He looked down through a bull's-eye in the floor. The city they had just left was beneath them. Washington, the nation's capital; the golden dome of the Capitol Building was slipping swiftly astern. Only then did he make a belated reply to Culver's statement.
"Well," he said shortly, "they'll have to meet it their own way. We told them all we knew. And a lot of good that did—not!"
"Five days!" said Culver. "It seems more like five years since the devils first came out. Nobody knows where they will hit next. But they're working north—and there's no trouble in telling where they've been."
Smithy's voice was hot in reply, hot with the intense anger of a young, aggressive man when confronted by the ponderous motion of a big organization getting slowly under way.
"If only we'd gone down underground," he exclaimed; "carried the fight to them! They live there—there must be a whole world underground. We could have carried in power lines, lighting the place as we went along. We could have fought 'em with gas. We'd have paid for it, sure we would, but we'd have given them enough hell to think of down below so they wouldn't raise so much of it up above.
"But no! We had to fight according to the textbooks. And those red devils don't fight that way; they never learned the rules."
uerilla warfare," Colonel Culver repeated. "There are certain difficulties about fighting enemies you can't see."
"They're clever," Smithy admitted. "We taught them their lesson down there in the desert—they've never been seen in daylight since. Out at night—and their invisible heat-rays setting fire to a city a mile away, then mopping up with their green flame-throwers if anyone's left. They pick our planes out of the sky even when they're flying without lights. Darkness means nothing to them! It was murder to send troops in against them, troops wiped out to a man! Artillery—that's no good either when we don't know how many of the devils there are, or where they are. There's no profit in shelling the place when the brutes have gone back underground."