Although the great flights of fighter planes were continually aloft, the reassuring program had gone on, the broadcasting trucks still rumbling about the streets foghorning their messages of cheer and optimism to a somewhat restive public. Some elements of the free press had been warning direly of "unknown dangers" and "possible treachery"—this causing some gimlet-eyed gentlemen in high places to come out with bills and demands for suppression of a free press for the duration of the so-called negotiations with the alien people. There had been no negotiations whatever. In this case, as in many others, the free press was perfectly right; but their warnings in the face of official hopefulness served only to confuse and fret the public. Hence, the tv lulled, the radio allayed, and the bellowing loudspeakers on the cruising trucks attempted to quiet fear under a blanket of sound.

At the said moment of attack, 11:34 a.m., the green saucers swept down with a perfection of simultaneity that made you think, as someone said later, that the devil had murmured "Synchronize your watches, boys." They hurtled from the skies over New York and Bangkok and Berlin and London and Madrid and Shanghai, down upon Moscow and San Francisco and Tokyo and Paris and Bombay. In the instant that the devastation hit New Orleans it also smashed at Edinburgh and Nome and Minsk and Berne. The first skyscraper toppled in Chicago as the first factory blew to flinders in Rio de Janeiro.

It was curious that their weapons did not seem to include the atomic variety. No A-bombs or H-bombs; rays, of incalculable destructive power and unknown origin, lanced from the diving saucers and struck the earth with the force of exploding bombs, but instead of crashing and then echoing away, these explosions continued, like great rolls of terrible thunder, for as long as the rays were aimed downward. One ray, directed from the belly-port of a canting ship, would set the ground a-shudder, crumple all structures in its path or near it, and create an ear-shattering blast that kept on and on until the saucer, tilting away, shut off the ray. So that each ray, in effect, was like an unending and ever-replenished series of huge bombs—and from each ship came a ray, and over each city there were hundreds of ships....

The mighty centers of civilization were obliterated. The great concentrations of population over the globe died. Manufacturing cities and cities which produced nothing of strategic value whatever were smeared indiscriminately into blood and dust and muck. It was an attack, not at man's weapons or production, but at man himself. It was the beginning of man's 

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