National guardsmen cordoned off the visitors that were sitting on the ground. Highway patrolmen worked to keep traffic moving as thousands of sightseers converged upon the sites where the visitors were sitting. And in some scattered places visitors, floating easily along, only a few hundred feet above the ground, patrolled the highways. Motorists stopped their cars to get out and gape and tangled traffic jams resulted. There were many accidents.
24. WASHINGTON, D.C
Winston Mallory, Secretary of Defense, said to the President, "Whiteside thinks we should run a test of how these things react to firepower. Under the circumstances, I recommend that we should turn him loose. It didn't make much sense when there was only one of them, but now that they've invaded.
"I object to your use of the term ‘invasion' for what is happening," said the Secretary of State. "A fair number of them have landed, but there has been no violence. They're not killing our citizens, they're not burning our cities."
William Sullivan, Secretary of Interior, said, "They chewed up a housing development across the Potomac. One of them gobbled up a lumberyard out on the West Coast. They're eating our forests in Michigan, in Maine, in Minnesota, in Washington and Oregon.
"But they haven't killed anyone," said State. "The only thing they've done is steal a little cellulose. They haven't.
"Just a minute, Marcus," said the President. "I want to hear more about this weapons test. What does Whiteside propose to do? Open up on them with tanks?"
"Nothing like that," said Mallory. "Just a simple test, that is all. We've got to know how these things respond. You remember, out in Minnesota, a man fired at the one that landed there and it fired back, killing him. He used a deer rifle, probably a.30 caliber. The thing about it is that we don't know what happened, how the visitor did it. It carried no apparent weaponry. It was bare of any external features. Yet when that man fired at it…".
"What you want to do is fire another.30 caliber, probably by remote control, then try to determine how the visitor fires back?"
"Precisely. We'll use cameras. High speed cameras. Some of them can take up to thousands of frames a second. That way we can track the bullet, record the moment of impact, see what happens on impact. A study of the film.
"Yes, I see," said the President. "If you can be sure the general will stop with a.30 caliber."
"He will stop at the.30 caliber. All we want, all he wants, is some idea of how the visitor shoots back. Once we know that, we can go on from there."
"If it seems necessary."
"That's right. If it seems necessary.
"And, for Christ's sake, tell Henry to go easy. Take all possible precautions. Exercise all restraint. Only the one shot to get the data."
"He'll go easy. I have talked with him about it."
"I'm impressed by what Marcus was saying," said the President. "Except for this cellulose business, nothing actually has happened. The closest to anything disastrous was the Virginia housing development
"People could have been killed," said Sullivan. "It was just plain dumb luck that everyone got out of the houses in time. There were people sleeping in those houses. A lot of them could have lost their lives. And they're sitting down at airports, closing runways. Let one plane crash because of that and we'd have casualties. Also, I understand they are flying along with planes, as if they might be studying them. So far nothing's happened, but it could."
"What would you have us do?" asked State. "Wheel out our artillery?"
"No, of course not. But we should be doing something. We shouldn't just be sitting here."
"We've called out the National Guard," said the President. "Troops are keeping each of our visitors isolated, keeping the public away from them. That way we probably will avoid incidents."
"What if our visitors start in on other housing developments?" asked Sullivan. "What if they move into the residential areas of our cities, leveling houses to get cellulose? What will we do then? How will we take care of the people who will be homeless?"
"They haven't done that yet," said Marcus White. "Virginia apparently was an isolated example. And the visitor stopped after chewing up a few houses, as if it realized it had made a mistake."
"We have to take care of emergencies as they arise," said the President. "Meanwhile, we'll have to do everything we possibly can to find out more about our visitors."
"The thing that puzzles me," said White, "is that so far they've landed only in the United States, with some small slop-over into Canada. None in Europe. None in Africa. None anywhere else. Why us? Why just us?"
"I think I may have a suggestion," said Dr. Steven Allen, the science advisor. "Let's put ourselves in the place of the visitors. Let's say we have sent out an expedition to some other planet. A half a dozen ships, a hundred—the number's not important. We are looking for one specific thing, like these things apparently are looking for cellulose. We don't know too much about this planet we have reached. A few things by instrument study from some distance off, but that is all. So we send one ship down to study the situation. There are several land masses and we pick one as a starter. The ship goes down and finds what we are looking for. It finds, as well, that the indigenous life in that area seems friendly. At first glance, there's nothing on that particular land mass that is about to cause too much trouble and we, of course, want as little trouble as possible. We know this one land mass is safe; we don't know about the others.
"You make a good point there," said the President. "Don't you agree, Marcus?"
"Yes, I do agree. I hadn't thought of it in quite that way. I had assumed the visitors might want a rather broad look at the entire planet."
"Have you anything else for us?" the President asked the science advisor.
"A big puzzle," said Allen. "Much as we hate to even think it, there seems to be a fair possibility that the visitors operate by means of some sort of gravitational control. They float an inch or two above ground level. The one that left Minnesota yesterday rose into the air with no sign of using any propulsive units. They come down to land slowly, almost as if they were gliding to a landing, but to glide you have to make use of wing surfaces and they haven't any wings."