about keeping cool and not losing our heads, spoiling the effect of these admonitions at once by a piercing, hysterical giggle.

Before a quarter of an hour had elapsed, there were minor riots and demonstrations throughout the continent. The worst of these were sparked by fanatic groups claiming that the end of the world had come. Others, scarcely less violent, went screaming that the Martians were invading us, that the White House had been captured "right on the television" and much more of such idiocies. In many places the militia were called out to suppress waves of looting and street fighting.

The Air Force, which had not been taken entirely unaware, since they had privately come to the conclusion some time before that the flying saucers were extraterrestrial, now flung a canopy of fighter planes, both jet and motor-driven, over Washington, and, somewhat later, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Birmingham and New York. Chicago, Los Angeles, and other cities of strategic importance were likewise protected within a period of two hours.

The rioting was subdued by evening. Army trucks equipped with public address systems patrolled everywhere, repeating the warnings to keep calm and do nothing until official word was broadcast of our intentions toward the aliens and vice versa. Meanwhile the first of the green horde was given a comfortable room in the Pentagon, where he was kept under an unobtrusive but thorough twenty-four-hour-a-day guard, and where means of communication with him were speedily sought for.

In a matter of a day and a half, or, to be precise, at two minutes to midnight on Sunday the 26th of December, he articulated his first English word. It was "Yes." Shortly he proved that he had absorbed much more than this word, for he began making attempts at complete sentences around 2:00 a.m. on the 27th. He had been under the constant supervision and teaching of a corps of scientists, language experts, and assorted brain-workers; he had shown no desire for sleep during the thirty-six hours he had been on the ground, and had listened to and worked with the teachers all that time. He showed now a good rudimentary grasp of English. It was given as the official opinion that he had shown in this the intelligence of a human genius, although not of the very highest order, rating perhaps an I.Q. of 195.

In the eight-hour period following this he spoke with the President and assured him, partly in words and partly in signs, that the folk of the green saucers were friendly explorers from a distant galaxy. His voice was throaty and 

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