Lockley moved forward.  Only he could know the situation as it presented itself here.  Even vengeance for Jill should be put aside, if it called for action irrelevant to this state of things.  But it did not.  A full and terrible revenge for her required exactly the action the coolest of cold-blooded resolutions would suggest be taken now.  And Lockley moved on and downward to take it.

He began to crawl downhill toward the lights, unaware that there were some gaps in his picture of the total scene.  For example, these lights could be detected by aircraft overhead.  The fact did not occur to Lockley.  He was not given pause by the relaxation of the enemy’s disguise so far as air observation was concerned.  He didn’t think of it.  He moved on.

He drew near the lighted area.  He did not walk, he crawled.  He began to listen with fury-sharpened ears.  If he could get close to that huge rocket, close enough to detonate its solid fuel stores....

That would be at once revenge and expedience.  If the rocket’s fuel blew up instead of burning as intended, it would annihilate the camp.  It would wipe out every living creature present.  But there would be fragments left by the explosion.  There would be corpses.  There would be wreckage.  And that wreckage and those corpses would be unmistakably human.  The last war on earth might not be avoided, but at the worst it would be fought against America’s actual enemy and not against imaginary monsters.

It was worth dying to accomplish even that.  But Jill....

Lockley’s progress was infinitely slow, but he needed to take the greatest pains.  He listened carefully.

He heard the faint high roaring of the planes overhead.  They were far away.  There were sounds of insects, and the cries of night birds, and the rustling of leaves and foliage.

There was another sound.  A new sound.  It was inexplicable.  It was a strange and intermittent muttering.  There was a certain irregular rhythm to it, a familiar rhythm.

He crawled on.

There was movement suddenly, off to his left.  Then it stopped.  It could be a man on watch against him simply shifting his position.  Lockley froze, and then went on with even greater caution.  He felt the ground before him for small twigs that might crack under his weight.

The muttering continued.  Presently Lockley realized that it was a human voice.  It was resonant and with many overtones, but still too faint for him to distinguish words.

He crossed a slight rise that had much brushwood.  The brushwood grew in clumps and he circled them with a patient caution foreign to his feelings.

The muttering changed and went on.  Lockley pressed himself to the ground.  Men went past him a hundred feet away.  He saw them in outline against the illuminated parked cars and trucks and in the space around the huge rocket.  They carried no rifles, probably no firearms at all.  Lockley’s march up the highway had warned them of the uselessness of guns, at least at short range.  They were watching for him now.  Perhaps these men were relieving other watchers on the hillside.