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 rotors flap-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 really was 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 watered 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.
“This could 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 glass-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, the person 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 glassite 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 the person 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 were alien, they were from the stars! 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 to do something, Alberts. Got to do something!”
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 buttons twice, spoke quickly, softly, into the mouthpiece. “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.