from those Tako used. It penetrated into the
borderland, reached the apparitions and forcibly materialized them!
A second or two it clung to that group of white men's shapes in the
ground. They grew solid; ponderable. But the space they now claimed
was not empty! Solid rock was here, yielding no space to anything!
Like the little materialization bombs, this was nature outraged. The
ground and the solid rock heaved up, broken and torn, invisibly
permeated and strewn with the infinitesimal atomic particles of what
a moment before had been the bodies of living men.

We caught with the beam that marching line of apparitions beneath
the ground surface--a section of Tako's army which was advancing
upon Westchester. The city streets over them surged upward. And some
we caught under the rivers and within the waters of the bay, and the
waters heaved and lashed into turmoil.

Then we turned the beam into the air. The apparitions lost contact
with their invisible mountain peaks. And with sudden solidity, the
gravity of our world pulled at them. They fell. Solid men's bodies,
falling with the moonlight on them. Dark blobs turning end over end;
plunging into the rivers and the harbor with little splashes of
white to mark their fall; and yet others whirling down, crashing
into the wreckage of masonry, into the pall of smoke and the lurid
yellow flames of the burning city.

The attack of the White Invaders was over.

* * * * *

A year has passed. There has been no further menace; perhaps there
never will be. And again, the invisible realm of which Don, Jane and
I were vouchsafed so strange a glimpse, lies across a void
impenetrable. Earth scientists have the projector, with its current
batteries apparently almost exhausted. And they have the transition
mechanism which we three were wearing. But of those, the vital
element had been removed by Tako--and was gone with him. Many others
were found on the bodies, and upon the body of poor Tolla. But all
were wrecked by their fall.

Perhaps it is just as well. Yet, often I ponder on that other realm.
What strange customs and science and civilization I glimpsed.

Out of such thoughts one always looms upon me: a contemplation of
the vastness of things to be known.

And the kindred thought: what a very small part of it we really
understand!

End of Project Gutenberg's The White Invaders, by Raymond King Cummings

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENB