h. From a whine it
became a scream. From a scream it rose to a shriek. Something
monstrous and red glittered in the dying sunlight. It was huge. It was
of no design ever known on earth. Wings supported it, but they were
obscured by the blasts of forward rockets checking its speed.

It was dropping rapidly. Then lifting-rockets spouted flame to keep it
from too rapid a descent. It cleared a mountain-peak by a bare two
hundred feet, some two miles to the south. It was a hundred-odd feet
in length. It was ungainly in shape, monstrous in conformation.
Colossal rocket-tubes behind it now barely trickled vaporous
discharges. It cleared the mountain-top, went heavily on in a steep
glide downward, and vanished behind a mountain-flank. Presently the
thin mountain air brought the echoed sound of its landing, of
rapid-fire explosions of rocket-tubes, and then silence.

Thorn Hard was snapping swift, staccato sentences into the
report-transmitter. Describing the clumsy glittering monster, its
motion; its wings; its method of propulsion. It seemed somehow
familiar despite its strangeness. He said so.

Then a vivid blue flame licked all about the rim of the world and was
gone. Simultaneously the G.C. speaker crashed explosively and went
dead. Thorn went on grimly, switching in the spare.

"A very violent electrical discharge went out from it then. A blue
light seemed to flash all around the horizon at no great distance and
my speaker blew out. I have turned on the spare. I do not know whether
my sender is functioning--"

The spare speaker cut in abruptly at that moment:

"It is. Stay where you are and observe. A squadron is coming."

* * * * *

Then the voice broke off, because a new sound was coming from the
speaker. It was a voice that was unhuman and queerly horrible and
somehow machine-like. Hoots and howls and whistles came from the
speaker. Wailing sounds. Ghostly noises, devoid of consonants but
broadcast on a wave-length close to the G.C. band and therefore
produced by intelligence, though unintelligible. The unhuman hoots and
wails and whistles came through for nearly a minute, and stopped.

"Stay on duty!" snapped the G.C. speaker. "That's no language known on
earth. Those are Martians!"

Thorn looked up to see Sylva standing by the Watch-plane door. Her
face was pale in the growing darkness outside.

"Beginning duty sir," said Thorn steadily, "I report that I have with
me Miss S