I took out two pills and got a glass of water. Then I put them carefully back in the tube, put on my gun and phone, left the hotel and headed for the Library of Congress.
On the way I stopped in a bar for a quick one and looked at a newscast. There was no news from Iowa, but when is there any news from Iowa?
At the Library I went to the general catalog, put on blinkers, and started scanning for references. "Flying Saucers" led to "Flying Discs", then to "Project Saucer", then "Lights in the Sky", "Fireballs", "Cosmic Diffusion Theory of Life Origins", and two dozen blind alleys and screwball branches of literature. I needed some sort of a Geiger counter to tell me what was pay dirt and what was not, especially as what I wanted was almost certain to carry a semantic-content code key classing it somewhere between Aesop's fables and the Lost Continent myths.
Nevertheless, in an hour I had a double handful of selector cards. I handed them to the vestal virgin at the desk and waited while she fed them into the hopper. Presently she said, "Most of the films you want are in use. The rest will be delivered to study room 9-A. Take the south escalator, puhlease."
Room 9-A had one occupant-who looked up as I came in and said, "Well! The wolf in person, how did you manage to pick me up again? I could swear I gave you a clean miss."
I said, "Hello, Mary."
"Hello," she answered, "and now, good-by. Miss Barkis still ain't willin' and I've got work to do."
I got annoyed. "Listen, you conceited little twerp, odd as it may seem to you, I did not come here looking for your no-doubt beautiful white body. I occasionally do some work myself and that is why I'm here. If you will put up with my unwelcome presence until my spools arrive, I'll get the hell out and find another study room,fa stag one."
Instead of flaring back, she immediately softened, thereby proving that she was more of a gentleman than I was. "I'm sorry, Sam. A woman hears the same thing so many thousand times that she gets to thinking that no other topic is possible. Sit down."
"No," I answered, "thanks, but I'll take my spools to an unoccupied room. I really do want to work."
"Stay here," she insisted. "Read that notice on the wall. If you remove spools from the room to which they are delivered, you will not only cause the sorter to blow a dozen tubes, but you'll give the chief reference librarian a nervous breakdown."
"I'll bring them back when I'm through with them."
She took my arm and warm tingles went up it. "Please, Sam. I'm sorry."
I sat down and grinned at her. "Nothing could persuade me to leave. I did not expect to find you here, but now that I have, I don't intend to let you out of sight until I know your phone code, your home address, and the true color of your hair."
"Wolf," she said softly, wrinkling her nose. "You'll never know any of them." She made a great business of fitting her head back into her study machine while ignoring me. But I could see that she was not displeased.
The delivery tube went thunk! and my spools spilled into the basket. I gathered them up and stacked them on the table by the other machine. One of them rolled over against the ones Mary had stacked up and knocked them down. Mary looked up.
I picked up what I thought was my spool and glanced at the end-the wrong end, as all it held was the serial number and that little pattern of dots which the selector reads. I turned it over, read the label, and placed it in my pile.
"Hey!" said Mary. "That's mine."
"In a pig's eye," I said politely.
"But it is–I read the label when it was faced toward me. It's the one I want next."
Sooner or later, I can see the obvious. Mary wouldn't be there to study the history of footgear through the Middle Ages. I picked up three or four more of hers and read the labels. "So that's why nothing I wanted was in," I said. "But you didn't do a thorough job; I found some that you missed." I handed her my selection.
Mary looked them over, then pushed all the spools into a single pile. "Shall we split them fifty-fifty, or both of us see them all?"
"Fifty-fifty to weed out the junk, then we'll both go over the remainder," I decided. "Let's get busy."
Even after having seen the parasite on poor Barnes's back, even after being solemnly assured by the Old Man that a "flying saucer" had in fact landed, I was not prepared for the monumental pile of evidence to be found buried in a public library. A pest on Digby and his evaluating formula! Digby was a floccinaucinihilipilificator at heart-which is an eight-dollar word meaning a joker who does not believe in anything he can't bite.
The evidence was unmistakable; Earth had been visited by ships from outer space not once but many times.
The reports long antedated our own achievement of space travel; some of them ran back into the seventeenth century-earlier than that, but it was impossible to judge the quality of reports dating back to a time when "science" meant an appeal to Aristotle. The first systematic data came from the United States itself in the 1940's and '50's. The next flurry was in the 1980's, mostly from Russo-Siberia. These reports were difficult to judge as there was no direct evidence from our own intelligence agents and anything that came from behind the Curtain was usually phony, ipso facto.
I noticed something and started taking down dates. Strange objects in the sky appeared to hit a cycle with crests at thirty-year intervals, about. I made a note about it; a statistical analyst might make something of it-or more likely, if I fed it to the Old Man, he would see something in that crystal ball he uses for a brain.
"Flying saucers" were tied in with "mysterious disappearances" not only through being in the same category as sea serpents, bloody rain, and such like wild data, but also because in at least three well-documented instances pilots had chased "saucers" and never come back, or down, anywhere, i.e., officially classed as crashed in wild country and not recovered– an "easy out" or "happy hurdle" type of explanation.
I got another wild hunch and tried to see whether or not there was a thirty-year cycle in mysterious disappearances, and, if so, did it phase-match the objects in-the-sky cycle? There seemed to be but I could not be sure-too much data and not enough fluctuation; there are too many people disappearing every year for other reasons, from amnesia to mothers-in-law.
But vital records have been kept for a long time and not all were lost in the bombings. I noted it down to farm out for professional analysis.
The fact that groups of reports seemed to be geographically and even politically concentrated I did not try very hard to understand. I tabled it, after trying one hunch hypothesis on for size; put yourself in the invaders' place; if you were scouting a strange planet, would you study all of it equally, or would you pick out areas that looked interesting by whatever standards you had and then concentrate?
It was just a guess and I was ready to chuck it before breakfast, if necessary.
Mary and I did not exchange three words all night. Eventually we got up and stretched, then I lent Mary change to pay the machine for the spools of notes she had taken (why don't women carry change?) and got my wires out of hock, too. "Well, what's the verdict?" I asked.
"I feel like a sparrow who has built a nice nest and discovers that it is in a rain spout."
I recited the old jingle. "And we'll do the same thing-refuse to learn and build again in the spout."
"Oh, no! Sam, we've got to do something, fast. The President has to be convinced. It makes a full pattern; this time they are moving in to stay."