ass of a
thousand or more strung over an area of forty blocks.

In mid-Manhattan soldiers saw that Tiffany's jewelry store housed
the lurking shapes. Some were lower, others higher; in this section
around Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street the apparitions were at
tremendously diverse levels. There were some perched high in the air
more than half way up the gigantic Empire State Building; and still
others off to the west were in the air fifteen hundred feet or more
above the Pennsylvania Station.

* * * * *

At Tiffany's--as indeed in many other places--the soldiers made
close visual contact with the apparitions. A patrolling group of
soldiers entered Tiffany's and went to the second floor. They
reported a seated group of "ghosts," with numbers of white shapes
working near them at a lower level which brought them into Tiffany's
basement.

The soldiers thought that what was seated here might be a leader.
Apparitions rushed up to him, and away. And here the soldiers saw
what seemed the wraiths of two girls, seated quietly together,
helmeted and garbed like the men. And men seemed watching them.

By one-thirty there was great activity, constant movement of the
apparitions everywhere. Doing what? No one could say. The attack, so
closely impending now, was presaged by nothing which could be
understood.

There was one soldier who at about one-thirty A.M. was watching the
spectres which lurked seemingly in the foundations of Tiffany's. He
was called to distant Westchester where the harried Army officials
had their temporary headquarters this night. He sped there on his
motorcycle and so by chance he was left alive to tell what he had
seen. The wraiths under Tiffany's were placing little wedge-shaped
ghostly bricks very carefully at different points. It occurred to
this soldier that they were putting them in spaces coincidental with
the building's foundations.

And then came the attack. The materialization bombs--as we knew them
to be--were fired. Progressively over a few minutes, at a thousand
different points. The area seemed to be from the Battery to
Seventy-second Street. Observers in circling airplanes saw it
best--there were few others left alive to tell of it.

* * * * *

The whole thing lasted ten minutes. Perhaps it was not even so long.
It began at Washington Square. The little ghostly wedges which had
been placed within the bricks of the arc