we did? We were helpless, every moment under the eyes
of guards whose little hand-beams could in a second annihilate us.
When, leaving the carrier, Jane had appeared garbed like the rest of
us and we had all been equipped with the transition mechanism which
we knew well how to use now, the thought came to me of trying to
escape. But it was futile. I could set the switches at my belt to
materialize me into New York. But as I faded, the weapons of the
guards would have been quick enough to catch me. How could Jane, Don
and I simultaneously try a thing like that.

"Impossible!" Don whispered. "Don't do anything wrong. Some chance
may come, later."

But with that slight transition over, Tako at once removed from our
belts a vital part of the mechanism in order to make it impotent.

An hour passed, here on the ledge, with most of the activity of
Tako's men incomprehensible to us.

"You shall see very soon," he chuckled grimly, "I can give the
signal to attack--all at once. Look there! They grow very bold,
these New York soldiers. They have come to inspect us."

* * * * *

It was night in New York City--about two A.M. of the night of May
19th and 20th. Our mountain ledge was within a store on the east
side of Fifth Avenue at 36th Street. We seemed to be but one story
above the pavement. The shadowy outlines of a large rectangular room
with great lines of show-cases dividing it into wide aisles. I
recognized it at once--a jewelry store, one of the best known in the
world. A gigantic fortune in jewelry was here, some of it hastily
packed in great steel safes nearby, and some of it abandoned in
these show-cases when the panic swept the city a few days
previously.

But the jewelry of our world was nothing to these White Invaders.
Tako never even glanced at the cases, or knew or cared what sort of
a store this was.

The shadowy street of Fifth Avenue showed just below us. It was
empty now of vehicles and people, but along it a line of soldiers
were gathered. Other stores and ghostly structures lay along Fifth
Avenue. And five hundred feet away, diagonally across the avenue,
the great Empire State Building, the tallest structure in the entire
world, towered like a ghostly Titan into the void above us.

This ghostly city! We could see few details. The people had all
deserted this mid-Manhattan now. The stores and hotels and office
buildings were empty.

A group of soldiers came into the j