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over to get the rails up. In fact, there was no way under the sun in which those rails could have been taken.
    Yet they weren’t there any more.
    “There’s where they start again,” Smitty said, after nearly a half-hour of walking. He pointed along the roadbed. In the distance, the twin gleam of steel could be seen again. A little beyond that point there was a minor depot, of the sort that is locked and tenantless, save in rush hours.
    “We’ll see what the ends of the rails look like,” Benson said, leading the way.
    He seemed to flow along the rough ties—not a big man, weighing only around a hundred and sixty-five pounds—but possessed of some mysterious quality of muscle that far outmatched in power sheer quantity. The giant Smitty moved lightly behind him, for all his bulk. And last trailed MacMurdie, with the bleak fighting gleam in his bitter blue eyes at the thought of the broken bodies behind them.
    They got to the place where the rails resumed their ruler course. Here, the rails ended bluntly. There was no fading or melting off into nothingness. There were no rails, then there were rails, with the rail ends square and untouched.
    A little beyond, several rails were missing, but beyond that, again, they were whole.
    Benson stooped and looked at the rail end.
    “I’d like a piece of this to have analyzed, Smitty,” he said.
    The giant bent down. The rails were old; had been in use a long time. Countless car wheels pounding over them had flattened them a little and forced the steel out in ragged little scallops at the edges. It is a formation to be found on most old rails.
    Smitty put gigantic thumb and forefinger on one of the thin splinters, twisted hard, straightened up. He handed the fragment to Benson, who put it carefully in his pocket.
    The gray fox of a man had ears as miraculous as his eyes, and so he heard the sound first. But Mac and Smitty heard it, too, very shortly after that.
    The sound in the sky.
    From somewhere overhead could suddenly be heard a faint, monotonous drone. The three of them searched the sky with their eyes for the sight of a plane. The noise was much like that which a plane motor might make.
    They couldn’t see anything up there!
    It was about five o’clock by now, and the western sky was a red glare. Even Benson could not have seen if a man were “walking,” if he happened to be in the western heavens.
    Thus, none of the three saw anything. But all of them heard the droning noise. It seemed very far up, very far away. It went on and on while they stood there craning their necks.
    Smitty saw the next thing first. He was peering in all directions, and he happened to stare down the railroad track near the horizon.
    “Look!” he said, clutching Mac’s ropelike arm with one hand and pointing with the other.
    He was pointing and staring with stupefied eyes at the little depot down the line.
    The depot was an old building, about as big as a six-room house. It had been built in the era of gingerbread architecture. There was a silly little cupola on it, which served no purpose. The rest of the frame structure was bare and unadorned, squatting like a crate beside a wooden platform bordering the track.
    The cupola was the first to go. It was leaning drunkenly when Smitty exclaimed aloud. After his cry, it seemed to melt, like a big cube of sugar. And under it the building began to dissolve, too.
    It was not quite a collapse; not like the account they had read of the pavilion in Lincoln Park. The thing just fell slowly, almost gracefully, to pieces, and it finally ended in an unsightly stack of old boards, beams, and slate shingles. There hadn’t even been much noise connected with it; just a low rumble like that of a colossus muttering in his sleep.
    They ran toward it.

    The noise in the sky was fading out, toward the west, over the open lake. It was gone by the time they reached the collapsed depot.
    They searched swiftly in the wreckage for people, with Smitty hauling beams