Abel Harwood fit the classic description of a crackpot perfectly. My status as an authentic scientist—if only an underpaid engineer—gave me every right to make that statement.

I had been doing some experimental force-field work, and when I met Laura she told me her father would be interested in talking to me about my work. So I had dinner at their home one night, and started talking about my project—and then old Harwood started talking about his.

It was some hodge-podge. Dimensional tubes, and force vortices, and subspace converters. A network of gadgetry in the basement that had taken twenty years and as many thousand dollars to build. A fantastic theory of bordering dimensions and alien races. I listened as long as I could, then made the mistake of expressing my honest opinion.

Harwood looked at me a long time after I finished. Then he said, "Just like all the others. Very well, Mr. Matthews. Kindly don't pay us a second visit."

"If that's the way you want it," I told him. "But I still think it's cockeyed!"

And a month later, I still did. Only now there was this vortex in the street, spewing forth alien entities that drank radiation. Crackpot or not, Harwood had turned something on that might take some doing to turn off.

Outside, the storm was continuing. I snapped on my radio, listened to the crackling of static that was the only sound it produced. Were Harwood's pets blanketing the radio frequencies, I wondered, as I twiddled the dials? Were they drinking them too?

I'd know soon enough, I thought.

That was just the beginning, that night when the Invaders came storming out of Harwood's vortex. The next few days told of terror and panic, of retreat and the swift crumbling of civilization.

The Invaders, they were called. Thousands of them, wandering around New York and the metropolitan area, devouring electricity, attacking people, bringing a reign of terror to the city.

The newspapers the second day said, in screaming two-inch headlines,

ALIEN BEINGS LOOSE HERE

The third day, there were no more newspapers. No one dared leave his home—not with the Invaders at large. No newspapers, no radio, no television—the channels of communication began to break down.

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