He opened the door and stepped out to the pavement. Another car came up beside him and stopped. A woman thrust her head out of the right hand window and asked, in a shrill, excited voice, "What is going on? What's that up ahead?"
"I think it's another visitor," said Garrison. "Like the one up
north."
"Oh, my God!" the woman shrilled. "Let's get out of here."
The man behind the wheel said, "Take it easy, Gladys. It may
not be a visitor."
He got out of the car and joined Garrison, who had walked out ahead of the cars, standing in the glare of the headlights. He ranged himself alongside Garrison and stood staring at the thing that loomed on the road ahead.
"How sure are you?" he asked.
"Not entirely," Garrison told him. "It looks like one. It popped
into my mind it could be one of them."
"It's big," said the other man. "I read about the one up north
and saw pictures of it. But I had no idea it could be that big."
It was big. It blocked both the traffic lanes and the grassy median that ran between them. It was black and rectangular and loomed high against the sky. Once having settled, it did not move. It sat there, a lump of blackness.
The woman had gotten out of the car and came up to them.
"Let's turn around and get out of here," she said. "I don't like
it."
"Goddammit, Gladys," said the man, "quit your caterwauling.
There's nothing to be afraid of. That one up north never hurt no one.
"It killed a man. That's what it did."
"After he shot at it. We ain't shooting at it. We're not going to bother it."
It must be a visitor, Garrison told himself. It had the square blockiness that the photos had shown. It was exactly as Kathy had described the one at Lone Pine. Except for its size; he was not intellectually prepared for the sheer, overwhelming size of it.
Two other cars had come up behind them and stopped, the people in them getting out to walk up the road to where the three of them stood. Another car came along, but did not stop. It ran off the road, crossed the median, gained the eastward traffic lanes and went roaring off.
The NASA announcement had said that the object in orbit appeared to be breaking up. It was doing a hell of a lot more, Garrison told himself, than simply breaking up; the visitors that had clustered in the orbiting object were coming down to Earth. There was one here, spraddled across the road, and the likelihood was that it was not the only one that had come to Earth. There would be others, scattered all over the world. That first landing at Lone Pine probably had been no more than a test attempt at landing, a preliminary probing to have a look at the situation. The Lone Pine visitor, before it had spawned and then had taken off, had been sending signals to its fellows orbiting in space and now the invasion was on. If it could be called an invasion. Garrison reminded himself that probably it was not an invasion in the classical sense of the term. A reconnaissance in force—could that be what it was? Or simply a visit, intelligences of another world dropping in to say hello?
He started walking up the road toward the visitor. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw that only one of the others who had been standing with him was following. With only a quick glance at the follower, he could not be sure which one of them it was. Perhaps, he thought, he should slow down and let the other man catch up with him, but decided against it. He did not feel like engaging in the meaningless chit chat that would come from the other, filled with questioning and wonder. Why do you think it landed here? What does it want? What kind of thing is it? ‘Where do you think it's from?
He increased his stride, almost running down the pavement When he came to within a few yards of the huge blackness, he swung to his right, to the far shoulder of the highway, and began making his way around it. There now was no question in his mind that it was a visitor—a huge black oblong box with no gadgets attached to it, with no external features at all. It sat there. It did not move. It did not click or purr. Going up to it, he laid his hand, spread wide, against its hide. The hide was hard, but not with the hardness of metal. It was warm, with a warmth that somehow had the feel of life. Like touching a man, he thought. Like stroking a dog or cat. A soft warmness, despite the hardness of the skin, that spoke of life.
Standing there, with his spread out hand against the warmness of the hide, a sudden chill ran through him, a chill that set his teeth on edge and made his face feel, for a moment, stiff and hard, as if it might be changing into stone. And, even as he felt the chill, his suddenly racing brain launched into a frantic scurry to analyze the chill. Not fear, said the analysis, not terror, not panic, no inclination to burst out screaming, no urge to run, no buckling of the knees—only that terrible coldness which was not the coldness of the body only, but a coldness of the mind, and a coldness of the mind that the mind could not understand.
Slowly he pulled his hand away from the hide and there was no need to pull it, for nothing held it there.
He let his arm drop to his side, but, otherwise, he made no movement and he felt the chill ebb out of him, not going quickly, but draining slowly from him until it was gone, although the memory of how it had been stayed with him.
A touch of strange, he thought, but more than a touch of strange. Rather a brush against something that he could not understand, that no human might be able to understand. A touch that was composed of the coldness and the vastness of deep space, of the glare of distant suns, of dark planets that were unlike the Earth, and the incomprehensibility of a life that had been spawned in the darkness of those planets. As if he had been hurled into a place that he did not know and perhaps could never know, that he could not even begin to know no matter how long a time he spent there. Incomprehensibility, that was it, he thought.
And, yet, the damn thing looked so ordinary, was so unspectacular, an almost old shoe structure.
He backed away from it, staring up at the great black wall of it that rose so high above him. And the hell of it was, he found, that he wanted once again to step close to it and lay his hand against it so that he again could feel the warmness of it, and perhaps the chill as well.
But he did not step closer to it, did not lay his hand against it. He backed a few steps away from it, then turned around and hurried back the way that he had come. Not running, for he sensed there was no reason he should run, but taking long, deliberate steps to get away from it as quickly as he could.
Out on the highway and clear of the visitor, he saw that several other cars had stopped and the cluster of people standing in the road had grown. He did not see the man who had followed him. Even had he seen him, he would not have recognized him, for he had caught only that one, quick, over-the-shoulder glimpse of him.
One man stepped out of the cluster to intercept him as he
came down the road. "What did you see?" the man asked. "Is
there anything going on?"
"Why don't you go and look?" Garrison asked him brusquely,
brushing swiftly past him.
It was strange, Garrison thought, that there was so little panic. If there was fear, it was being hidden. What was it about the visitors that seemed to inspire no fear? Maybe it was because the big black box had so few alien connotations. Perhaps because it was so totally unlike the common concept of something out of space. To a people brought up on the idiocies of TV and movie imaginations, the reality must seem quite commonplace.
His car was standing with the headlights burning and the engine running. He got into it, pulled up the road a car length or so, then cut to its left, drove across the median to reach the eastbound lanes. A mile down the road he pulled into a flanking service lane to reach a roadside phone booth.