the cockroaches, of course.

The general said petulantly, "Let's get down to business, Colonel. I want an armored company brought up immediately, and I want the fallen-star area put off limits at once. Have the sheriff show you where it is." He turned to Sergeant Wilkins. "Sergeant, get on the phone as soon as the colonel gets off it, and arrange for my personal Cadillac to be delivered here first thing."

After phoning his paper, Dexter headed for the dining room and sat down beside General Longcombe. "Anything new on the VEMs, General?" he asked.

General Longcombe sighed. There were shadows under his eyes, and his cheeks showed signs of sagging. "They're still in circulation. Scared the wits out of a couple of teenagers and ate their hot-rod. We've got them under constant surveillance, of course, and what with all the underbrush they trample it's easy enough to track them. But we can't stop them. They eat our gas grenades and our fragmentation grenades, and they're impervious to our tank killers and our antitank mines. A small A-bomb would take care of them nicely, but even assuming there's an area around here large enough and isolated enough to permit us to use an A-bomb, there's no way of herding them into it."

"It just so happens that there is such an area," Jeremiah Smith said. "Tillson Valley—about ten miles south of here. You'd have to vacate Old Man Tillson, of course, but he'd be glad to go if you made it worth his while. He hasn't grown a thing but weeds anyway since he got his pension. Just sits around all day and sucks up beer."

"But there's still no way of getting the VEMs out there," General Longcombe objected.

"Tell me, general," Dexter said, "have they eaten any of your jeeps or trucks or personnel carriers?"

General Longcombe shook his head. "They've had plenty of opportunity to, too."

"I have a theory," Dexter said.

The look that promptly settled on General Longcombe's face made no bones about what he thought of presumptuous young reporters with theories. Colonel Mortby, however, was considerably less biased. "It won't do any harm to listen to what he's got to say, sir," he pointed out, "and it may even do some good. It'll be at least a day before the ship is excavated and even then we may not know any more about the sort of life forms we're dealing with than we do now."

Dexter needed no 

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