were not organs of sight, but they were the windows of the mind. They were the source of those tenuous flames that seemed to caress Norden.

As Taylor looked at the eyes he felt plunged into the pathless depths of a vast, powerful brain. He was in contact with an infinity of intelligence far beyond limits of human comprehension. It was a surging intelligence of energy, abysmal, vaporous and limitless, transcending the dimensions, out-reaching boundless time, overshadowing matter.

The eyes made Taylor forget he was a man. His own mind seemed merged in the intellectual energy floating among the monster machines of the forge room. Dimly, he was conscious that this power was not directed at him, but at Norden who stood, still whistling, in front of the globe.

The sphere was whistling, too, and the sound transformed itself into music of the stars.

A discordant note rose in the song from Norden's imitation of the voice. Norden was shrieking hatred for Taylor's nation, for all those who opposed the self-designated supermen of the world.

"My race must be preserved!"

The thought was Norden's, reflected to Taylor from the shoreless depths of the energy brain.

"All other peoples are evil, decadent, and are doomed to slavery under the man of the future. The future man will be a child of my race. My race is superior. From it the uberman will rise. You must help. Prey on these inferior peoples. They do not deserve to live."

The sphere's hues changed, reddish, then yellow, back to orange.

"Is this Norden a man?" came the sphere's questioning thought. "Why doesn't he flee? Why doesn't he scream in terror? He's different from the others. Perhaps he is, as he claims, a superior being. There was one, who called himself Orkins, who talked with us. But when Orkins saw us slay he ran away in terror. This Norden begs us to kill."

"It is only through destruction of the weak that the strongest survive," Norden answered. "Man is a cruel, but noble creature. Those who fail to kill are weak."

The sphere's whistle grew thunderous.

"You speak the philosophy of my world!" it said.

From the depths of the sphere a rhythm of thought arose. A whispered epic sang through the fibres of Taylor's mind, telling of a world of energy, whipped into a storm of war. Spheres of energy, overwhelmed a weaker race made up of gaseous clouds of atoms.

In the midst of this titanic battle a huge disc appeared, carried by the gaseous clouds. It was a concave lens, like some powerful optical instrument. But instead of focusing beams of light, it reflected, not only light but all forms of energy. As the spheres attacked they were shattered into spores and shot away through space.

The whispered song told of the flight through space. Behind lay a world, unlike the earth, which the spheres called home. It was a gaseous, flaming world where matter and energy mingled as one substance. It was mottled with spots of cold gases which warred with the whispering spheres. It was the sun.

The sun was power, yet a ceaseless struggle between energy and matter. But neither energy nor matter was in control. Should matter control, the sun would cool. If energy triumphed, the sun would explode. It was war, like the wars of the earth, where one philosophy was based on power, and the other seeking justice. A victory for might would make a ruthless world. Justice was worthless without injustice. The ideals were mutually dependent, yet always at war.

"The cold gases tricked us," whispered the sphere. "The weak have no right to outwit the strong. The weak has no right to survive. Justice is an unnatural condition. Progress means nothing, except on the road to glory. Your race, sharing our philosophy, can build another great energy reflector to send us back. We can aid our people in triumphing over these inferior beings who claim rights in a world of might."

"We can built what you wish," Norden promised.

It was a promise like other promises Norden had made, Taylor thought. Norden once had promised to help Taylor fight the spheres.

"I will call the others!"

The sphere floated upward toward the hole in the roof. It circled the factory and moved away, toward the town, where a score of other majestic, glowing globes floated like bubbles of fire.

Norden watched, a smile cracking his jutting jaw.

There was still a whispering sound. A single shrill hiss came from the casting room.

"Why do you claim superiority, Norden?" Taylor spoke.

The spy turned. For the first time he saw Taylor.

"Himmel!"

Norden's eyes looked beyond Taylor and rested on Masters, who was emerging from the tunnel.

"Is it because you pose the doctrine of slavery and destruction? Is it because your cultural contributions are keyed to military conquest? Is it because of your lies and broken promises? Is it because you are more skillful in butchery? It is because you have refined the art of terrorism?"

Taylor was advancing, half crouching, toward Norden.

Norden's arm swished in a swift motion. He drew an automatic pistol from his pocket and leveled it at Taylor and Masters.

"Because I am the stronger!" Norden said.

Taylor had not expected Norden to be armed. He had overlooked the possibility that the spy might have an extra weapon hidden in the tunnel.

CHAPTER VII

Humanity's Army

Taylor and Masters raised their arms. They were caught.

"There is nothing you can do now to save yourself, or your country," Norden said. "Nothing. The spheres will destroy you and your people. They will destroy every living creature who does not surrender to my nation. Might will come into its own."

"Are you sure the spheres are so invincible?" Taylor asked. "Remember, they were expelled from the sun. They must have been checked on the sun many times, otherwise they would have destroyed the creatures who opposed them."

"They are greater than anything on the earth," Norden said.

"The spheres are not for the earth. Our battles are not theirs. By betraying your world to these creatures, you are betraying the whole human race."

"This is not so!" Norden said, thickly. "I know how to handle them. Orkins told me. He said he imitated their whistle and they spared him, while they killed the others in the plant. He didn't realize the value of his discovery. He was too much of a coward."

Norden beckoned his prisoners to him and disarmed them. He pointed to the door of the casting room.

"Look!"

In the center of the room was a metal pot used for small castings. It was filled with molten, glowing metal. Beside it sat a single orange sphere, spraying the pot with bolts of heat to keep the contents warm, for the electrical energy that had supplied the melting pot had long-since been cut off.

In the center of the pot an orange-red bubble was rising from the metal. A sphere was forming on the surface of the metal.

"The rise of living energy!" Norden said. "Our own kind of life may have begun ages ago in much the same way. A spore from some far off world may have drifted here through space, found conditions just right, and taken root. Thus the spore of the sun—the whispering spheres—found a set of conditions fitted for growth. That metal pot is filled with seeds of the spheres. One by one they will hatch and grow into a force that will bring extinction to all men, except those of my race. The spheres do not want the world, they want the sun. We will see that they go back to the sun, after they have had their sport, killing the weaklings of your nation."

Taylor shuddered as he looked at the growing sphere. This deep, intense intelligence, which found sport in killing human beings, already seemed to be pouring from the depths of its half-formed body.

"The fact that I am alive, proves my superiority," Norden said. "Your people ran in terror at the