The only trouble was that I never had a chance to use these preparations; the Pass Christian saucer landed.
The Pass Christian saucer was only the third to be seen after landing. Of the first two, the Grinnell saucer had been concealed by the slugs-or perhaps it took off again-and the Burlingame saucer was a radioactive memory. But the Pass Christian saucer was tracked and was seen on the ground almost at once.
It was tracked by Space Station Alpha-and recorded as an extremely large meteorite believed to have landed in or near the Gulf of Mexico. Which fact was not connected with the Pass Christian saucer until later but which, when it was, told us why we had failed to spot other landings by radar screen . . . the saucers came in too fast.
The saucers could be "seen" by radar-the primitive radar of sixty-odd years ago had picked them up many times, especially when cruising at atmospheric speeds while scouting this planet. But our modern radar had been "improved" to the point where saucers could not be seen; our instruments were too specialized. Electronic instruments follow an almost organic growth toward greater and greater selectivity. All our radar involves discriminator circuits and like gimmicks to enable each type to "see" what it is supposed to see and not bother with what it should ignore. Traffic block control sees atmospheric traffic only; the defense screen and fire control radars see what they are supposed to see-the fine screen "sees" a range from atmospheric speeds up to orbiting missiles at five miles a second; the coarse screen overlaps the fine screen, starting down at the lowest wingless-missile speed and carrying on up into the highest spaceship speeds relative to Earth and somewhat higher-about ten miles per second.
There are other selectivities-weather radar, harbor radar, and so forth. The point is none of them sees objects at speeds over ten miles per second . . . with the single exception of meteor-count radars in the space stations, which are not military but a research concession granted by the U.N. to the Association for the Advancement of Science.
Consequently the "giant meteor" was recorded as such and was not associated with flying saucers until later.
But the Pass Christian saucer was seen to land. The submersible cruiser U.N.S. Robert Fulton on routine patrol of Zone Red out of Mobile was ten miles off Gulfport with only her receptors showing when the saucer decelerated and landed. The spaceship popped up on the screens of the cruiser as it dropped from outer-space speed (around fifty-three miles per second by the space station record) to a speed the cruiser's radars would accept.
It came out of nothing, slowed to zero, and disappeared from the screen–but the operator had a fix on the last blip, less than twenty miles away on the Mississippi coast. The cruiser's skipper was puzzled. The radar track surely could not be a ship, since ships don't decelerate at fifty gravities. It did not occur to him that g's might not matter to a slug. He swung his ship over and took a look.
His first dispatch read: SPACESHIP LANDED BEACH WEST OF PASS CHRISTIAN MISSISSIPPI. His second was: LANDING FORCE BEACHING TO CAPTURE.
If I had not been in the Section offices I suppose I would have been left out of the party. As it was my phone shrilled so, that I bumped my head on the study machine I was using and swore. The Old Man said, "Come at once. Move!"
It was the same party we had started with so many weeks-or was it years?-before, the Old Man, Mary, and myself. We were in the air and heading south at emergency maximum, paying no attention to block controls and with our transponder sending out the police warning, before the Old Man told us why.
When he did tell us, I said, "Why the family group? You need a full-scale air task force."
"It will be there," he answered grimly. Then he grinned, his old wicked grin, an expression I had not seen since it started. "What do you care?" he jibed. "The 'Cavanaughs' are riding again. Eh, Mary?"
I snorted. "If you want that sister-and-brother routine, you had better get another boy."
"Just the part where you protect her from dogs and strange men," he answered soberly. "And I do mean dogs and I do mean strange men, very strange men. This may be the payoff, son."
I started to ask him more but he went into the operator's compartment, closed the panel, and got busy at the communicator. I turned to Mary. She snuggled up with a little sigh and said, "Howdy, Bud."
I grabbed her. "Don't give me that 'Bud' stuff or somebody's going to get a paddling."
Chapter 27
We were almost shot down by our own boys, then we picked up an escort of two Black Angels who throttled back and managed to stay with us. They turned us over to the command ship from which Air Marshal Rexton was watching the action. The command ship matched speeds with us and took us inboard with an anchor loop-I had never had that done before; it's disconcerting.
Rexton wanted to spank us and send us home, since we were technically civilians-but spanking the Old Man is a chore. They finally unloaded us and I squatted our car down on the sea-wall roadway which borders the Gulf along there-scared out of my wits, I should add, for we were buffeted by A.A. on the way down. There was fighting going on above and all around us, but there was a curious calm near the saucer itself.
The outlander ship loomed up almost over us, not fifty yards away. It was as convincing and as ominous as the plastic-board fake in Iowa had been phony. It was a discus in shape and of great size; it was tilled slightly toward us, for it had grounded partly on one of the magnificent high-stilted old mansions which line that coast. The house had collapsed but the saucer was partly supported by the wreckage and by the six-foot-thick trunk of a tree that had shaded the house.
The ship's canted attitude let us see that the upper surface and what was surely its airlock-a metal hemisphere, a dozen feet across, at the main axis of the ship, where the hub would have been had it been a wheel. This hemisphere was lifted straight out or up from the body of the ship some six or eight feet. I could not see what held it out from the hull but I assumed that there must be a central shaft or piston; it came out like a poppet valve.
It was easy to see why the masters of the saucer had not closed up again and taken off from there; the airlock was fouled, held open by a "mud turtle", one of those little amphibious tanks which are at home on the bottom of a harbor or crawling up onto a beach-part of the landing force of the Fulton.
Let me set down now what I learned later; the tank was commanded by Ensign Gilbert Calhoun of Knoxville; with him was Powerman 2/c Florence Berzowski and a gunner named Booker T. W. Johnson. They were all dead, of course, before we got there.
The car, as soon as I roaded it, was surrounded by a landing force squad commanded by a pink-cheeked lad who seemed anxious to shoot somebody or anybody. He was less anxious when he got a look at Mary but he still refused to let us approach the saucer until he had checked with his tactical commander-who in turn consulted the skipper of the Fulton. We got an answer back in a short time, considering that the demand must have been referred to Rexton and probably clear back to Washington.
While waiting I watched the battle and, from what I saw, was well pleased to have no part of it. Somebody was going to get hurt-a good many had already. There was a male body, stark naked, just behind the car-a boy not more than fourteen. He was still clutching a rocket launcher and across his shoulders was the mark of the beast, though the slug was nowhere around. I wondered whether the slug had crawled away and was dying, or whether, perhaps, it had managed to transfer to the person who had bayoneted the boy.