ostrich-hoofed schmoes from outer space.

Well, the earth rose up around him and his truck before he rightly knew what was going on; and after a period of blackness he woke up to pain and a stench like one of Poe's charnel houses in his nostrils. He found that he was lying with his left arm draped over a jagged hunk of truck, clutching the mike with stiff fingers. Not being one to act without thinking in an emergency, he lay perfectly quiet and listened for a while to the rumble and crump of bombs—which he later found out had been the rays from the saucers instead—and the buzzing of his own skull. He could taste blood and feel it drying on his skin. He didn't believe he was at all badly hurt.

A little way from his face there was a busted headlight. He gazed at it a while, collecting his thoughts and opinions, and noticing that an arrangement of the shattered glass and chrome made a quite respectable mirror in which he could see a good deal of what went on behind him. Before he had decided what to do, he saw the saucer come to ground on the blasted field. He played possum and after a bit he saw the greenie come up the rise and stand there glaring around, holding the queer pennon and tipping back the pronged helmet from his eye.

Trace concentrated on holding still until the critter stepped over to him, and then Trace exploded all over the poor bastard, and took away his gun, which he wouldn't be needing any longer, and ran.

He half expected to be popped off by a bullet or a ray or a lord-knew-what from the saucer, but he reached the first edge of ruins safely and went to ground like a rabbit. Sitting in an angle of broken wall, he scanned the city. The saucers were engaged in a final mop-up. Trace felt sick. He looked at his town from end to end and he knew there couldn't be a dozen people alive in it. He had no way of knowing what was happening to the rest of the world, but he made some shrewd guesses. He was aware of the incredible number of blips that had been showing up on the radar screens lately. He knew that this city wasn't important enough in the scheme of things to warrant more than a small section of the attacking forces. This must be what Revelations called "the great day of God" when good and evil fought it out at Armageddon. Except that evil seemed to be winning, hands down.

Trace Roscoe peeked over his wall at the grounded saucer, and saw that a lot of greenies were coming out of it, advancing cautiously toward their dead comrade who lay with ten feet of flag-pole sticking up from his throat. Trace 

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