Either the crews of the spaceships were aliens to humanity with no knowledge of mankind, or else they were men and conducting a ruthless war of nerves and an exhaustive test of the ability of the world outside their nation to defend itself. Four days after the seizure of a transatlantic plane, four coaches of the Trans-Siberian Railroad went skyward, accompanied by a tumultuous mass of roadbed and other debris.
Two days later a building in the Georgetown section of Washington, D.C., went screaming heavenward in a shapeless mass of collapsed timbers. Two days later still—there was no warning of it otherwise—radars in the Pacific area noted a rising object. Telescopes caught it some twelve hundred miles out. It was a tramp-steamer, its bottom a rusty red, rising forlornly through nothingnes
