When I was fairly eating, he gestured at the map. "I have made my decision. We will land in north Brazil. I will also sen' a force to Central Africa. It can move north over the Sahara grain fields, into Europe. And from Brazil we can move north and south. I think that North and South Americas and Europe and Africa are mos' important places to attack, Peter. We will frighten them, if we attack them there!" Irony was in his voice and in his smile! And I had thought to influence this fellow! CHAPTER XVIII THE EARTH AT BAY! History will record that the forces of Graff, the Xenephrene, landed upon earth at 2 A.M., July 9, 1957, in north Brazil, at one degree fourteen minutes north latitude, and sixty-one degrees twenty-two minutes west longitude. There was no one person on earth who saw more than a fragment of what followed during those frightful weeks; out of a myriad accounts, history will piece a pallid, dispassionate vision of the whole. For myself, I witnessed many horrible things. But only fragments--as an ant with its tiny viewpoint sees the forest through which it crawls, and might futilely try to describe it. I can only name facts; imagination must supply the rest, and even then inevitably fall far short of the grim, tragic reality. I was crouching with Graff and Zetta at a floor window of the giant Space liner when, that July 9, we slowly settled to within a thousand feet of the ground. A dark, tropic, overcast night. From beneath our bow a crimson, howling radiance, one of the barrage projectors, sprang downward. There was no one left alive over the ten-mile circular area around which our barrage was flung that night, to tell what happened. I saw the houses of this newly-settled agricultural area melt and vanish as we swept them with the radiance. The barrage went up. By dawn, all the country near us was deserted of its people, who fled in terror as far away from us as they could get. The tropic jungle had wilted since the Great Change. The land here was cleared; broad, fertile fields, planted now with grain, corn, and garden produce. Prosperous farms, crowded with settlers in their small, new houses. New villages. Several small cities. Over a hundred mile area they were deserted in a day. Graff's other vehicles arrived. One was dispatched to Africa. It landed in the French Sudan, in latitude fifteen degrees five minutes north and longitude three degrees nineteen minutes west--not far south of the city of Timbuktu, which had tripled in size and importance since the Great Change. The red barrage was flung up here, but it was on the flying platforms. Within a day it began moving directly north.