UPON the little observatory balcony at the top of the Empire State some twelve hundred feet above the stricken city, Don and I were with Tako as he erected the giant projector. In the midst of the silent shadowy outline of the stricken city falling around us, we had carried the projector up the mountain slope. The spectre of the Empire State Building was presently around us; we were in a hallway of one of the upper stories. Slowly, we materialized with our burden. I recall, as the dark empty corridor of the office building came to solidity around me, with what surprise I heard for the first time the muffled reverberations from the crumbling city….

We climbed the dark and empty stairs, upward into the mooring mast. Don and I toiled with the box, under the weapons of our two guards.

It was only a few minutes while Tako assembled and mounted the weapon. It stood a trifle higher than the parapet top. It rolled freely upon a little carriage mounted with wheels. Don and I peered at it. We hovered close to Tako with only one thought in our minds, Jane’s murmured words—if we could learn something about this projector….

THEN the horror dulled us. We obeyed orders mechanically, as though all of it were a terrible dream, with only a vague undercurrent of reiterated thought: some chance must come—some fated little chance coming our way.

I recall, during those last terrible minutes when Tako flung the projector beam to send all his distant enemies hurtling into annihilation, that I stood in a daze by the parapet. Don had ceased to look. Tako was rolling the projector from one point to another around the circular balcony. Sometimes he was out of sight on the other side, with the observatory room in the mast hiding him.

We had been ordered not to move. The two guards stood with hand weapons turned on so that the faint green beams slanted downward by their feet, instantly ready, either for Don or me.

And I clung to the balcony rail, staring down at the broken city. It lay strewn and flattened as though, not ten minutes, but ten thousand years of time had crumbled it into ruins.

Then shots from the distant warships began screaming at us. With a grim smile, Tako silenced them. There was a momentary lull.

And then came our chance! Fate, bringing just one unforeseen little thing to link the chain, to turn the undercurrent of existing circumstances—and to give us our chance. Or perhaps Jane, guided by fate, created the opportunity. She does not know. She too was dazed, numb—but there was within her also the memory of what Tolla had almost said. And Tolla’s frenzy of jealousy….

TAKO appeared from around the balcony, rolling the projector. Its beam was off. He flung a glance of warning at the two guards to watch us. He left the projector, flushed, triumphant, all his senses perhaps reeling with the realization of what he had done. He saw the two girls huddled in the moonlight of the balcony floor. He stooped and pushed Tolla roughly away.

“Jane! Jane, did you see it? My triumph! Tako, master of everything! Even of you—is it not so?”

Did some instinct impel her not to repulse him? Some intuition giving her strength to flash him a single alluring moonlit glance?

But suddenly he had enwrapped her in his arms. Kissing her, murmuring love and lust….

This was our chance. But we did not know it then. A very chaos of diverse action so suddenly was precipitated upon this balcony!

Don and I cried out and heedlessly leaped forward. The tiny beams of the guards swung up. But they did not reach us, for the guards themselves were stricken into horror. The shot from a far-distant warship screamed past. But that went almost unheeded. Tako had shouted, and the guards impulsively turned so that their beams missed Don and me.

Tolla had flung herself upon Tako and Jane. Screaming, she tore at them and all in an instant rose to her feet. Tako’s cylinder, which she had snatched, was in her hand. She flashed it on as Don and I reached her.

THE guards for that instant could not fire for we were all intermingled. Don stumbled in his rush and fell upon Tako and Jane, and in a moment rose as the giant Tako lifted him and tried to cast him off.

My rush flung me against Tolla. She was babbling, mouthing frenzied laughs of hysteria. Her beam pointed downward, but as she reeled from the impact of my rush, the beam swung up; missed me, narrowly missed the swaying bodies of Tako and Don, and struck one of the guards who was standing, undecided what to do. It clung to him for a second or two, and then swung to the other guard.

The guards in a puff of spectral light were gone. Tolla stood wavering; then swung her light toward Tako and Don. But I was upon her.

“Tolla! Good God—”

“Get back from me! Back, I tell you.”

I heard Jane’s agonized warning from the floor. “Bob!”

Tolla’s light missed my shoulder. Tako had cast Don off and stood alone as he turned toward us. Then Tolla’s light-beam swung on him. I heard her eery maddened laugh as it struck him.

A wraith of Tako was there, stricken as though numbed by surprise…. Then nothingness….

Shots from the distant warships were screaming around us. One struck the base of the building.

I clung to my scattering senses. I gripped Tolla.

“That projector—what was it you almost told Jane?”

SHE stood stupidly babbling. “Told Jane? That projector—”

She laughed wildly, and like a tigress, cast me off. “Fools of men! Tako—the fool!”

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.

A YEAR has passed. There has been no further menace; perhaps there never will be. And again, the invisible realm of which Don, Jane and I were vouchsafed so strange a glimpse, lies across a void impenetrable. Earth scientists have the projector, with its current batteries apparently almost exhausted. And they have the transition mechanism which we three were wearing. But of those, the vital element had been removed by Tako—and was gone with him. Many others were found on the bodies, and upon the body of poor Tolla. But all were wrecked by their fall.

Perhaps it is just as well. Yet, often I ponder on that other realm. What strange customs and science and civilization I glimpsed.

Out of such thoughts one always looms upon me: a contemplation of the vastness of things to be known.

And the kindred thought: what a very small part of it we really understand!