A moment, and the general was again visible.

"That will be all." Once more the momentary softening. "Good luck, my
boy." A final exchange of salutes, and the screen went blank.

I switched on the light. There in the little machine was a slip of
paper. I extracted it. The lines of type, the scrawled signature,
burned into my brain like letters of fire.

"To: All Officers of the Military Forces of the Americas.

Subject: Military Assistance. Eric Bolton, Captain M.I.S.,
M.F.A. is authorized to call upon you for any assistance.
You will comply with his requests.

Alton Sommers, Lieut. General Commanding M.I.S., M.F.A.

By authority of the Commander in Chief."

In the corner appeared my thumb-print.

I stood there for a long time, mulling the thing over. The Staff was
laying tremendous stress on the enemy's strange cloud formation, even
to the extent of disclosing the secret of the new defensive device.
The Easterners, too, had something novel, something that would cut off
absolutely the transmission of ether waves. Nothing either side had
yet produced would do that. What was happening behind that screen?
Would they break through our defenses at last?

A vision arose before me. Hordes of yellow men, of black, of white
renegades from the nations where the red flag waved dominant, pouring
over the Americas. The horrors that Britain had undergone, the last
European nation to hold out against the Red horde, flashed into my
mind. I shuddered. Never. It must not be.

* * * * *

I was hurled from my feet by an electric shock. A great flood of
sunlight burst in on me. A corner of the booth, three-foot concrete,
had been sheared away, whiffed into nothingness! I arose and dashed
into the open. A raid was in progress. The air was electric with the
clashing of opposing barrages. The terrible silence of the pitched
battles of that war oppressed me. I saw a squad, caught in the beam of
an Eastern ray-projector, destroyed. The end man must have been just
on the edge of the beams--half his right side lay twitching on the
ground. The rest of him, and the seven others, were smoking heaps of
blackened cinders.

High over No Man's Land--queer how those old phrases last--a covey of
enemy helicopters hung, waiting for the barrage to lift. A black hulk
broke the surface of the water, split open: then another. Enemy
sub-surface craft. The fight was being waged under