e Police or
Army men around, but they'd passed through; Malone saw a forgotten
overseas cap lying on the road ahead.

With a shock, he realized that he was now in Pennsylvania, close to
where he wanted to go. A signboard told him the town he was looking at
was Milford. It was a mess, and Malone hoped fervently that it was a
mess that could eventually be cleaned up.

The town was a small one, and Malone was glad to get out of it so
quickly.

"That's the kind of thing I mean," he said aloud. Then he paused. "Are
you there, anybody?"

He imagined he heard Luba's voice saying: _Yes, Ken. Yes, I'm here.
Listening to you._

Imagination was fine but, of course, there was no way for them to get
through to him. They were telepathic, but Kenneth J. Malone, he told
himself sadly, was not.

"Hello, out there," he went on. "I hope you've been listening so far,
because there isn't too much more for me to say.

"Just this: you've wrecked my country, and you've wrecked almost all
of the rest of civilization. You've brought my world down around my
ears.

"I have every logical reason to hate your guts. By all the evidence I
have, you are a group of the worst blackguards who ever existed; by
all the evidence, I should be doing everything in my power to
exterminate you.

"But I'm not.

"My prescience tells me that what you've been doing is right and
necessary. I'm damned if I can see it, but there it is. I just hope
you can explain it to me."

XV

Soon, he was in the midst of the countryside. It was, of course,
filled with country. It spread around him in the shape of hills,
birds, trees, flowers, grass, billboards and other distractions to the
passing motorist.

It took Malone better than two hours more to find the place he was
looking for. Long before he found it, he had come to the conclusion
that finding country estates in Pennsylvania was only a shade easier
than finding private homes in the Borough of Brooklyn. In both cases,
he had found himself saddled with the same frantic search down what
seemed likely routes which turned out to lead nowhere. He had found,
in both cases, complete ignorance of the place on the part of local
citizens, and even strong doubts that the place could possibly have
any sort of existence.

The fact that is was growing dark didn't help much, either.

But he found it at last. Rounding a curve in a narrow, blacktop road,
he saw the home behind a grove of trees.

He recognized it ins