With the exception of Leroy, the Chapmans sat forward. Little Susie had cuddled up next to her older brother and was holding his hand. Tight.
“…some of the more daring souls now are venturing near the edge. Their silhouettes stand out against the metal sheen. One man wants to touch the thing-he’s having an argument with a policeman. Now the policeman wins…. Ladies and gentlemen, there’s something I haven’t mentioned in all this excitement, but…it’s becoming more distinct. Perhaps you’ve caught it already on your radio. Listen, please…”
The Chapmans leaned forward-and even Leroy turned back toward the radio. A scraping sound, faint but distinct, crackled over the air waves.
The reporter was asking, “Do you hear it? Curious humming sound that seems to come from inside the object. I’ll move the microphone nearer. Here…now, we’re not more than twenty-five feet away. Can you hear it now?”
The Dorn sisters had heard all of it.
They, too, had turned up the volume (the younger sister, Miss Eleanor, doing the honors) and their knitting was dropped to their laps, unattended, as their wide eyes stared toward the radio.
Ironically, neither woman had much interest in the news, normally-they took pride in not reading much of anything in the local paper except the church news. Neither sister read current magazines; why waste their time reading trash? History, the Bible, education, religion.
Miss Jane’s hands were folded. “God is in His Heaven,” she said.
Having resumed her chair, Miss Eleanor said, “And all’s right in the world.”
But neither of them sounded terribly sure of either statement.
In the modest living room of an apartment in Brooklyn, an out-of-work housepainter named Dennis Chandler, 36, sat with his wife, Helen, listening to the radio. The childless couple had guests-Helen’s younger brother Earl and his wife Amy and their five-year-old Douglas. Dennis and Helen had neither a car nor a telephone. He and his wife went to a local Methodist church about once a month. They’d gone this morning.
Like many listeners, Dennis had switched from Charlie McCarthy only to accidentally land on the station reporting the fall of a meteor. He and his wife and their guests had heard exactly the same thing that the Chapmans had, and most of what the Dorn sisters had.
Dennis, too, was excited and concerned, though not as frightened as his wife and their guests, who were sitting forward, trembling. Douglas was on his mother’s lap, arms draped around her neck.
“You know, Earl,” Dennis said, “we could drive out in your car to where the meteor hit. Could be something to see.”
Earl, who was in his late twenties, said he wouldn’t mind. “Sounds like an adventure,” he said.
But then, when the radio announcer said that he and the Princeton professor had travelled eleven miles in ten minutes, Dennis sat forward in his armchair and said to his wife Helen, “That wasn’t any ten minutes, was it? They were just on!”
Helen said, “It’s hard to keep track of time, but…you might be right.”
“It was ten minutes,” Amy said. “Wasn’t it, Earl?”
Earl wasn’t sure.
Dennis said, “Anyway, with all these news flashes, the streets around Princeton would be packed-they couldn’t get there that fast, even if it was ten minutes!”
Helen, frowning in thought, suggested, “Why don’t you check the listings, in the paper?”
Dennis snapped his fingers. “Good idea, honey.”
The husband went to the kitchen where the Sunday Daily News lay on a counter, waiting to wrap garbage. He shuffled through to the radio listings and found that CBS was offering The Mercury Theatre on the Air’s presentation of H.G. Wells’s War of the Worlds at eight P.M.
Chuckling to himself, he returned to the tiny living room, settled back in his armchair and said to all assembled, “It’s just a silly play! What knuckleheads we are-shall we switch back to Charlie McCarthy?”
“No!” Helen said. “If it could fool us like that, then it’s well done. Let’s keep listening!”
Everybody agreed that was a good idea, so they indeed kept listening, and really enjoyed the show, laughing heartily at times, little Douglas smilingly shrieking with safe fear.
But the Chapmans (with the notable exception of young Leroy) were legitimately terrified.
Carl Phillips’s excited voice crackled out of the console:
“… do you still think it’s a meteor, Professor?”
“I don’t know what to think. The, uh, metal casing is definitely extraterrestrial…uh, not found on this earth. Friction with the earth’s atmosphere usually tears holes in a meteorite. This thing is…smooth and, as you can see, of cylindrical shape…”
Leroy said nothing.
But in his mind, hearing Professor Pierson’s voice, the boy heard himself scream: “That…is…the…Shadow!”
His little sister was hugging Les, shivering with fear, and Les looked pretty scared, himself.
Normally, Leroy would’ve been sympathetic. He loved his siblings, though the three had the usual kid squabbles. But right now, he relished their discomfort.
“Just a minute!” the announcer yelled. “Something’s happening! Ladies and gentlemen, this is terrific! This…end of the thing is beginning to…flake off. The top is beginning to rotate like a screw, and the thing must be hollow…”
And Leroy laughed out loud-a deep laugh, in imitation of his favorite radio avenger.
Grandfather stood, went over and lifted the boy up by the arm and swatted his blue-jeaned bottom.
But Leroy only smiled.
Like the Shadow, Leroy knew.
Rusty, at his desk at State Troopers’ HQ in upstate New York, sat in gaping astonishment as the words tumbled out of his radio. Upstairs, against his better judgment, Rusty’s no-nonsense duty corporal, Richard Stevens, had switched his radio on, too, and was listening.
And now Corporal Stevens was sitting at his desk with the same wide-eyed, open-mouthed astonishment as that dope Rusty.
Both troopers, seated before their respective radios, watched the little talking boxes as if they could see the images reporter Carl Phillips was describing, and indeed on the movie screens of their minds, they could.
And then a succession of overlapping, agitated voices jumped out:
“She’s movin’!”
“…darn thing’s unscrewing!”
“Stand back, there! Keep those men back, I tell you!”
“It’s red hot, they’ll burn to a cinder!”
“Keep back there. Keep those idiots back!”
Then-a hollow metallic clunk.
“She’s off! The top’s loose!”
“Look out there! Stand back!”
That was all Rusty needed to hear.
He ran up the two floors, corncob pipe tight in his teeth, and leaned in the doorway, from which he saw the normally cool-calm-collected duty corporal standing at his desk, staring at the radio, looking like a wild man.
And then the announcer was back: “Someone’s crawling out of the hollow top, someone or…some thing. I can see…peering out of that black hole two luminous disks…Are they eyes? It might be a face. It might be almost anything…”
The corporal looked toward Rusty and the expressions of the two men mirrored fear and astonishment, matching the outburst of awe from the crowd at the scene.
Phillips was saying, “Something wriggling out of the shadow like a gray snake. Now it’s another one, and an…another one, and another one…. They look like tentacles to me. I, I can see the thing’s body now, it’s large, it’s large as a bear-glistens like wet leather, but that, that face, it, it…. Ladies and gentlemen, it’s indescribable.”