outside. I looked up.

"Laura! What are you doing here?"

"I had to get away," she said. She was soaked to the skin, cold and shivering. She was wearing only a flimsy housecoat over some sort of pajamas. "Daddy wasn't looking, and I ran out of the house. I ran all the way."

"But how'd you get past the—the—?"

"The Invaders?" She pointed outside. "There's a storm going on. They're all in the sky, drinking up the lightning again. They didn't bother me at all on the way over. Much better food available, I guess." She shivered again.

"Look, you've got to get out of that wet stuff," I told her. I threw her a towel and my bathrobe. "Here, get into this, and then we can talk."

"Okay."

She disappeared into my other room, and returned a few minutes later, looking drier but just as pale and frightened. She peered inquisitively at the machine I had been building, then turned to me.

"Chuck—Dad's out of his mind!"

"I've known that a long time," I said.

"No—I don't mean that way. He's really insane, Chuck. You know that he's been in contact with these Invaders? That he deliberately brought them here!"

"No!"

She nodded. "He reached them through some short-wave transmitter of his, and made mental contact with them. They showed him how to build the Gateway—and he let them through! They promised to give him the world, when they get through with it!"

I clenched my fists and stared angrily at the cloud-swept sky. "The madman! He was getting his revenge for the years people laughed at him, I guess. But—what's to happen to us?"

"I don't know. The creatures won't harm him, and they're under orders not to touch me unless I leave his protection—which I have. But as for you and the rest of the world, I don't think Daddy cares at all. Chuck, he's out of his head!"

"We've got to stop him," I said grimly. "We've got to close that gateway and drive off the things he's let through. But how?"

"The generator's in his basement," Laura said. "If we could get in there and smash 

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