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The dog snapped tentatively. Thorn flattened still harder against the wall, with discovery and death hovering very closely about him. Then the beast’s master intervened.

“Grego! Here, sir! A council room is no place, for thee, anyway. Here, I say! So, then–“

He hastened to the dog and caught its collar. Twisting the leather cruelly, he dragged the protesting, snarling brute to the doors and slid them shut with the wolfhound barking and growling on the outside. “Someone put him in his kennel,” he said through the panels. A scuffling in the hall told of the execution of the order. The council room became quiet again, and Thorn leaned against the wall and closed his eyes for an instant.

“We were saying, Soyo,” the leader addressed the dog’s owner, “that the Ziegler plans start for Arvania to-morrow night. All is arranged. These innocent looking bits of paper”–he thumped a small packet of documents lying before him–“shall deliver mighty America to us!”

* * * * *

A subdued cheer answered the man’s words–while Thorn stared at the packet of papers with unbelieving eyes. It had never occurred to him that the Ziegler plans might be in that very room, on the table with the rest of the welter of letters, thumbed documents, and cups and saucers. And there they were–the vital projector plans–not in a safe or hidden in some fantastic place, but right before his eyes!

Involuntarily his hand extended eagerly toward the packet, then was withdrawn. Not now. He was invisible–but the papers, if he grasped them, would not be. Clenched in his unseen hand, they would be perfectly visible, moving in jerks and starts as he raced for the door.

Like lightning his mind turned over one plan after another for making away with that precious packet. Each scheme seemed impossible of fulfilment.

“The biggest difficulty is in getting them out of the country,” the spare, elderly man was saying. “But we have solved that. Solved it simply. I myself shall bear them, sewn in my clothes, to our native land. The American authorities could search, on some pretext, any other of our number who tried to smuggle them out. But me they dare not lay a finger on. That would be an overt act.”

Thorn’s thoughts whirled desperately on. Wait till later and follow whoever left the room with the plans? But he hated to let them get out of his sight.

And at this point he became suddenly aware that the man named Kori was gazing fixedly at him.

Thorn was between the section of the table where Kori sat, and the angular buffet-end. Kori could not possibly see anything but the shining mahogany, thought Thorn. And yet the man’s eyes were narrowing to ominous slits as he started in his direction.

* * * * *

Thorn held his breath. Was the shielding film changing in structure? Were the repolarized atoms slowly losing their straight-line arrangement, allowing light rays to penetrate through to his body instead of diverting them to form a pocket of invisibility around him? The film had never acted like that before–but never before had Thorn applied it to living flesh with its disintegrating heat and moisture.

“Excellency,” said Kori at last, a hard edge to his voice, “look thou at that buffet. No, no–the end nearest my chair.”

“Well?” said the elderly man. “I see nothing.”

Thorn breathed a sigh of relief. But the relief was to be of short duration.

“Come to my place, if thou wilt, and see from here,” said Kori.

The leader got up and came to Kori’s place. Kori pointed straight at Thorn.

“There–seest thou anything out of the ordinary?”