ght light of day.
But now it was not alone. Beside it a white tower reared upward. Pure
white and glistening in the sunshine, a bulging, uneven shaft rose a
hundred feet sheer. It looked as solid as marble. Its purpose was
unguessable. There was a huge, fan-shaped space where the vegetation
about the rocket-ship was colored a vivid red. In air-photos, the
rocket-ship would look remarkably like something from another planet.
But nearby, Thorn could see a lazy trickle of fuel-fumes from a
port-pipe on one side of the monster....

"That tower is nothing but cellate foam, which hardens. And Sylva!
See?"

She came cautiously through the brushwood and looked down. She
shivered a little. From here they could see beneath the bows of the
rocket-ship. And there was a name there, in the Cyrillic alphabet
which was the official written language of the Com-Pubs. Here, on
United Nations soil, it was insolent. It boasted that the red ship
came, not from an alien planet, but from a nation more alien still to
all the United Nations stood for. The Com-Pubs--the Union of Communist
Republics--were neither communistic nor republics, but they were much
more dangerous to the United Nations than any mere Martians would have
been.

"We'll have some heavy ships here to investigate, soon," said Thorn
grimly. "Then I'll signal!"

* * * * *

He flung back his head. High up and far away, beyond that invisible
barrier against which Watch-planes had flung themselves in vain, there
were tiny motes in mid-air. These were Watch planes too, hovering
outside the obstacle they could not see, but which even hexynitrate
bombs could not break through. And very far away indeed there was a
swiftly-moving small dark cloud. As Thorn watched, that cloud drew
close. As his eyes glowed, it resolved itself into its component
specks. Small, two-man patrol-scouts. Larger, ten-man cruisers of the
air. Huge, massive dreadnaughts of the blue. A complete
combat-squadron of the United Nations Fighting Forces was sweeping to
position about the dome of force above the rocket-ship.

The scouts swept forward in a tiny, whirling cloud. They sheered away
from something invisible. One of them dropped a smoking object. It
emitted a vast cloud of paper, which the wind caught and swept away,
and suddenly wrapped about a definite section of an arc. More and more
of the tiny smoke-bombs released their masses of cloudlike stuff. In
mid-air a dome b