Glodd puffed into steam and fire without a sound.
Not one greenie turned his head to see. Not an eye flickered from the giant screen.
Trace prudently shut the door, and jumped for the nearest aperture to watch the movie unroll. Bill had managed to lift the volume of the film even higher, and like a hymn to pandemonium, a paean of ear-shattering vociferance, the drums roared from the screen. Now the movement on the two-dimensional roadway was closer, and the front ranks of countless marching soldiers could be seen. It was an old film clip, taken in Germany at least seventeen years before: Hitler's legions, goose-stepping grandly toward the cameras of a world then—however uneasily—at peace. The soldiers grew, widened, shot higher as they neared. The drums remained like endless thunder, and with them there now lifted the for-long-hateful marching song of the Third Reich.
The green men broke. They fled toward the front of the theater, croaking and squawking, and without doubt their thought-radiating helmets flung the fear and panic from one to another, filling the hall and passing through space and metal into the lines of saucers that lay across the continent and the world. At the front door they were jammed into a struggling mass; someone with a hold on himself thought of using his pistol on the locks, and the wave of green erupted into the dark street.
There was no firing at the screen. The soldiers there had grown to quadruple human size. "Giants!" whispered Bill to himself. "They think they're giants!" Then aloud, over the racket from the screen, he said to Trace, "It's like those natives of India or wherever the hell it was, who ran out of the movie houses to get away from the locomotives that were ramming out at 'em from—"
"It's better than that," said Trace. Once more Bill felt that the sergeant wasn't telling something he knew; but again he shrugged and let it go. Trace was a smart boy and what happened from now on was up to him.
The Graken in the balcony had all tumbled and hurtled to the bottom; the last few stragglers were pounding across the small lobby, uttering their birdlike cries of fear. The German Army was enormous on the screen, now their bootsoles showed huge in the goose-step, now the song and the drums were almost unbearably stentorian. Trace Roscoe grinned widely as the first letters of the title and credits flashed out to an empty house. "Come on," he yelled, "hop to it, you two. I'd guess we have ten minutes to clear this town, before the saucers rip in after the bunch of Goliaths we unleashed on 'em." He laughed as they made for the steps. "First time the Nazis ever did anything good for anybody!"
CHAPTER IX
They did get free of the town, but only just in time. The saucers came in very low, over the heads of the scurrying men, and the rays that lanced out of their bellies were phosphorescing yellow-green. They struck first at the theater, from which until that instant Trace could still hear the roaring of the sound track; then they began leveling the place from end to end, and if their weapons had been atomic, explosive, or any other known military projectile short of a javelin, then the fleeing humans would have died in their tracks. As it was, they were knocked off their feet time after time, were flung headlong to pick themselves up bruised and shaken. But close as the rays came, the men suffered neither concussion nor burns.
Sergeant Trace Roscoe admired the things from his viewpoint as a professional soldier. They were the ultimate weapon if you wanted to destroy an objective without any after-effects, or if you had a pin-pointed target you had to smash individually from its surroundings. The rays annihilated anything they touched, dissolving metal, pulverizing stone, boring even into the ground beneath, while leaving everything beyond the vaporized area inviolate. The Graken were some boys at the scientific business.
Some distance from the town they found it easier going, as the vibrations of the earth were less. They scrambled up the slope of the hill and stood together at its crest, watching the town disappear in green smoke and yellow flame. Then Trace heard, faint yet plain, a sharp cough among the greater noises. Rifle shot! He oriented himself fast, and ran in the cold darkness toward the place where he'd left Jane Kelly with four others and a rifle. For the first time the soldier in him was unimportant, the mission of revenge forgotten, while Trace Roscoe worried over a girl.
He needn't have fretted. She stood squarely on her excellent legs, cradling the heavy gun in two fine long hands, an expression of utter determination on her beautiful face; and opposite her in the murky night sat Johnson and Kinkaid and Barbara Skye, moving nothing but their mouths. Jane, oblivious to Trace's approach, was saying, "Wiggle a foot, anybody who wants it blown off...."
Trace quietly laid an arm over her shoulders, and despite her control she jumped; he said, "Good girl. Damn fine girl." It was the only speech of love he'd ever made, and it didn't sound quite as strong as he'd wanted, but she smiled up at him with relief and maybe a bit of affection in those dark eyes. "I lost Hafnagel," she said then. "I'm sorry, Trace."
"It's okay. Did you kill him?" He saw nothing incongruous in that idea. She blinked and said, "No. I shot to stop him but he dodged out of sight."
"The saucers," squealed Johnson. "They're attacking us."
