Grinder and Hassling became indignant. They didn’t want Marker messing with it until they could check it carefully and try to get samples of the atmosphere inside it in sealed containers for qualitative analysis. Klippe reassured them.
“But what is it, gentlemen?” he demanded.
There was no answer. Hassling rumbled something about a vortex of unknown forces, a dislocation in space, rupture in the continuum.
Two days later nobody was any closer. Grinder, in tones of intense irritation, explained the technical problem to Klippe. “The bloody awful thing won’t stay still. Perform a test fifteen times and you get twelve different results.”
Not one of us had guessed what it was. We were too used to thinking in terms of tough metallic shells, and big ports that unscrewed soundlessly to permit tentacled you-name-its to emerge.
It was a space ship.
There wasn’t any hysteria. The Emergency Committee went at their task in a sane orderly way. This was Man, attacking a problem, in the best sense of the word attack.
Now consider this. The story is off the rails. Ingredients are missing. Traditionally we should have had national and international hysteria, scare headlines, and, of course, three practically essential people. You know those people well. The old professor, his beautiful daughter, and the young engineer who has a really wild idea of what to do about things. The idea works, always. Man triumphs.
It wasn’t like that. We were just a competent group out there eight miles from Walesville, Ohio, trying to make sense out of nonsense.
The only change in the Thing was that it kept getting more opaque. The reason for that was obvious. Those rocks that fell kept chipping and splitting. Sometimes one would fall on another. The grass and twigs and small trees kept getting ground up finer. The floating soldier had disappeared. Perhaps a rock fell exactly when he did. The air inside the thing kept getting more and more murky with floating ground-up debris.
I was generally ignored. My job wouldn’t start until they found out what it was. If it turned out to be something unpalatable, I had to guide the eventual press coverage so as to sugar coat it. Marker was convinced that it was a Russian experiment, and a second cousin of psychological warfare. He thought they’d dropped it there like a leaflet. Hassling wouldn’t buy that. Grinder had stopped talking to anybody except the bright young men he had imported, with Klippe’s permission. We had two floors in the Walesville Hotel. The battalion personnel, of course, encamped at the area. Walesville was convinced we were setting up some kind of atomic installation. The citizens were busy signing petitions objecting to it.
On the sixth day it changed. The whirling inner motion stopped. Everything fell and it was crystal clear again. It had that strange sheen. Grinder and Hassling went to work again.
I heard Grinder make his new complaint to Klippe. “Now the damn thing is absolutely impervious. Come with me. I’ll show you.”
I tagged along. They’d spray-painted a section of it so they could see what they were working on. They’d borrowed some OD paint from the battalion quartermaster. The scum of paint stuck to a curved featureless surface. By walking over to one side you could see the back of the layer of paint. It gave me a weird feeling to be that close to it. I touched it where it wasn’t painted. It was damn cold. The moisture on my fingertips froze at once and I had to pull my fingers gingerly off of it. It made me remember a pre-school winter long ago in Scranton when some big boys talked me into touching my tongue to a metal lamp post when it was two degrees above zero. They ran. I stood and yelled, glued to the post, until my mother came out with a pan of hot water and unstuck me.
One of Grinder’s people used a diamond drill, running off one of the battalion generators. He could get through the paint and that was that. He couldn’t get a micromillimeter deeper.
At the subsequent conference Admiral Plover suggested tank trucks full of concrete and high-pressure hoses. He wanted to cement the whole thing over and go home and forget about it. Hassling and Grinder became more indignant than even Marker had made them.
I was on the way back to Walesville at three o’clock the next afternoon, riding in a jeep with a sergeant. We both heard the damnedest noise coming along behind us that either of us had ever heard. That was when it had started, but we didn’t know it then. It sounded as if a hundred thousand tons of rock was being rolled down the highway in a big tin barrel. The sergeant, bless him, was quick. He yanked the wheel without even taking time to look back. We bounced through a big shallow ditch and stopped way out in the middle of a field.
I looked at the highway. There was a big blue-and-silver bus on it. I saw something go by. It wasn’t a thing, it was an effect that I saw go by. Imagine that a solid three-lane concrete highway can develop a wave, as if the concrete is water. The wave crest went by. It went by the bus too. No bus. The sound went on down the highway toward Walesville. We heard it booming into the distance. We heard it fade away, with faint after-echo like thunder. The sergeant and I walked to the highway.
I will not describe the highway now, or what was left of the bus. The same thing happened to the highway and the bus that happened to Walesville. I will tell you about Walesville as I saw it at 5:30.
First you must imagine a very methodical stubborn child. This child has a big sand box. He has made a whole village in the sand box. Buildings, cars, people and all. All out of sand, carefully colored. On a rainy afternoon this child borrows his mother’s eggbeater. He starts at one corner of his sand box and he digs it in deep and churns his way back and forth for a couple of hours until he is right back where he started. Plain sand. But with little bits of flecks of color.
Walesville was a flat gray-brown waste two miles long and a mile and a half wide. Nothing stuck up more than six inches from that surface. The late sun slanted across it. I bent over and picked up a handful of the odd soil. It was like picking up sand on a beach and looking at it closely. You see infinitesimal shells, tiny bits of colored rock. These were larger pieces, but the effect was the same. I held pieces of concrete, pieces of brick, a small bright piece of metal, some bits of paper, a piece of wood varnished on one side, some soil and a piece of pink bone with a small shred of flesh attached to it. I dropped the handful hastily and rubbed my hand on the side of my pants. A flock of birds flew across the expanse, headed for distant trees, peeping excitedly as they flew.
The sergeant found one-half of a dime. He fingered it. His broad tan face showed no expression as he looked at the drab plain. The highway had been the same. There was a faint bluish tinge to the chopped area where the bus had been. The slant of the sun caught small fragments of glass and metal. A city dump, I thought. A dump where a city had been. Scratch one city. Scratch 14 thousand people. It was too big a concept to absorb all at once.
“Let’s go back,” the sergeant said.
We went back. We met others coming in. We tried to tell them, but they had to see for themselves. They said the Thing was gone. They said it had left a little after three. The ruin of the highway began a mile beyond the roadblock.
Klippe held the next conference at midnight. Generators supplied the lights. The battalion officers attended.