“Stop the car.”
He did so.
“Now come here.”
He did so.
Thirty seconds later he moved back behind the wheel, said in a hoarse and shaking voice, “Okay. Those ships are sitting out there behind us and you are sitting beside me and I haven’t had a breakdown.”
Alice sat back in the corner of the seat, a wise and secret smile on her lips.
At ten o’clock they sat in his room and watched the photographs reproduced on the television screen. The first one showed the flare picture of the nine ships taken from five thousand feet, before the raid.
The second picture showed the same nine ships after seventy tons of high explosive had been dumped on them. Except for a few dark stains on the silvery surface of what had been grassy fields, the picture showed no change whatsoever.
On the following morning they found that the enemy had been at work during the night. All encampments were in the same stage of development. Squat, rectangular structures were beginning to take shape within the central area. These structures were being built of silvery blocks which were being dug out of a central hole by an automatic digger. The procedure was to dig up a loose hopper of dirt and crushed rock which, on the video screen with the cameras run by a daring operator, seemed to be a half cubic yard. This dirt and rock went into a central compressor, was reduced startlingly to a small silver colored block or brick, placed in position by articulated arms and fingers which bore grotesque resemblance to a bricklayer hopped up with too much benzedrine.
Alice said, “Oh, I’m a gay little lass with brittle remarks for every contingency, but this I fail to like. I’m getting close to screams. This, Larry, is colonization, clumsy though it may be.”
At eleven the video networks combined to show the status of construction at ten sites. One of them had been subjected to direct artillery fire. The artillery fire had disabled some of the brick-laying machines. One of them had Alice close to hysteria. The metallic fingers had been crushed and the machine continued the building of an invisible wall while the silver bricks piled up at the end of the chute from the compresser.
At the Cleveland site the scrapers had done poor work. The walls were going up at grotesque, out-of-focus angles, as though seen through a distorting lense.
At a site neat Portsmouth in the southern tip of Ohio, a tank column roared in onto the silver floor. Flame throwers spattered the equipment with sticky gobs of fire. Shells ricocheted off the dull armor of the equipment. The machines worked stubbornly on like picnickers undismayed by an invasion of beetles. The tanks looked oddly dwarfed by the massive hulls of the ships. When the ammunition was exhausted, the column retreated, having partially disabled two bricklayers and completely disabled three more by direct hits on the articulated fingers. The few score others worked on, raising the silver walls of the rectangular buildings and the disabled machines went through the motions, accomplishing nothing.
Statesmen made brave speeches. The public was told to be brave and steadfast. Bombs thumped into the sites. Near Keokuk a reckless construction worker, without authority, became a national hero by taking his big shovel, clattering up to the invader housing project and rattling off with one of the silver bricks in the teeth of the shovel. It was found to be quite warm, giving off no radioactivity, in weight about eight hundred pounds. Scientists guessed that its extreme weight and hardness came from a partial crushing of the atomic structure of the earth and rock. In all hardness tests, Rockwell, Brinell and others, it recorded off the scale. A high-speed diamond drill failed to scratch it. The brick was flown to Pittsburg where the most massive equipment of the steel industry failed to distort it.
Keith Embuscado, klaxon-voiced commentator, said, in a special program, “Even now they are inside those ships, sneering at our efforts, believing that we have no deadlier weapon which we can use against them. I say that now is the time to use our greatest weapon, the world’s greatest weapon.”
Alice said, “Very neat. Now when they use The Bomb, ole Keith can take the credit.”
The site in Northern Wisconsin was selected for the use of the bomb, and all persons within a twenty mile radius were moved out late that day. Dawn was set for the trial use of the bomb.
Alice and Larry listened to the radio and watched the screen far into the night. They decided to stay up and wait for the reports of the bomb.
The grey dawn had taken on a rosy cast in the windows of Larry’s room when the cold voice of the air observer came over the radio.
“Approaching target area to observe damage. The mushroom cloud has broken up. The bomb was exploded fifty feet in the air directly over the center of the site. We are at three thousand feet. I see the silvery area ahead of us. The ships are still in the same pattern. Now I can see the area clearly. All invader construction has been flattened. The center of the area is a tumbled mass of the silver bricks. Their equipment has been scattered. The ships unimpaired. The blast depressed the center of the silver area turning it into a shallow bowl.” Suddenly there was a bit of excitement in the cold voice. “I see movement down there. Yes, movement. The scattered equipment is still in motion. Aimless, as though confused. Yes, going through the same motions as prior to the blast.”
The commercial newscasters came on, a vanguard of analysts, and then a series of analyses of the analysts.
They climbed up one side of the subject and down the other, gradually making clear the facts that, except for the initial opening of the doors of the ships, no lives had been taken, that the atomic bomb was fine way off there in Wisconsin, but what would happen where the sites were close to cities, that already there were near panics over the depressed property values near the sites.
One newscaster stated that the Russians were rumored to have made contact with the invader and had enlisted aid and support in spreading, by force of arms, the communist doctrine.
Larry was baffled and confused. The invasion from space refused to fit into the accepted story lines, the approved plots, the standard situations. According to his training in the writing of science fiction, one of two things should have happened. One, the bomb should have brought direct retaliation, or two, it should have been harmless. This was the absurd third possibility. The bomb had wrecked one site and yet there was no retaliation.
This made it absolutely essential for him to devise a plot situation, a reason for this absurdity. Either that or go quietly mad.
“Why?” he asked thinly. “Why?”
Alice went over to him and pushed a vagrant lock of hair off his forehead. “It isn’t going according to the books, is it, darling?”
“How can I even go back to work? I couldn’t even exterpolate a trend. I couldn’t even statistically predict an election.”
He stood up and began to pace back and forth. He thought aloud. “The plot isn’t going anywhere. The alien is efficient in many ways, absurd in others. It isn’t a self-respecting invasion. It’s more like a mechanical toy that...”
He stopped in midstride and gave Alice a long look. However it was a look that went through her and beyond her. Then he grinned delightedly, grabbed her and swung her around in a grotesque dance.
When she got her breath she said, “What? How?”
“Baby, get your hat. We’re going calling on the invader.”
“Have you gone out of your mind?”
“Completely. This is the only answer that will sell the story.”
“Story? Sell?”
“I keep forgetting that this is happening. We have some phone calls to make.”
At dawn they were on the familiar grassy bank where they had been before. Alice said, “You are grouchy in the morning, Larry.”