It was a week of strained tenseness; a certain electricity seemed at hand in the atmosphere, inhibiting speech. The colonists felt almost as though they were required to whisper.... A week during which Murray, with Dangerfield and Tholfsen, worked energetically at their radio, and progressed far enough so they could do a fairly competent job of sending and receiving in Morse code. A week during which the naval party got a freighter from the South Street docks and brought her round into the Hudson. At dawn one morning, Gloria, with Farrelly, Kevitz and Yoshio, piled into a limousine with the idea of taking the freighter on a trip to Coney Island. Murray accompanied them to try communicating with the shore via the ship's wireless. The day was dark, with lowering clouds, which explains why they missed seeing the tetrapteryxes. But for the General Sherman statue they never would have seen them until too late. The general's intervention was purely passive; Murray noticed and called Gloria's attention to the curious expression the misty light gave the bronze face and she looked up to see, to be recalled to her driving by a yell from Kevitz announcing the metallic carcass of a policeman squarely in their path. Gloria twisted the wheel sharply to avoid it; the car skidded on the damp pavement, and reeling crazily, caromed into the iron fence around the statue with a crash. At the same moment an enormous mass of rock struck the place where they should have been and burst like a shell, sending a shower of fragments whistling about their ears. Shaken and dazed by the shock, they rolled out of the car, for the moment mistaking the two impacts for one; and as they did so there came a rush of wild wings, an eldritch scream and Yoshio was snatched into the air before their very eyes. Kevitz fired first, wildly and at random. Murray steadied himself, dropping his gun across his left forearm, and shot cool and straight--but at too great a distance, and they saw nothing but a feather or two floating down from the great four-winged bird as it swung off over Central Park, carrying the little Jap. They saw him squirm in the thing's grip, trying to get his sword loose, and then with a rattle of dropped stones around them, more of the birds charged home. Only Gloria had thought of this and withheld her fire. The others swung round as she shot and in an instant the whole group was a maze of whirling wings, clutching claws, shouts, shots and screams. In twenty seconds it was done: Gloria and Murray rose panting and breathless, and looked about. Beside them, two gigantic bird-forms were spilling their lives in convulsive agony. Dangerfield and Farrelly were gone--and a rending screech from behind the buildings told only too well where. "What's the next step?" asked Murray with such owlish solemnity that Gloria gave a burst of half-hysterical laughter. She looked round.