nd children who still had not left the
city, went down to death in those ten minutes. Yet no observer could
have seen them. Their little bodies, so small amid these Titans of
their own creation, went into oblivion unnoticed in the chaos.

* * * * *

The little solidifying bombs of the White Invaders did their work
silently. But what a roar surged up into the moonlit night from the
stricken city! What tumult of mingled sounds! What a myriad of
splintering, reverberating crashes, bursting upward into the night;
echoing away, renewed again and again so that it all was a vast
pulsing throb of terrible sound. And under it, inaudible, what faint
little sounds must have been the agonized screams of the humans who
were entombed!

Then the pulse of the great roaring sound began slowing. Soon it
became a dying roar. A last building was toppling here and there.
The silence of death was spreading over the mangled litter of the
strewn city. Dying chaos of sound; but now it was a chaos of color.
Up-rolling clouds of plaster dust; and then darker, heavier clouds
of smoke. Lurid yellow spots showed through the smoke clouds where
everywhere fires were breaking up.

And under it, within it all, the vague white shapes of the enemy
apparitions stood untouched, still peering curious, awed triumphant
at what they had done.

Another ten minutes passed; then half an hour, perhaps. The
apparitions were moving now. The many little groups were gathering
into fewer, larger groups. One marched high in the air, with faint
lurid green beams slanting down at the ruins of the city; not as
weapons this time, but as beams of faint light, seemingly to
illuminate the scene, or perhaps as signals to the ghostly army.

The warships in the Hudson were steaming slowly toward the Battery
to escape. Searchlights from them, from the other ships hovering
impotent in the bay, and from a group of encircling planes, flashed
their white beams over the night to mingle with the glare of the
fires and the black pall of smoke which was spreading now like a
shroud.

* * * * *

There were two young men in a monoplane which had helplessly circled
over mid-Manhattan. They saw the city fall, and noticed the lurking
wraiths untouched amid the ruins and in the air overhead. And they
saw, when it was over, that one great building very strangely had
escaped. The Empire State, rearing its tower high into the s