continent and the world. At the front door they were jammed into a struggling mass; someone with a hold on himself thought of using his pistol on the locks, and the wave of green erupted into the dark street.

There was no firing at the screen. The soldiers there had grown to quadruple human size. "Giants!" whispered Bill to himself. "They think they're giants!" Then aloud, over the racket from the screen, he said to Trace, "It's like those natives of India or wherever the hell it was, who ran out of the movie houses to get away from the locomotives that were ramming out at 'em from—"

"It's better than that," said Trace. Once more Bill felt that the sergeant wasn't telling something he knew; but again he shrugged and let it go. Trace was a smart boy and what happened from now on was up to him.

The Graken in the balcony had all tumbled and hurtled to the bottom; the last few stragglers were pounding across the small lobby, uttering their birdlike cries of fear. The German Army was enormous on the screen, now their bootsoles showed huge in the goose-step, now the song and the drums were almost unbearably stentorian. Trace Roscoe grinned widely as the first letters of the title and credits flashed out to an empty house. "Come on," he yelled, "hop to it, you two. I'd guess we have ten minutes to clear this town, before the saucers rip in after the bunch of Goliaths we unleashed on 'em." He laughed as they made for the steps. "First time the Nazis ever did anything good for anybody!"

CHAPTER IX

They did get free of the town, but only just in time. The saucers came in very low, over the heads of the scurrying men, and the rays that lanced out of their bellies were phosphorescing yellow-green. They struck first at the theater, from which until that instant Trace could still hear the roaring of the sound track; then they began leveling the place from end to end, and if their weapons had been atomic, explosive, or any other known military projectile short of a javelin, then the fleeing humans would have died in their tracks. As it was, they were knocked off their feet time after time, were flung headlong to pick themselves up bruised and shaken. But close as the rays came, the men suffered neither concussion nor burns.

Sergeant Trace Roscoe admired the things from his viewpoint as a professional soldier. They were the ultimate weapon if you wanted to destroy an objective without any after-effects, or if you had a pin-pointed target you had to smash individually from its 

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