But obstacles of some sort prevented his getting to his electromagnetic apparatus again after that message I have just given. For some days we received nothing. Perhaps he was having fresh audiences, and trying to evade his previous admissions. Who can hope to guess?

And then suddenly, like a cry in the night, like a cry that is followed by a stillness, came the last message. It is the briefest fragment, the broken beginnings of two sentences.

The first was: “I was mad to let the Grand Lunar know⁠—”

There was an interval of perhaps a minute. One imagines some interruption from without. A departure from the instrument⁠—a dreadful hesitation among the looming masses of apparatus in that dim, blue-lit cavern⁠—a sudden rush back to it, full of a resolve that came too late. Then, as if it were hastily transmitted, came: “Cavorite made as follows: take⁠—”

There followed one word, a quite unmeaning word as it stands: “uless.”