---

---

Peter Karson was dead. He had been dead for some time now, but the dark blood was still oozing from the crushed ruin of his face, trickling down into his sodden sleeve, and falling, drop by slow drop, from his fingertips. His head was tilted over the back of the chair at a queer, unnatural angle, so that the light made deep pools of shadow where his eyes had been.

There was no sound in the room except for the small splashing the blood made as it dropped into the sticky pool on the floor. The great banks of machinery around the walls were silent. I knew that they would never come to life again.

I rose and walked over to the window. Outside, the stars were as before: tiny, myriad points of light, infinitely far away. They had not changed, and yet they were suddenly no longer friendly. They were cold and alien. It was I who had changed: something inside me was dead, like the machinery, and like Peter.

It was a kind of indefinable emptiness. I do not think it was what Peter called an emotion; and yet it had nothing to do with logic, either. It was just an emptiness—a void that could not be filled by eating or drinking.

It was not a longing. I had no desire that things should be otherwise than they were. I did not even wish that Peter were not dead, for reason had told me that he had to die. That was the end of it.

But the void was still there, unexplainable and impossible to ignore. For the first time in all my life I had found a problem that I could not solve. Strange, disturbing sensations stirred and whispered within me, nagging, gnawing. And suddenly—something moved on the skin of my cheek. I raised a hand to it, slowly.

A tear was trickling down my cheek.

---

Young Peter Karson put the last black-print down and sighed with satisfaction. His dream was perfect; the Citadel was complete, every minutest detail provided for—on paper. In two weeks they would be laying the core, and then the metal giant itself would begin to grow, glittering, pulsing with each increment of power, until at last it lay finished, a living thing.

Then there would remain only the task of blasting the great, shining ship out into the carefully-calculated orbit that would be its home. In his mind's eye he could see it, slowly wheeling, like a second satellite, about the Earth; endlessly gathering knowledge into its insatiable mechanisms. He could see, too, the level on level of laboratories and storerooms that filled its interlocking segments; the meteor deflectors, the air renewal system, the mighty engines at the stern—all the children of his brain.

Out there, away from the muffling, distorting, damnable blanket of atmosphere, away from Earth's inexorable gravitational pull, would be a laboratory such as man had never seen. The ship would be filled with the sounds of busy men and women, wresting secrets from the reluctant ether. A new chemistry, a new physics; perhaps even a new biochemistry.

A discordant note suddenly entered his fantasy. He looked up, conscious of the walls of his office again, but could see nothing unusual. Still, that thin, dark whisper of dread was at the back of his mind. Slowly, as if reluctantly compelled, he turned around to face the window at his back.

There, outside the window, fifty stories up, a face was staring impassively in at him. That was the first impression he got; just a face, staring. Then he saw, with a queer, icy chill, that the face was blood-red and subtly inhuman. It tapered off into a formless, shriveled body.

For a moment or an eternity it hung there, unsupported, the bulging eyes staring at him. Then it grew misty at the edges. It dissolved slowly away and was gone.

"Lord!" he said.

He stared after it, stunned into immobility. Down in the street somewhere, a portable video was shrilling a popular song; after a moment he heard the faint swish of a tube car going past. Everything was normal. Nothing, on examination, seemed to have changed. But the world had grown suddenly unreal.

One part of his brain had been shocked into its shell. It was hiding from the thing that had hurt it, and it refused to respond. But the other part was going calmly, lucidly on, quite without his volition. It considered the possibility that he had gone temporarily insane, and decided that this was probable.

Hardly knowing what he did, he found a cigarette and lit it. His hands were shaking. He stared at them dully, and then he reached over to the newsbox on his desk, and switched it on.

There were flaring red headlines.

Relief washed over him, leaving him breathless. He was horrified, of course, but only abstractedly. For the moment he could only be glad that what he had seen was terrible reality rather than even more terrible illusion.

INVADERS APPEAR IN BOSTON.
200 DEAD

Then lines of type, and farther down:

50 CHILDREN DISAPPEAR FROM
PARIS MATERNITY CENTER

He pressed the stud. The roll was full of them.

MOON SHIP DESTROYED
IN TRANSIT
NO COMMUNICATION FROM
ANTARCTICA IN 6 HOURS
STRANGE FORCE DEFLECTS
PLANES FROM SAHARA AREA
WORLD POLICE MOBILIZING

The item below the last one said:

Pacifica, June 7—The World Police are mobilizing, for the first time in fifty years. The order was made public early this morning by R. Stein, Secretary of the Council, who said in part: