of the invaders themselves. You probably
saw the display of lights that marks their camp down in the valley a
mile beyond my place. We have learned since that the space ship of the
invaders dropped silently down into the valley the night before the
moon turned green and established the camp as a sort of outpost and
observatory. They left two of their number there as pioneers, then the
rest of them departed in the space ship for their present post up near
the moon.

"Ruth and I were revived only that the two invaders in the camp might
question us regarding life on this planet. They have a science that is
based upon principles as utterly strange and incomprehensible to us as
ours probably is to them. They probed my brain with a thought machine.
It was an apparatus that worked both ways. What knowledge they got
from me I do not know, but I do know that they unwittingly told me
much in the bizarre and incredible mental pictures that the machine
carried from their brains to mine.

* * * * *

"They are refugees. Bruce, from a planet that circled about the star
that we know as Alpha Centauri, a star that is the nearest of all our
stellar neighbors, being only four and a third light years distant.
Their home planet was disrupted by a colossal engineering experiment
of the Centaurians themselves, the only survivors being a group of
fifty who escaped in a space ship just before the catastrophe.

"There were no other habitable planets in their own system, so in
desperation these refugees sped out across the void to our solar
system in the hope of finding a new home here. They reconnoitered our
Earth secretly and found it ideal. But first they believed that they
must conquer the life that already held this Earth. To do this, they
struck with the Green Sickness.

"The rays that are turning the moon green emanate from the space ship
hovering up there some fifty thousand miles from the moon itself. The
Centaurian's rays, blending with the sunlight striking the disc of the
full moon, are intensified in some unknown way, then reflected across
the quarter of a million miles to the Earth, to flood this planet with
virulent radiance.

"The green moonlight is radioactive in nature, and overcomes animal
life within a matter of fifteen minutes or less. The rays are most
powerful when the moon is in the sky, but their effect continues even
after it has set, because as long as the green moonlight strikes an