but...." He shrugged and was silent.

"Then—then you think we'll have to surrender?"

"Doesn't look hopeful, does it? Japan in control of the Pacific, and this here. We'll hold out for a while, of course. But suppose these things come out of the sea indefinitely?"

"We've got to assume they can." Joan's eyes were dark and very tired. "What's to prevent Japan from loaning her weapon to her friends? Think of these things swarming in over England."

"War," said Fallon somberly. "A hell of a long, rotten war."

He leaned against the car, his grey-green eyes half closed. The breeze came in from the sea, heavy with the stench of amphibian bodies. The radio droned on. The single deep line between Fallon's straight brows grew deeper. He began to talk, slowly, to Joan.

"The experts say that the Little Brown Brothers must have some kind of a movable projector capable of producing rays which upset the evolutionary balance and cause abnormal growth. Rays like hard X-rays, or the cosmic rays that govern reproduction.

"California Tech has dissected several types of monsters. They say that individual cell groups are affected, causing spontaneous growth in living individuals, and that metabolism has been enormously speeded, so that life-cycles which normally took years now take only a few weeks.

"They also say that huge numbers—the bulk of these creatures—are mutants, new individuals changed in the egg or the reproductive cell. All these monsters are growing and spawning at a terrific tempo. Billions of eggs, laid and hatched, even with the high mortality rate.

"They're evolving, at a fantastic rate of speed. They're growing legs and lungs and becoming mammals. They're coming out of the sea, just as our ancestors did millions of years ago. They're coming fast, and they're hungry."

He fixed the girl suddenly with a bright, sharp stare.

"Do you think a thing as big as that is man-made?"

There was a grim, stony weariness in her face. "The Japanese say so. What other explanation is there?"

"But," said Fallon, "why not South America, too?"

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