g more premeditated. One
wing flew wildly up. The flier seemed to plunge crazily groundward. At
the last fraction of a second, the plane reeled again and crashed into
the fisherman's shack before which, from a distance of five miles, a man
had been photographed, laughing.

Timbers splintered. Glass broke musically. Then there were thuds as men
leaped swiftly from the plane and dived under the still-falling
roof-beams. There were three, four, half a dozen men in fleet uniforms,
with blasters in their hands. They used the weapons ruthlessly upon a
civilian who flung himself at an incongruously brand-new signalling
apparatus in a corner of the shattered house. A second man snarled and
savagely lunged at his attackers; he was also blasted as he tried to
reach the same device.

There was no pause. Over the low ground to the west a flight of bombers
appeared, bellowing. In mass formation they rushed out above the sea.
Far to the right and high up, a second formation of man-made birds
appeared suddenly. It dived steeply from invisibility toward the water.
Over the horizon to the left there came V's of bomber-planes, one after
another, by dozens and by hundreds. More planes roared above the
shattered shack. They came in columns. They came in masses. From the
heavens above and over the ground below and from the horizon that rimmed
the world, the planes came. Planes from one direction crossed a certain
patch of sea.

They were not wholly clear of it when planes from another part of the
horizon swept over the same area, barely wave-tip high. Planes from the
west raced over this one delimited space, and planes from the north
almost shouldered them aside, and then planes from the east covered that
same mile-square patch of sea, and then more planes from the south....

They followed each other in incredible procession, incredibly precise.
The water on that mile-square space developed white dots, which always
vanished but never ceased. Spume-spoutings leaped up three feet, or ten,
or twenty and disappeared, and then there were others which spouted up
one yard, or two, or ten. There were innumerable temporary whitecaps.
The surface became pale from the constant churning of new foam-patches
before the old foam died.

Then, with absolute abruptness, the planes flew away from the one square
mile of sea. The late-comers climbed steeply. Abruptly, behind them,
there were warning booms. Then monstrous masses of spray and bubbles
and bl