Alice Fiddler walked over and twisted the dial to turn the set off. “We know as much as they do, Graim. Good coffee, this.”
“This is a moment of enormous consequence. You can’t turn off our source of information like that and drink coffee. It isn’t part of the story line.”
“With a little practise, Graim, you could bore me good. Now hush up and have some more coffee. I’ll turn it back on to junior in a little while.”
“A story has to keep moving,” he said.
“But lambie, this isn’t a story! This is it.”
He looked at her. She sat comfortably in his best chair, one leg tucked under her. She looked at him over the rim of the cup and winked. He blushed.
“Shy, eh?” she said.
“Nobody would ever accuse you of that, Miss Fiddler.”
“For goodness sake, Graim, stop being stuffy. Apparently you took the day off too. Truce. What do you say?”
He grinned at her. “Truce Alice.”
“That’s better. You look almost human now. Go comb you hair and shave. When you get through we’ll see what’s new.”
As he looked at his long, sober face in the mirror, as he hacked at the beard, he tried vainly to disassociate himself with the fictions he had written and the reality of the present. It was useless. He had lived for so long in so many dream worlds of fantasy that he could not look on reality except as another figment of fantasy, another story line to be plotted to a happy conclusion.
“That’s better,” she said as he came back into the room. “Now we’ll see.” She turned on the radio and they soon had two new facts. One, that another ship, similar to the others, but enormously larger, was in orbit around the earth at the equator at an estimated height of three hundred miles. Two, that the smaller ships were conscientiously covering every kilometer of the land surface of the earth.
“Mapping,” he said.
She frowned. “For the first time, you make sense, Larry. Constant speed, constant height. All the land surface. For what?”
“Exploration party?”
“No. Too many of them.”
“Colonization?”
They stared at each other and the first cool touch of fear was on them. She lowered her voice as she said, “I hope not. I have a hunch that would be a bad, bad thing.”
They had lunch together in a white enamel restaurant on the corner. She insisted on paying for her own. At three o’clock in the afternoon there was more news. The ships all stopped where they were. A survey indicated that there was no town or hamlet, however small, over which the ships had not been seen. Technicians, searching the air waves had found that one end of the band was blanketed with shrill high screams. They had recorded these screams, slowed them down, found that they were signals, some sort of a communication code. The best linguists and code men had been assigned to work on the problem. But there was little hope of it being broken. One expert stated that, from the general structure of the code signals he was willing to venture a guess that it concerned mathematical measurements, but having no knowledge of the mathematical structure being used, he failed to see how it could be broken down.
Alice said, “Brother! It sounds like a Graim epic. But where’s the fearless hero who cracks both code and invader?”
“I thought we said truce,” Larry grumbled.
They listened to the news cast. No ships could be seen from metropolitan New York. The other ships were stationary. Two news services were broadcasting from aircraft circling the silent ships.
Alice changed to another program. An excited voice said, “This is Mal McKay, folks. It’s a bright sunny afternoon up here at three thousand feet. Our copter is hovering over one of these monsters from space. It looks like the back of some huge prehistoric beast. I’ve given the pilot the word, folks. We’re settling toward it. Closer, closer. We’ve landed! You of the radio audience can no longer hear our motors. Folks, it’s quiet up here, what I mean quiet. And we’ll have to get a new word to indicate how still and motionless this space ship is. It is as though it were welded to a big pole that extends down to the center of the earth. I’ll have to admit that it gives me the shakes, folks. You can probably hear it in my voice.”
“The darn fool!” Alice muttered. She scowled.
The bright, eager voice continued. “Now for the hide of this beast, folks. It seems to be metallic and yet it has the look of old rock. It seems corroded. I stamp my heel and it’s like stamping on a boulder. Now I’m touching it with my hand. There is a bit of warmth to it, but no more than you’d expect as the results of this late afternoon sunshine. I can see the other ships to the north and to the west. They’re just as steady and inert as this one. When we came up we saw the thin lines against the sides of the beast indicating doors or ports or whatever. There’s something or somebody inside this thing I’m standing on, folks, and it would be interesting to know what it or they are, hey? I have a stethoscope with me. You know, one of those things the doc checks your heart with? There’ll be a few moments of air silence while I listen through the hide of this monster.”
“He’ll be giving it a nickname,” Graim said with disgust.
“The human race,” Alice said, “is a big puppy that goes charging and yapping and wagging its tail at everything new.”
There was new excitement in the announcer’s voice. “Well, I’ve heard it or them. Sounds like a busy office. A bunch of clickings down in there. Click, clack, click, clack. And that’s all.”
“Relays,” Graim said. “Why couldn’t they have put a scientist on top of that thing instead of a human airdale?”
“Now, folks, I am taking out of my pocket a Willow’s file. You’ve heard of Willow’s files. ‘Sharpest steel teeth in the world.’ With this file I am going to scrape off a sample of the hide of this thing from space. There is a little flaked bit here sticking up, like an enormous pock mark, as though something hit it a blow and bounced off after damaging the hide. Listen and you’ll hear me filing on it.”
Over the radio came a tiny grating sound. It continued on and on. Then it stopped. The announcer laughed nervously. “Well, I guess that the sharpest steel teeth in the world aren’t quite sharp enough for this baby. I seem to be wearing the teeth off the file and I haven’t even made a mark on the thin edge I was sawing on. I see by my Sweething Watch — time when you need it — that my air time is running out. This is Mal McKay, folks, your things-of-the-day reporter, signing off from a brand new spot, the top of one of the spaceships near Cleveland. Until this same time tomorrow...”
The network cut in with station identification and a spot commercial. This time Graim switched off the set.
He clenched his fists and glared down at the rug. “No dignity,” he muttered. “No respect. No awe. Just as if those ships were two-headed calves in a sideshow.”
“But don’t you see?” Alice said. “That’s been the trouble with your stories. Your people in fiction have been loaded with awe and respect and dignity. And so they weren’t people. They are all little cardboard annies that you yank around with strings.”
He looked at her bleakly. “There are supposed to be riots tonight. Fear all over the world. Sidewalk orators talking about the end of the world.”
“Nuts, my boy. Joe Citizen is going home after a hard day in the shop. He pecks at the wife, snarls at the kids, stretches out on the couch, unfolds the paper and says, ‘Whaddya know? Space ships!’ Then he reads the bowling league scores.”