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.
Gold answered, his voice slightly flustered, on the second ring.
"I am glad you called," he said. "I was tempted to call you, but
hesitated, because I thought you'd be asleep."
"Why should you be calling me?"
"Well, another visitor has landed. Right in our lap this time. It's sitting on one of the runways at the airport."
"That's only half of it," said Garrison. "There's a second one. Came down on Highway 12, about a mile east of Ridgedale shopping center. It's blocking off the road."
"You there now?"
"That's right. It landed half a mile or so ahead of me. I better come on in. These may not be the only landings in the area. You have someone you can send out to keep an eye on this one?"
"I don't know. I'll look around. Jay was still here, so I sent him to the airport. Have a photographer out there as well."
"What's happening at the airport?"
"Not much, so far. The visitor is roosting out there, not bothering anyone, but the men in the tower are up tight. Not much air traffic out there now, but it'll pick up in a few hours. The visitor being there means there's one less runway to handle the planes."
"Anything on the wires? Any other landings in other places?"
"Fragmentary reports. Nothing solid. Nothing confirmed. Someone in Texas phoned the police to report one down. Another report from New Jersey. Simple reports of sightings, nothing official yet."