ed TRACER LIGHT, she left the set in
operation and made her way up to the top floor of the apartment house.
Taking the fire exit to the roof, Mrs. Mimms found herself among a
forest of TV aerials. However there was a small circle of light cast
about one of them and she went to it and attached the filter.

Returning to her apartment, Mrs. Mimms went immediately to bed. She
would have liked a last cup of tea before retiring, but she was too
tired to fix it.

The telephone woke the time traveler at half past ten the next
morning. She answered it sleepily. It was a young mother, Mrs. Mimms'
first customer. Could Mrs. Mimms _possibly_ come that night? The voice
sounded desperate, then relieved when Mrs. Mimms answered Yes, she
would be there.

Remembering that she had had nothing to eat since her own century,
Mrs. Mimms hurried below to the delicatessen and purchased some Danish
pastry. She looked forward to a cup of strong tea. As she waited for
the water to boil, she switched on the apparatus and dialed once or
twice across the band. At that hour most of the apartments were
silent. Wives were attending to cleaning or washing and the children
had been sent out to play. Leaving the apparatus for a minute, Mrs.
Mimms made her tea. When she returned there was a burst of static on
the loudspeaker, then a loud childish voice and images took shape on
the screen.

"I'm captain of this spaceship, Ronnie Smith," insisted the taller of
the two youngsters. "You gotta do like I say. We're the first guys on
this planet, see? We got cut off from the ship by the monsters and we
only got another half hour of oxygen left. We gotta shoot our way
back. Let's go, Lieutenant Smith."

"Ah, you're always the captain," muttered Lt. Smith mutinously, though
inaudibly under his F.A.O. Schwartz plastic helmet. The two Earthlings
advanced cautiously across the parking lot in the rear of the
apartment building, mowing down the aliens like flies with their
atomic ray guns.

"Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah. See me get that one, Smith?" screamed the captain
murderously. "Right in the belly, look at the guts. Ah-ah-ah-ah. Big
spiders, about twenty feet tall. There's some more. Make every shot
count, Smith. We gotta make the ship before they do."

"I just blasted five of 'em with one shot," bragged Lt. Smith,
leveling his pistol at a particularly large alien and watching it
dissolve.

Fighting their way desperately across the parking lot the spacemen
finally ma