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tell-tale buzz of internal combustionor Diesel engines that announced the presence of conventional airships was absent.
Kpalimé
was as silent as she was elusive. In her, the Crimson Wizard could approach his target unseen, unheard, undetected.
    He guided the airship out of her berth atop the Central Railroad Tower, pressing a control that caused the hangar door to slide shut behind
Kpalimé
. The airship slipped through the wintrysky above Seacoast City’s concrete canyons. The lights of theaters and restaurants, of a hundred thousand apartment dwellings and of as many automobiles clogging the metropolis’s thoroughfares, turned the cityscape into a fairyland of glittering jewels.
    But these were not the jewels that concerned the Crimson Wizard. His mind was focused on the jewels that had been stolen from the Municipal Museum.

    The Wizard tapped out a new series of instructions on the nearly invisible Zeppelin’s control panel and
Kpalimé
slowed, then halted in midair, hovering more than 200 feet above the gabled roof of the museum. A few night-flying birds and bats were the only companythat the silent airship encountered. Even the sharp senses of these aerial creatures would not have detected the sensor rays that emanatedfrom
Kpalimé
.
    Inside the airship the Wizard bent and placed his eye to the viewing lens of a special instrument created at his behest by his assistant, Nzambi. The viewer was teamed with the airship’s ray emitter. The emanations of the ray emitter made it possible for the Wizard to detect the passage on the ground below of any source of organic chemicals. The trail of each species, he knew, lefta chromic signature all its own, and the scent-track of each individual differed as subtly yet as distinctly as did their fingerprints.
    With a sardonic grin, the Wizard referred to the device as his spoor detector.
    Now he drew his breath sharply, lifted his eye from the viewer and sat silently, contemplating what he had seen. A trail led from the Municipal Museum of Art and History. To the nakedeye the trail would have been invisible. To the Wizard it stood out as vividly as a stream of luminous water flowing through a darkened countryside.
    The trail led to the curb in front of the museum. There, it disappeared.
    The Wizard uttered a low exclamation. He had located the spoor of his prey, only to lose it almost at once at the point where they entered a waiting vehicle and drove away.The Wizard had suffered a setback, but he was not one to accept defeat. He manipulated the controls of the miniature Zeppelin and its compressed air engines whispered back to life.
Kpalimé
moved silently through the air above Seacoast City, describing an outward spiral with its center directly above the Municipal Museum of Art and History.
    The miniature airship whispered its way over SeacoastCity’s theater district, over the avenues of expensive shops and great department stores, over the luxurious apartment buildings that housed the city’s wealthy and powerful and over the noisome tenements where the poverty-stricken and their outcast brethren huddled in misery. Full dark had long since fallen and from the vantage point of the airship the million lights of the city gleamed like as manyluminous gems, but the Crimson Wizard had no time to enjoy the sight that unraveled to his view.
    A quarter mile away and a thousand feet above
Kpalimé
, the transoceanic night-flier, a Langley-Hawker trimotored biplane, carried itscapacity load of sixteen passengers toward their destination, the Seacoast City Municipal Aerodrome.
    Soon
Kpalimé
whispered through a bank of mist that had risen fromthe Saturn River on whose banks Seacoast City had been built. The rays of the emitter penetrated the mist effortlessly. The Wizard uttered an exclamation of pleasure. The trail that had disappeared in front of the museum had reappeared in this district of warehouses and piers.
    Guided by the skilled hands of the Wizard, the airship slipped lower