gone. I've made you rich and your children too. If you'd rather go to jail than work yourself to death staying out, it's no business of mine!"

He opened his car-door and stepped inside. But Bud Gregory jumped up and shambled anxiously after him.

"But, Mr. Murfree!" he protested. "Look heah! My gawsh, Mr. Murfree! You cain't do that to me! Uh—uh—if you want some kinda dinkuses, o'course I'll try to make 'em, suh. But don't go off and leave me with all that trouble, suh! Please!"

CHAPTER III

Ruthless Enemies

Either the crews of the space-ships were aliens to humanity with no knowledge of mankind, or else they were men and conducting a ruthless war of nerves and an exhaustive test of the ability of the world outside their nation to defend itself. Four days after the seizure of a transatlantic plane, four coaches of the Trans-Siberian Railroad went skyward, accompanied by a tumultuous mass of roadbed and other debris.

Two days later a building in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., went screaming heavenward in a shapeless mass of collapsed timbers. Two days later still—there was no warning of it otherwise—radars in the Pacific area noted a rising object. Telescopes caught it some twelve hundred miles out. It was a tramp-steamer, its bottom a rusty red, rising forlornly through nothingness toward some unguessable rendezvous among the stars.

The steamer could not be identified, and it would be weeks before its name could be guessed at by its non-arrival at any port. But unquestionably it had had a crew, and every man was now a frozen, distorted corpse somewhere in its hull. Men, or monsters gratifying scientific curiosity, the crews of the seven space-ships were ruthless.

Waves of panic went over the globe. The loss of life, of course, had been relatively small. It would not yet total a hundred persons. But the blank indifference to human communications and men's total inability to fight back bred terror. Every human being on earth was at the mercy of the unseen things in the skies. And there was not only no way to fight, there was nowhere to flee.

Every spot on earth came under the gaze of at least one of the space-ships at least once each day. There was no single human being who could not be snatched away to strangulation in emptiness at the will of whatever creatures manned the satellite space-ships hurtling round 

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