with leaden pellets from his old sixshooter before he died. He showed me the way to lick those shadows. Simply, it's this. A concentration of powder can open a hole in the atomic shield of the shadows. But in our atomic weapons we have a flow of power and it's sucked away by the shield before it can concentrate.

"In Elizabeth, Dead-Eye had concentrated power--the leaden projectile. Its comparatively inert atoms struck the shield and broke through before it could be spread out evenly over the shield. For a moment, the shield was out of balance. That's your job and mine--keep that shield out of balance until we can find the invaders within and destroy them. I realize that you've had only five days to study what these old weapons are and how they operate--but we haven't any more time. We've got to lick an enemy from outside and an enemy from within at one and the same time. Do you think we can do it?" A roar of assent greeted him.

They numbered in the thousands. Space rovers of the Twenty-fourth century, moving in a long, spread out line toward the edge of the blue flower that still pulsated and grew, reaching farther and farther out from White City. Curt Wing's heart was filled with pride--pride in these thousands who, with strange, obsolete arms, were moving against a shadowy foe equipped with weapons the like of which they'd never dreamed; pride in that unbeatable spirit and courage of man, the magnificent fool, who had lifted himself by his own bootstraps from the caves of Earth to the vast reaches of the stars!

It was Curt Wing's powder gun which opened the attack when they struck against the invisible force barrier. In the dawn light, all up and down that long thin line, the powder guns began snapping and crackling. Tommy guns, rifles and revolvers hurled their slugs at the wall.

The long line kept moving forward. Wing snapped on the portable radio phone strapped across his chest, and at his words, far behind him, a dozen space cruisers--those which could be spared from the battle against the Mercurians above Earth--rose and soon were scintillating in the rays of a sun still hidden by the rim of Earth. As the line of marching men strode forward, the cruisers, their rocket motors vibrating the air, circled high above them. The line reached the edge of the flower--and the intensity of the firing increased until it was the steady roll of a thousand drums. Wing spoke into the phone again as the flower grew bluer along the edge. The blue deepened and deepened until it was almost black. Then Wing spoke into the phone once more. The circling cruisers steadied. 

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