of the earth, as far as I know, who had bridged with logic the widely separated phenomena with which this reminiscence deals. Another year passed. I gained three pounds, drank too much, rowed incessantly with my staff, and got a tidy raise. A telegrapher took a swing at me midway through the office Christmas party, and I fired him. My wife and the kids didn’t arrive hi April when I expected them. I phoned Florida, and she gave me some excuse or other about missing the plane. After a few more missed planes and a few more phone calls, she got around to telling me that she didn’t want to come back. That was okay with me. In my own intuitive way, I knew that the upcoming silly season was more important than who stayed married to whom. In July, a dispatch arrived by wire while a new man was working the night desk. It was from Hood River, Oregon. Our stringer there reported that more than one hundred “green capsules” about fifty yards long had appeared in and around an apple orchard. The new desk man was not so new that he did not recall the downhold policy on silly-season items. He killed-it, but left it on the spike for my amused inspection in the morning. I suppose exactly the same thing happened in every wire service newsroom in the region. I rolled in at 10:30 and riffled through the stuff on the spike. When I saw the “green capsules” dispatch I tried to phone Portland, but couldn’t get a connection. Then the phone buzzed and a correspondent of ours in Seattle began to yell at me, but the line went dead. I shrugged and phoned Benson, in Fort Hicks. He was at the police station, and asked me: “Is this it?” “It is,” I told him. I read him the telegram from Hood River and told him about the line trouble to Seattle. “So,” he said wonderingly, “I called the turn, didn’t I?” “Called what turn?” “On the invaders. I don’t know who they are-but it’s the story of the boy who cried wolf. Only this time, the wolves realized-” Then the phone went dead. But he was right. The people of the world were the sheep. We newsmen-radio, TV, press, and wire services-were the boy, who should have been ready to sound the alarm. But the cunning wolves had tricked us into sounding the alarm so
many times that the villagers were weary, and would not come when there was real peril.
The wolves who then were burning their way through the Ozarks, utterly without opposition, the wolves were the Martians under whose yoke and lash we now endure our miserable existences.