"They don't know you're alive, Mac. They're smashing the Nazi Army." And he was damned if he'd explainthatcrack, he thought. "Now listen to me," he went on, talking in his sergeant's voice to these reluctant recruits. "We don't have any too much time left. We did something down there that's convinced the Graken—the green ones—that there's a race of giants on the earth. They're blotting out a regiment of the giants, but they are sure to believe there are more. So they're going to want to kidnap this planet as soon as they can, so they can get reinforcements from their base for the big fight." Quickly and untechnically he told them how the Graken annexed worlds for their growing system in some far galaxy. "That may happen in the next ten minutes, or it may take a day or so for them to link up their chain of saucers. I'd say at a wild guess, we have an hour to bollix up their plan. So we're going to attack the saucers—"
Kinkaid screeched indignantly. "What! When we could head for cover—live off farms—hide out in the hills—"
"Get this through your miserable skull," bawled Trace. "If so be it these bastards manage to get us into their home system, we will end up in one of two ways: we will be hunted down and slaughtered like vermin, or we'll be caught and bred for food! There won't be any such thing as guerrilla warfare against 'em. They can let loose a billion or two of their people on every continent on the world!" He stepped close to the cowering plump Kinkaid. "I tell you," he hissed angrily, "I think we have a chance to beat them even now. It has to be fast and it'll take every ounce of brains and every last muscle in this whole damn crew to do it. Now take hold of yourself, you excuse for a man, and remember that your breed—not your state or your country or your nationality, but yourspecies—has been slaughtered by the millions; cut down, maybe half wiped out; and now it's heading for the finish, and we're probably the only ones alive who have any idea of the future at all! For God's sake, man,bea man! Come on and fight!"
Kinkaid stared at him, his eyes round and frightened in the darkness. Then he drew a breath they could all hear plainly as it rasped in his throat. "All right," he said. "You tell me what to do and I'll do it."
Johnson nodded. "I'm sorry. I don't mean to be scared," he said to Trace. "I'll try to help too."
Well, doggone, thought Trace with satisfaction, I figured they could be made into a fighting force, and so they have been. Doggone.
He briskly shared out the weapons: the revolver to Slough, the rifle with its three remaining cartridges to Johnson, a ray pistol to Bill and one to himself. Then without another word he led them down the hill toward the saucers, which were resting again in their long quiet line beyond the smoking ruin of the town.
Jane Kelly he kept close to him, helping her now and then down a bad stretch of rough, icy ground. Once she asked him, "Trace, why do you think they'll take the earth away so soon? Why have we so little time?"
"Logic. They haven't any reason to wait. They're afraid now of the mythical giants. They'll want to yell for help. And—" he paused, and then with surprise he heard himself telling this woman something he had never said to anyone else. "I'm half Irish, half pure black Irish, and I haven't exactly the second sight, mind you, but I do get hunches and they do pan out. Sometimes I'm all crawling with hunches. Well, I am now. I get the feeling that time's closing down like a goddam—pardon me—like a big steel bear-trap on us. My spine prickles and my flesh is inching around on my bones. It's awful danger we're in at this minute, Miss Kelly, worse than it's been till this minute. My God, maybe they're setting those dials now, and us fiddling around on a hillside!"
"Have you any hunch about whether we'll beat them?" she asked seriously, and a feeling of awe at something unknown in his voice took hold of her. He was phrasing his sentences like a wizard in a bog, and she could almost smell the incense of prophecy.
He growled something that sounded obscene. "No," he said, "I tell you true, I haven't the least idea of that. I only know we've been given a peep at their secrets, and if we don't foul the Graken, nobody ever will." Then he leaped down a steep place, and was silent.
CHAPTER X
As they ran with loping strides across the frozen plain, Trace heard a shout behind him; he turned his head and there was Hafnagel, pounding after them and calling desperately. Trace slowed a little, jogged on until the big man had caught up with him. "I thought you lit out for the thickets," said Trace shortly.
Hafnagel panted. "I decided to throw in with you," he said. "I was lying out in the brush listening to you.... I was lonely." He waved his hands, groping for an explanation for conduct he did not wholly understand. "You're crazy," he said, "but I have to go with you. A fellow's got to strike back, I guess. He can't take everything lying down."
"Come on," said Trace.
They neared the first saucer, which lay, a colossal green metal eye staring up at heavy clouds in the winter sky, quiet and yet aware. Bill Blacknight said, a crack in his voice, "Are they looking at us? Are they watching us, Trace?"
"Dunno. We're going inside. Remember, once a Graken sees us, the whole bloody tribe of 'em knows where we are. We've got to kill instantly, or knock the helmets off before we're spied, understand?"
"But a helmet sends a radio message when it's removed," the midget Slough protested. "Those helmets called the aliens to them—"
"I doubt it," said Trace. "I think they're useless without a Graken head in 'em. Each of those beauties had a second or so in which to thinkdanger, danger! Now let's find the way into this hulk." He turned away impatiently. There was no time to argue possibilities. There was only time to act, and maybe there wasn't even that.
