cation of man's
past or present existence anywhere in the sky or on the ground.

Then Wilma gripped my arm and pointed. I saw it; away off in the
distance; looking like a phantom dirigible airship, in its coat of
low-visibility paint, a bare spectre.

"Seven thousand feet up," Wilma whispered, crouching close to me.
"Watch."

The ship was about the same shape as the great dirigibles of the 20th
Century that I had seen, but without the suspended control car, engines,
propellors, rudders or elevating planes. As it loomed rapidly nearer, I
saw that it was wider and somewhat flatter than I had supposed.

Now I could see the repellor rays that held the ship aloft, like
searchlight beams faintly visible in the bright daylight (and still
faintly visible to the human eye at night). Actually, I had been
informed by my instructors, there were two rays; the visible one
generated by the ship's apparatus, and directed toward the ground as a
beam of "carrier" impulses; and the true repellor ray, the complement of
the other in one sense, induced by the action of the "carrier" and
reacting in a concentrating upward direction from the mass of the earth,
becoming successively electronic, atomic and finally molecular, in its
nature, according to various ratios of distance between earth mass and
"carrier" source, until, in the last analysis, the ship itself actually
is supported on an upward rushing column of air, much like a ball
continuously supported on a fountain jet.

The raider neared with incredible speed. Its rays were both slanted
astern at a sharp angle, so that it slid forward with tremendous
momentum.

The ship was operating two disintegrator rays, though only in a casual,
intermittent fashion. But whenever they flashed downward with blinding
brilliancy, forest, rocks and ground melted instantaneously into
nothing, where they played upon them.

When later I inspected the scars left by these rays I found them some
five feet deep and thirty feet wide, the exposed surfaces being
lava-like in texture, but of a pale, iridescent, greenish hue.

No systematic use of the rays was made by the ship, however, until it
reached a point over the center of the valley--the center of the
community's activities. There it came to a sudden stop by shooting its
repellor beams sharply forward and easing them back gradually to the
vertical, holding the ship floating and motionless. Then the work of
destruction began systematically.

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