"Blake," he called, and spelled out the
name of their field, "warning--Venus--"

"Hold them!" he yelled to Sykes at the sound of rushing feet. "Keep them
off as long as you can!"

"... Prepare--for invasion. Blake, this is McGuire...." Over and over,
he worked the swinging pointer into symbols that might in some way, by
some fortunate chance, help that helpless people to resist the horror
that lay ahead.

And while heavy bodies crashed against the door that Sykes was holding,
there came from some deep-hidden well of memory an inspiration. There
was a man he had once met--a man who had confided wondrous things; and
now, with the knowledge of these others who had conquered space, he
could believe wholly what he had laughed and joked about before. That
man, too, had claimed to have travelled far from the earth; he had
invented a machine; his name--

The pointer was swinging in frenzied haste to spell over and over the
name of a man, and the name, too, of a forgotten place in the mountains
of Nevada. It was repeating the message; then finished in one long
crashing wail as a cloud of vapor shot about McGuire and his hand upon
the pointer went suddenly limp.

CHAPTER XI

Captain Blake's game of solitaire had become an obsession. He drove
himself to the utmost in the line of duty, and, through the day, the
demands of the flying field filled his mind to forgetfulness. And for
the rest, he forced his mind to concentrate upon the turn of the cards.
He could not read--and he must not think!--so he sat through long
evenings trying vainly to forget.

He looked up with an expressionless face as Colonel Boynton entered the
room. The colonel saw the cards and nodded.

"Does that help?" he asked, and added without waiting for an answer, "I
don't like cards, but I find my mathematics works well.... My old
problems--I can concentrate on them, and stop this eternal, damnable
thinking, thinking--"

There was something of the same look forming about the eyes of
both--that look that told of men who struggled gamely under the sentence
of death, refusing to think or to fear, and waiting, waiting,
impotently. Blake looked at the colonel with a carefully emotionless
gaze. "It's hell in the big towns, I hear."

The Colonel nodded. "Can't blame them much, if that's what appeals to
them. A year and a half!--and they've got to forget it. Why not crowd
all the recklessness and excesses they can into the time that is
left?--poor devils