Swiftly he completed a full turn around the silent spacecraft. He could see nothing that might be an entrance; the green metal, steel or whatever alloy might be tougher than steel, showed no crack or crevice. Lord, he thought prayerfully, Lord, we have to find it fast.
Slough said, "It must be one of the ports. Check the ports." He gestured to the rim of the saucer, a thick border which widened every thirty feet to make an oval opening; these were perhaps two feet deep, and closed there by a smooth plate of metal which Trace presumed would slide away in time of need, to allow guns to project or possibly to serve as rocket jet exhausts. The openings would admit a man, all right, even so large a man as a Graken. And if one of these was the door, then it must be openable from the outside.
He set his group to checking each port; but Bill Blacknight stepped back a little, his mind buzzing. If I was a green one-eyed bird-foot, he thought, and I was trotting up to my personal saucer, I wouldn't want to peer closely at every damn port on the rim before I found the door, would I? Hell, I'd want some sign somewhere, a pointer I could spot without any trouble. Where'd it be? Near the top, most likely, and it ought to be plain enough to see without squinting. He examined what he could see of the top of the ship. The center was a raised bump, round and wide. Bill felt his mouth twitch up with excitement as he saw that it was not a perfect circle; off to the left it pushed out into a sharp point, as though the circle were being pierced from within itself by an arrow. He ran to the section of the edge to which this indicator aimed, and found one of the ports directly in line with it. Softly he called Trace, who came at the double.
"This is it?" asked the sergeant. "Can't see any difference. How do you figure?" Bill told him, as he scanned the lip of the oval port for signs of a door. Nothing. "Boost me up," said Bill.
Hafnagel held him on his shoulders, and Bill leaned into the port and ran his educated fingers over the smooth surfaces therein. He found the lock, a raised set of thumb-sized nodes and two bars that would not move for him. Frantically he searched his mind for every trick he knew of locks and bolts and all such mechanisms. He began trying various manipulations, all his years of magic concentrating in the flying fingers.
The metal plate slid without sound into the sidewall, leaving an opening through which a diffused green glow poured out into his face.
Bill thought of the peculiar way he had moved the node and bar, and node and bar.... In all the world, it was not likely that any man except a trained magician would have touched them in the right sequence. He puckered his lips and whistled without noise. "What if I'd studied for the law, like Mother wanted me to?" he murmured. "Holy cats!"
Taking the initiative, he hoisted himself from Hafnagel's shoulders and wormed into the hole. The passage was slick without being actually greased, and within seconds he rose to his feet in the first room of the great disk.
Trace followed, then the others, Hafnagel coming last. They gathered in a taut, apprehensive group, staring about them.
The room was empty of life. There was no sound in the saucer save for their own quick breathing.
CHAPTER XI
Without a glance at the curious furnishings of the craft, Trace Roscoe headed for the door on the right-hand side. It was a tall rectangle, like an earth-made door, but without knob; as Trace came within a foot of it, it slid into the wall so briskly that he would not have touched it had he been coming at a dead run. Electric eye, or the same principle, he thought, striding forward.
Nor was there anyone in this room, which was plainly a sleeping chamber. Trace marched for the next barrier, but Slough darted over to investigate a narrower door, and thus discovered the first two Graken. The vanishing portal showed a lavatory, and the pair of greenies stared up, startled, from a massive washbowl, in which they had been bathing their faces and bare arms. Their helmets were slung on wall pegs. Both of them went for their pistols, but Trace, not so surprised as they, beat them to the draw. He fired over the tiny man's shoulder, and the Graken died, their flesh dissolving into steam and fragments.
Barbara Skye said her first word in an hour. It was triumphant, but quite unprintable. Jane Kelly said nothing, but she grinned at the other girl with appreciation.
Trace bethought himself of the old Western axiom, that one good man with a rifle was worth four good men with revolvers. He took the big sporting gun from Johnson, and, thrusting his ray pistol into the front of his shirt where it would be handy, walked purposefully at the next door. He had a feeling about this one.
He wasn't wrong. Three aliens grouped around a table, bending above some chart or mathematical calculation, turned and rose as he stepped into the doorway. Two of them he blasted before they had glimpsed him, and the third he took in the face with a heavy slug just as the beast was opening his mouth to shout or challenge. The rifle echoed like artillery in the small room, and Trace thought with a momentary despair that it had likely been heard all through the ship. He stepped over the twitching corpses and went on.
This time the door opened before he had neared it, and a green man, ready and tensed, stood on the threshold with a gun in his big fist. Trace, caught for an instant unawares, went to his knees and jerked up his pistol; it shot its deadly thin stream of force on the heels of the alien's, and he saw it strike the broad chest and begin to disintegrate the whole being. The Graken's shot had missed.
