The abysmal invaders

BY EDMOND HAMILTON
Other huge shapes galloped past, carrying annihilation and death across the town.
Much of the story, no doubt, we shall never know. Much concerning that staggering, deadly invasion which leapt out upon an unsuspecting world will remain forever hidden by that dark curtain of mystery which screens from us the workings of the unknown. Theories, suggestions, surmises—with these alone can we fill the gaps in our knowledge, and these are valueless. It were better to ignore them entirely, in any history of the thing, and record only the known facts. And such a record begins, inevitably, with the disappearance of Dr. Morton, and with the sensational circumstances surrounding that disappearance.
It is easy enough to understand the sensation caused by the thing, for Dr. Morton—Dr. Walter Morton—was considered the world's foremost living paleontologist at the time. Attached to the great Northcote Museum in Chicago for a dozen years, he had risen in those years to the summit of eminence in his chosen field of science. It was he who had found in a Kentucky cavern the first perfect specimen of the ichthyornis, rarest of Mesozoic birds; he who had completely shattered the dinosaur-transition theory by his brilliant comparison of sauropodian and ornithischian characteristics; and he who had discovered the rich bone-fields at Salty Gulch, in Montana, unearthing there the superb allosaurus and stegosaurus skeletons which made the Northcote collections unrivaled.
Such achievements would have brought fame to any man, and in Morton's case that fame was heightened by the fact that most of his work he had carried out single-handed. It was his custom, indeed, to conduct his prospective surveys quite alone, securing help only for the actual unearthing of his own discoveries. So that it was alone that he had gone into the dark fastnesses of Sutter's Swamp, early in May, in search of the traces of prehistoric animal life which he believed might exist there.