We saw this one ourselves.
But in the city where we live, one doubts even the validity of that credential.
We went so far as to entertain a while the idea of devoting this issue to accounts only by those who had slept through, who were busy in the cellar or windowless back room when, or — hope on hope — could claim to have been strolling about yesterday afternoon and observed during, nothing extraordinary in the sky.
But if the advent in our nights of George is anything to go by, we should have to look outside our misty and deliquescent city limits to find a negative witness. At least we hope so.
Please, return to page one. The plight of Jackson's Lower Cumberland area, where apparently all power has gone out with the breaking of the water main on my last Thursday (how dangerous that is for the rest of us nobody can say because nobody can estimate the losses from the fractured dam in terms of our decreased population) is a real dilemma. More real we would like to feel, than yesterday's portent.
We are not anxious either to describe or even name what passed. Presumably some copy of this will get beyond our border; we should like to keep our good name. We would much prefer to give our opinions on Lower Cumberland Park. But another writer (page one, continued page seven) has already rehearsed his eyewitness, first-hand account. And, anyway, in his words, "…chances are, no one lives there any more."
Dubious to time, the arc became visible in the late afternoon of the overcast day. In a spectrum ranging only through grey, black, and blue, you would have to see to judge the effects of those golds and bronzes, those reds and purplish browns! Minutes later, most of us here had gathered in the August Garden. The view was awesome. Speculation, before awe silenced it, was rampant. When, after fifteen minutes, perhaps a fourth of the disk had emerged, we had our first case of hysteria… But rather than dwell on those understandable breakdowns, let us commend Professor Wellman on his level-headedness throughout, and Budgie Goldstein on her indomitable high spirits.
More than an hour in the rising, the monumental… disk? sphere? whatever? eventually cleared the visible buildings. There is some question, even among those gathered in August, as to whether the orb actually hovered, or whether it immediately changed direction and began to set again, slightly (by no more than a fifth of its diameter) to the left — this last, the estimate of Wallace Guardowsky.
The lower rim, at any rate, was above the horizon for fifteen or twenty minutes. Even at full height, it could be stared at for minutes because of the veiling clouds. Colonel Harris advised, however, that we curtail prolonged gazing. The setting, almost all are agreed, took substantially less time than the rising, and has been estimated between fifteen minutes and a half an hour. We have heard several attempts now, to estimate size, composition, and trajectory. We doubt recording even the ones we could understand would be much use — the merest indulgence in cleverness before something so… awful! Do we hear objections from you eager for meaningful cosmologic distractions? May we simply ask your trust: of the explanations heard, none, frankly, were that clever. And we do not choose to insult our readers.
We recall, with distrust and wheedling astonishment, the speed at which the last such celestial apparition acquired, by common consent of the common, its cognomen. How heartening, then, that this vision should prove too monstrous for facile appellation. (One has been suggested from a number of quarters, but all common decency and decorum forbids us to mention it; we have defamed the young woman, many feel, enough in these pages already.) Indeed, though a label might cling to such when we review it with a smile, certain images lose their freedom and resonance if, when we regard them with a straight face, we do so through the diffraction of a name.
"What do you think of that?" Faust asked, coming a little ways across the street.
Kid laughed. "Calkins is pretty quick to call a spade a spade. But when it comes to naming anything else, he's still chicken-shit!"
"No, no. Not that." Faust had to toss the rolled paper three times before getting it into the second story window. "I mean on page one."
Kid, sitting on the stoop, leaned down to scratch his foot. "What—?" He turned back to the front of the tabloid. "Where is Cumberland Park, anyway?"
"Lower Cumberland Park?" Faust craned his ropy neck and, beneath his corduroy jacket, scratched his undershirt. "That's down at the other end of Jackson. That's where they got some really bad niggers. It's where the great god Harrison lives."
"Oh," Kid said. "Where I was last night. It says here something about nobody living there any more."
Faust hefted the bundle on his hip. "Then all I know is that I leave a God-damn lot of papers in front of a God-damn lot of doors, and they ain't there the next day when I come back. Damn, splashing around in all that water in the street yesterday morning!" He squinted back at the window. "It was better this morning though. Hey, I see you again tomorrow. That your book the office is full up with?"
"I don't know," Kid said. "Is it?"
Faust frowned. "You should come up to the office sometime and take a look where they print the paper and things. Come up with me, some day. I'll show it all to you. Your book went in the day before yesterday—" Faust snapped his fingers. "And I put cartons of it in the bookstores last night. Soon as it… well, you know, got dark."
Kid grunted and opened the Times again, to look at something not Faust.
"Get your morning paper!" The old man loped down the block, hollering into the smoke: "Right here, get your morning paper!"
What he'd opened to was another quarter-page advertisement for Brass Orchids. He left it on the stoop, and walked toward the corner, when a sound he'd been dimly aware of broke over the sky: Roaring. And nestled in the roar, the whine a jet makes three blocks from the airport. Kid looked as the sound gathered above him. Nothing was visible; he looked down the block. Faust, a figurine off in a milky aquarium, had stopped too. The sound rolled away, lowering.
Faust moved on to disappear.
Kid turned the corner.
It's different inside the nest, he thought, trying to figure what should be the same:
The crayoning on the dirty wall—
The loose ceiling fixture—
In his hand, the knobs squared and toothy shaft rasped out another inch—
A black face came from the middle room, looked back inside; shook his head, and went down to the bathroom. Among voices, Nightmare's laugh, and:
"Okay. I mean, okay." That was Dragon Lady. "You said your thing, now what you want us to do?"
While someone else in the hubbub, shouted, "Hey, hey, hey come on now. Hey!"
"I mean now… yeah!" Nightmare's voice separated. "What do you want?"
Kid went to the door.
Across the room, Siam and Glass noticed him with small, different nods. Kid leaned on the jam. The people in the center, their backs to him, were not scorpions.
"I mean—" Nightmare, circling, bent to hit his knees—"what do you want?"
"Look." John turned to follow him, holding the lapels of his Peruvian vest. "Look, this is very serious!" His blue work shirt was rolled up his forearms; the sleeves were stained, dirty, and frayed at one elbow. His thumbnails, the only ones visible, were very clean. "I mean you guys have got to…" He gestured.
Milly stepped out of the way of his arm.