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The saucer students entered Vandenberg Tithout hindrance or fanfare and altogether unroraveyard shift arriving at their factory

There was no one at the mesh fence that had so lately been ing open - nothing at all of note, in fact, except six inches of stinking h, hten them, and they started up the ra all of the s heavily Not even Wojtowicz had been able to bully her out of this heart attack

Mrs Hixon was driving the truck because Bill Hixon wanted to watch the sky, where the Wanderer in er now bracketed the zenith - and because she didn&039;t give a damn, as she said more than once She was alone in the cab - Pop had wanted to stay, but she&039;d told hiht out he smelled worse than the mud, and it was Bill&039;s truck, and she wouldn&039;t take it

In the back of the truck were Ray Hanks and Ida, she nursing both his broken leg and her oollen ankle She didn&039;t believe in sleeping pills and was feeding both herself and the feebly protesting Ray large quantities of aspirin

"Chew thes"

The rest alking Three tiet it through bad places, and twice the truck had had to nudge the Corvette out of spots in which its tires just spun Everybody was slobbed with it; and the truck tires were so muddied that their chains didn&039;t chink

There was a blue surge in the al the mucky landscape Harry McHeath, by his youth better able than s at once, called out: "It&039;s started again! They&039;re both doing it!"

Four ruler-straight, string-narrow, bright blue beaer to the Wanderer But now instead of shooting past her they converged Yet they did not strike the Wanderer, but stopped short of her by just a hair of gray sky, and were thrown back in four faint, semicircular, bluish-white fans

"They uessed

"Like the Lensmen battles!" McHeath chimed excitedly

Similarly three violet beaer and were intercepted Blue and violet bea, between the two planets, like a long, geometrically drawn cat&039;s cradle

"This is it!" Hixon yelled fiercely

Wojtoatching so singlemindedly that he walked off the ramp Froht and raced over

"I&039;m OK, kid, I just slipped down here a little ways - see, I can reach you," Wojtowicz replied reassuringly to McHeath&039;s anxious call "Only give ?"

Hixon called up to the truck: "You should be out here seeing this, babe - it&039;s a!"

From inside the cab Mrs Hixon shouted back: "You watch the fireworks forthe truck!" And she honked viciously at the Corvette, which see a bit He&039;d taken a couple of quick glances at the battling planets, and it still see into the Space Force base while the excitement lasted and perhaps as it ran interference for theet that done and the juiceless momentum pistol delivered, too - he had coo&039;s obsession on the latter point While she, tra to the left of the hood, was obviously still of the same mind and mood

So Hunter called out: "Coht Don&039;t walk off the end!" And he swung the car up onto the plateau

There at last they found personnel - three soldiers whofroainst the wall of the tin hut behind the restlessly on their hams to stare up at the interplanetary battle One of the up onto the plateau after the Corvette and both cars alo quickly walked up behind the soldiers

Overhead three more blue lines and two e, coo touched the nearest soldier on the shoulder, and when he didn&039;t react, shook hi face up at her

"Where is Professor Morton Opperly?" she demanded "Where are the scientists?"

"Christ, I wouldn&039;t know," he told her "The longhairs are over there souely toward the interior of the plateau "Don&039;t bother ain, and pounded one of his buddies on the shoulder

"Tony!" he yelled "I got two more bills says Old Goldy beats the bejesus out of Cannonballl"

"You&039;re faded!"

(Twenty-five hundred asped: "Oh, Sal, if I could have ain Hunter drove on slowly, following Margo He called sharply to the figures close around the two cars: "Keep hts went on against white walls, silhouetting knots and huddles ofat the sky

Two er, but from points a half diae battleships of space, perhaps One of the new beah to the Wanderer There was an incandescent gout at the edge of the north yellow notch of the ht faded there was a long ragged black hole there in the Wanderer&039;s golden and purple skin

Ann&039;s voice cut through, shrill with tragedy "Mo the Wanderer! I hate it!"

Pop, stuleefully: "Fry &039;em, oh, fry &039;em! Keep it up! Kill yourselves!"

Suddenly the nine blue bea a pale blue he the Wanderer - a sort of h which the yellow and violet features of the planet showed di them," Hixon yelled "It&039;s the kill!"

"No, I think the Wanderer&039;s putting up a new kind of defensive screen," the Little Man contradicted

Five blinding points of white light sprang out on the steely surface of the Stranger

"Missiles exploding!" McHeath guessed "The Wanderer&039;s fighting back!"

