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necessary'" (124), including copying a pattern from human bodies. The pods plan to take over the world but can only survive on Earth for five years, after which they will move on into space, having used up this planet. As part two ends, Miles and Becky leave Professor Budlong's house and see Jack, chased by police and driving frantically through Santa Mira. Miles and Becky climb into the hills on the edge of town, tiring, realizing that nowhere is safe.
    In part two of the serial, Finney methodically disposes of any reasonable explanation for what is happening and ratchets up the terror that Miles, Becky, and the reader feel as the characters come to realize that they are up against a seemingly unbeatable foe.
    The conclusion of the three-part serial begins on Saturday, just over a week after the story began. Miles and Becky return to Miles's office, where they are soon trapped by Mannie Kaufman, Professor Budlong, and two other pod people. Miles and Becky use their wits to defeat the first attempt to replace them with pods and escape by attacking their captors as they try to transfer them to a jail cell.
    Miles and Becky head for the hills and hide in a field until darkness falls. They walk toward Highway 101 and see pods growing in a field. They fill the field's irrigation ditches with gasoline and set the pods on fire, burning them as they grow. A crowd catches Miles and Becky but lacks emotion, almost as if uncertain about what to do with the humans.
    At the last minute, Jack Belicec arrives with FBI agents to rescue Miles and Becky. Everyone watches as the remaining pods drift off into space, leaving a clearly inhospitable planet behind. As the serial ends, Miles recalls the incident from a vantage point years later, recalling how the pod people eventually died off and Santa Mira came to life again. He and Becky are together and he can hardly believe it ever happened.
But this much I know: once in a while, the orderly, immutable sequences of life are inexplicably shifted and altered. You may read occasional queer little stories about them, or you may hear vague distorted rumors of them, and you probably dismiss them. But — some of them — some of them —are quite true [73].
    The editors of Collier's must have known that they had something special on their hands, because Jerome Beatty, Jr., wrote, in an editor's note in the December 24, 1954 issue, that
Mr. Finney's realistic tale scared the devil out of us. For reassurance, we showed it to Dr. Harry A. Charipper, chairman of the department of biology of New York University, and asked him about the "transmutation" of "substance" from one form of life to another, which is how the body snatchers are taking us over. He says: "Readers need not be reminded that twenty-five years ago that which is real now was but fantasy. The scientific analysis on which this story is based is most intriguing and certainly within the realm of possibility." Gulp.
    Movie producer Walter Wanger also seems to have purchased the rights to the story by the time it appeared in Collier's-, William Relling, Jr., notes that Wanger traveled to Jack Finney's home town of Mill Valley, California, "just after New Year's Day in 1955" with screenwriter Daniel Mainwaring and director Don Siegel to talk about the story and to scout filming locations (63). Kevin McCarthy, who would star in the film, recalled that he was living in New York in 1955 when Siegel telephoned him from California '"about a story that had been recently serialized in Collier's, the popular weekly magazine.'" McCarthy told an interviewer that '"I guess Siegel sent me the pertinent issues of the mag or I dug 'em up myself!'" (McCarty 233).
    Invasion of the Body Snatchers , the film that was made from the original story, has become a cult classic among cinema enthusiasts. What was it about the three-part serial in November and December 1954 that excited a movie producer and led to countless articles in scholarly journals and books?
    When