straightened, and was reaching for the pistol at his belt when a dark figure sprang from behind, dashing him to earth. Marlowe!
The thought beat through Hunter's brain as he lay, unable to twitch a muscle, watching the combat of those two figures that reeled about, striking, kicking, twisting. But what was that? What? That thin humming that suddenly made itself heard, that grew to a droning, to a rumbling, reverberating thunder. Out of the pit a dark shape was drifting up, a black disk that grew, grew, grew.
Boom! Boom! Boom! It grew until it had attained a diameter of thirty feet, then hovered above the pit, near the struggling men. As he glimpsed it, Marlowe cried out despairingly, and Powell's mad laughter flung up. And now was a sudden stir at the edge of the hovering disk, a flurry of movement there. Hunter darkly glimpsed shapes that crowded about the disk's edge, that peered at the struggling men. Did they mistake the two as a menace to themselves, did they fail to recognize Powell? For even as the two men reeled in battle toward the disk, a blinding shaft of blue light stabbed out from the disk's edge and struck the struggling pair. Under that ray and in its light, Hunter saw the faces of the two men change horribly, stiffen, draw, crack, and over him swept a breath of utter cold, an icy little wind that seemed to freeze his blood.
An instant he saw Powell and Marlowe thus, staggering, reeling, falling, then they had collapsed to a shapeless heap on the ground, and the blue ray, striking out past them, had touched the glowing cone on the little mound, which instantly exploded with a flash of light, releasing Hunter from its prisoning power.
The blue ray was sweeping in a circle about the hilltop now, and with sudden frantic fear he crawled through the open door of the dark cabin, crouching in a corner of it fearfully. Suddenly the ray swept up to the cabin, and beneath its touch the glass of the windows cracked instantly. An icy puff of air again swept over Hunter, in his corner, as the ray swept through the open door and hung steady for a moment.
Its blue light illumined a little metal stove opposite the door, a stove that covered instantly with a rime of frost and ice at the ray's touch. A moment the ray hung thus, steadily, doubtfully, then abruptly vanished, as though snapped out. Hunter sighed chokingly.
The humming sounds began again outside, and his fear mastered by curiosity, he crept to the cracked window. A mass of tiny black circles was rising from the pit, floating up and growing at the same time, while the first disk hung to one side, watching. The black circles rose high, expanded almost instantly to the size of the first, were joined by that first disk.
For a minute Hunter watched the disks circling above, swirling about in an eddying mass. Then three detached from those above and sank down to the hilltop, hovering close above it and sweeping it ever and again with the deadly blue ray that came and went across the cabin while he watched. The other disks, more than a score in number, grouped in a compact formation, then raced swiftly south.
The vanguard of the atomic conquerors, loosed at last upon the world of man!
5
It is doubtful if we shall ever know the exact purpose of that first raid on the atomic invaders. That question might be solved if we knew how much information they had received from Powell regarding our Earth. As it is, we look on that first coming
