He did not know that an alien electronic pickup device was transmitting his image from an apartment house hallway in Greenwich Village to a hovering flying disk high in the sky. Within the disk the screen glowed brightly and Loring's image was life size. It stood out with a startling, three-dimensional clarity. Not only was the image studied carefully, it was relayed to a dozen other flying disks within a radius of six hundred miles. The eyes that watched were dark and inscrutable, buried in folds of pinkish flesh. They did not blink, but stared steadily and without noticeable animation. Each eye was like a smoky lens, concealing more than it revealed, keeping its many secrets hidden. Each eye was a Sphinx-eye, brooding and unfathomable. And each was the eye of a Martian. The truth would have staggered Loring and broken down all of his defenses. He would have stood motionless, his hand on the doorknob, struggling to remain calm but feeling his sanity imperiled. Fortunately he did not know, did not even suspect that everything he said or did was being constantly scrutinized. His ignorance was shared by every man, woman and child on Earth. Not even the sharp, wise eyes of the astronomers had detected the rocket flares on Mars when the Martian ships had taken off from the red planet on their three-stage journey across space. There were other things that Loring did not know or suspect. The Martian invaders of Earth had been woman hunting. They had been woman hunting so relentlessly for five days that even as Loring's image flickered on their tele-communication screens their great, silvery mother ship was moving slowly above the autumn-resplendent countryside one hundred and forty miles from New York City, at an altitude of ninety feet above ground level. It was a deserted region of sapling spruce and birches and dwarfed evergreens, growing so symmetrically on the sloping hillsides that each isolated group of trees had a deceptive appearance of greenhouse cultivation. The Martian invaders were taking a calculated risk. They were almost sure that the sparsely settled region would contain no eyewitness whom they could not quickly capture and silence. But they could not be completely sure. The screams of the captured women or the barking of savage dogs on the scattered farms or in the streets of the small village communities might be just loud and frantic enough to alert the hard-eyed, stony-faced men whose duty it was to carry arms and be always on guard.