whirl of wings and action.

"Everybody out!" yelled Ben. "Now! While they're busy." In a concerted rush the colonists poured through the door.

Nobody could remember clearly what did happen. Someone was down—hurt somewhere—but was flung into a car. Through the turmoil the tossing form of one badly-wounded bird struggled on the ground, and with a roar of motors the cavalcade started.

CHAPTER VI

The Terror by Night

It would be futile—and impossible—to chronicle all the events of that wild ride; to tell how the light-bombs dropped unceasingly from above; how the driver of one car, blinded by the glare, hurtled his vehicle through the plate-glass window of a store, and how McAllister, the artilleryman, fought off the birds with a huge shard of glass from the window; how the passengers in another car, wrecked by a bomb, got a fire-engine and cleared their way to Times Square with clanging bell and clouds of malodorous fire-extinguisher chemicals; or how Mrs. Roberts decapitated one of the monsters with a single blow of the cleaver she carried.

Dawn found them, a depressed group of fourteen, gathered in the protection of the underground passages.

"Well, what next?" asked Gloria, who seemed to have preserved more of her normal cheerfulness than anyone. "Do we stay here till they come for us, or do we go get 'em?"

"We get out," said Ben Ruby. "No good here. They know too much for us."

"Right," declared Beeville. "The usual methods of dealing with animals won't work this time. They are all based on the fact that animals are creatures of habit instead of intelligence, and unless I am much wrong, these birds are intelligent and have some bigger intelligence backing them."

"You mean they'll try to bomb us out of here?" asked Roberts.

McAllister looked up from the dice he was throwing. "You bet your sweet life they will. Those babies know their stuff. The one that was after me was onto the manual of the bayonet like he'd been raised on it."

"That's nice," said Gloria, "but what are we going to do about it?"

"Get an anti-aircraft gun from the Island and shell hell out of them when they come round again," 

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