He was hidden when the car appeared.  It was a perfectly commonplace car with a whip aerial at its rear.  It came confidently along the highway.  A hundred yards from him, there were explosions.  Smoke came out of the open windows.  The engine stopped and the car bucked crazily and went into the ditch beside the highway.  A man plunged out, slapping at his leg.  A revolver in its holster had exploded all its shells.  The leather holster had saved him from serious injury, but his clothing was on fire.  Other men, two of them, got out hastily.  Things had exploded in the back of the car, too.  The three men swore agitatedly.

Then one of them said something which stimulated the others to frantic flight down the highway away from the ditched car.  The third man limped anxiously after the faster-moving two.

Lockley, watching and hating with undivided attention, knew when the terror beam came on again.  He felt it, very faint because of his protection, but quite distinct.  The explosions had taken place when the car was in the area now covered again by the terror beam.  The men in the car, astonished and scorched, had fled because the beam was due to come back on and they didn’t want to be caught in it.

Lockley noted that the human confederates of the monsters had no protection against the beam to match his own.  Perhaps the monsters themselves were protected only near the projectors.  This was an item affecting his plans of revenge for Jill.  He stored it away in his mind.  Then he realized that the weapons in the car had exploded just like the pistol on his own seat cushion.  The explosion was not associated with the terror beam.  There’d been no beam in action when his own pistol blew up.  It did not seem reasonable that if the monsters possessed a detonation beam that they’d turn it on their own confederates.

No.  Rational beings would do nothing so self-contradictory.

Then Lockley looked down at the cheese grater-pocket radio device of his own manufacture.  He considered the fact that his own pistol had exploded the instant he’d turned the gadget on.  The weapons in the other car detonated when that car was near him.

He plodded onward thinking very clearly and precisely about the matter.  He even remembered to turn off his gadget because he would need it to avenge Jill.  But when he tried to think of any subject unconnected with revenge, his mind became confused and agitated.

Two miles along the highway, which had not yet turned to head in toward Boulder Lake, there was a farmhouse.  Lockley walked heavily to the abandoned building.  He found the door locked.  Without conscious thought, he forced it.  He searched the closets.  He found a shotgun and half a box of shells.  He considered them, then left the gun and all the shells but three.  He went out.  Presently he laid a shotgun shell down on the road.  He paced off twenty-five yards and dropped another.  He dropped a third twenty-five yards farther on, and then carefully counted off three hundred feet.  The car had been just about that far away when the explosions came.