"Agreed," I said. I leaped down the steps to stand face to face with his robot. "I give you three days of grace," I cried, "and then we begin to slay you all over England." * * * * * I looked from him to the others of that group of inferno-bred ogres, shining like so many luminous bloated corpses at the bottom of the sea, with the colors of malice and savagery changing, coming and going in their rotten bodies; feeling the last exhalations of their enmity touching me like a palpable force. It had not begun to dawn on me that we had won. My head throbbed and racketed like a gourd full of thunder. Then I saw two men coming toward me through the mob, and my headache died to a near-forgotten dull throb; for they were John Baringer and Geoff Exeter. "Look what I found on the lawn," said the doctor. "Sitting out there as calm as ice, whistling Lili Marlene!" "What ho," said Geoff, groping with his hand until I had gripped it with mine. "You boys have fun?" "I knew it," said I. "I knew you were the one. How'd you get out? How'd you find your way to Birmingham?" "Long story, son ... everyone okay?" "All but Johnson." "The sergeant," said Geoff blankly. "Why, he's to live forever, hang it." "He's gone." Geoff was still for a minute, and then burst out, "Well, don't say it like a morbid stuffed owl! After fifty years of civilian life, he smelt the powder and heard the shots again, God be thanked! So he died--so bloody what? It's how he _should_ have gone." "Right," said I, from the heart. I turned to the aliens then, and found sixteen grinning, drooling, mindless carcasses, staring round with blank dull eyes. They were empty hulks. The usurpers were gone into their silver-blue fastnesses, and the fight was done. CHAPTER XXIV A week had gone by. The seven of us sat over our dessert in London's finest dining room: Arold Smiff well-scrubbed and ill at ease, Geoff cheerful as ever. Alec busy savoring the coffee. John cynical again. Colonel Bedford complacent and stolid, my Marion all radiant and lovely, and myself, the erstwhile most savage one-man crime wave since Genghis Khan was a pup, fiddling with the silverware and feeling rather mournful, now that all was over. At first we spoke of the past, as though each of us hated to think of a future apart from his companions. We asked one another questions of which we had heard the answers a dozen times before. Geoff told again how he had wandered down the secret stair that night, feeling his way along the walls, lonely and worried, and how he had remembered as he came to the ground floor that there was an old hidden exit in the back of the fireplace.