The Project Gutenberg EBook of Invasion, by William Fitzgerald Jenkins

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Title: Invasion

Author: William Fitzgerald Jenkins

Release Date: July 19, 2009 [EBook #29455]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Transcriber's Note:

This etext was produced from Astounding Stories March 1933.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the
U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.

[Illustration: He picked Sylva up in his arms and ran madly.]

Invasion

By Murray Leinster

* * * * *

[Sidenote: The whole fighting fleet of the United Nations is caught in
Kreynborg's marvelous, unique trap.]

It was August 19, 2037. The United Nations was just fifty years old.
Televisors were still monochromatic. The Nidics had just won the World
Series in Prague. Com-Pub observatories were publishing elaborate
figures on moving specks in space which they considered to be Martian
spaceships on their way to Earth, but which United Nations astronomers
could not discover at all. Women were using gilt lipsticks that year.
Heat-induction motors were still considered efficient prime movers.

Thorn Hard was a high-level flier for the Pacific Watch. Bathyletis
was the most prominent of nationally advertised diseases, and was to
be cured by RO-17, "The Foundation of Personal Charm." Somebody named
Nirdlinger was President of the United Nations, and somebody else
named Krassin was Commissar of Commissars for the Com-Pubs. Newspapers
were printing flat pictures in three colors only, and deploring the
high cost of stereoscopic plates. And ... Thorn Hard was a high-level
flier for the Pacific Watch.

That is the essential point, of course--Thorn Hard's work with the
Watch. His job was, officially, hanging somewhere above the
twenty-thousand-foot level with his detector-screens out, listening
for unauthorized traffic. And, the normal st