But always they knew where the shadows were--the slashing bolts pointed them out unerringly. They were very close to that unseen line of shadows. The thunder of those bolts was rending the air and mixing in the fresh smell of ozone with the pall of smoke and putrid smells which even the driving rain could not beat to earth.

Suddenly, Wing and Dead-Eye stopped. It was as if they had walked into a solid wall. But this wall was different. It pushed them backward easily, although they strove to move ahead.

"A harmless force wall," Wing said in answer to Dead-Eye's query. "But we can't get through. There goes our grand gesture, Dead-Eye. We can hardly thumb our noses while we're being pushed backward."

"Huh!" grunted Dead-Eye. "I'll fix 'em." He leveled Elizabeth, aimed her into the unseen obstacle. His thumb flicked at the hammer, and Elizabeth's gruff voice broke through the cacophony of noise with amazing clarity. He strode forward, Wing beside him, and blasted at the invisible wall.

Of a sudden, the noise was gone. Wing halted in amazement. The tremendous symphony of sound which had been pounding at his ears now miraculously was stilled.

Elizabeth's last shot still echoed, but the crash of masonry and plastic, the scream of tortured steel, the growling crackling of the shadows bolts, the snapping as fire gulped at wood and inflammables--all these were gone.

But while they still marveled at this change from noise to silence, something happened. They were thrown off their feet, and they once more found themselves out in the noise and fire.

No more had they picked themselves up from the rubble than the invisible wall was nudging at them again, shoving them ahead of it.

The insentient wall kept nudging them backward--ever backward until there was no longer any sense of time or place to them. A confused roar of crashing buildings, explosions, groans of tortured metal; an indiscriminate blend of smells, of smoke, fire, charred flesh and wood; a heterogeneous awareness of pain, cold heat; a knowledge that this, for Earthmen, was the end.

What did it matter now that Zhan Nekel and his rocket fleet thundered ever closer to Earth? That Pat, who had come back with her promise of happiness, loved him? What did anything matter anymore, except dying like an Earthman should--in the ruins of his world, still trying to lick something so 

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