They were artificial objects, doubtless blackened so they could not be seen against black space, traveling on courses which allowed them to survey and perhaps to threaten every spot on earth every day.

The scientific article which pointed out these facts suggested that they might be guided missiles sent up from earth and expending no power while they waited for the commands which would send them hurtling down upon a chosen target. Or they might not be earthly, but space-ships.

They might even be a fleet of exploring vessels from the planet of some other sun, which did not make contact with humanity but observed in preparation for purposes which could only be guessed at. Everybody guessed it to be conquest at the least.

Panic welled up among the people of the earth. If a space-fleet of some alien race had grim designs upon Earth, the danger was great. But if men had made the ships and sent them secretly up into the heavens, they meant more than danger. They meant doom. And whether their crews were men or monstrous creatures from beyond the abyss of interstellar space, their existence and silent menace produced terror and panic and—men being what they are—fury amounting almost to despair.

Murfree was busy. Very busy. But he realized that the danger of the seven invisible space-things was more important than any of his private affairs, and he knew the only man on earth who might be able to do something about that danger. He boarded a plane for the West Coast to see Bud Gregory.

Two nights later Murfree drove cautiously down a winding narrow road through fog. His headlights cast a golden glow into the dense white pall of a Puget Sound fog-bank, and the fog gathered up the light and threw it back. Murfree drove at the barest of crawls. He could see the edge of the road on either side, and the mist-wetted trunks of second-growth trees, but it would be very difficult indeed to pick out the beginning of that disused logging-road which led to Bud's shack.

Bud Gregory was, of course, something so extraordinary that nobody ever felt the need for a word to describe him, and he lived in a tumbledown shack somewhere in this cut-over land. It was easy to miss the way at the best of times. At night, and in such a densely obscuring fog, it would be difficult indeed to find it. Murfree slowed the car until it barely moved, straining his eyes for a sign of the turn-off.

His relationship to Bud Gregory was at least peculiar. Murfree had 

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