Page:Amazing Stories Volume 15 Number 10.djvu/45



T cannot fail," said Kora-san, I quietly. "It must not fail, for if it does, the world of Quenna is lost. Too many years of our labor have gone into it, and we are the only ones who remain now."

There was something terrifying about the machine. Nothing like it had ever been created. It looked like a huge cube of brilliant quartz, a great, transparent block of strange matter, elevated several feet above the level of the hall, resting on a single, star-shaped slab of jade. Beside it, an inclined panel that was its control board.

It was time they had started the machine, yet the Quennians hesitated. They stood together, five, white-robed men, postponing the moment for which they had waited so long, the same thoughts and fears running through them. Lito, chief among these scientists, let his eyes wander about the great, vacant hall. Everything was ready. Shafts of warm, invigorating sunlight poured through the arched windows to the floor, standing like buttresses against the walls. He looked out of one of the windows to the barren land that stretched endlessly to the horizon, and he reflected on the enormity of their task.

"Just one chance," he said. He had repeated the phrase often in the last days. "The machine will work once. It will go there and return, then it will