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 pa.s.sed 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.
The Adjutant felt the adrenaline flowing erratically. He had been taking slop from the General for three weeks, and now to be forced into flying up himself, into the very jaws of death (as he phrased it to himself), to look over the situation . . . he would brook no backtalk from a whey-faced flight boy fresh out of Floyd Bennett.
Alberts shooed him off, directed him back to the stick. "Don"t worry yourself, pilot." He licked his lips, added, "They cleared, and all we have to worry about is that saucer line up ahead."
The discs were rising out of the late evening Nevada haze. The clouds seemed to have lowered, and the fog seemed to have risen, and the two intermingled, giving a wavering, indistinct appearance to the metallic line of saucers, stretching off beyond the horizon.
The Adjutant looked out through the curving bubble of the helicopter"s control country, and felt the same twinges of fear rippling the hair along his neck that he had felt when the General had started putting the screws to him.
The Sikorsky rescue copter windmilled in toward the saucer, its rotorsflap-flap-flap-flapping overhead.
The pilot sticked-in on the dirty saucer. It rose out of the mist abruptly, and they were close enough to see that there reallywas dust streaked with dirt along the dull metal surface of the ship.Probably from one of these Nevada windstorms , the Adjutant thought.
They scaled down, and came to a hovering stop two feet above the empty metal face of the disc.
"See anything?" the Adjutant asked.
The pilot craned off to one side, swept his gaze around, then turned on the searchbeam. The pole of light.w.a.tered across the sleek saucer bulk, and picked up nothing. Not even a line of rivets, not even a break in the construction. Nothing but dirt and pockmarks, and what might be considered patches, were this a tire or an ordinary ship.
"Nothing, sir."
"Take us over there, right there, will you, pilot?"
The Adjutant indicated a lighter place on the metal of the ship. It seemed to be a different shade of chrome-color. The Sikorsky jerked, lifted a few inches, and slid over. The pilot brought it back down, and they looked over the hull of the saucer at that point.
It was, indeed, lighter in shade.
"Thiscould be something, pi - "
The shaft rose up directly in front of the Sikorsky before he could finish the word.
It was a column of transparent, almost gla.s.s-like material, with a metal disc sealing off the top. It was rising out of the metal where there had been no break in the skin, and it kept rising till it towered over them.
"M-m-m - " the Adjutant struggled to get the word loose.
"Move!" More a snarl than a command. But before they could whip away, theperson stepped up inside the column, stared straight out, his gigantic face on a line with their cab.
He must have been thirty feet tall, and completely covered with reddish-brown hair. His ears were pointed, and set almost atop his head. The eyes were pocketed by deep ridges of matted hair, and his nose was a pair of breather-slits. His hands hung far below his indrawn waist, and they were eight-fingered. Each finger was a tentacle that writhed with a separate life of its own. He wore a loose-fitting and wrinkled, dirty sort of toga affair, patched and covered with stains.
He stared at them unblinking. For he had no eyelids.
"Gawd Almighty!" the pilot squawked, and fumbled blindly at his controls for an instant, unable to tear his eyes away from the being before them. Finally his hand met the controls, and the Sikorsky bucked backward, tipped, and rose rapidly above the saucer, spiraling away into the night as fast as the rotors would windmill. In a minute the copter was gone.
The gla.s.site pillar atop the dirty saucer remained raised for a few minutes, then slowly sank back into the ship.
No mark was left where it had risen.
Somehow, news of theperson leaked out. And from then on, telescopes across the world were trained on the unbroken band of discs circling the Earth. They watched in shifts, not wanting to miss a thing, but there was nothing more to see. No further contact was made, in person or by radio.
There was no sign of life anywhere along the chain of discs. They could have been empty for all anyone knew. Going into the eighth week, no one knew any more about them than on the day they had arrived.
No government would venture an exploratory party, for the slightest hint of a wrong move or word might turn the unleashed wrath of the saucers on the Earth.Stocks fell quickly and crazily. Shipping was slowed to a standstill, and production fell off terrifically in factories. No one wanted to work when they might be blown up at any moment. People began a disorganized exodus to the hills and swamps and lost places of the planet. If the saucers were going to wash the cities with fire and death, no one wanted to be there when it happened.
They were not hostile, and that was what kept the world moving in its cultural tracks; but they werealien , they were from thestars ! And that made them objects of terror.