Well, it had missedhim, Trace realized, as he heard the sharp gasps behind him. He looked and saw Kinkaid's headless body topple over between Barbara and Jane. It proved the incredible depth of the women's feeling for this fight and this terrible problem, for neither of them screamed....
Shoulder to shoulder Trace and Bill Blacknight went through the room and their pistols' beams snaked out without sound together, as before them the control panels and intricate machinery of the pilot cubicle appeared behind three tall green-skinned Graken. Slough's revolver bellowed hoarsely behind them. Bill felt a tug at his coat, and later discovered that a great patch of cloth had been burned away by the enemy's rays. Johnson, half-crazed with anger now and gone quite berserk, plunged past them as they fired at the aliens and the last spitting stream from a pistol caught him in the belly and burst his body asunder.
They were in the control room, the six who had come this far alive, and the door through which they had leaped would not close. Bill fumbled wildly at the jamb, at the edge that was flush with the wall, and then Slough said, "The bodies! Roll away the bodies!"
Hafnagel and Bill took unpleasantly blasted corpses by the heels and dragged them out of the cubicle; then, having cleared the space near the door, it slid swiftly shut, leaving them outside. They went to it, it opened, and at last the six were together in a shut room.
Trace handed his pistol to Hafnagel. "Can you trigger it?" he asked, thinking of the man's stiff fingers. Hafnagel put out his hand and flexed it easily. "Don't ask me why," he said shortly. "It happened when we came into this thing." He took the weapon.
"Nervous release," said Trace. "I've seen it happen under fire." He turned to the bank of mechanisms, the sprawling panels full of controls. "Brother," he said under his breath. Then he went to work, trusting the others to guard his back.
Even when he heard Slough's revolver bang twice, he did not look up from the things he was working on.
CHAPTER XII
They had killed nineteen Graken, and Slough, reloading the clumsy revolver with his tiny hands, presumed that the entire crew was not dead. They had killed nine on their way in here, and had finished off ten more since, as they barged in the door or crept up to it to attack the presumptuous humans.
The queer part of it was that, although Trace had been sweating blood over the instruments for more than a quarter of an hour, no reinforcements had appeared from the other saucers. Slough did not understand this. Certainly a number of those perishing Grakens had sent out frantic messages for aid before they died; and according to the late Glodd's story, such thought-calls should have been heard even over in Europe, Africa, or Asia, let alone in the saucers that were, so to speak, just next door.
The only answer seemed to be that one saucer was expendable. This, considering the Graken's mutual reliance, must mean that every other saucer was engaged in work of the utmost importance—such as forming the chain which would carry Terra through sub-space into the system called Lluagor.
He handed his revolver to Jane Kelly. The girl was pale, but her features were set in strong, determined lines. Slough admired her; she was one of the finest specimens of womankind he had ever seen. "I don't think we can expect more visitors, my dear," he said to her, adding to himself,unless we find ourselves in another galaxy. "You keep this ready, however." He went to Trace Roscoe.
Trace gruffed at him. "Don't need you. Get back there."
"Of course you need me. I was an airplane designer, remember? I have some knowledge.... Have you found the electronic device yet?"
Trace turned up a lined and agonized face. After a moment he said, "No. Not yet."
"Keep going, then. I'll start at the other end," said Slough.
The banks and panels were far more intricate even than they had first supposed. Slough believed that the device they were searching for would probably be a type of klystron, considering the ultrahigh-frequency application. Whatever turn the Graken science had taken, he felt the the principles of electronics, being universal, must be those involved in this sub-space travel; and it did not seem reasonable that an electronic mechanism could be very different on Chwosst or Terra or Mars or any where else.
Trace believed this too. He was a pretty fair student of electronics and he doubted that any race could disguise a high vacuum thermionic tube or an amplifying circuit or a thyratron so that he, Sergeant Trace Roscoe, couldn't identify it. The photoelectric cells that opened and closed the doors seemed to be of the same type as those used on this planet for the same function; Trace had taken two minutes off to pry off the cover of the cell in the left wall and inspect the construction. So he ought to know the "kidnap-device" when he came across it.
He glanced at his watch. More than half an hour had passed since they entered the ship.
The race of man hung on his fingers, which fumbled among a myriad esoteric gadgets in search of one which might be no more than a pair of resonant cavities, an anode, a cathode, and a grid. He felt his coolness departing, the sweat of terror stood on his face, he lost the tough-sergeant veneer and became a panting, panicked man.
Then he caught the eye of Jane Kelly, and he bit his lip and told himself off in Gaelic cuss words, and went to his job again with a firmer grip.
And in five minutes he found the device he was hunting.
"Slough!" he shouted, in the bull's roar that once had nearly drowned out the Red guns in Korea. "Slough, come here!" And the small man, who had been six steps away, bounded to his side with his blue eyes wide in astonishment. "Is this it?" asked Trace fiercely. "Am I right, is this it?"
