mong members of groups which had come to stage
demonstrations against extraterrestrials. The fighting spread to
individuals.

Police-car sirens wailed. Squad-cars came careening out of
uptown-traffic streets and converged on the tumult. The sirens produced
violent surgings of the crowd. There was a wild rush in this direction
as a siren sounded from that, and then an equally wild rush in another
direction still as blazing headlights and a moving howl came from
elsewhere. Rushing figures surged against the doors to the lobby of the
Communications Building.

Members of the Toppers and the Comets and the Maharajas and other
fanatics rushed up the stairs. There was a sign "_On the Air_" lighted
from behind outside the studio in which the world-wide broadcast was in
progress. There was a door. They opened it.

The watching world heard the racket as a former Nobel prize-winner's
stilted questions about the children were drowned out. This was not a
planned invasion. It was a totally chaotic rushing-about of people who'd
been half hysterical to start with, who had been crushed in a
senselessly swaying mob, had been pushed bodily into a building-lobby
jammed past endurance, and escaped into a maze from which they'd
blundered into a studio with a broadcast going on. Stagehands and
necktie-less persons rushed to throw them out. But the noise grew
greater while Linda Beach tried gamely to cover it up.

It was not easy. In fact, it was impossible. One of the Toppers found
himself cornered by two stagehands and dashed triumphantly across that
sacrosanct space, the area in a camera's field of vision. He raced
behind Linda Beach, then smiling pleasantly and talking at the top of
her voice to cover the noise behind her. The Topper snatched as he went
by. Linda Beach staggered, and her necklace broke, and this particular
juvenile delinquent plunged into the crowd by the doorway and wormed his
way through to lose himself in the crush outside.

But now the cops from the squad-cars were at work.

* * * * *

The lobby began to be partially cleared. Fugitives from panic came down
into the street where they were commanded to get moving and keep moving.
They did.

And Soames arrived at the studio. He'd fought his way there with a sort
of white-hot passion, because Gail was where this lunatic mob might
trample her. He raged, and then he saw her standing with precarious
composure out of the way of everythi