on the air on schedule, mostly limited to five-minute
periods in which to cover all the noteworthy events of the world. Part
of that five minutes, too, was taken up by advertising matter from a
sponsor. Now music was rare. There were occasional melodies, but most
were interrupted for new interpretations of the threat to earth at
Boulder Lake. Every sort of prominent person was invited to air his
views about the thing from the sky and the creatures it brought. Most
had no views but only an urge to talk to a large audience. Something,
though, had to be put on the air between commercials.

The actual news was specific. Small towns around the fringe of the
Park area were being evacuated of all their inhabitants. Foreign
scientists had been flown to the United States and were at the
temporary area command post not far from Boulder Lake. Rocket missiles
were aimed and ready to blast the lake and the mountains around it
should the need arise. A drone plane had been flown to the lake with a
television camera transmitting back everything its lens saw. It
arrived at the lake and its camera relayed back exactly nothing that
had not been photographed and recorded before. But suddenly there was
a crash of static and the drone went out of control and crashed. Its
camera faithfully transmitted the landscape spinning around until its
destruction. Military transmitters were beaming signals on every
conceivable frequency to what was now universally called the alien
spaceship. They had received no replies. The foreign scientists had
agreed that the terror beam--paralysis beam--death beam--was
electronic in nature.

Lockley had thought Jill asleep from pure weariness, but her voice
came out of the darkness beside the big tree trunk.

"You found that out!" she said. "About its being electronic!"

"I had a sample stationary beam to check on," said Lockley. "They
haven't. Which may be a bad thing. Nobody's going to make useful
observations of something that makes him blind and deaf and paralyzed
while he's in the act. There are some things that puzzle me about
that. Why haven't they killed anybody yet? They've got the public
about as scared as it can get without some killing. And why didn't we
get the full force of the beam after the plane had been driven away?
They could have given us the full treatment if they'd wanted to. Why
didn't they?"

"If people run away from the towns," said Jill's voice, very tired and
sleepy, "maybe they thi