backing down upon it. A few whirling electrons piloted them; they stared through telescopes and held up photographs to the light, hardly believing.

"One city," whispered Ekaterina. "One city!"

Holbrook squinted at the picture. He was not a military man and had no experience with aerial photographs. Even greatly enlarged, it bewildered him. "A city over the whole planet?" he exclaimed.

Grushenko looked through the viewport. This close, the golden shield was darkly streaked and mottled; here and there lay a metallic gleam. "Well, perhaps twenty per cent of the total area," he replied. "But the city forms a continuous webwork, like a net spread over the entire oceanless globe. It is obviously a unit. And the open spaces are all used—mines, landing sites, transmission stations, I suppose. It is hard to tell, they are so different from any designs we understand."

"I imagine their food is synthetic," said Ekaterina. Her snub nose wrinkled. "I should not like that. My folk have been peasants too many centuries."

"There are no more peasants on Earth," said Grushenko stiffly. Then he shook his hairless skull and clicked his tongue in awe. "But the size of this! The power! How far ahead of us are they? A thousand years? Ten thousand? A million?"

"Not too far ahead to murder poor old Solomon Levine," said the woman raggedly. Holbrook stole a glance at her. Sweat glittered on the wide clear brow. So she was afraid too. He felt that the fear knocking under his own ribs would be less if he could have been warding her, but she had been bleak toward him since their quarrel. Well, he thought, I'm glad she liked Solly. I guess we all did.

"There was some mistake," said Grushenko.

"The same mistake could kill us," said Holbrook.

"It is possible. Are you wishing you had stayed behind?"

The engines growled and grumbled. Fire splashed a darkness burning with suns. At 7800 kilometers out they saw one of the sputniks already identified on photographs. It was colossal, bigger than the Rurik, enigmatic with turrets and lights and skeletal towers. It swung past them in a silence like death; the sense of instruments, unliving eyes upon him, prickled in Holbrook's skin.

Down and down. It was not really surprising when the spaceships came. They were larger than the 

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