Slough glared at the small recess, and said, "Aha!" It was an intricate and highly specialized form, if he was any judge, of the resonant cavity magnetrons with which he had worked often in the past. He said so, and Trace nodded. "Okay. Now we gimmick it."
"Can I help?" asked the midget, eager as a boy.
"You're damn right. My fingers are too big to get into all the crannies. You do what I tell you; get in behind the tube, like so, with your index finger...."
As Trace ordered and Slough obeyed, the others came round them, still alert for raiders, but eager to listen to the mysterious words which came, sharp and intense, from the sergeant's lips. Now and then Slough would disagree, and they'd argue; Bill began to fidget with apprehension. The words were Greek to him.
"But if we lead in the wire from this other thing, which has got to be the fuel feed—"
"Why must it be? We don't know it is. I say build up the frequency of oscillation until—"
"Well, then, stick your damn fingers over here and hold this steady while I—"
And so on. Bill was certain that it would never end, that they must be caught at sunrise by an investigating party of the green aliens; but suddenly the midget and the soldier were moving off from the control banks, looking at each other with expressions half smug and half fearful. "Let's get out," said Trace abruptly.
"What did you do?" asked Jane Kelly, as they hurried through the rooms toward the entrance port.
"Gimmicked it," said Trace. His hand fell on her arm and squeezed reassuringly. "The electronic device is now altered so it'll build up an intolerable frequency; it's also connected with the thing we think is the fuel feeder, and with a row of buttons we're almost certain connect with the blasting rays."
They reached the port. "In other words," prompted Jane, "what?"
"In other words, when the ships are set to zoom old Earth into the sub-space subways, this disk is going to blow sky-high; and since they're all connected in series electronically, the whole goddam fleet will explode simultaneously."
They wriggled through the short passage, dropped to the ground. It was very dark on the plain. Patches of snow on the ground showed dark shapes of tree and bush and boulder; after the green light of the saucer, this outer world was dim and full of illusions. Jane thought she saw a Graken approaching, and stifled a scream when she realized it was the shadow of a swooping owl. She said loudly, "I don't like it."
"What?" asked Trace. They were standing in the shadow of the saucer, indecisive.
"I don't like this. It's too easy. It's a let-down." She grasped him by the arms, and he, startled, looked down into her face that was a lovely softened blur in the night. "I'm half Irish too, Trace Roscoe, half pure black Irish; that's the Kelly in me. And I tell you plain, I feel wrong about this. It can't happen so pat, you can't just change a wire or two, hook up this and attach that, and foil the kidnapping of a whole world. There's something wrong, there's a thing missing that's vital."
"Baby," he said, so low that no one heard but the girl, "I can tell you what it is. It's a security on this. Because there's about one chance in a thousand that what we did will work like we want it to. That machinery's out of this world. Half of what we did I can't explain to myself, even. We just made a purblind stab at bollixing the deal."
"It's something else. You're forgetting something. Oh, Trace, Trace," she cried suddenly, gripping him savagely in her anguish, "I know! It's that there's no crew in this saucer, and they aren't coming to fight us! That means they've either taken the earth into their galaxy already, or else that they'll do it without bothering about this saucer—and then where will your fine plan be?"
Trace almost sat down, his body went so limp. "Oh My God," he said slowly in capitals. "I never thought of that."
"You've got to get a crew here," she said, as the others crowded about them stammering their worry and terror. "You've got to get them out of their ships, no matter how busy they are, and let them see that they can take this one over again. They can't know anything that's happened since we killed the last one in there."
"She's right," exclaimed Bill. "We have to create a diversion to suck 'em out of their hidey-holes, Trace."
"The only way is to attack the saucers," he said wearily, "and how we do that with two rayguns and a revolver, heaven only knows."
"Why, we do it with two rayguns and a revolver, then," said Barbara suddenly. "Why not? That next saucer's maybe a hundred feet away. Take a shot at it, for Pete's sake. Try it and see."
Trace inflated his chest and stuck out his jaw and once more he was the complete sergeant. He tore the pistol from Bill's hand, raised it and sent a streak of green death arrowing at the dark bulk of the spacecraft. Playing it along the rim, he tried to strike the oval ports with it; and he did not release the trigger for a full minute. "Now let's see," he said. He looked at Jane and the redhead. "You two take off," he barked. "Head for the hill, pronto." His tone was so unanswerable that they ran, Jane twisting her head back at every third step. Shortly they were out of sight.
Nothing moved, and if there was any damage to the other saucer, it could not be seen from where the men stood. Trace, impatient, was lifting the weapon again, when a green light shone out from the center of the edge.
"Ah," breathed Trace. "We've raised 'em. Now let 'em come, don't stop 'em, and we'll man this death-trap yet!"
