"You're a couple of space zanies," Packer muttered, yanking the gargoyle-like smoke glasses from his eyes and pulling off his space crash-helmet. "Pat almost went crazy when she found you'd left the hospital. We've been searching for you ever since in this hell. It was only luck Pat spotted you with the infra-red, or you'd be rolling still." Curt Wing leaned back against the car cushion. "Well, Lieutenant," he said, "I might as well be rolling still for all the good I can do against these shadow-things." He lifted his bandaged head, his dark eyes almost black now with weariness and hate of the beings who were casually flicking man into the limbo of forgotten things. "You know what we're up against, don't you, George?" he asked. From the pilot seat, Pat said bitterly: "We know, Curt. The whole world knows. The telecasts have been bombarding the world with it ever since the first shadow came out and hurled our own destruction back at us a hundred-fold." George Packer added, "I was recruited to pull our biggest space guns out and hook them up on land rockets. The ships can't rise, somehow, and when we've called for ships from other points, they get so close and then their power gives out." "But, gee," put in Dead-Eye, "this car's running. How come?" "Don't know why, Dead-Eye," Packer added. "These, of course, don't have the new cyc motors; still run on the old combustion principle. The force field probably neutralizes the cycs, but doesn't faze the firing gas in the cars." "The space guns didn't help, I suppose?" Wing asked. "No," Packer said, twisted his face ruefully. "The shadows thrived on it and threw our bolts back ten times as hard. It wasn't nice to see." "Sometimes," he said, wistfully, "I wish we were back in your beef-striker--sorry, Dead-Eye--cow-puncher days. It was man to man then, and you knew that it wasn't the weapon but the wielder." He ran his hands through his tousled blond hair. "Yep," said Dead-Eye. "Elizabeth and me'd fix 'em if we could see 'em." * * * * * The bucketing car began to have smoother going; the darkness outside was lifting, and the beat of the rain seemed to decelerate. In the comparative quiet and peace, Curt Wing's dulled mind, clarified by the stimulating drug, was beginning to work again; his spirit numbed and beaten down by pain and inability to solve the enigma of the shadows and their weapons was lifting itself, shaking itself from its lethargy, as something stirred within. Just that buoyant spirit of man which refused to admit defeat? Wing was wondering. Or was despair so deep that I couldn't go any deeper so I have to come up toward hope again? The rocket car suddenly sloughed to a stop. "Sorry," Pat said softly, and laughed. There was a note of hysteria in that laugh. "But we're surrounded." The three men peered out through the plastic windshield. The shadow-things were ahead, moving toward them.