The past several days Joe Chester had slept soundly. Tonight his sleep was especially deep, since he could rest secure in the knowledge that tomorrow the troublesome, fascinating alien device would be safely on its way via military helicopter to the Manned Space Center in Houston, allowing him to spend at least a portion of the holiday with his family.
So the shattering roar and subsequent rolling concussion came as even more of a shock than it would have in the weeks previous. Chester, wartime reactions still active, threw himself out of bed. He was on his feet and stumbling outside before the trailer cot had ceased trembling.
Freezing air formed a weathery gauntlet that stunned his still-warm skin even through the long woolen under wear. The numbness gradually gave way to a steady pounding.
A soft susurration rose from the surrounding knot of trailers as others came awake, uncertain queries volleying from trailer to trailer. A glance up and down the road showed distant lights winking on. There were two battalions of crack but nonetheless trigger-ready troops stationed around the ranch, and they would need to know soon what was going on.
"Oh, my God, no!" an agonized voice sounded nearby. Then Calumet was rushing past him, clad in pajamas and robe, his bare feet kicking up dirt and gravel behind him as he ran toward the barn.
Goldberg and Tut appeared shortly thereafter, the big physicist struggling to clear his eyes and adjust his glasses simultaneously. Goldberg simply stared, her mouth moving slowly. She shivered a little and looked her age.
A light had gone out of the barnyard.
In its explosive departure the spacecraft had taken the front half of the barn roof with it. Bits and pieces of wood were still raining down on them, clattering like hail on the metal roofs of the trailers and bouncing off the sprawling ranch house nearby. From the front porch the two dogs were barking and whining piteously.
Looking toward the house, he saw that all three Shattucks were standing there, gazing at the barn. At least, he reflected with stunned relief, they'd elected to display the device on the barn instead of their home.
"Due west," a shrill-soft tone sounded behind him. Following Goldberg's instructions, he turned his eyes to the western sky. A bright star was rising heavenward there, shrinking in intensity as he watched. It was gone quickly.
Goldberg sat down on the hard earth, her old flannel nightgown crumpling devotedly around her, and sobbed. Chester had no words to assuage the loss of a lifetime's opportunity.
Tut was trying to comfort her, but Chester could sense that the younger man was having difficulty holding back tears himself.
As was often true of people in shock, Chester was unaware of his own paralysis. With the clarity of the stunned he noted how only wisps of hay were falling now. He noticed as well that there was no fire in the combustible soft and that none of the fallen fragments of wood were so much as scorched. Their mechanical visitor's method of propulsion was as infinitely cold as the reaches it was once again traversing-cold and silent.
There'd been no muted roar of pitiful, primitive rockets, no whine of energy building. The initial crack had been the sound of bare wood and metal giving way. The subsequent booming had been produced by air rushing in to fill the path displaced by the craft's departure. Again he looked at the vast hole in the barn and marveled at the acceleration achieved so rapidly.
A dejected figure was walking toward him, head staring dully at the ground. Calumet had both hands in the pockets of his robe, a picture of dejection too severe for the cold to affect. He stopped, noticing that the Shattucks had moved to stand midway between their home and the-barn. Chester strolled over to join them all.
"Well," said Beth Shattuck to the distraught Calumet, "it appears like you were right, after all."
"Right?" he muttered, seeming to only half hear her.
"Yep. About it bein' dangerous." She pointed for; ward. "Look what it went and did to our barn. Come on, J.W.," she urged her husband, "we'd better go reassure those fool cows or they'll give nothin' but Bu1garian buttermilk for a month."
The three Shattucks started for the remains of their barn. At least three and maybe four small gray-black cats of dubious pedigree trailed in their wake.
Again Chester stared upward in the direction taken b the vanished visitor from another world, another system. He found that he had to look away. The stars beneath that cloudless big country sky were pressing unbearably close all of a sudden.
"What do you think happened, Mr. Calumet-Jean?"
Somehow the chemist heard him and gave an indifferent shrug. "It was a robotic lander, probably similar in function to our advanced Viking landers. It set down here, gathered the information it was designed to, and left. Now it's on its way home, that's all." His gaze turned starward, unafraid.
"The operative question is, How long did it take coming? If it was ten years or something equally reasonable, we may finally meet some of those beings we always told ourselves are running around bumping in each other like crazy out there. If it took a thousand then neither you nor I will be around to see it."
"I wonder if it set down here accidentally." Chester murmured. "In a way they might be as disappointed as we were after the first couple of Mars landings." He nodded at the barn. "It couldn't have learned very much sitting up there."
"That all depends on what you want to study," countered Calumet. "I'm not so sure its touchdown here was as random as we might think. It was an incredibly sophisticated device. Can you conceive of an average family reacting to it as the Shattucks did? Their one reaction to it was that it was beautiful.
"Then we have the matter of the chicken-stealing coyotes which the device paralyzed, not to mention those thugs on their way to your base. I'd give twenty years of my life to have a look at the sensing equipment inside that thing.
"Somehow it must have made up its mind that it liked the Shattucks and this location and that it wasn't going to be moved. Furthermore, it was apparently intelligent enough to decide that the theft of chickens was detrimental to the family. Or that might just have been some sort of experiment. We'll never know. Not now."
"It's gone," noted Chester perfunctorily, "and there's nothing we can do about it. I'll make a report, calm the troops guarding the ranch, and then we can all go home, I guess. It's finished."
"I wonder," Calumet murmured, gazing heavenward,
"What?"
"Oh, nothing, really. It's just that it's not every night you see a new star recede into the firmament-funny coincidence."
"What is?" a puzzled Chester wanted to know.
Calumet looked at his watch. "That in a couple of hours dawn will break on the morning of the twenty-fifth." His smile was crooked. "Maybe we weren't meant to have too close a look at our guest this time around. Merry Christmas, Major."
Calumet wrapped his robe a little tighter around him and walked toward the big trailer that held sleeping quarters for the three scientists. Chester headed for his own and the field telephone inside.
He hesitated with the door half-open, even though he knew that the heat from the little electric heater was being sucked voraciously into the open air. His eyes went for the last time to the empty path the departed device had taken on its homeward course to no one knew where.
"And to all a good night," he whispered softly as he closed the door quietly behind him, shutting out the sky.
COLLECTIBLE