Packing a few shirts and such in a Gladstone bag, I left London in the black Jaguar, ostensibly on a casual motoring jaunt. I headed up through the East Anglian Heights, stopping the first night in the lovely town of Bury St. Edmunds. Strolling through the streets next morning, I was astonished and heartened beyond measure to find not a single usurper abroad. I went into a pub--I had begun to think that the aliens were concentrated in pubs, so many horrendous bartenders had I seen--and bought a pint from a perfectly normal girl. Lingering about the town, I passed the time of day with gardeners and workmen and loafers, and was tempted to throw up the game and stay here in this oasis of normality forever; but after lunch forced myself to get into the Jaguar and roar off into the Lincoln Heights, where I spent a jolly evening in Old Bolingbroke talking politics with a spidery yellow creature who amused himself by flicking my face now and again with his hairy-looking, tenuous, unfelt members. When at last I went to bed I felt that I had served my apprenticeship and was a full-fledged spy who could thenceforth bear anything the enemy could show or do.... I worked westward and put up for a week at Manchester, in which great inland port I found an awful concentration of _them_. I left the two-seater at a garage and walked the streets from dawn till midnight, observing, thinking furiously, trying to construct impossible plans of attack. The third night, making sure that my knife was safely sheathed under my coat, I went into the slums to do murder. Deliberately I chose my victim: a strapping brute of a navvy whose mortal form was surrounded by a cloudy gray beast of indescribable grossness. I shadowed him from tavern to tavern, finally catching him alone in a narrow gut of an alley where the light fell dismally on scummed pools of stagnant water and heaps of filth. I crept up behind him and circling his neck with my left arm I held him motionless for dragging seconds, my knee in the small of his back. He struggled madly, but could not turn his head; and although the gray fiend puffed up and hurled out its streamers of ugly mist-like stuff, I knew it was helpless to see me without twisting the human neck around. That was what I had wanted to know for certain, what I had staked the continuance of my crusade on. I tipped up the navvy's chin and sliced across his throat with the clean steel. He died, gurgling, and the monster dwindled away into gray ribbons and vanished. * * * * *