She looked up again, and at last began to realize how large and how far away the saucer was. No: rather, how small and how very near it was. It was just the size of the largest circle she might make with her two hands, and it floated not quite eighteen inches over her head.
Fear came then. She drew back and raised a forearm, but the saucer simply hung there. She bent far sideways, twisted away, leaped forward, looked back and upward to see if she had escaped it. At first she couldn’t see it; then as she looked up and up, there it was, close and gleaming, quivering and crooning, right over her head.
She bit her tongue.
From the corner of her eye, she saw a man cross himself. He did that because he saw me standing here with a halo over my head, she thought. And that was the greatest single thing that had ever happened to her. No one had ever looked at her and made a respectful gesture before, not once, not ever. Through terror, through panic and wonderment, the comfort of that thought nestled into her, to wait to be taken out and looked at again in lonely times.
The terror was uppermost now, however. She backed away, staring upward, stepping a ludicrous cakewalk. She should have collided with people. There were plenty of people there, gaping and craning, but she reached none. She spun around and discovered to her horror that she was the center of a pointing, pressing crowd. Its mosaic of eyes all bulged, and its inner circle braced its many legs to press back and away from her.
The saucer’s gentle note deepened. It tilted, dropped an inch or so. Someone screamed, and the crowd broke away from her in all directions, milled about, and settled again in a new dynamic balance, a much larger ring, as more and more people raced to thicken it against the efforts of the inner circle to escape.
The saucer hummed and tilted, tilted . . .
She opened her mouth to scream, fell to her knees, and the saucer struck.
It dropped against her forehead and clung there. It seemed almost to lift her. She came erect on her knees, made one effort to raise her hands against it, and then her arms stiffened down and back, her hands not reaching the ground. For perhaps a second and a half the saucer held her rigid, and then it passed a single ecstatic quiver to her body and dropped it. She plumped to the ground, the backs of her thighs heavy and painful on her heels and ankles.
The saucer dropped beside her, rolled once in a small circle, once just around its edge, and lay still. It lay still and dull and metallic, different and dead.
Hazily, she lay and gazed at the gray-shrouded blue of the good spring sky, and hazily she heard whistles.
And some tardy screams.
And a great stupid voice bellowing, “Give her air!” which made everyone press closer.
Then there wasn’t so much sky because of the blue-clad bulk with its metal buttons and its leatherette notebook. “Okay, okay, what’s happened here stand back figods sake.”
And the widening ripples of observation, interpretation and comment: “It knocked her down.” “Some guy knocked her down.” “He knocked her down.” “Some guy knocked her down and—” “Right in broad daylight this guy . . .” “The park’s gettin to be . . .” onward and outward, the adulteration of fact until it was lost altogether because excitement is so much more important.
Somebody with a harder shoulder than the rest bulling close, a notebook here, too, a witnessing eye over it, ready to change “ . . . a beautiful brunet . . .” to “an attractive brunet” for the afternoon editions, because “attractive” is as dowdy as any woman is allowed to get if she is a victim in the news.
The glittering shield and the florid face bending close: “You hurt bad, sister?” And the echoes, back and back through the crowd, “Hurt bad, hurt bad, badly injured, he beat the hell out of her, broad daylight . . .”
And still another man, slim and purposeful, tan gaberdine, cleft chin and beard-shadow: “Flyin’ saucer, hm? Okay, Officer, I’ll take over here.”
“And who the hell might you be, takin’ over?”
The flash of a brown leather wallet, a face so close behind that its chin was pressed into the gaberdine shoulder. The face said, awed: “FBI” and that rippled outward, too. The policeman nodded—the entire policeman nodded in one single bobbing genuflection.
“Get some help and clear this area,” said the gaberdine.
“Yes, sir!” said the policeman.
“FBI, FBI,” the crowd murmured, and there was more sky to look at above her.
She sat up and there was a glory in her face. “The saucer talked to me,” she sang.
“You shut up,” said the gaberdine. “You’ll have lots of chance to talk later.”
“Yeah, sister,” said the policeman. “My God, this mob could be full of Communists.”
“You shut up, too,” said the gaberdine.
Someone in the crowd told someone else a Communist beat up this girl, while someone else was saying she got beat up because she was a Communist.
She started to rise, but solicitous hands forced her down again. There were thirty police there by that time.
“I can walk,” she said.
“Now, you just take it easy,” they told her.
They put a stretcher down beside her and lifted her onto it and covered her with a big blanket.
“I can walk,” she said as they carried her through the crowd.
A woman went white and turned away moaning, “Oh, my God, how awful!”
A small man with round eyes stared and stared at her and licked and licked his lips.
The ambulance. They slid her in. The gaberdine was already there.
A white-coated man with very clean hands: “How did it happen, miss?”
“No questions,” said the gaberdine. “Security.”
The hospital.
She said, “I got to get back to work.”
“Take your clothes off,” they told her.
She had a bedroom to herself then for the first time in her life. Whenever the door opened, she could see a policeman outside. It opened very often to admit the kind of civilians who were very polite to military people, and the kind of military people who were even more polite to certain civilians. She did not know what they all did nor what they wanted. Every single day they asked her four million five hundred thousand questions. Apparently they never talked to each other, because each of them asked her the same questions over and over.
“What is your name?”
“How old are you?”
“What year were you born?”
“What is your name?”
Sometimes they would push her down strange paths with their questions.
“Now, your uncle. Married a woman from Middle Europe, did he? Where in Middle Europe?”
“What clubs or fraternal organizations did you belong to? Ah! Now, about that Rinkeydinks gang on Sixty-third Street. Who was really behind it?”
But over and over again, “What did you mean when you said the saucer talked to you?”
And she would say, “It talked to me.”
And they would say, “And it said—”
And she would shake her head.
There would be a lot of shouting ones, and then a lot of kind ones. No one had ever been so kind to her before, but she soon learned that no one was being kind to her. They were just getting her to relax, to think of other things, so they could suddenly shoot that question at her. “What do you mean it talked to you?”
Pretty soon it was just like Mom’s or school or anyplace, and she used to sit with her mouth closed and let them yell. Once they sat her on a hard chair for hours and hours with a light in her eyes and let her get thirsty. Home, there was a transom over the bedroom door and Mom used to leave the kitchen light glaring through it all night, every night, so she wouldn’t get the horrors. So the light didn’t bother her at all.