Tempers were short; memos had long since been replaced by curses and demands. Allegations were thrown back and forth across the oceans. Dereliction of duty proceedings were begun on dozens of persons in high places.
The situation was worsening every moment. In the tenth week the nasty remarks ceased, and there were rumors of a court-martial. And a firing squad.
"Got todo something, Alberts. Got to dosome thing!"
The Adjutant watched the spectacle of his superior shattering with something akin to sorrow. There went the cushy job.
"But what, General?" He kept his voice low and modulated. No sense sending the old boy into another tantrum.
"I - I want to go up there . . . see what he looks like . . . see what I can d-do . . ."
An hour later the Sikorsky carried the General to the Maginot Line of silent saucers.
Twenty minutes later he was back, bathed in sweat, and white as a fish-belly. "Horrible. All hair and eyes. Horrible. Horrible." He croaked a few more words, and sank into a chair.
"Call Ordnance," he breathed gaspingly. "Prepare a missile.
"With an atomic warhead.
"Now!"
They attached the parasite missile beneath a night-fighter, checking and double-checking the release mechanism.
Before they released the ship, they waited for the General"s okay. This wasn"t just a test flight, this was an atomic missile, and whatever the repercussions, they wanted them on the General"s head, not their own.
In the base office, the Adjutant was replacing the phone in its cradle. "What did Washington say, General?" he asked the trembling officer.
"They said the situation was in my hands. I was free to do as I saw fit. The President can"t be located.
They think he and his cabinet have been smuggled out West somewhere, to the mountains."
The General did not look at his Adjutant as he spoke the words. He stared at his clasped and shaking hands.
"Tell them to release the missile. We"ll watch it on TV."
The Adjutant lifted the phone, clicked the connection b.u.t.tons twice, spoke quickly, softly, into themouthpiece. "Let it go."
A minute and a half later, from half a mile away on the launching strip, they heard the jet rev-up and split the evening sky with its fire.
Then they went to the television room and watched the lines of screens.
In one they saw the silent girdle of saucers. In another they were focused on the dirty saucer, with a sign above the screen that said INITIAL TARGET. In a third they had a line-of-sight to the night-fighter"s approach pattern.
"There it comes!" one of the technicians yelled, pointing at the lighter dark of the jet as it streaked toward the ma.s.sed saucers, leaving a trail of fire behind it. They watched silently as the plane swooped in high, dove, and they saw the parasite leave its belly, streak on forward. The jet sliced upward, did a roll, and was a mile away as the parasite homed in exactly.
They watched with held breath as the small atomic missile deaded-in on the dirty saucer, and they flinched as it struck.
A blinding flash covered all the screens for a moment, and a few seconds later they heard the explosion.
Shock waves ripped outward and the concussion was great enough to knock out eighteen of the thirty telemetering cameras.
But they could see the dirty saucer clearly on one. In that one the smoke and blast were clearing slowly.
A mushroom-shaped cloud was rising, rising, rising from the sloping dish of the saucer"s upper side. As it moved away they could see oxidized smears and blast pattern of white jagged sunbursts. It looked as harmless as a kid"s experiment with a match, pota.s.sium nitrate, and powdered magnesium. It had not harmed the saucer in the least. But . . .
There was a crack along the top face of the saucer. And from that gash spilled a bubbling white substance. The stuff frothed out and ran across the top of the saucer. It pitted and tore at the metal of the ship wherever it touched. There was a weird sound of clacking and coughing from the ship, as though some intricate mechanism within were erupting.
Then, as they watched, the gla.s.site pillar rose up out of the ship . . .
. . . and theperson was within.
Unmistakably, his face was a violence of rage and hatred. His fists beat against the gla.s.site, and he roared - silently, for no sound could be picked up by the audio ears - inside the pillar. He spat, and blood - red and thick - dotted the clear gla.s.site. His mouth opened screaming wide and long, sharp teeth could be seen.
He shook a fist at the emptiness beyond the saucer, and the pillar lowered into the ship.
A minute later, for the first time since it had arrived, the dirty saucerflicked! out of existence and was gone.
"That was perhaps the wrong move, General . . ."
The General, who had been fastened to the TV screen by some invisible linkage, tore his eyes away from the set, and whirled, glowering, on his Adjutant.
