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in a particularly dead month. During all of June the news had been dead, and now July had begun with a bang!
    With time to think and investigate, the airport officials went over the ship with the Air Guard, using a fine-tooth comb. It was soon evident that the job had been done from the outside, as the Pirate had said. The emergency pilot testified that when he entered the ship, he found a small piece of wire securing the air lock from the outside. This had certainly been put on while the ship was in flight, and that meant that whoever had done this, had landed on the great ship with a small plane, had somehow anchored it, then had entered the plane through the air lock at the ten mile height. He had probably flown across the path of the plane, leaving a trail of gas in its way to be drawn in through the ventilator pumps. It had been washed out by the incoming good air later, for the emergency pilot had not been affected.
    Now the investigation led them to the mail-room. Despite the refractory nature of the metal, the door had been opened by melting or burning out the lock. And an opening had been burned into the safe itself I Opened by melting it through!
    A bond shipment was due the next day, and the airline officials planned to be on the watch for it. It would get through safely, they were sure, for men were put on board in steel chambers hermetically welded behind them, with oxygen tanks and automatic apparatus sealed within to supply them with clean air. The front of the tanks were equipped with bullet-proof glass windows, and by means of electrically operated controls the men inside could fire machine guns. Thus they were protected from the Pirate's gas and able to use their weapons.
    The ship was accompanied by a patrol of Air Guardsmen. Yet, despite this, cancer cases were aboard with the hope of being gassed.
    When the plane reached the neighborhood of San Francisco, there had been no sign of an attack. The Pirate might well retire permanently on a million, if he were alone, as the singular signature indicated; but it seemed much more probable that he would attempt another attack in any case. Well, that just meant watching all the planes from now on, a tremendous job for the Air Guard to handle.
    The leader of the patrol turned in an easy bank to descend the ten miles to earth, and his planes followed him. Then suddenly through the communicator came an unmistakable sound. The plane automatically signaling for an emergency pilot! That could only mean that the plane had been gassed under the very eyes of his men!
    The bonds were gone and the passengers gassed, and incredibly, the men in the steel tanks were as thoroughly gassed as the rest.
    The note was brief, and as much to the point as was the absence of the bonds.
    To the Officials of the Airport: Restore as usual. The men in the tanks are asleep also-I said the gas would penetrate any material. It does. A mask obviously won't do any good. Don't try that C-32L mask. I warn you it will be fatal. My gas reacts to produce a virulent poison when in contact with the chemicals in the C-32L. The Pirate
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    CHAPTER I
    On the thirty-ninth floor of a large New York apartment two young men were lounging about after a strenuous game of tennis. The blue tendrils of smoke from their pipes rose slowly, to be drawn away by the efficient ventilating system. The taller of the two seemed to be doing most of the talking. In the positions they had assumed it would have been rather difficult to be sure of which was the taller, but Robert Morey was a good four inches taller than Richard Arcot. Arcot had to suffer under the stigma of “runt” with Morey around-he was only six feet tall.
    The chosen occupation of each was physical research, and in that field Arcot could well have called Morey “runt", for Arcot had only one competitor-his father. In this case it had been “like father, like son". For many years Robert Arcot had been known as the greatest American physicist, and