At another time it would have been funny--she was asking _me_ to stop this catastrophe when the best brains in the Western Hemisphere were legging it up the hill with nothing on their minds but mileage. "This is no time for jokes," I told her. "Let's get up to the house and call Washington, Doc." There were two phones in the house but we couldn't get within yelling distance of either of them. Both generals were on the wire, countermanding each other's orders right and left and screaming for the Air Marines. The living-room t-v was blaring full blast at a circle of both Eastern and Western hemispheres and they were hitting us right where we lived. In the space of a few minutes those speeding fire-worms had spread over the entire globe. They had penetrated the defense screens of both Eastern and Western hemispheres and they were hitting us right where we lived. "The invaders do not seem to be conscious of us as entities," the newscaster gabbled. "But they are attracted to concentrations of nuclear materials as flies are drawn to honey and for the same reason. Every atomic pile on Earth has been besieged by these alien monsters, who are draining away our nuclear energy like leeches. At the present rate all smaller piles will soon be inerted and larger ones--wait, a special bulletin.... "Latest information sheds some light upon the sudden onslaught of the Blazers, as the invaders are being called by a public still largely unaware of its danger. They first appeared some twenty minutes ago during a top-secret military experiment at the Connecticut laboratory of Dr. Marvin Maxey, well-known scientific--" Somebody shut off the set and we stared at each other in blank silence. Nobody even tried to pass the buck--fixing the blame wasn't important now. All that mattered was that unless the Blazers were stopped immediately our world was finished. Those fission-hungry fiends would strip us to the last erg of our nuclear energy--and to a world geared to atomic power that meant the end. We had forgotten the coming war completely. There was no point in worrying now about being blasted out of our beds. In a few days most of us would be starving to death in them. The brasshats camped on the telephones until daylight before they gave it up. Dora was dishing up scrambled eggs and coffee to Doc and me in the kitchen when Three-star Corbin stumbled in, out on his feet. "You were right, Dr. Maxey," he groaned. "Using your Dimension-tube as a weapon was a mistake, a cosmic and irremediable error. These invaders are indestructible--the concerted might of Allied Military has failed to repel them. The doom of Earth is sealed." Doc plucked unhappily at his beard. "Surely we can retool our industries to electric power in time," he said. But he didn't sound sure. He sounded beaten.