up. A car or truck had stopped beyond the road-blocking beam and
waited for it to be cut off, as it had been.

Lockley stepped into the woods hating the vehicle bitterly as it
approached, but wanting to save destruction for those where Jill had
been taken.

He was hidden when the car appeared. It was a perfectly commonplace
car with a whip aerial at its rear. It came confidently along the
highway. A hundred yards from him, there were explosions. Smoke came
out of the open windows. The engine stopped and the car bucked crazily
and went into the ditch beside the highway. A man plunged out,
slapping at his leg. A revolver in its holster had exploded all its
shells. The leather holster had saved him from serious injury, but his
clothing was on fire. Other men, two of them, got out hastily. Things
had exploded in the back of the car, too. The three men swore
agitatedly.

Then one of them said something which stimulated the others to frantic
flight down the highway away from the ditched car. The third man
limped anxiously after the faster-moving two.

Lockley, watching and hating with undivided attention, knew when the
terror beam came on again. He felt it, very faint because of his
protection, but quite distinct. The explosions had taken place when
the car was in the area now covered again by the terror beam. The men
in the car, astonished and scorched, had fled because the beam was due
to come back on and they didn't want to be caught in it.

Lockley noted that the human confederates of the monsters had no
protection against the beam to match his own. Perhaps the monsters
themselves were protected only near the projectors. This was an item
affecting his plans of revenge for Jill. He stored it away in his
mind. Then he realized that the weapons in the car had exploded just
like the pistol on his own seat cushion. The explosion was not
associated with the terror beam. There'd been no beam in action when
his own pistol blew up. It did not seem reasonable that if the
monsters possessed a detonation beam that they'd turn it on their own
confederates.

No. Rational beings would do nothing so self-contradictory.

Then Lockley looked down at the cheese grater-pocket radio device of
his own manufacture. He considered the fact that his own pistol had
exploded the instant he'd turned the gadget on. The weapons in the
other car detonated when that car was near him.

He plodded onward thinking very clearly and precisely abou