CHAPTER XIII
They lay in a kind of shallow ditch just under the outer edge of the great saucer, watching the orange lights from the helmets bob and duck nearer. Bill said quietly, "We're cut off from the hill now."
"That's okay. The women will wait; and we can fall back on the ruins of the town if they chase us. They may just investigate the ship here, and not bother with us. We are only vermin, after all."
Hafnagel said, "What if they see the changes you made in that panel?"
"They shouldn't, unless they look almighty close."
"And will it work?" asked the big man.
"Who the hell knows?" retorted Trace irritably. "Maybe it's too late now. Maybe we're spinning around Tsloahn already. Who can tell? We can't see the stars, the clouds are too thick."
The aliens were very close now and the four men fell silent. The lamps drew up to the deserted ship, hesitated, and at last one lifted and disappeared, as its wearer vanished into the open port. Trace shut his eyes and said a quick private prayer of thanksgiving; then he whispered, "We're okay now. Let's head for the ruins." They crawled out of the ditch and like a quartet of raiding Comanches, their work done, made for the empty wreckage at top speed.
Behind them a shout went up, a raucous croak of triumph. Then a voice said weirdly in English, pitched high and carrying, "Not run, die!"
Trace got the idea, disagreed with it, and put all his strength into a terrific sprint. He found himself bathed in orange radiance, as the distant Graken focused their helmet beams; just before the first green ray was fired, he saw a very low wall of bricks miraculously uncrumbled, jinked and made for it, dived over and landed on his chest with a scarce-felt smack of pain. The others followed him, and hugged dirt as the rayguns sliced the cold air harmlessly.
After a while the orange glow went away. Trace cautiously looked over the wall. He couldn't see anything but he had a feeling. They hadn't all gone into the ships, he knew that.
He was not quite unprepared, therefore, when the Graken came over the bricks on top of him.
It was probably the largest and heaviest of all those whom the band had seen. It fell on Trace like the side of a collapsing barn, and Trace felt all his breath leave his lungs in one excruciating wheeze. He fought to bring the muzzle of the raygun against it, but could not move his arm, which was pinned under the creature's knee. Only the soldier's left arm was free. He flailed a blow that landed solidly, but the alien only squalled, and chopped at his face with its clubbed pistol. Trace felt skin and flesh give way along his cheekbone, blood gush from the slice of the metal. He heaved up as heartily as he could, at the same time aiming another left jab for the brute's face. His knuckles took it square in the eye. It shrieked, reeled back on its knees, and Trace fought tigerishly and was free. He delivered his finest right cross to the throat, and the Graken writhed on the frozen earth. Then Slough and Bill were there—the fight had taken only seconds—and the magician in a frenzy of rage booted the green head with the toe of his heavy shoe. That was that.
Slough's voice said softly, "Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, cui lurmen ademptium." He rolled the big head up to the dusky light, and the broad single eye gaped blankly. "Virgil said that about another Cyclops, luckily of a mythical breed. 'A horrible monster, misshapen, vast, whose only eye had been put out.'" He signed. "Trace, the only real work we had is done, for failure or success it's finished, and we can't do any more good here. Let us go back to the women. If so be it our plan succeeds, they'll need you to watch over them in the—ah, the post-war world, which may be a little wild for a time. And if we've lost our gamble, then you should be with your girl when the end comes. You can't do any good by fighting guerrilla-fashion down here."
"My girl?" asked Trace, who had no idea of how he had been moon-calfing at Jane Kelly.
Hafnagel laughed. It was a joyous sound, the expression of a troubled man who had found release. "Go on, Sarge," he said. "Go to the hill, all three of you. I'll cover your withdrawal from here." He hefted the raygun he carried. "Don't argue with me," he said before Trace could speak. "You know a retreat needs a rear guard—and I mean to have another Graken scalp or two before I quit. Go on."
Trace argued in passionate whispers, but shortly found himself creeping on all fours across the razed town, without fully remembering how he had left the wall. There was no sound or sign of movement on all the wide plain; and as they came to the beginnings of the slope, he said, "I shouldn't have left him. He ought to have come with us."
Then they saw in the distance the streaks of green fire, and a pair of orange spotlights which almost immediately went out. The ray pistols kept darting their beams along the ground, and Trace said again, "I shouldn't have left Hafnagel."
"He never meant to follow us," said Slough.
"It was right to leave him," said Bill Blacknight quietly. "You gave him a few minutes of glory. That's no bad deal, you know."
When they crested the hill, the green shafts had vanished, and the plain was dark under the heavy clouds that hid the sky.
CHAPTER XIV
The five of them sat on the lip of the hill, hunched up against the cold, clasping their knees and occasionally rubbing hands or ankles for warmth. Trace had one arm around Jane Kelly, whose dark head lay against his chest. He was almost happy. He thought he had lost, lost his vengeance and his universe, and still he was all but contented, because he had this girl close to him.
