second or two, and then swung to the other guard.

The guards in a puff of spectral light were gone. Tolla stood
wavering; then swung her light toward Tako and Don. But I was upon
her.

"Tolla! Good God--"

"Get back from me! Back, I tell you."

I heard Jane's agonized warning from the floor. "Bob!"

Tolla's light missed my shoulder. Tako had cast Don off and stood
alone as he turned toward us. Then Tolla's light-beam swung on him.
I heard her eery maddened laugh as it struck him.

A wraith of Tako was there, stricken as though numbed by
surprise.... Then nothingness....

Shots from the distant warships were screaming around us. One struck
the base of the building.

I clung to my scattering senses. I gripped Tolla.

"That projector--what was it you almost told Jane?"

* * * * *

She stood stupidly babbling. "Told Jane? That projector--"

She laughed wildly, and like a tigress, cast me off. "Fools of men!
Tako--the fool!"

She swung into a frenzy of her own language. And then back into
English. "I will show you--Tako, the fool! All those fools out there
under the ground and in the sky. I will show them!"

She stooped over the projector and fumbled with the mechanism.

Don gasped, "Those apparitions--is that what you're going to
attack?"

"Yes--attack them!"

The beam flashed on. But it was a different beam now. Fainter, more
tenuous; the hum from it was different.

It leaped into the ground. It was a spreading beam this time. It
bathed the white apparitions who were peering up at the city.

Why, what was this? Weird, fantastic sight! There was a moment of
Tolla's frenzied madness; then she staggered away from the
projector. But Don and I had caught the secret. We took her place.
We carried it on.

We were hardly aware that the far-off warships had ceased firing. We
hardly realized that Tolla had rushed for the parapet; climbed,
screaming and laughing--and that Jane tried to stop her.

"Oh, Tolla, don't--"

But Tolla toppled and fell.... Her body was almost not recognized
when it was later found down in the ruins.

Don and I flung this new beam into the night. We rolled the
projector around the platform, hurling the beam in every direction
at the white apparitions....

* * * * *

It had caught first that group which lurked in the ground near the
base of the Empire State. Tolla had turned the beam to the reverse
co-ordinates