-formed, straddled and split,
narrowed, widened, rippled in ribbons, broke into a thousand white-hot
parallel lines, melted and revolved in interwoven rings like
old-fashioned engine-turning, flung up to the zenith, made as if to
descend and renew the torment, halted at the last instant, twizzled
insanely round the horizon, and vanished, to bring back for the
hundredth time darkness more shattering than their instantly renewed
light over all Illinois. Then the tune and lights ceased together, and