here, a ribbon of concrete road which once had been a
reasonably important feeder-highway.

"Let's go."

They went off through the rain along the road, nearly parallel to the
route the Wabbly was taking. Rain beat at them. Off in the woods to
their right the Wabbly's noise grew louder as they overtook it. They
passed it, and came abruptly out of the wooded area upon cultivated
fields, rolling and beautifully cared-for. There had been a
farm-headquarters off to one side, a huge central-station for all the
agricultural work on what once would have been half a county, but there
were jagged walls where buildings had been, and smoke still rose from
the place.

Then the Wabbly came out of the woods, a dim gray monstrous shape in the
rain.

* * * * *

The helicopter man pulled the ignition-cord and a rocket began to
sputter. He made a single wipe with his knife-blade along the twisted
insulated wires of the Bissel battery, and a wavering blue spark leaped
into being. The rocket shot upward, curved down, and landed with enough
force to bury its head in the muddy ploughed earth and conceal the
signal-flare that must have ignited.

"That ought to do it," said the 'copter man. "Let's send some more."

Sergeant Walpole got exhaustedly off his monocycle and duplicated the
'copter man's efforts. A second rocket, a third.... A dozen or more
rockets went off, each one bearing a wavering, uncertain blue spark at
its tip. And that spark would continue for half an hour or more. In a
loop aerial, eight miles up, it might sound like a spark-plug, or it
might sound like something else. But it would not sound like the sort of
thing that ought to spring up suddenly in front of the Wabbly, and it
would sound like something that had better be bombed, for safety's sake.

The Wabbly was moving across the ploughed fields with a deceptive
smoothness. It was drawing nearer and nearer to the spot where the
rockets had plunged to earth.

It stopped.

Another rocket left the weary pair of men, its nearly flashless exhaust
invisible in the daytime, anyway. The Wabbly backed slowly from the
irregular line where the first rockets sparked invisibly. It was no more
than a distinct gray shadow in the falling rain, but the queer bulk atop
its body moved suddenly. Like a searchlight, the power-beam swept the
earth before the Wabbly. But nothing happened.

The 'copter man turned on the vision set he had packed from th