The saucers rested without motion on the plain. The clouds had thinned, the moon's location could be told by its misted radiance, but no stars shone and the humans could not tell whether they were spinning around Sol or Tsloahn. After all, as Trace had said, the moon might have been kidnapped with them—or it might be a different moon, one of the other stolen planets in the Graken's home system.
Barbara hated stillness. She asked Trace, "How come those greenies thought your damned old movie was real? Couldn't they tell it was only a picture—them and their high IQ's?"
"No," said Trace. He roused himself and looked over at her. Bill Blacknight was snuggled against her (oh, for warmth, sure, thought Trace cynically) and the magician was obviously on the verge of the same strange happiness that touched Trace himself. "No," he said again, "they couldn't tell it was a picture."
"Why not?"
"Because they only have one eye apiece."
"I don't see what difference that makes."
He assumed the role of patient instructor, dredging in his memory for the right words. "You need two eyes functioning as one organ to have what they call binocular vision. The retina isn't adapted for three-dimensional perception, see?"
"No," said Barbara.
"Well, to perceive solid things for what they are, you have to have two retinal images, thrown on both eyes by the one object. You get help from linear and aerial perspective—if you know the size of a thing you can judge how far away it is—but supposing you don't know its size, you're liable to misjudge its distance if you've only got one eye. One eye, two dimensions; two eyes, three dimensions."
"I get that," said Bill sleepily. "How'd you happen to think of it, Trace?"
"It was Slough here. Twice a greenie made a mistake as to how far away he was: once on the street, when it didn't grab for him when it could have, and again in the theater, when Glodd motioned for him to come closer, and hit him accidentally. Both of them thought Slough was average human size. Both were looking at him from a low viewpoint, the first on its knees and Glodd sitting on the floor. That's when it occurred to me that their eye-sight must be two-dimensional. Of course it wouldn't bother them on their home planets, where everything was known by size and aerial perspective filled in their deficiencies. Probably their navigational instruments made up for their lack of depth perception in flight, too. But when I turned the Nazi Army onto them, they were baffled. They must have thought giants were coming up out of a hole under the theater. Which is why they ran like hell, and then blasted the town."
"Very clever," said Slough. Jane echoed this, and Trace said to her quietly, "I'm not quite the uneducated slob you might think I was, baby."
"I don't think anything of the sort! You're—you're a man, a fine tough intelligent man." She was so sincere she sounded angry. Trace glowed with pride.
There was a very long silence then. Nobody moved from their chosen vantage point. The hidden moon went down. At last Trace cleared his throat self-consciously.
"I'd like to ask a question myself. Of you, Slough."
After a slight pause, Slough said, "What is it, Trace?"
"Well, you're a little too smart a geezer for reality, if you know what I mean. You figured those helmets for thought-radios, when it was a fantastic possibility that no normal man would have hit on so quick with so little to go on. Then you did things with the electronic device in that saucer that I couldn't have come up with in a coon's age."
"I'm an engineer," said the tiny man. He chuckled. "And I read a lot of science-fiction."
"Okay. Then there's this. Thirty-odd hours ago you had a badly broken left arm, which I set for you and put in a sling." Trace spoke slowly, almost with fear now that he voiced his suspicions. "Some time during our first raid on the town, you discarded the sling; when we were in the saucer, you fought and afterwards you worked on the instruments with both hands. It's impossible, but it must be true—your arm knit completely within a day." He turned and bending over Jane Kelly he stared wide-eyed at the dark figure of the little man.
"Slough," said Trace huskily, "what are you?"
Slough sighed. "Whatever I am, Trace Roscoe, I am not your enemy. No, nor ever shall be, yours or your people's. Look!" He cried out so suddenly that the four of them, shocked, stared out in the direction in which he gestured. "The saucers," he said, "they're rising!"
"The gimmicked one?" asked Bill, whose eyes were bleary with lack of sleep.
"Yes, all of 'em," said Trace. He jumped up, hauling Jane to her feet with him. "It's coming, they're hoping to do it," he said, and he clenched his teeth and took a firm grip on the girl, as though he wanted to hold her on the earth when it shot into the uncanny regions of sub-space. "Hold tight," he said, with no particular sense but a vast deal of emotion. "Hold tight, Jane baby." And Jane held him tightly.
The saucers rose higher, dwindling in size; they reached the low cloud layer and passed into it, becoming hazy and then invisible.
Twenty thousand spacecraft girdled the globe, linked electronically, readied for flight with their stolen planet to unknowable distances of deep space.
The men and women waited, their breath emerging in brief white frosty spurts in the cold air. And nothing happened.
