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Sticking out of the breast pocket of her ulster was the big envelope containing her bid. Five minutes before the hour the men began filing in one by one, awkwardly uncovering their heads, and standing in one another's way. Some, using their hats as screens, looked over the rims. When the bids were being gathered up by the clerk, Dennis Quigg handed over McGaw's.

By the firelight vague shapes came and went, their shadows grotesquely flung against the leafy screens. The figures quickened their paces and their gestures; then suddenly, with cries, flung themselves into wild activity. And all about the fire, Stern saw a wheeling, circling, eddying mob of black and frightful shapes. "The swine!" he breathed. "Wait wait till I make a pint or two of Pulverite!"

Then the red light overhead winked to green, and the dome flickered and solidified into cold, inert metal. The screens lighted up again, and Vall could see Skordran Kirv, across Asia and the Pacific, getting into his helmet. A dot of light in the center of the underview screen widened as the mesh under the conveyer irised open around the pickup.

It was long, and low-ceiled, and the paper on the walls was a dingy red, so old that the figure on it had retired into the background been absorbed by it, so to speak. The two long, dusty, windows looked upon an area, and were grilled half way up by wrought-iron screens which, too, helped to shut out the light of day. The long table was covered by a red figured table cloth.

No sooner was he hidden that the front end of the ship went up in a blaze of light, in spite of their ray screens going full blast. They were up so high by that time that when the bow was burned off the other three fainted from lack of air. Then their generators went out, and pretty soon two peculiar-looking strangers entered.

The smiling scenes on its walls and the tall screens which broke its length made it more habitable than the drawing-rooms beyond; but her chief reason for preferring it was the satisfaction she found in having fires lit in both the monumental chimneys that faced each other down its long perspective. This satisfaction had its source in the old Marquise's disapproval.

"Why not send a copper torpedo to destroy their entire planet?" suggested Dunark. "Wouldn't work. Their detecting screens would locate it a thousand million miles off in space, and they would ray it. With a zone of force that would get through their screens, that would be the first thing I'd do. You see, every thought comes back to that zone. We've got to get through it some way."

In the little house in the garden where the Twins lived, there are no thick walls. There are only pretty wooden screens covered with fine white paper. These screens slide back and forth in grooves, and when they are all shoved back at once the whole house is turned into one big, bright room. This is why the Twins had to be so careful not to make any noise.

Brandon flung out a tractor rod and threw the mass of his cruiser upon it as it locked into those sullen green walls. But as soon as the enemy felt its drag, their screens flared white, and the massive Terrestrial space-ship quivered in every member as that terrific cable of force was snapped.

The climax was reached when Bert tried to imitate a thunderstorm in the mountains and pulled over a big trunk full of old clothes and some window screens standing in a corner. The show broke up in a hurry, and when Mrs. Bobbsey appeared on the scene, wanting to know what the noise meant, all the actors and the doll audience were out of sight.