high in the powers of the world, able to command.

* * * * *

I went back to South America, to my reporting. I wanted to be on hand
when the attack of which Tilda had warned became reality.

I was some twelve miles from the deadly circle when the giant tanks
appeared. They were larger than any moving thing ever seen on Earth
before. Tracklayers, caterpillars--and swinging above them slender
towers which bore ominous gleaming nozzles. On they came.

Then they struck at us. From the nozzles a cold brilliance leaped out,
unnamable, that swept forward like a slow lightning, a kind of crackling
sheet of cold fire that spread from tower to tower, in an arc that began
to bend toward our lines.

The fire came in mile-wide swaths. There was no outcry, no terror--just
the sweating lines of men in foxholes, the crews about the guns, heaving
ammo into their maws; the rumbling trucks and the careening jeeps. The
fire swept over all like liquid, radiance, like a pouring out of
moonlight, soft but brilliant, mild yet deadly. Then it was gone. And
when it had gone, nothing but silence remained. Dead men stretched out
where they had lain waiting, fallen where they labored; jeeps careened
on to crash into stumps or bigger trucks--and stop forever. Only silence
and death and nothingness was left.

When the silence swept across the whole front I dropped my glasses and
lit out for my own car, and headed for the coast. I wanted to file this
story in person, and I knew, too, that army would not be there in the
morning. I meant to stay alive. I knew that the hope for mankind lay in
what honest men were doing with Stegner's formulae. I had to know. So I
fled.

Next day they were dropping atom bombs on every moving thing in
Stegner's ghastly Eden. High flying bombers flew in swarms--and many of
them were being shot down by the weird fire. I saw those atom bombs
falling, on television, and the white radiance reaching up toward them.
I saw it catch them in its embrace, saw them explode harmlessly in the
air, midway in their plunge. Whatever the fire was, it was a defense
against the atom bomb, for it exploded them before they could reach
their targets.

It didn't catch them all, and it didn't intercept all the high-flying
bombers loosing their guided rocket missiles. It got enough though, to
show us we were on the losing end. What we needed was a miracle. And the
miracle did occur....

At first, even with