She swung into a frenzy of her own language. And then back into English. "I will show you--Tako, the fool! All those fools out there under the ground and in the sky. I will show them!" She stooped over the projector and fumbled with the mechanism. Don gasped, "Those apparitions--is that what you're going to attack?" "Yes--attack them!" The beam flashed on. But it was a different beam now. Fainter, more tenuous; the hum from it was different. It leaped into the ground. It was a spreading beam this time. It bathed the white apparitions who were peering up at the city. Why, what was this? Weird, fantastic sight! There was a moment of Tolla's frenzied madness; then she staggered away from the projector. But Don and I had caught the secret. We took her place. We carried it on. We were hardly aware that the far-off warships had ceased firing. We hardly realized that Tolla had rushed for the parapet; climbed, screaming and laughing--and that Jane tried to stop her. "Oh, Tolla, don't--" But Tolla toppled and fell.... Her body was almost not recognized when it was later found down in the ruins. Don and I flung this new beam into the night. We rolled the projector around the platform, hurling the beam in every direction at the white apparitions.... * * * * * It had caught first that group which lurked in the ground near the base of the Empire State. Tolla had turned the beam to the reverse co-ordinates from those Tako used. It penetrated into the borderland, reached the apparitions and forcibly materialized them! A second or two it clung to that group of white men's shapes in the ground. They grew solid; ponderable. But the space they now claimed was not empty! Solid rock was here, yielding no space to anything! Like the little materialization bombs, this was nature outraged. The ground and the solid rock heaved up, broken and torn, invisibly permeated and strewn with the infinitesimal atomic particles of what a moment before had been the bodies of living men. We caught with the beam that marching line of apparitions beneath the ground surface--a section of Tako's army which was advancing upon Westchester. The city streets over them surged upward. And some we caught under the rivers and within the waters of the bay, and the waters heaved and lashed into turmoil. Then we turned the beam into the air. The apparitions lost contact with their invisible mountain peaks. And with sudden solidity, the gravity of our world pulled at them. They fell. Solid men's bodies, falling with the moonlight on them. Dark blobs turning end over end; plunging into the rivers and the harbor with little splashes of white to mark their fall; and yet others whirling down, crashing into the wreckage of masonry, into the pall of smoke and the lurid yellow flames of the burning city. The attack of the White Invaders was over. * * * * *