"How do I know? They look it but you never can tell with all the junk that comet left around the earth. They might be just some new kind of tank full of dodos."
"Yeh, but—" The buzzing roar of one of the light-rays crashing into a clump of trees not a hundred yards away, recalled them to themselves. Gloria looked up, startled. The other monster was moving slowly forward, systematically searching the hillside with its weapon.
"Say, boy friend," she said, "I think it's time to go away from here. See you at high mass."
But the conference at headquarters in Hammonton that night was anything but cheerful.
"It comes to this, then," said General Grierson, the commander-in-chief of the expedition. "We have nothing that is effective against these dodo tanks but the twelve-inch railroad artillery, using armor-piercing shell and securing a direct hit. Our infantry is worse than useless; the tanks are useless, the artillery cannot get through the armor of these things, although it damages the enemy artillery in the back areas."
Ben Ruby rubbed a metal chin. "Well, that isn't quite all, sir. One of the American tanks was hit and came through—damaged I will admit. The lightning, or light-ray these dodos threw, penetrated the outer skin but not the inner. We could build more tanks of this type."
General Grierson drummed on the table. "And arm them with what? You couldn't mount a twelve-inch gun in a tank if you wanted to, and we haven't any twelve-inch guns to spare."
One of the staff men looked up. "Has airplane bombing been tried on these—things. It seems to me that a one or two-thousand pound bomb would be as effective as a twelve-inch shell."
"That was tried this afternoon," said the head of the air service, with an expression of pain. "The 138th bombing squadron attacked a group of these tanks. Unfortunately, the tanks kept within range of their light-ray artillery and the entire squadron was shot down."