yward. When the shells arrived and
burst, it was gone.

It could still be sighted as a spark of sunlight shooting for the
heavens. Jets roared toward it. It vanished.

Coburn heard the ensign saying in a flat voice: "If that wasn't
accelerating at fifteen Gs, I never saw a ship. If it wasn't
accelerating at fifteen Gs ..."

And that was all. There was nothing else to shoot at. There was nothing
else to do. Jets ranged widely, looking for something that would offer
battle, but the radars said that the metal ship had gone up to three
hundred miles and then headed west and out of radar range. There had not
been time for the French to set up paired radar-beam outfits anyhow, so
they couldn't spot it, and in any case its course seemed to be toward
northern Spain, where there was no radar worth mentioning.

Presently somebody noticed the dingy, stubby, draggled tramp steamer
over which the Invaders' craft had hovered. It was no longer on course.
It had turned sidewise and wallowed heavily. Its bow pointed
successively to every point of the compass.

It looked bad. Salvoes of the heaviest projectiles in the Fleet had been
fired to explode a thousand feet above it. Perhaps--

A destroyer went racing to see. As it drew near--Coburn learned this
later--it saw a man's body hanging in a sagging heap over the railing of
its bridge. There was nobody visible at the wheel. There were four men
lying on its deck, motionless.

The skipper of the destroyer went cold. He brought his ship closer. It
was not big, this tramp. Maybe two thousand tons. It was low in the
water. It swayed and surged and wallowed and rolled.

Men from the destroyer managed to board it. It was completely unharmed.
They found one small sign of the explosions overhead. One fragment of an
exploded shell had fallen on board, doing no damage.

Even the crew was unharmed. But every man was asleep. Each one slumbered
heavily. Each breathed stertorously. They could not be awakened. They
would need oxygen to bring them to.

* * * * *

A party from the destroyer went on board to bring the ship into harbor.
The officer in charge tried to find out the ship's name.

There was not a document to be found to show what the ship's name was or
where it had come from or what it carried as cargo. That was strange.
The officer looked in the pockets of the two men in the wheel house.
There was not a single identifying object on either of them.