this earth was too big to be grasped and understood all at once. If Trace had found the bodies of a score of people, he might have burst into tears, for his heart was big and Irish and sentimental. But pacing down the stinking tomb of hundreds of thousands of men and women was so incredible as to be simply a fact and not a comprehensible horror.

Alone he stood in the middle of a more-or-less flat plain in the city, staring and listening; and when he heard the shout, he went toward it at once, exulting that so quickly he'd discovered a private, or it might be a captain, for his army. There was a hole that was floored with cracked steps and went down into the ground, and Trace dived into it without hesitation.

Sitting at the bottom, with chunks of concrete heaped around him like divot around a duffer's tee, was a thin gentleman in a mustache, half a top hat, one leg of a pair of black trousers, and little else but a scowl. "They killed her," he said as Trace came into his view. "They blew her right out of my arms."

"Can you stand?" Trace asked him, reaching out one big hand.

"I don't know. Ouch! Yes, I can," said the man. "I tell you, they murdered Fannie."

"I'm sorry, fellow. Your wife?"

"My rabbit."

"Rabbit?" Trace turned him around and looked him over for wounds; there were none more serious than extensive bruises.

"I'm a magician," said the naked man. "Blacknight the Great. I had Fannie for three years and she never made a mistake. Smartest damn rabbit you ever saw. I was carrying her to a shelter and one of those rays shot along over the Farinello Building and the whole street blew up and she was gone, just like that. Damn green monsters." He stared at the sergeant. "I suppose it seems silly to you, feeling bad about a rabbit?"

"No," Trace said shortly. "I had a marmoset once. Let's get out of here and see how many others are alive."

"I haven't heard a thing for an hour," Blacknight said. "Not until your footsteps in the gravel. I think they're all gone." The two men stood in the open, craning their necks. "Nobody," the thin man said bitterly. "Two men left out of a world. We can't even start our race again. That takes a female too. My God," he said suddenly, and put his hands over his face.

"Come on," Trace Roscoe said sharply. "I'm 

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