Mr. Parham was astounded by his own fatalism. He who had conceived he held the mastery of the world in his shapely hand was now an almost apathetic spectator of his own frustration. He saw Gerson battering at the trap with a feeling — it was almost akin to gratified malice.

Gerson, he realized, had always been the disagreeable aspect of his mastery; always Gerson had spoilt things; always he had touched the stages of the fine romance of this adventure with an unanticipated cruelty and horror. Mr. Parham was traditional and ready to be traditional, but Gerson he saw now was ancestral and archaic. Mr. Parham realized now as he watched those simian fists hammering with furious gestures on the thick metal and pausing for the answering blows of the men outside, that he had come at last to detest Gerson almost as much as he detested Sir Bussy. He knew that this violence was futile, and he despised it as much as he hated it.

He put out his arm and touched Gerson.

Gerson sprang round, manifestly in a state of intense irritation and his mask did not completely stifle his interrogative snarl.

“That door may have fallen automatically,” said Mr. Parham. “For all we know yet — everyone here may be dead.”

Gerson thought and then nodded and made a gesture for Mr. Parham to precede him.

“And indeed,” said Mr. Parham to himself, “for all I know they may be dead.”

In another moment he knew better. The little passage opened out into what seemed to be a large circular space and at the further side of this they saw two figures, unmasked and regarding them. Gas L was as if it had never been. They were men clad in the white overalls dear to chemists and surgeons. They made signs as if for Mr. Parham and Gerson to move softly. They pointed to something hidden as yet from the newcomers. Their forms were a little distorted and their gestures a little exaggerated by some intervening transparent substance.

So they had had an anti-gas for Gas L.

Mr. Parham advanced, and Gerson came close behind.

They emerged upon a circular gallery.

The place made Mr. Parham think of the inside of the reservoir of a coal-gas works. Such a place would surely look like this place if it had electric lights inside it. It was large — it might have been a hundred yards in diameter — and shaped like a drum. The little gallery on which they stood ran round it, and in the central pit and occupying most of it was a huge glass bulb, a vast retort, in which a greenish-white liquid was boiling and bubbling. The shining curvature of the glass rose before them, reflecting them faintly with a certain distortion. It shortened and broadened them. It robbed Mr. Parham of all his natural dignity and made Gerson look incredibly squat and filthy and evil. The liquid in the retort was not seething equally; it was traversed and torn here and there by spurts and eddies of commotion; here it was mysteriously still and smooth, here with a wild rush came a drive of bursting bubbles. They stormed across the surface and raised eruptive mounds of ebullient liquid. And over the whole whirled and danced wisps of filmy vapour. But this held Mr. Parham’s attention only for a moment. He realized that he was in the presence of Camelford and Sir Bussy, and he forgot everything else in that confrontation.

Both these men were dressed in the same white overalls as the assistants across on the other side of the rotunda. But they had the air of having expected Mr. Parham and his companion. They seemed to have been coming to meet them.

With a gesture of irritation Mr. Parham wrenched off his mask and Gerson followed suit.

“The Lord Paramount of Britain,” said Camelford and bowed with manifest irony.

“Looks uncommonly like my old friend Parham,” said Sir Bussy.

“This other gentleman, if I’m not mistaken,” said Camelford, “is that master strategist, General Gerson.”

“It’s a loyal Englishman, Mr. Camelford,” said the General, “who has done his best to save a great empire.”

“You lost a good lot of it to begin with,” said Camelford.

“Because we were shot at from behind.”

“How’s your war going now?”

“The war’s gone to pieces. Mutiny. Disorder. London is in revolt and crying for peace. American peace propaganda has done us in- with treason at the back of us. It’s the story of the poor old Kaiser over again. Beaten on the home front. No fair soldiering. If we could have made enough of Gas L— if we could have got all we had reasonably thought we should get . . . God! There was nothing wrong in my plans. Except that you’ve made a corner in Gas L. While we fought the enemy, you, you dirty sneaks, cornered our munitions. And now you’ve got us, and may Hell take you for it!”

Camelford turned to Sir Bussy. “He speaks with heat, but I think we may admit his facts are sound. You’ve always had the buying-up instinct.” He smiled blandly at Gerson. “We’ve got the stuff, as you say. We don’t pretend we haven’t. Sir Bussy has been amazing. But it isn’t for sale. We thought it a pity to waste it on Gas L, and so we are making use of it in another way. Our way.”

A faint memory of the Lord Paramount reappeared in Mr. Parham. He made the old familiar gesture with his hand. “I want that material,” he said. “I demand it.”

Sir Bussy’s nether lip dropped. “What for?” he asked.

“To save the Empire. To save the world from chaos.”

“There ain’t going to be no chaos,” misquoted Sir Bussy.

“What are you going to do? Where do you think you are driving? Are you going to sit here and barter your stolen goods to the highest bidder?”

“Cornered, perhaps, but not stolen,” Sir Bussy corrected.

“Well?”

“We’re going to take control,” said Sir Bussy.

“YOU! A handful of financial and technical scoundrels!”

“WE’RE not going to take control,” said Camelford, “if Sir Bussy will forgive me. Something else HAS taken control. And there are more men coming into this business of creation than you or Gerson dream.”

Mr. Parham looked about him, at the smooth circular walls about them, at the monstrous glass retort, at the distant figures of the silent attendants in white. Their number had now increased to six, and they all stood watching noiselessly. It was extraordinarily still and large and clean and — queer. It was not like war. It was not like government. It was not like industrialism. It was profoundly unhistorical. It was the new thing coming. And at his side stood Gerson. He, on the contrary, was like all the heroes of all the faint hopes that have ever succeeded. That never very attractive little figure in its uniform of soiled khaki suffered enormously by the contrast, looked brutish, looked earthy. Crawling through the darkness over rough ground usually given over to rabbits and an occasional goat had not improved his never very meticulous appearance, and his native physical vigour, the natural strength of his dark hair, made it very evident that he had had no time for a shave for a couple of days.

Mr. Parham, who had always had a reasonable care for his own costume, experienced a wave of profound disloyalty to his sturdy colleague. This latter looked a pig of a creature, he looked as toughly combative with anything and everything as a netted boar. He was more than half an animal. Yet surely for all his savagery he had the inflexible loyalty of a great hero, he had a heart of ruthless, inexorable gold. Surely?

Mr. Parham’s thoughts came back to the last sentence Camelford had uttered and to this strange place into which he and Gerson had blundered. “Something else had taken control?” Not Gerson but something else? What was the issue that had brought them to this confrontation? Gerson hot and dirty, versus this Something Else? Which was not this group nor that group. Not the nation nor the Empire. Not America nor Europe. Which was a sort of emanation from the released and freely acting intelligence of mankind.

A trace of the Master Spirit was still in Mr. Parham’s manner, but behind the mask of his resolute bearing he felt his mind had fallen open and lay unprotected against new strange heretical assailants.

“What is your aim he............