went limp. Lockley had the revolver almost
before he reached the floor.

"Quick!" he snapped. "Where was the machinery? Front or back part of
the trailer?"

"All of it," panted Jill. "Mostly front. What--"

"The hall again," Lockley snapped. "Hunt for a back door!"

He thrust her out. She fumbled toward the back of the building while
he went to the street entrance. The trailer-truck loomed huge. The
driver's helper came out of it. Another man followed him. Still
another....

Lockley fired from the doorway. One bullet through the front part of
the truck. One near the middle. Then a third halfway between the first
two. The three men dived to the ground, thinking themselves his
targets. But Jill called inarticulately from the back of the dark
hall. Lockley raced back to her. He saw starlight. She waited,
shivering. They went out and he closed the door softly behind him.

He took her hand and they ran through the night. Overhead there was a
luminous mistiness because of the street light, but here were abysmal
darknesses between vague areas on which the starlight fell. Lockley
said evenly, "We've got to be quiet. Maybe I hit some of the
machinery. Maybe. If I didn't, it's all over!"

The back of a building. An alleyway. They ran down it. There was a
street with trees, where the street lights cast utterly black shadows
in between intolerable glare. They ran across the street. On the other
side were residences--the business district was not large. Lockley
found a gate, and opened it quietly and as quietly closed it behind
them. They ran into a lane between two dead, dark, dreary structures
in which people had lived but from which all life was now gone.

A back yard. A fence. Lockley helped Jill get over it. Another lane.
Another street. But this street was not crossed--not here, anyhow--by
another which led back to the street of the telephone office. A man
could not look from there and see them running under the lights.

The blessed irregularity of the streets continued. They ran and ran
until Jill's breath came in pantings. Lockley was drenched in sweat
because he expected at any instant to smell the most loathesome of
all possible combinations of odors, and then to see flashing lights
originating in his own eyes, and sounds which would exist only in the
nerves of his ears, and then to feel all his muscles knot in total and
horrible paralysis.

They heard the truck motor rumble into life when they were many block