The inhabitants of Earth had already seen far too many Martian ships. Fortunately their Martian origin had not been stressed even by the credulous, and the majority of eyewitnesses preferred to believe they came from Venus, or the dark side of the moon, or some unknown region of outer space. No scientist of world wide prestige had even seen a flying saucer, and scientists in general refused to take Unidentified Flying Objects seriously, and were quick to dismiss the many rumored sightings as superstitious nonsense--a product of mass hysteria. Nevertheless it was a dangerous undertaking. If a Martian ship should meet with an accident and be forced to land, tangible proof would exist in abundance. There would be a fiery crater in the quiet countryside which would flame more brightly than a cluster of burning buildings. The walls of the crater would be eroded and smoke-blackened, its circumference sprinkled with radio-active dust from the descending ship's exploding rocket jets. A search party would be likely to find, scattered about in the immediate vicinity, fragments of a radio-active metal unknown on Earth. A wave of terror would sweep from city to city, from continent to continent, until it engulfed the entire planet. Emergency warning signals would be broadcast everywhere, from New York and London, from Paris and Moscow, to the remote Asian villages: _It has come. The ultimate horror, the unbelievable. Earth has been invaded by the intelligent inhabitants of another planet._ And if a Martian should be captured alive.... The thought could be accepted by the human mind perhaps and even embraced with a momentary, wholly unjustified feeling of triumph. But to a Martian it would be a death thought, too hideous to contemplate. A Martian in a cage or in a laboratory, stared at, jeered at perhaps, completely at the mercy of his human captors. A Martian stretched out on an operating table, with sharp instruments of human science glittering in a cone of radiance above his strapped-down body. Pain, torment beyond endurance. Martian pride humbled, and dragged through the dust. A dissecting laboratory. Would Earth display pity or stay its hand if it needed knowledge to forge weapons to combat an intelligent race bent on space conquest--a race so different from Man in some respects that it would be easy to think of its captive members as caged beasts or hideous and dangerous monsters? No mercy would be shown. No mercy could be expected. It would be a battle to the death, and in some respects Earth's technological knowledge was formidable. No Martian ship could hope to survive a full-scale atomic attack. The hydrogen bomb was far more destructive than any Martian weapon, deadly as some of those weapons were. A single nuclear bomb could destroy ten or twelve Martian ships moving in close formation.