ies!"

They crowded around his gruesome find and caught their first glimpse of
the invaders from space. Anatomical details could not be distinguished
since the bodies had been caught under a rain of crushing beams, but
they saw that they were not too different from both Terrestrians and
Venerians--though their blood seemed strangely pallid, and their skin
was of a ghastly whiteness. Evidently they had been assembled before an
unfamiliar sort of instrument panel when catastrophe struck; Morey
indicated the dials and keys.

"Nice to know what you're fighting," Arcot observed. "I've a hunch that
we'll see some of these critters alive--but not in this ship!"

They turned away and resumed their examination of the shattered
mechanisms.

A careful examination was impossible; they were wrecks, but Arcot did
see that they seemed mainly to be giant electrical machines of standard
types, though on a gargantuan scale. There were titanic masses of
wrecked metal, iron and silver, for with these men silver seemed to
replace copper, though nothing could replace iron and its magnetic uses.

"They are just electrical machines, I guess," said Arcot at last. "But
what size! Have you seen anything really revolutionary, Wade?"

Wade frowned and answered. "There are just two things that bother me.
Come here." As Arcot jumped over, nearly suspended by his ray pistol,
Wade directed his light on a small machine that had fallen in between
the cracks in the giant mass of broken generators. It was a little
thing, apparently housed in a glass case. There was only one objection
to that assumption. The base of a large generator lay on it, metal fully
two feet thick, and that metal was cracked where it rested on the case,
and the case, made of material an inch and a half thick, was not dented!

"Whewww--that's a nice kind of glass to have!" Morey commented. "I'd
like to have a specimen for examination. Oh--I wonder--yes, it must be!
There's a window in the side up there toward what was the bow that
seemed to me to be the same stuff. It's buried about three feet in solid
earth, so I imagine it must be."

The three made their way at once to where they had seen the window. The
frame appeared to be steel, or some such alloy, and it was twisted and
bent under the blow, for this was evidently the outer wall, and the
impact of landing had flattened the rounded side. But that "glass"
window was quite undisturbed! There was, as a further proof, a large