lder Lake National Park. All humans had
supposedly fled from it. It was abandoned to the creatures of the
thing from the sky. But something came out of it.

Nobody saw the thing, of course. Nobody could approach it, which was
the point immediately demonstrated. No human being could endure being
within seven miles of whatever it was. It was evidently a vehicle of
some sort, however, because it swung terror beams before it, and
terror beams on either side, and when it was clear of the Park it
played terror beams behind it, too. Men who suffered the lightest
touch of those sweeping beams of terror and anguish moved frantically
to avoid having the experience again. So when something moved out of
the Park and sent wavering terror beams before it, men moved to one
side or the other and gave it room.

On a large-scale map in the military area command post, its progress
could be watched as it was reported. The reports described a
development of unbearable beam strength which showed up as a bulge in
the cordon's roughly circular line. That bulge, which was the cordon
itself moving back, moved outward and became a half-circle some miles
across. It continued to move outward, and on the map it appeared like
a pseudopod extruded by an enormous amoeba. It was the area of
effectiveness of a weapon previously unknown on earth--the area where
humans could not stay.

Deliberately, the unseen moving thing severed itself from the similar
and larger weapon field which was its birthplace and its home. It
moved with great deliberation toward the small town of Maplewood,
twenty miles from the border of the Park.

Jeeps and motorcycles scurried ahead of it, just out of reach of its
beams. They made sure that houses and farms and all inhabited places
were emptied of people before the moving terror beams could engulf
them. They went into the town of Maplewood itself and frantically made
sure that nothing alive remained in it. They went on to clear the
countryside beyond.

The unseen thing from the Park moved onward. High overhead there was a
dull muttering like faraway thunder, but it was planes with filled
bomb racks circling above the starlit land. There were men in those
planes who ached to dive down and destroy this separated fraction of
an invasion. But there were firm orders from the Pentagon. So long as
the invaders killed nobody, they were not to be attacked. There was
reason for the order in the desire of the government to be on fr