“But some people are alarmed!”
“You and I are alarmed, Larry. And responsible heads of governments. And chronic worriers. A lot of smart men in a lot of labs all over the world are doing some constructive thought on what makes those brutes stay up in the air and where they could have come from and what they want and how to get in touch with them.”
“I want to do something,” he said.
Her tone was soft. “Sure you do, Larry. You’re identifying yourself with the heroic young men of your stories. You want to go steaming out and solve the great problem. Have you got a bank account?”
He gave her a puzzled stare. “A few hundred. Why?”
“Those ships are coming down somewhere. I have a beatup coupe in a garage around the corner. You’ll be miserable the rest of your life unless you get a good look at them. When they come down we’ll go take a look. Okay?”
He was suddenly excited. “That sounds wonderful!” Then he frowned. “But why do you care?”
“Have you ever had a woman give you an answer that gave herself away? Have you ever met a shameless woman?”
He swallowed hard. “I... I don’t know.”
She smiled. “Here’s your answer, lad. I care because you care.”
She stood up quickly and before he could make a sound she had left the room and closed the door behind her.
After giving her answer due consideration, Lawrence Graim stood up, arched his chest, squared his shoulders and walked pompously around his room until he found that he was running into the furniture. Then he sat down, wearing a wide, fatuous, indelible smile.
At eight the next morning he was knocking on her door. She opened her door and he was so impressed with how good she could look in the morning that he forgot what he was about to say.
She said, “I heard it too, Larry. I’ll be down to your room in ten minutes. And then we’ll go. Make some of that coffee of yours. You’re going to make some happy girl a good wife.” She shut the door.
He went one floor past his room, walked back up. By the time the coffee was perking she came in carrying a small suitcase, a topcoat over her arm.
Over her coffee she said, “Every thrill seeker in Manhattan will be boiling out to take a look at the spot where they landed. We’ll have to avoid the crowd. They’re about eight miles northwest of Nyack. Everybody will be steaming up the parkway and crossing at the G. Washington Bridge. So we’ll take the tunnel and circle around and come in from the back. I know the back roads in that area. Okay?”
“Fine with me. But why the suitcase?”
“This might be just a little more than a jaunt, Larry.” He looked into her eyes and for a moment he shared her fear.
After the fourth back road they tried was blocked with a jammed stream of yapping cars, a crescendo of klaxons, they gave up. Larry turned back, found a place where the ditch was shallow and pulled well off into a clump of brush. They locked the car, leaving the bags inside. He walked behind her up the road, by the double line of cars, noting that she wore flat-heeled shoes, also noting that her walk was, to him, as intriguing as would be an intricate dance by any other woman.
Others were doing as they had done, and soon they were part of a long stream of pedestrians. Weary sweating men wearing self-consciously indifferent looks while their wives shepherded the kids. “Mommy, where’s the Martians?” “Just a little way further, honey.”
The feet stirred up dust from the shoulder. A little old lady sat with austere dignity in the back seat of a huge black sedan, trapped by lesser cars. A man had set up his pitch beside the road. “Getcher Martian balloons here! Balloons for the kiddies, lady? Watchem fly.”
Peanuts and popcorn and balloons and ice cream. Holiday atmosphere. It could have been the National Air Races, or the P.G.A. Tournament, or the big day at Indianapolis, or Barnum and Bailey come to town.
Alice said, “For goodness sake get the look off your face, as though you smelled something bad. Now you know what really happens when spaceships land.”
Troopers on motorcycles idled up through the crowds, motors thudding heavily, weary voices saying, “Stay in line. Stay in line.”
It was a two-mile walk to where the ships had landed. And when Alice and Larry got there, they could see nothing but the backs of the multitude. People standing and talking and laughing and holding the children on high. “See the Martians, honey?”
The ships had landed in a vast open stretch where there were only a few lightly wooded hummocks.
Larry pushed Alice sideways through the crowd. He whispered, “Over on the left there is a hill where we can see something.”
The hill turned out to be steeper than it had looked. They went up the back of the hill and it was necessary to grab at the small trees, clutch at roots. Alice went down onto the shale, taking the knees out of both stockings and staining her dress.
At last they came through the fringe of brush at the top and they could see the wide sunlit area, the vast crowd on the right in a huge semicircle. There were nine ships and they had landed in the form of a nine pointed star, but with a clear area in the center of the star about a half mile across. They were the fat, clumsy spokes of a vast wheel with an enormous hub. Larry once again got the impression of age so vast, so incredible, that the mere thought of it was dizzying.
He remembered something of the same feeling from an army stopover in Cairo, when he had gone out and looked at the pyramids. But this was intensified.
They were not mathematically spaced, but were subtly out of line, in keeping with their clumsiness in the air.
The bolder members of the crowd were right up next to the ships, shaded by the bulging overhang.
“I don’t like their being so close,” Alice said. “It makes me feel as though something were going to happen.”
“I don’t get it. They’ve landed in groups like this all over the world according to the radio. They’ve picked relatively level places. Like... well, like big slugs settling down on a ripe fruit.”
Alice shivered. “That’s almost too good, Graim. Save it for your next epic.”
“Want to go down there?”
“Uh uh. I like it here. I like it very much here.”
He moved to the side, found a grassy bank. They sat and smoked and looked at the thickening crowd, at the silent ships.
When a cloud moved across the face of the sun, Alice moved closer to Larry. It made him feel masculine and protective. He was tasting the delights of this new feeling when the side ports of the ships opened. They were rectangular sections, thirty yards wide, possibly fifty yards high. They were hinged along the bottom edge and the method of their opening was that they Tell open. They were enormously thick, and so heavy that when they fell against the soil, the top edge was imbedded deeply.
And, of course, the spectators who had been standing there were instantly smashed into the ground.
There was an instant of silence, and then an enormous roaring scream of fear from the huge crowd. Except for a few dazed and hardy souls who had the vague idea of extricating their loved ones from the pulped soil and who clawed at the fallen ports as effectually as ants struggling with a boulder, every man, woman and child turned and fled, wide-eyed, gasping with fear, trampling the weak and the slow.
Within two minutes the ships had the vast area to themselves. Bodies lay where they had been trampled. A few moved feebly like half-crushed insects. The trampled grass was a litter of gum wrappers, empty cigarette packs, half-eaten sandwiches. Several toy balloons drifted forlornly toward the clouded sky.