perch of a few thousand feet, grinned as his narrowed eyes beheld the
sticky curtain of death-crammed gas hug over the enemy base.

"That'll quiet 'em for a few minutes!" he muttered savagely.

A few minutes--but not more. And he had no more bombs; his ammunition
belts were nearly depleted. "I guess," he murmured, "I'd better follow
that quitter, Praed. I've paid 'em for the boys they got, anyway!"

He levelled the plane out, threw a last glance at the carpet of gas he
had laid, and spurred the purring Rahl-Diesels to their limit. His
speed dial flashed round to five hundred, five-fifty--seventy--and
finally rested, quivering, at the scout's full six hundred miles per
hour.

Under the streamlined plane's speeding body the gnarled, bomb-torn
terrain of Nevada hurtled by. A rather sad frown creased Lance's
prematurely old brow as he glimpsed it. Thousands of lives had been
thrown into that ground; the hot, tumbled waste was doused with
freely-sacrificed blood, the blood of whole regiments of America's
heroic First Home Army. Martyred men! Lance couldn't help swearing to
himself at the bitter thought of that terrible reckoning day. It was
the price his country had paid for her continued ignoring of the
festering peril overseas. Slaughtered like sheep, those glorious
regiments had been! Helpless, almost, before the ultra-modern war
weapons of the United Slav hordes, they'd stopped the numbingly quick
advance merely by the weight of their bodies. Like little Belgium, in
1914. They'd held the Slavs to California, ravished, war-desolated
California.

* * * * *

The thin front-line trenches far behind, Lance began a slanting dive
that raised his speed well over six hundred. Through the front
magnifying mirror he spied the squat khaki buildings of his base.
Werewolves of War, the batch of planes he belonged to had been
christened, and it was a richly deserved title. In front of the front
they fought, detailed to desperate, harrying missions, losing an
average of ten men a day. The ordeal of gas and fire and acid bullets
added five years to a man's brow overnight--if he served with the
Werewolves of War.

Lance was only twenty-four, but his hair was splotched with dead gray
strands; his eyes were hard and weary; his face lined with new
wrinkles. Ah, well, it was war--and a losing war, he had to admit,
that they fought. If a miracle didn't come, America would crumble even
as old Europe had,