you might think about this!"

He passed over the rest of the papers. But he pointed to one from Seattle. Alone among the newspapers of the United States, the Seattle Intelligencer did not feature the carrying-off of an air-liner to space as its lead story. The Intelligencer featured a photograph of its down-town section, where above the tall buildings an elongated object hung in mid-air. Murfree had just seen that same object in mid-air, so even the fuzziness of the news-photo did not keep him from recognizing it as Bud Gregory's fishing-boat, floating serenely over a startled and frightened city. And the headlines told the rest:

SPACE-SHIP HOVERS OVER SEATTLE!

Lesser headlines reported:

All U.S. Arms Against Invaders From Space!

And there was a third head:

Anti-Aircraft Guns Arrive Too Late to Open On Invader Over City! Shoot On Sight Is Army Order!

While Bud grew panicky at the danger his children had been in, Murfree drove out the woods-road. He was going shopping for something Bud Gregory could turn into a weapon against the seven ships which circled the earth, in space.

The world armed—quite uselessly. And now that there could be no doubt of the artificial nature of its new satellites, or that they contained crews of highly intelligent beings—quite possibly men—all the world struggled to enter into communication with the mysterious craft.

Short waves, long waves, micro-waves, frequency-modulated waves, amplitude-modulated signals, every conceivable type of radiation signal, was beamed at the small, invisible, hurtling objects as they swung madly about the globe. There was no acknowledgment and no reply. Acres of mirrors were set up, and focussed to make visual signals by reflected sunlight, following first one, then another of the unseen fleet. This, too, was ignored.

And Seattle was not the only city to fancy itself examined by something out of space. Tehran, a village in Shropshire, England, a sizeable city in Czechoslovakia, and Durham, N.C., all firmly reported that they had been inspected at close range by space-craft.

Only 

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