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 and discussed their theoretical significance.

"Find anything wrong?" Stoddard inquired at length, straightening up and replacing the cover that housed the cell assembly.

"Nothing worth mentioning," said Arnold. "Think there's time for another run?"

"Yeah, I guess so. Put the sun back on the slit and we'll take another crack at her anyhow."

But the second run proved no better than the first; in fact, if anything the cutoff occurred a trifle farther in toward the violet than before.

"I might as well take the whole works down to the laboratory for a complete overhaul," Stoddard declared, looking at his brain-child as if he would like to heave it over the side of the mountain. He watched a cloud drift lazily across the disk of the sun projected against the slit. "Get any weather predictions on the radio this morning?"

Arnold gave him a quizzical glance. "Haven't you heard yet? All the radio stations have been dead for more than a week."

"What's the matter with 'em?"

"Well, it's really quite mysterious. Last Monday KLX faded out right in the middle of a program, and then stations farther up the dial began to be hit one after the other. For awhile all you could get were the amateurs and the police department. Now they're dead, too."

Stoddard, who regarded the radio as one of the major threats to his peace of mind, took the news philosophically. "Well, I'm glad to hear we aren't the only ones having trouble these days. But I'll bet my wife was sore when she couldn't hear what happened to Priscilla Lane, Private Secretary, last night."

Stoddard was in his laboratory in the basement of the Astrophysics Building at Western Tech hard at work on the wiring diagram for the amplifier system when Arnold came breezing in, his bright young face aglow with enthusiasm.

"Guess what?" he exclaimed. "Friedmann's in town. He's agreed to give a talk this afternoon in Dickinson Hall on his theory of the Xi effect. You know Friedmann, don't you?"

Stoddard shook his head. "Never heard of him."

Arnold hooked one leg over the corner of the desk. "Well, in my opinion he's the foremost cosmologist in the world today. He had so much trouble getting published at first that his reputation isn't as big as it should be. Everybody thought his first paper was written by some crank until Eddington saw it and recognized its value immediately. Now Friedmann won't send his articles to any of the regular journals. You've got to dig his stuff out of all sorts of queer places, like the Proceedings of the Geophysical Society of Venezuela or the Annals of the Portuguese Meteorological Union."

"I know how he feels," said Stoddard sympathetically.

"Well, I thought we should hear 8