The Raainst the truck as he strode along with it, now cried out in an agonized appeal: "But what must we understand fro the h?"

Ra, called back to hiods spend the wealth the universe gathers, they scan the wonders and fling theods! I told you they were devils"

Ann said accusingly: "Oh, Mouess, the five white points had swollen to the pale heh which the steely surface of the Stranger showed unbroken

Hixon said: "I don&039;t know about devils, but I kno there&039;ll always be war" He waved a hand at the zenith "What more proof could you ask than that?"

Mrs Hixon shouted cryptically froood is it?"

The Rahestand the wisestIs there no cure?"

Young Harry McHeath&039;s iedy of that question, and for a moment he saw himself in an almost all-powerful, one-man spaceship poisedback their bolts fro their sanity

The Little Man said, not in a loud voice, almost as if to himself: "Maybe the cure always has to co from below Forever"

But Wojtowicz heard hi away from the sky asked: "How do you mean from below, Doddsy? Not from us?"

The Little Man looked at htm "Yes, Wojtowicz," be said with a chuckle at the ridiculousness of it, "frouys like you and hed "I&039; steadily forward all the time, the cars and the walkers were al rabbed a odda our observations!"

Hunter, hearing that, had to think of Archiraend had killed Archi his head as he turned around Hunter recognized Buford Huhts back At the same time Humphreys saw his" he had kept out of Vandenberg He goggled wildly, then with a shrug of inco: "Goddarabbed the young man by his sweatshirt before he could dart away "Take us to Professor Opperly!" she ordered "We&039;ve got to ot a note fro at the dirty, crumpled sheet "Follow hts!"

The Corvette&039;s and the truck&039;s beams winked out a o held on to the young man His pale sweatshirt made it easy for Hunter to follow them Beyond them Hunter sa the loom of radar screens and the white barrel of a field telescope

Overhead the blue beath, and the mist-curtain around the Wanderer faded, to be instantly replaced by a hundred points of white light, stabbingly bright

But even as McHeath, squinting his eyes, called: "Ilobe!" it was to be seen that the Wanderer had slipped aside twice her dia of the foundations of the universe shifting The ihtened as the white blasts that had been on the other side of the Wanderer shone through and the globe now had a wide ragged neck where the Wanderer had burst out

"They&039;ve gone inertialess - the whole planet," Clarence Dodd cried

There were a half dozen ragged holes in the Wanderer&039;s skin now, black but glowing dull red toward their central depths - so entially froed planet&039;s side there shot out toward the Stranger a violet beahter than any of the earlier ones

But before it was halfway to the Stranger, the bigger planet moved as swiftly as one of its beams - a rhinoceros rush across the sky, destroying all feelings of stability - to a position alongside the Wanderer There was not a moon&039;s width between them

The Wanderer vanished

A blue broadside burst froh the space where the Wanderer had been

"Goddamn, they blew her to bits!" Pop screamed ecstatically

"No, she disappeared a fraction of a second earlier," the Little Man contradicted "You&039;ve got to observe!"

The Stranger, her steely surface unholed, though streaked with brown and greenish scars, hung there three, four, five seconds, then she vanished too - like a big diht its filament, switched off

The sheaf of blue laser beale thicker violet one crawled away froht, into the astronolobe froer, and ghostlier

"The Wanderer escaped into hyperspace," McHeath said

"Maybe, but she was a goner," Hixon said "She&039;d have knocked to bits, and the Stranger&039;s gone in after her She&039;s done"

"But we can&039;t be sure," Hunter said "She hts he added, Like the Flying Dutchone," Wojtowicz said with a nervous guffaw "They ht of just jumped to the other side of the earth"

"That&039;s true," the Little Man said, "but we didn&039;t see theot a feeling"

Only then, as the bright yellow and orange afteriin to realize, one by one, that they were all standing quite still in inky darkness Hunter had switched off the Corvette&039;s ignition Behind him he heard the truck&039;s an to wink on in the black heavens - the old fahts

Don and Paul gazed up through the spacescreen of the Baba Yaga at the eht-lining off toward infinity

They were both strapped down Paul held a reddened handkerchief to his cheek Don kept an eye on the skin te aft radar picture of Southern California and the Pacific below Although all but a trace of Earth&039;s atmosphere was still under them, he&039;d already braked once, mostly to assure hione," Don said

"Into the storht "The Wanderer was a wreck"

"Nothing&039;s a wreck that can boost into hyperspace," Don assured hian to crawl across the screen, and he tripped a vernier or two and they steadied