The three men pounced on their rifles, threw them up and were firing methodically even before they had regained the erect position. Alan and Brave, crack shots who had been used to practice every Sunday morning on the military range, shot for the heads; Bill, a less certain marksman, tried for the chests. The brain and heart were the only sure targets when you fought a man who could feel no pain and could keep going with half of his body shot away. For a brief time it seemed to the soldiers that the scientists were shooting aliens; then the leader turned and saw where the muzzles pointed. "Get 'em!" he bellowed, and sprayed a charge from a grenade pistol that went wide of its mark but fanned Bill's cheek with tiny scraps of hot breeze. Next instant he was down kicking from Bill's slug, and the guards of the gate were finished. The vanguard of the outlanders swept in and across the grounds. They had concentrated on this single gate, as the others had too open approaches for safety. There were men from sixteen saucers, over four hundred of them, and they ran like deer, like cheetahs after deer, like winds after cheetahs. Mutely, with a kind of ferocious impersonality, they descended on the colony. Men came running out with machine guns and feverishly began to load them. They were picked off by rifle bullets, by paralyzing ray tubes, and relays came and were picked off and more came. One gun stuttered into action momentarily, and the crew went twisting up in the air, their gun blown apart, their bodies rent by a weapon that even Alan had not known of. He spotted it finally, a blunderbuss-shaped thing of silver with a flaring mouth, fired like a bazooka. Another machine gun blew up. Among the buildings there was hand-to-hand combat, automatics against fire tubes, outlander against rebel outlander in wrestling, heaving confusion. All the men from the stranger planet fought without speaking; the robots shouted, like normal men in a battle. Brave was bawling war whoops and Alan was cursing steadily, as he always did under fire. Bill Thihling had got himself lost somewhere. The leader of Alan's saucer went by, blond hair streaming, blood dripping down the brown chest. Alan caught a thought: _thanks_. He knew, from touching Alan's mind in passing, that many of the nonrobot men and women were gathered in safety, and even a number of the alien-controlled puppets had been herded into the welding room and locked in, obedient to Alan's hypnotic order. * * * * *