After twenty minutes, Trace put a trembling hand to his forehead. "We lose," he said. He saw Slough begin to walk away from them, going back along the gradual slope among the bare trees, but he did not even call after him. It didn't matter a damn now, what or who the midget was.
"We lose," he said again, and hugged Jane fiercely.
And then the sky exploded.
CHAPTER XV
Trace flung himself on the ground, sheltering Jane; he felt rather than saw that Bill had done the same with Barbara. He gazed up, and saw the great rack of clouds torn and dispersed by the force of the blast. There was a chain of brilliant green-white balls of light, like so many bursting sky-rockets, that stretched from horizon to black horizon across his world. He thought of the shards of metal, the evil whistling splinters and hunks of meteoring death that would rain out of the sky after such a multiple explosion, and he buried his face in Jane's soft hair, trying desperately to cover her whole body with his own. The noise above them was so mighty a roar that Trace was deafened, and his head hummed and rang intolerably.
In that moment, oddly, he thought again of Slough, and realized what he must be. The Irish intuition, second sight, or what-have-you it works in a cockeyed way, he said to himself, waiting for the shower of molten hail.
Slough was of the extraterrestrials too!
Oh, not the Graken, the wicked green one-eyed bird-footed destroyers. But he was a saucerman, right enough. Lord knew how many of them had been living among us before the greenies attacked. No telling how many had died, how many still lived.
Trace remembered the saucer sightings that had perplexed the Air Force for so many years before. The blue-lit disks that soared and dipped and shot away from pursuit, the disks which had been seen by reputable folk for—well, possibly for centuries. Funny he hadn't thought of it before, but all those well-vouched-for sightings could not have been Graken. The Graken shot into our system no longer ago than late December! And all the long while before we'd been under the surveillance ofblue-litsaucers—not green, but blue at night and silvery in the sunlight!
He wriggled, his body awaiting the impact of the metallic missiles, his mind occupied with Slough.
And if there'd been saucers here for so long, and even saucer-people among us, what had happened to them when the Graken came? Any space battles between warring saucers would have been seen. Had they retreated to their own planet at sight of the Graken fleet, through space or interdimensional sub-space? Maybe. Or maybe they'd hidden in or on the earth.
Why hadn't they fought? The Graken had no allies in the universe. The blue-disk cowards had run! Except old Slough, if he were one, he hadn't run. Why had the great ships left Terra? Not their fight? Or....
Or suppose they couldn't fight! Suppose they had no weapons in their craft, no rays nor bombs—Trace exclaimed wordlessly as this probable truth occurred to him. The blue disks were only observers, they weren't warcraft. Perhaps their people had no weapons at all. Perhaps they were a nation of peace, as the Graken were a nation of eternal war. And their long watch over the world had been either curiosity, or hopeful friendliness.
In which case, they'd likely be back. Trace hoped they would; he had liked Slough. Terra could use friends now.
He jerked his head up and stared at the sky. Even if the Graken ships had been three miles up, their remains should have showered down to earth by this time. He got to his feet with a grunt. The gimmicking of the controls in that saucer had been better than he'd known; the ring of saucers had not only exploded, they'd been atomized.
Trace helped Jane to her feet, as Bill Blacknight did the same for Barbara. "Well," said Trace, "let's not sit on our cans out here all night. Let's get this show on the road. We have a hell of a lot to do."
"Such as what?" asked Bill.
"Mac," said Trace firmly, "this is still the Army of the United States, and we got a world to police up. There'll be more left than us four; there'll be millions of people, here and on the other continents too, who'll need all the help we can give 'em."
"We can help the world?" asked Barbara. "Us four?"
"We've done a lot already," said Jane drily.
"There's more, we haven't begun yet. We have to find a radio, get in touch again," said Trace, his voice strong and happy. "There ought to be some planes left, in private airports and out in the country. We got to scrape together what's left of civilization and patch it up and make it better than it ever was. You know anybody that could do the job better?"
"No," Jane said, "darling." Trace blinked. He was not a demonstrative man, but he leaned over and kissed her on the nose with haste and embarrassment. "Come on," he said, gulping a little, "we got work to do."
They started off along the crest of the hill, and then Bill grasped Trace's arm and said in a whisper, "Oh, oh Lord, we forgot."
"Forgot what?"
"We may be in the Graken's star system, what the hell was it, in Lluagor! They took such a long time—maybe they got us there before they blew up!"
The four people searched each other's faces silently, and even Trace was too appalled at the thought to verify it for a moment. Then Jane Kelly turned her face up to the sky, where the clouds had been rent and scattered by the blast.
After a long moment she put her hand in Trace's.
"I'm not much of an astronomer, Trace," she said, her voice calm and sweet and proud. "But even so, I can recognize the Big Dipper when I see it." She pressed his fingers affectionately. "And Idosee it," she said....