nt message. "We need all the
reinforcements you can send us!" and a picture of the beleaguered city
appeared in ghastly detail upon the screens of the observers; a view
being recorded from the air. It required only seconds for the
commissioner to order every available man and engine of war to the seat
of conflict; then, having done everything they could, Hinkle and Samms
stared in helpless, fascinated horror into their plates, watching the
scenes of carnage and destruction depicted there.

* * * * *

The Nevian vessel--the sister-ship, the craft which Costigan had seen in
mid-space as it hurtled earthward in response to Nerado's summons--hung
poised in full visibility, high above the metropolis. Scornful of the
pitiful weapons wielded by man she hung there, her sinister beauty of
line sharply defined against the cloudless sky. From her shining hull
there reached down a tenuous but rigid rod of crimson energy; a rod
which slowly swept hither and thither as the detectors of the amphibians
searched out the richest deposits of the precious iron for which the
inhuman visitors had come so far. Iron, once solid, now a viscous red
liquid, was sluggishly flowing in an ever-thickening stream up that
intangible crimson duct and into the capacious storage tanks of the
Nevian raider; and wherever that flaming beam went there went also ruin,
destruction, and death. Office buildings, skyscrapers towering
majestically in their architectural symmetry and beauty, collapsed into
heaps of debris as their steel skeletons were abstracted. Deep into the
ground the beam bored; flood, fire, and explosion following in its wake
as the mazes of underground piping disappeared. And the humanity of the
buildings died: instantaneously and painlessly, never knowing what
struck them, as the life-bearing iron of their bodies went to swell the
Nevian stream.

Pittsburgh's defenses had been feeble indeed. A few antiquated railway
rifles had hurled their shells upward in futile defiance, and had been
quietly absorbed. The district planes of Triplanetary, newly armed with
iron-driven ultra-beams, had assembled hurriedly and had attacked the
invader in formation, with but little more success. Under the impact of
their beams the stranger's screens had flared white, then poised ship
and flying squadron alike had been lost to view in a murkily opaque
shroud of crimson flame. The cloud had soon dissolved, and from the
place where