Trace gave him a look that in its time had crackled the enamel on the teeth of many a GI. He said slowly, "My name is Sergeant Roscoe and I am your commanding officer and you had better remember it, Mac, or you will have cause to wish you had become extinct some years before you ever laid eyes on me. Now I shall continue. The fleet of enemy ships left here at a terrific pace between one and two o'clock this afternoon, heading in the direction of Washington, D.C. I haven't spotted one since. Therefore what we will do is pick up our flat feet and head for the capital. God knows what we'll find there, but it's a cinch we've got to get out of here plenty fast." "Why?" asked Kinkaid, the fat one. "For one thing, Mac, they'll not be back this way, because what have they got to come back for?" asked Trace patiently. "All the more reason to sit right here," said Hafnagel. "We can dig enough out of the ruins to live like kings." "Ignoring the fact that you are gonna go where I say you're gonna go," said Trace through his teeth, "let me ask you, Mac, to take a sniff of the breeze." "The smell's bearable." "It will get worse. By this time two days from now it'll be enough to suck the guts out of you. I needn't say why." "Oh," said Hafnagel, his cheek twitching. "Oh, I hadn't thought--" "Exactly. Don't try to. Just listen to me. I am your superior officer, Mac," said Trace, "and with you and these other slewfooted remnants I am going to put a crimp in them Martians--_those_ Martians--that they'll feel clean to the GHQ. Now we'll take ten and be on our way. I want to clear this area before the atmosphere gets serious." He looked at them, seven shivering people huddled from the cold into the coats, scarves and parkas they had managed to snatch before their universe had erupted into nothingness. Despair was unknown to Trace Roscoe, but a grin of wonder touched his mouth; wonder at his own temerity. He was leading these poor reluctant untrained slobs against a million or two giant bird-footed interplanetary warriors, and with about nine-tenths of his mind he expected to do some damage to them. The other tenth said to him, with the voice of his grandmother, "Och, Trace boy, it's mad you are, mad clean through to your Irish bones." "Wirra, Grandmither," Trace said to her in his head, "it's the bloody English in me too, d'ye see, that won't let me stop sluggin' and won't admit I can be whupped; and then there's all the American of me, and ye know fine that an American never is whupped at all, at all!" He chuckled--first time that day--and sat down to examine the alien's pistol by the flare of his lighter. CHAPTER IV