As it swept steadily along the streets of Manchester that night, overtaking the fleeing crowds and leaving them in shapeless heaps, it must have seemed like the very day of doom to those below. They speak of it as enduring for hours, that time that the invaders hung above the city, while in reality the disks remained over Manchester somewhat less than twenty minutes. How many were slain in that time it is impossible to guess. The city, at least, was thrown into a wild intense panic, and no doubt that was the purpose of the invaders. That accomplished, they gathered together and sped away to the west, to Liverpool.

The story of the massacre at Liverpool is almost identical with that at Manchester. There too the disks struck down with icy death at the city, but one curious feature differentiates the Liverpool account. It seems that as the Cold Ray swept around the city, it crossed, ever and again, the city’s harbor and the sea outside. And for many days afterward, immense icebergs of unprecedented size ranged the English coast, born of that striking of the ocean by the blue ray.

At Manchester and Liverpool, and even as far south as Birmingham, the invaders came down without warning, striking unexpectedly, spreading death and dread, then racing away. But some time before they reached London, word of the attacks on the northern cities had been received, and men waited, ready for battle, so that it was over London that the atomic people and the forces of man clashed for the first time.

It was the assumption of the War Office in London that Manchester and Liverpool had been attacked by the airplanes of some continental power, without the formality of a declaration of war. Certainly, they did not dream of the real nature of the menace that was speeding toward them.

Presently, from all the air-stations around the city, plane after plane was spiraling up, while in a great ring around London the giant searchlights stabbed the night, sweeping the sky in search of the invaders. Even while the planes ascended and hung in a thin line high above the city, thunder was growling, low and ominous, and lightning flickering across the sky.