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He found his nose bleeding and plugged it with his handkerchief. He was still rather dazed, and he still had the feeling that there was something extremely important that he must do. He stood rocking on his feet, trying to clear his head, when two men came along the sand-dunes behind the beach. One of them carried two automatic rifles. The other was trying to bandage a limp and flapping arm as he ran. They saw the Sergeant and ran to him.

“Hell, Sarge, I thought y’were blown to little egg-shells.”

“I ain’t,” said Sergeant Walpole. He looked again at the hole in the ground and swore painedly.

“Look at that,” said the man with the flapping arm. “Hell’s goin’ to pop around here, Sarge.”

The sergeant swung around. Then his mouth dropped open. Just half a mile away and hardly more than two hundred yards from the shore-line, the Diesel tramp was ramming the beach. A wake still foamed behind it. A monstrous bow-wave spread out on either hand, over-topping even the combers that came rolling in. It was being deliberately run ashore. It struck, and its fore-mast crumpled up and fell forward, carrying its derrick-booms with it. There was the squeal of crumpled metal plates.

“Flyin’ a yeller flag just now,” panted one of the two privates. “We started poppin’ hexynitrate bullets at her an’ she flung a shell at us. She’s a enemy ship. But what the hell?”

Smoke spurted up from the beached ship. Her stern broke off and settled in the deeper water out from the shore. More smoke spurted out. Her bow split wide. There were the deep rumbles of black-powder explosions. Sergeant Walpole and his two followers stared blankly. More explosions, and the ship was hidden in smoke, and when it blew away her funnel was down and half or more of her upper works was sliding into the sea, and she had listed suddenly.

* * * * *

Sergeant Walpole gazed upward. Futilely, of course; there was nothing in sight overhead. But these explosions did look like the hexynitrate stuff they put in small-arm bullets nowadays. A thirty-caliber bullet had the explosive effect of an old-style six-pound T.N.T. shell. Only, hexynitrate goes off with a crack instead of a boom. It wasn’t an American plane opening up with a machine-gun.

Then the beached ship seemed to blow up. A mass of thick smoke covered her from stem to stern, and bits of plating flew heavily through the air, and there were a few lurid bursts of flame. Sergeant Walpole suddenly remembered that there ought to be survivors, only he hadn’t seen anybody diving overboard to try to get ashore. He half-started forward….

Then the sea-breeze blew this smoke, too, away from the wreckage. And the tramp was gone, but there was something else left in its place–so that Sergeant Walpole took one look, and swallowed a non-existent something that came up instantly into his throat again, and remembered the urgent thing he had to do.

“Pete,” he said calmly, “you hunt up the Area Officer an’ tell him what you seen. Here! I’ll give you a report that’ll keep ’em from slammin’ you in clink for bein’ drunk. Grab a monocycle somewheres. It’s faster than a car, the way you’ll be travelin’. First telephone you come to that’s workin’, make Central put you in the tight beam to head-quarters. Then go on an’ report, y’self. See?”

Pete started, and automatically fumbled with his limp and useless arm. Then he carefully tucked the unmanageable hand in the pocket of his uniform blouse.

“That don’t matter now,” he said absurdly.

He was looking at the thing left in place of the tramp, as Sergeant Walpole scribbled on one of the regulation report-forms of the Eastern Coast Observation Force. And the thing he saw was enough to upset anybody.