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battle, no strategy. If they had, they would have wiped us out long ago. They make sudden raids and then they retire. They make no attempt to hold territory as such. They don’t loot. All they seem to want is killing. At times it has seemed to us that they have deliberately not wiped us out, as if they were conserving us, making us last as long as possible so we’d still be there to satisfy their bloodlust.”
    Wilson glanced at the girl sitting on the sofa beside Gale and caught on her face a shadow of terror.
    â€œTwenty years, you say,” said Sandburg. “You held these things off for twenty years.”
    â€œWe are doing better now,” said Gale. “Or at least we were doing better before we left. We have weapons now. At first we had none. The Earth had been without war and weapons for a hundred years or more when their spaceship came. They would have exterminated us then if they had fought a total war, but as I have explained, it has not been total war. That gave us time to develop some defense. We fabricated weapons, some of them rather sophisticated weapons, but even your weapons of today would not be enough—your nuclear weapons, perhaps, but no sane society.…”
    He stopped in some embarrassment, waited for a moment and then went on. “We killed a lot of them, of course, but it seemed to make no difference. There always seemed as many of them as ever, if not more. Only the one spaceship came, so far as we could determine. It could not have carried many of them, large as it was. The only answer to their numbers seems to be that they are prolific breeders and that they reach maturity in an incredibly short time. They don’t seem to mind dying. They never run or hide. I suppose, again, that it is their warrior’s code. Nothing quite so glorious as a death in battle. And they took so damn much killing. Kill a hundred of them and let one get through and it more than evens the score. I imagine that we lived the same kind of fear-ridden life as the old American pioneers who lived in the shadow of Indian raids. If we had stayed, they would eventually have wiped us out. Even trying to conserve us, as they may have been trying, they still would have exterminated us. That is why we’re here.
    â€œIt is impossible, I think, for the human race to accept the sort of creatures they are. There is nothing that we know that can compare with them. The traditionally blood-crazed weasel in the chicken coop is a pale imitation of them.”
    â€œPerhaps,” said the President, “in view of what we have been told, we should do something now in regard to that artillery.”
    â€œWe have, of course,” the Attorney General pointed out, “no real evidence.…”
    â€œI would rather,” said Sandburg sharply, “move without ironclad evidence than find it suddenly sitting in my lap.”
    The President reached for his phone. He said to the Secretary of Defense, “You can use this phone. Kim will put through the call.”
    â€œAfter Jim has made his call,” said State, “perhaps I should use the phone. We’ll want to get off an advisory to the other governments.”

10
    Miss Emma Garside turned off the radio and sat in silence, bolt upright in her chair, in something approaching awe of herself for the brilliance of the idea that had just occurred to her. It was not often (well, actually never before) that she had felt that way, for although a proud woman, she also was inclined to be mousy in both her actions and her thought. The pride she had was a secret pride, divulged only occasionally and in a very guarded manner to Miss Clarabelle Smythe, her very closest friend. It was a pride she held close within herself, for comfort, although there were times she flinched a little when she remembered the undoubted horse thief and the man who had been hanged for a rather heinous offense. She had never mentioned either the horse thief or