"Yes, all of 'em," said Trace. He jumped up, hauling Jane to her feet with him. "It's coming, they're hoping to do it," he said, and he clenched his teeth and took a firm grip on the girl, as though he wanted to hold her on the earth when it shot into the uncanny regions of sub-space. "Hold tight," he said, with no particular sense but a vast deal of emotion. "Hold tight, Jane baby." And Jane held him tightly. The saucers rose higher, dwindling in size; they reached the low cloud layer and passed into it, becoming hazy and then invisible. Twenty thousand spacecraft girdled the globe, linked electronically, readied for flight with their stolen planet to unknowable distances of deep space. The men and women waited, their breath emerging in brief white frosty spurts in the cold air. And nothing happened. After twenty minutes, Trace put a trembling hand to his forehead. "We lose," he said. He saw Slough begin to walk away from them, going back along the gradual slope among the bare trees, but he did not even call after him. It didn't matter a damn now, what or who the midget was. "We lose," he said again, and hugged Jane fiercely. And then the sky exploded. CHAPTER XV Trace flung himself on the ground, sheltering Jane; he felt rather than saw that Bill had done the same with Barbara. He gazed up, and saw the great rack of clouds torn and dispersed by the force of the blast. There was a chain of brilliant green-white balls of light, like so many bursting sky-rockets, that stretched from horizon to black horizon across his world. He thought of the shards of metal, the evil whistling splinters and hunks of meteoring death that would rain out of the sky after such a multiple explosion, and he buried his face in Jane's soft hair, trying desperately to cover her whole body with his own. The noise above them was so mighty a roar that Trace was deafened, and his head hummed and rang intolerably. In that moment, oddly, he thought again of Slough, and realized what he must be. The Irish intuition, second sight, or what-have-you it works in a cockeyed way, he said to himself, waiting for the shower of molten hail. Slough was of the extraterrestrials too! Oh, not the Graken, the wicked green one-eyed bird-footed destroyers. But he was a saucerman, right enough. Lord knew how many of them had been living among us before the greenies attacked. No telling how many had died, how many still lived.