The captain, who was the commanding officer, told this much to Dr. Howard; together we went across the grassy fields. Before us, as we rose over a slope, there loomed a great column of steam going up into the sparkling light of day. We went very near to it before we halted. So near that we could see even through its veiling mists great shattered masses of glittering metal, buried almost completely in the soft earth, from which they had smashed a huge crater in striking. We stared at it for a time, not daring to go nearer for the heat that had caused the steam still radiated intensely from the shattered metal. Not far across the fields was a thinner steam-column, and they told us that the colossal metal mass that caused it was buried even deeper in the earth, so deep that hardly any part of it could be distinguished. Dr. Howard and I stared at the two giant geysers of white vapor. It was victory, we knew. Victory, whether partial or complete, over the space-visitors who had held earth beneath such a spell of terror. Far above, cruising on the surface of earth's atmosphere, two of their mighty vessels had struck a field of the air-mines we had released, had crashed in shattering annihilation through the dark night! Victory! Yet it was not as I had dreamed the victory would be. I had thought of a wild climax after a terrific battle. It was so strange, so different. Just Dr. Howard and I and the khaki-clad soldiers and the wondering villagers, standing there in the soft light of the Georgia dawn, in the quiet fields with only the sound of birds about us, gazing so quietly toward those twin gigantic steam-columns. Then realization of what it meant struck through to my terror-numbed heart. Victory, whether partial or complete--it meant the dissolution of the spell of horror that had gripped earth, the gathering of earth's forces to carry on the struggle, if need be, against foes whom we now knew were not invincible. Victory, and in a few moments the word of it would be flashing out around the earth.... Our victory proved complete after all, at least in so far as it marked the end of the terrible trawlings. Whether the two huge space-ships that had met their end over Georgia were the only ones to come to earth, or whether there were others that were forced to flee by this destruction of their fellows, we cannot say. We know only that after the fall of those two through the night, the colossal trawls did not descend again. But for days, weeks, and months, the world waited in anxious dread for their reappearance. "We Have Come of Age"