«You really ought to be looking out, Beautiful, instead of lying there like a dope. This is a day, Beautiful. This may be the beginning of the end—or of something new. I wish they’d hurry up and get it open.»
Army trucks were coming into the circle now. Half a dozen big planes were circling overhead, making a lot of noise. Bill looked up at them quizzically.
«Bombers, I’ll bet, with pay loads. Don’t know what they have in mind unless to bomb the park, people and all, if little green men come out of that thing with ray guns and start killing everybody. Then the bombers could finish off whoever’s left.»
But no little green men came out of the cylinder. The men working on it couldn’t, apparently, find an opening in it. They’d rolled it over now and exposed the under side, but the under side was the same as the top. For all they could tell, the under side was the top.
And then Bill Wheeler swore. The army trucks were being unloaded, and sections of a big tent were coming out of them, and men in khaki were driving stakes and unrolling canvas.
«They would do something like that, Beautiful,» Bill complained bitterly. «Be bad enough if they hauled it off, but to leave it there to work on and still to block off our view—»
The tent went up. Bill Wheeler watched the top of the tent, but nothing happened to the top of the tent and whatever went on inside he couldn’t see. Trucks came and went, high brass and civvies came and went.
And after a while the phone rang. Bill gave a last affectionate rumple to the cat’s fur and went to answer it.
«Bill Wheeler?» the receiver asked. «This is General Kelly speaking. Your name has been given to me as a competent research biologist. Tops in your field. Is that correct?»
«Well,» Bill said. «I’m a research biologist. It would be hardly modest for me to say I’m tops in my field. What’s up?»
«A spaceship has just landed in Central Park.»
«You don’t say,» said Bill.
«I’m calling from the field of operations; we’ve run phones in here, and we’re gathering specialists. We would like you and some other biologists to examine something that was found inside the—uh—spaceship. Grimm of Harvard was in town and will be here and Winslow of New York University is already here. It’s opposite Eighty-third Street. How long would it take you to get here?»
«About ten seconds, if I had a parachute. I’ve been watching you out of my window.» He gave the address and the apartment number. «If you can spare a couple of strong boys in imposing uniforms to get me through the crowd, it’ll be quicker than if I try it myself. Okay?»
«Right. Send ’em right over. Sit tight.»
«Good,» said Bill. «What did you find inside the cylinder?» There was a second’s hesitation. Then the voice said, «Wait till you get here.»
«I’ve got instruments,» Bill said. «Dissecting equipment. Chemicals. Reagents. I want to know what to bring. Is it a little green man?»
«No,» said the voice. After a second’s hesitation again, it said, «It seems to be a mouse. A dead mouse.»
«Thanks,» said Bill. He put down the receiver and walked back to the window. He looked at the Siamese cat accusingly. «Beautiful,» he demanded, «was somebody ribbing me, or—»
There was a puzzled frown on his face as he watched the scene across the street. Two policemen came hurrying out of the tent and headed directly for the entrance of his apartment building. They began to work their way through the crowd.
«Fan me with a blowtorch, Beautiful,» Bill said. «It’s the McCoy.» He went to the closet and grabbed a valise, hurried to a cabinet and began to stuff instruments and bottles into the valise. He was ready by the time there was a knock on the door.
He said, «Hold the fort, Beautiful. Got to see a man about a mouse.» He joined the policeman waiting outside his door and was escorted through the crowd and into the circle of the elect and into the tent.
There was a crowd around the spot where the cylinder lay. Bill peered over shoulders and saw that the cylinder was neatly split in half. The inside was hollow and padded with something that looked like fine leather, but softer. A man kneeling at one end of it was talking.
«—not a trace of any activating mechanism, any mechanism at all, in fact. Not a wire, not a grain or a drop of any fuel. Just a hollow cylinder, padded inside. Gentlemen, it couldn’t have traveled by its own power in any conceivable way. But it came here, and from outside. Gravesend says the material is definitely extra-terrestrial. Gentlemen, I’m stumped.»
Another voice said, «I’ve an idea, Major.» It was the voice of the man over whose shoulder Bill Wheeler was leaning and Bill recognized the voice and the man with a start. It was the President of the United States. Bill quit leaning on him.
«I’m no scientist,» the President said. «And this is just a possibility. Remember the one blast, out of that single exhaust hole? That might have been the destruction, the dissipation of whatever the mechanism or the propellant was. Whoever, whatever, sent or guided this contraption might not have wanted us to find out what made it run. It was constructed, in that case, so that, upon landing, the mechanism destroyed itself utterly. Colonel Roberts, you examined that scorched area of ground. Anything that might bear out that theory?»
«Definitely, sir,» said another voice. «Traces of metal and silica and some carbon, as though it had been vaporized by terrific heat and then condensed and uniformly spread. You can’t find a chunk of it to pick up, but the instruments indicate it. Another thing—»
Bill was conscious of someone speaking to him. «You’re Bill Wheeler, aren’t you?»
Bill turned, «Professor Winslow!» he said. «I’ve seen your picture, sir, and I’ve read your papers in the Journal. I’m proud to meet you and to—»
«Cut the malarkey,» said Professor Winslow, «and take a gander at this.» He grabbed Bill Wheeler by the arm and led him to a table in one corner of the tent.
«Looks for all the world like a dead mouse,» he said, «but it isn’t. Not quite. I haven’t cut in yet; waited for you and Grimm. But I’ve taken temperature tests and had hairs under the mike and studied musculature. It’s—well, look for yourself.»
Bill Wheeler looked. It looked like a mouse all right, a very small mouse, until you looked closely. Then you saw little differences, if you were a biologist.
Grimm got there and—delicately, reverently—they cut in. The differences stopped being little ones and became big ones. The bones didn’t seem to be made of bone, for one thing, and they were bright yellow instead of white. The digestive system wasn’t too far off the beam, and there was a circulatory system and a white milky fluid in it, but there wasn’t any heart. There were, instead, nodes at regular intervals along the larger tubes.
«Way stations,» Grimm said. «No central pump. You might call it a lot of little hearts instead of one big one. Efficient, I’d say. Creature built like this couldn’t have heart trouble. Here, let me put some of that white fluid on a slide.» Someone was leaning over Bill’s shoulder, putting uncomfortable weight on him. He turned his head to tell the man to get the hell away and saw it was the President of the United States. «Out of this world?» the President asked quietly.
«And how,» said Bill. A second later he added, «Sir,» and the President chuckled. He asked, «Would you say it’s been dead long or that it died about the time of arrival?»
Winslow answered that one. «It’s purely a guess, Mr. President, because we don’t know the chemical make-up of the thing, or what its normal temperature is. But a rectal thermometer reading twenty minutes ago, when I got here, was ninety-five three and one minute ago it was ninety point six. At that rate of heat loss, it couldn’t have been dead long.»