He smelled jungle, and muskiness, and decay, and flowers, and every conceivable discordant odor.  Flashes of insane colorings formed themselves in his eyes.  He heard the chaotic uproar which meant that his auditory nerves, like the nerves in his eyes and nostrils and skin, were stimulated to violent activity, reporting every kind of message they could possibly report all at once.

He groaned.  He tried to find a hiding-place for Jill so that if or when the invaders searched for her, they would not find her.  But he expected his muscles to knot in spasm and cramp before he could accomplish anything.

They didn’t.  The smell lessened gradually.  The meaningless flashings of preposterous color grew faint.  The horrible uproar his auditory nerves reported, ceased.  He and Jill had been at the mercy of the unseen operator of the terror beam.  Perhaps the beam had grazed them, by accident.  Or it could have been weakened....

It was very puzzling.

CHAPTER 5

When darkness fell, Lockley and Jill were many miles away from the clearing where he had made the S.O.S.  They were under a dense screen of leaves from a monster tree whose roots rose above ground at the foot of its enormous trunk.  They formed a shelter of sorts against observation from a distance.  Lockley had spotted a fallen tree far gone with wood-rot.  He broke pieces of the punky stuff with his fingers.  Then he realized that without a pot the bracken shoots he’d gathered could not be cooked.  They had to be boiled or not cooked at all.

“We’ll call it a salad,” he told Jill, “minus vinegar and oil and garlic, and eat what we can.”

She’d been pale with exhaustion before the sun sank, but he hadn’t dared let her rest more than was absolutely necessary.  Once he’d offered to carry her for a while, but she’d refused.  Now she sat drearily in the shelter of the roots, resting.

“We might try for news,” he suggested.

She made an exhausted gesture of assent.  He turned on the tiny radio and tuned it in.  There was no scarcity of news, now.  A few days past, news went on the air on schedule, mostly limited to five-minute periods in which to cover all the noteworthy events of the world.  Part of that five minutes, too, was taken up by advertising matter from a sponsor.  Now music was rare.  There were occasional melodies, but most were interrupted for new interpretations of the threat to earth at Boulder Lake.  Every sort of prominent person was invited to air his views about the thing from the sky and the creatures it brought.  Most had no views but only an urge to talk to a large audience.  Something, though, had to be put on the air between commercials.