like the moon. But the ring-mountains were worn away by rain
and snow. New mountain-ranges rose up. Continents changed. Now there's
no way to find even the traces of a disaster so long past. But the moon
has no weather. Nothing ever changes on it. Its wounds have never
healed."

Gail frowned in concentration.

"A bombardment like that would be something to live through," she said
vexedly. "An atomic war would be trivial by comparison. But it happened
millions and millions of years ago. We women want to know about things
that are happening now!"

Soames opened his mouth to speak. But he didn't.

The flickering, wavering, silver-plated wave-guide tube of the radar
suddenly steadied. It ceased to hunt restlessly among all places
overhead for a tiny object headed for Earth. It stopped dead. It
pointed, trembling a little as if with eagerness. It pointed somewhere
east of due south, and above the horizon.

"Here's a meteor. It's falling now," said Soames.

Then he looked again. The radar's twin screens should have shown two
dots of light, one to register the detected object's height, and another
its angle and distance. But both screens were empty. They showed nothing
at all. There was nothing where the radar had stopped itself and where
it aimed. But all of the two screens glowed faintly. The graph-pens
wrote wholly meaningless indications on their tape. A radar, and
especially a meteor-tracking radar, is an instrument of high precision.
It either detects something and pin-points its place, or it doesn't,
because an object either reflects radar-pulses or not. Usually it does.

* * * * *

The radar here, then, gave an impossible reading. It was as if it did
not receive the reflections of the pulses it sent out, but only parts of
them. It was as if something were intermittently in existence, or was
partly real and partly not. Or as if the radar had encountered an
almost-something which was on the verge of becoming real, and didn't
quite make it.

"What the--"

The inter-base radio screamed. At the same instant the twin
radar-screens flashed bright all over. The twin pens of the tape-writing
machine scrambled crazy lines on the paper. The noise was monstrous. A
screaming, shrieking uproar such as no radio ever gave out. There was
horror in it. And what Soames could not know now was that at this same
instant the same sound came out of every radio and television set in use
in all the wo