party and amicable contact with the civilization
of that other planet, utterly shattered by presumed outrages by
Jacaro. He made call after call, and his demands for information grew
more urgent as he got closer to the source of trouble. His cause for
worry was verified long before he had finished. Even as he made the
first call, New York newspapers had crowded a second-grade murder off
their front pages to make room for the white mist upstate.

* * * * *

The early-morning editions had termed it a "poisonous fog." The
breakfast editions spoke of it as a "poison fog." But it grew and
moved and by the time Tommy had a clear line to get actual information
about it, a tabloid had christened it the "Death Mist" and there were
three chartered planes circling about it for the benefit of their
newspapers. State troopers were being reinforced. At ten o'clock it
was necessary to post extra traffic police to take care of the cars
headed upstate to look at the mystery. At eleven it began to move!
Sluggishly, to be sure, and rather raggedly, but it undoubtedly moved,
and as undoubtedly it moved independently of the wind.

It was at twelve-thirty that the first casualty occurred. Before that
time, the police had frantically demanded that the flood of sightseers
be stopped. The Death Mist covered a square mile or more. It clung to
the ground, nowhere more than fifty or sixty feet high, and glittered
with all the colors of the rainbow. It moved with a velocity of
anywhere from ten to twenty miles an hour. In its path were a myriad
small tragedies--nesting birds stiff and still, and rabbits and other
small furry bodies contorted in queer agonized postures. But until
twelve-thirty no human beings were known to be its victims.

Then, though, it was moving blindly across the wind with a thin
trailing edge behind it and a rolling billow of descending mist as its
forefront. It rolled up to and across a concrete highway, watched by
perspiring motor cops who had performed miracles in clearing a path
for it among the horde of sightseeing cars. It swept on into a
spindling pine wood. Behind it lay a thinning sheet of vapor--thick
white mist which seemed to rise and move more swiftly to overtake the
main body. It lay across the highway in a sheet which was ten feet
deep, then thinned to six, to three....

* * * * *

The mist was no more than a foot thick, when a party of motori