But there it was, right in place, a half mile away from each neighbor on either side, and casting that fearful shadow along the ground.
Storm clouds formed above them, and spilled their contents down. The rain washed across their smooth, metallic tops, and ran off, to soak the ground a mile beneath.
They made no move, and they offered no hostility, but-as the hardware dealer in San Francisco said-”My God, the things could blast us at any second!” And-as the Berber tribesman, talking to his dromedary-mounted fellows said-”Even if they hang silent, they come from somewhere, and I’m frightened, terribly frightened.”
So it went, for a week, with the terror clogging the throats of Earthmen around the world. This was not some disaster that happened in Mississippi, so the people of Connecticut could read about it and shake their heads, then worry no more. This was something that affected everyone, and a great segment of the Earth’s population lived under those sleek metal vehicles from some far star.
This was terror incarnate.
Getting worse with each passing day.
The Adjutant felt his career frustration, his deep anger, his distaste for this pompous piss-ant of a General growing rapidly. He had worked as the General’s aide for three years now, and been quite happy with the assignment. The General was an important man, and it was therefore surprising how few actual top-rung decisions had to be made by him, without first being checked and double-checked by underlings.
The Captain knew his General thought of him as his pride-and-joy. Certainly he did; the Adjutant made most of the decisions, and all the General had to do was hand out the orders. Without ever letting the General know his work was being done for him by an aide, the Adjutant had become indispensable. “A good man, that Alberts,” the General said, at the Officers’ Club.
But this crisis with the saucers was something else. It had been dumped in the General’s lap, both from above, and from below, and he was sweating. He had to solve this problem, and for the first time in his life his rough-hewn good looks and military bearing and good name could not bluff him through.
He actually had to make a meaningful decision, and he was almost incapable of doing it. That made him edgy, and snappish, and dissatisfied, and it made the Adjutant’s job not quite so cushy.
“Confound it, Alberts! This isn’t some base maneuver you can stammer through! This is a nationwide emergency, and everyone is on my neck! God knows I’m doing all I can, but I need a little help I I’ve tried to impress upon you the-the-seriousness of the matter; this thing has got to be ended. It’s got the world in an uproar. You’re getting up my nose with this attitude, boy! It’s starting to stink like subordination, Alberts...”
The Adjutant watched, his mouth a fine line. This was the first time the General had spoken to him in such demeaning manner. He didn’t like it; a lot. But it was just another sign of the cracking facade of the old man.
The General had come from wealthy Army parents, been sent through West Point and graduated with top honors. He had joined the Air Force when the Army and Air Corps were one and the same, and stayed on after the separation. He had served in the air, and risen in the ranks almost faster than the eye could see. Mostly through his father’s connections. The honors, the service duty, the medals...all through pull.
The man was a wealthy, sheltered, and vacillating individual, and the Adjutant had been making his decisions for three years. Alberts wondered what would happen when the rotation plan moved him to another job, next year. Would the new Adjutant catch on as fast as he had from the last one? Or would the General pull strings so he could stay on?
But that was all in the future, and this saucer decision was one the General had to make for himself. It wasn’t minor.
And the General was cracking. Badly.
“Now get up there and do something!” the General cried, slamming the empty desktop with a flattened hand.
His face was blotched with frustration and annoyance, and-naturally-Alberts saluted, swiveled, and left.
Thinking, I hope the Pentagon lowers the boom right down his wattled throat, right down his gullet to his large colon!
One saucer was a dirty affair. Not with the dust and filth of an atmosphere, for the saucer had obviously not been very long in air, but with the pocks and blazes of space. Here a small cluster of pits, where the saucer had encountered a meteor swarm; there a bright smear of oxidized metal. Its markings were slovenly, and there were obvious patchings on its metal hull.
Somehow, it seemed out of place among all the bright, shining, marvelously-intricate, painted saucers. It seemed to be a rather poor relation, and never, never flickered out of existence. All the others might be subject to that strange disappearing act, but not the poor relation. It stayed where it was, somewhere above the Fairchild Desert of Nevada.
Once a civilian pilot from Las Vegas, disregarding the orders of the C.A.P., flew very close to the dirty saucer. The pilot buzzed the ship several times, swooping in and over and back around in huge, swinging arcs. By the time he had made his fourteenth Immelmann and decided to land atop the saucer, just for yuks, the hurry-up bleep was out to interceptors based near Reno and Winnemucca, and they caught him high, blasting him from the sky in a matter of minutes.
With the fate of a world hanging in the balance, there could be no time for: subtlety or reasoning with crackpots. He had been irrational, had defied the stay-grounded, keep-back orders, and so had fallen under the martial law which had ruled the country since the day after the five thousand had appeared.
Radio communication with the ships was impossibly fruitless.
Television transmission was equally worthless.
Bounced signals failed to come back; the metal of the ships sopped them up.
Telemetering devices brought back readings of the density-or seeming density-of the ships, and when they were reported, the situation looked bleaker than before.
The metal was, indeed, super-strong.
The only time things looked promising was when a philologist and a linguist were recruited to broadcast a complete course in English for thirty-six hours straight. The beam was directed at first one ship, then another, and finally when it was directed at the dirty saucer, was gulped in.
They continued broadcasting, till at the end of thirty-six hours, the dumpy, red-faced, runny-nosed, and sniffling Linguist, who had picked up his cold in the broadcasting shack, pushed back his chair, gathered his cashmere sweater from where it had fallen in the corner, and said there was no use.
No reply had come in. If the beings who had flown these saucers were intelligent enough to have gotten here, they would surely have been intelligent enough to have learned English by then. But there had been no reply, and spirits sank again.
Inter-channel memos slipped frantically down from President to Aide, to Secretary of Defense, to Undersecretary, to Chief of Staff, to the General, who passed the memos-bundled-to his Adjutant. Who worried.
It had been the only one where there was any slightest sign of contact. “Look, pilot, I want you to fly across that dirty one,” the Adjutant said.
“Begging the Captain’s permission...” the wide-eyed young pilot demanded, over his shoulder; he continued at the nod from Alberts “...but the last man who buzzed that big-O, sir, got himself scissored good and proper. What I mean, sir, is that we’re way off bounds, and if our clearances didn’t, uh, clear, we might have a flock of my buddies down our necks.” He spoke in a faint Texas drawl that seemed to ease from between his thin lips.