The tread of the Wabbly made a perfect roadway. Presently Sergeant
Walpole looked up to find himself scrutinizing somebody's dining-room
table, set for lunch. The Wabbly had crossed a house in its path without
swerving. Walls, chimneys, timbers and planks, all had gone beneath its
treads. But they had been pressed so smoothly flat that until Sergeant
Walpole looked down at his footing, he would not have known he was
walking on the wreckage of a building.

It was half an hour before he reached the village. The Wabbly had gone
from end to end, backed up, and gone over the rest of it again. There
was the taint of gas in the air. Sergeant Walpole halted outside the
debris. His gas-mask had been blown to atoms with Observation-Post
Fourteen.

"They're tryin' to beat the news o' their comin'," he reflected aloud,
"which is why they smashed up the village. The telephone exchange was
there.... Tillie's under there somewheres...."

He fumbled with the rifle, suddenly swearing queerly hate-distorted
oaths. Tillie had not been the great love of Sergeant Walpole's life.
She was merely a country telephone operator, reasonably pretty, and
flattered by his uniform. But she was under a mass of splintered wood
and crushed brick-work, killed while trying to connect with the tight
beam to Area Headquarters to report the monster rushing upon the
village. That monster had destroyed the little settlement. There was
nothing left at all but wreckage and the eight-foot tracks of monster
treads. Sometimes those tracks crossed each other. Between them wreckage
survived to a height of as much as four feet, which was the clearance of
the Wabbly's body.

Something roared low overhead. Sergeant Walpole swore bitterly, looked
upward, and waited to die. But the small plane was American, and old. It
was a training-plane, useless for front-line work. It dived to earth,
the pilot waved impatiently, and Walpole plunged to a place beside him.
Instantly thereafter the plane took off.

"What was it?" shouted the pilot, sliding off at panic-stricken speed
across the tree-tops. "They heard the bombs go off all the way to
Philly. Sent me. What in hell was it?"

* * * * *

A thin, high, wailing sound coming down as lightning might be imagined
to descend.... The pilot dived madly and got behind a pine forest before
the explosion and the concussion that followed it. Sergeant Walpole saw
the pine-trees shiver. The sheer explos