"That"s forme to worry about, Captain Alberts. I told you the military mind can solve problems by thedirect method, the uncomplicated method, while these scientists dawdle and doodle helplessly." He was speaking loudly, almost hysterically, and the Adjutant recognized relief in the officer"s tones.
"They"re on the run!" the General shouted, grinning hugely. "On the run, by George! Now, come on, Alberts, let"s get a few antiaircraft battalions out there on the desert and pick off the rest of them in this area. Wait till the President hears ofthis !"
They were out on the desert, the ack-ack guns sniffing at the sky, pelting the saucers from six separate batteries. They were intent on what they were doing, certain that anyone in those other ships (and why did the Adjutant keep getting the feeling that those other ships wereempty? ) would turn tail and disappear as quickly as the dirty saucer had done an hour and a quarter before.
They had just lobbed five fast sh.e.l.ls at a snow-white saucer with purple markings, when the dirty saucer reappeared.
Flick!
He was back, that hairy alien in the dirty, stained toga. He was back in the same spot he had vacated, almost directly above the General"s batteries.
The pillar rose, and the General watched stunned as the metal top slid off the pillar, and the alien stepped out.
He stepped onto the top of his ship, and they saw the gash in the hull had been repaired. Caulked with some sort of black sticky stuff that stuck to the alien"s clawed feet as he walked along the top of the saucer. He carried a thick, gun-like object in his hands, cradled against his ma.s.sive chest.
Then he screamed something in a voice like thunder. They could hear it only roughly, for it was in a guttural tongue. Then he switched to English, and screamed again, in more detail.
The General strained his ears. His hearing had never been the best, but the Adjutant heard, it was clear to see, from the look of horror and failure and frustration on his face. Then the Adjutant dove away from the antiaircraft gun, rolled over several times, and sprinted out into the desert.
The General hesitated only a moment before following, but that was enough.
The alien turned the gun-like object on the batteries, and a roar and a flash sent the metal screaming skyward, ripping and shredding. Bodies were flung in every direction, and a blue pallor settled across the landscape as a thirty-foot crater opened where the battery had been.
The General felt himself lifted, buffeted, and thrown. He landed face forward in the ditch, and saw his arm land five feet away. He screamed; the pain in his left side was excruciating.
He screamed again, and in a moment Alberts was beside him, dragging him away from the area of destruction. The alien was standing spraddle-legged atop his machine, blasting, blasting, scouring the Earth with blue fire.
The alien screamed in English again, and then he stepped into the pillar, which lowered into the ship once more. A few seconds later the shipflicked! away, and materialized in the sky ten miles off, above the air base.
There was more blasting. Blue pallor lit the sky for a full half hour.The saucerflicked! and was gone. A few moments later the blue pallor - fainter yet, but strengthening all the time - was seen twenty miles further on, washing Las Vegas.
Flick! Flick! Flick!
And a dozen more saucers, dirtier than the first, materialized, paused a moment as though getting their bearings, thenflicked! away.
For the next hours the blue pallor filled the sky, and it was easy to see the scouring was moving across the planet systematically.
The General"s head was cradled in his Adjutant"s lap. He was sinking so rapidly there was no hope at all.
His entire left side had been scorched and ripped open. He lay there, looking up at the face of the once-dapper Adjutant, his eyes barely focusing. His tongue bulged from his mouth, and then a few words.
Haltingly, "I . . . c-couldn"t hear . . . what he s-said, Alb-berts. W-what . . . did . . . he . . . say?"
The General"s eyes closed, but his chest still moved. The Adjutant felt all the hatred he had built for this man vanish. Though the bl.u.s.tering fool had caused the death of a world, still he was dying, and there was no sense letting him carry that guilt with him.
"Nothing, General. Nothing at all. You did your very best, sir."
Then he realized the last "sir" had been spoken uselessly. The General was dead.
"You did your best, sir," the Adjutant spoke to the night. "It wasn"t your fault the attendant picked us.
"All the alien said was that there were destructive pests in thisparking lot , and he was one attendant who was going to clear them out even if he had to work overtime for a century."
The words faded in the night, and only the blue pallor remained. Growing, flashing, never waning. Never.
SOLDIER.
If this next story seems a bit familiar, it"s only because an ego-drenched movie director ripped it off when I adapted it in 1965 for a segment ofThe Outer Limits . So I brought a lawsuit against the film company.