Joe saw a man walking in the same direction as himself. He was walking
deliberately back to the Platform. Somebody else was headed back too....

Very peculiarly, almost all the men on the floor had ceased to run. They
began to gather in little groups. They knew flight was useless. They
talked briefly. Profanely. Here and there men started disgustedly back
toward the Platform. Their lips moved in expressions of furious scorn.
Their scorn was of themselves.

There was a gathering of men about the base of the framework that still
partly veiled the Platform. They tended to face outward, angrily, and to
clench their fists.

Then somebody started an engine. A man began to climb furiously back to
where he had been at work. Quite unreasonably, other men followed him.

Hammers began defiantly and enragedly to sound.

The work crew in the Shed went defiantly and furiously back to work. A
clamor was set up that was almost the normal working noise. It was the
only possible way in which those men could express the raging contempt
they felt for those who would destroy the thing they worked on.

But there were some other men who could do more. There were three levels
of jet planes above the Shed, and they could dive. The highest one got
first to the line along which the missile from an unknown place was
plunging toward the Shed. That plane steadied on a collision course and
let go its wing load of rockets. It peeled off and got out of the way.
Seconds later the others from the jet umbrella were arriving. A tiny
spray of proximity-fused rockets blazed furiously toward the invisible
thing from the heights.

Other planes and yet others came hurtling to the line their radars
briskly computed for them. There were more rockets....

The black-painted thing with more than the speed of an artillery shell
plunged into a miniature hail of rockets. They flamed viciously. Half a
dozen--a dozen--explosions that were pure futility.

Then there was an explosion that was not. Nobody saw it, because its
puny detonation was instantly wiped out in a blaze of such incredible
incandescence that the aluminum paint on jet planes still miles away was
scorched and blistered instantly. The light of that flare was seen for
hundreds of miles. The sound--later on--was heard farther still. And the
desert vegetation miles below the hell bomb showed signs of searing when
the morning came.

But the thing from the north was vaporized, utterly, some forty-