On the morning the radar reported something odd out in space, Lockley
awoke at about twenty minutes to eight. That was usual. He'd slept in
a sleeping bag on a mountain-flank with other mountains all around.
That was not unprecedented. He was there to make a base line
measurement for a detailed map of the Boulder Lake National Park,
whose facilities were now being built. Measuring a base line, even
with the newest of electronic apparatus, was more or less a
commonplace job for Lockley.
This morning, though, he woke and realized gloomily that he'd dreamed
about Jill Holmes again, which was becoming a habit he ought to break.
He'd only met her four times and she was going to marry somebody else.
He had to stop.
He stirred, preparatory to getting up. At the same moment, certain
things were happening in places far away from him. As yet, no unusual
object in space had been observed. That would come later. But far away
up at the Alaskan radar complex a man on duty watch was relieved by
another. The relief man took over the monitoring of the giant,
football-field-sized radar antenna that recorded its detections on
magnetic tape. It happened that on this particular morning only one
other radar watched the skies along a long stretch of the Pacific
Coast. There was the Alaskan installation, and the other was in Oregon.
It was extremely unusual for only those two to be operating. The
people who knew about it, or most of them, thought that official
orders had somehow gone astray. Where the orders were issued, nothing
out of the ordinary appeared. All was normal, for example, in the
Military Information Center in Denver. The Survey saw nothing unusual
in Lockley's being at his post, and other men at places corresponding
to his in the area which was to become Boulder Lake National Park. It
also seemed perfectly natural that there should be bulldozer
operators, surveyors, steelworkers, concrete men and so on, all
comfortably at breakfast in the construction camp for the project.
Everything seemed normal everywhere.
Up to the time the Alaskan installation reported something strange in
space, the state of things generally was neither alarming nor
consoling. But at 8:02 A.M. Pacific time, the situation
changed. At that time Alaska reported an unscheduled celestial object
of considerable size, high out of atmosphere and moving with
surprising slowness for a body in space. Its course was parabolic and
it would probably land somewhere in South Dakota. It might be a
bolide--a large, slow-moving meteorite. It wasn't likely, but the
entire report was improbable.
The message reached the Military Information Center in Denver at 8:05
A.M. By 8:06 it had been relayed to Washington and every
plane on the Pacific Coast was ordered aloft. The Oregon radar unit
reported the same object at 8:07 A.M. It said the object was
seven hundred fifty miles high, four hundred miles out at sea, and was
headed toward the Oregon coastline, moving northwest to southeast.
There was no major city in its line of travel. The impact point
computed by the Oregon station was nowhere near South Dakota. As other
computations followed other observations, a second place of fall was
calculated, then a third. Then the Oregon radar unbelievably reported
that the object was decelerating. Allowing for deceleration, three
successive predictions of its landing point agreed. The object, said
these calculations, would come to earth somewhere near Boulder Lake,
Colorado, in what was to become a national park. Impact time should be
approximately 8:14 A.M.
These events followed Lockley's awakening in the wilds, but he knew
nothing of any of them. He himself wasn't near the lake, which was to
be the center of a vacation facility for people who liked the
outdoors. The lake was almost circular and was a deep, rich blue. It
occupied what had been the crater of a volcano millions of years ago.
Already bulldozers had ploughed out roads to it through the forest.
Men worked with graders and concrete mixers on highways and on bridges
across small rushing streams. There was a camp for them. A lakeside
hotel had been designed and stakes were driven in the ground where its
foundation would eventually be poured. There were infant big-mouthed
bass in the lake and fingerling trout in many of the streams. A huge
Wild Life Control trailer-truck went grumbling about such trails as
were practical, attending to these matters. Yesterday Lockley had seen
it gleaming in bright sunshine as it moved toward Boulder Lake on the
highway nearest to his station.
But that was yesterday. This morning he awoke under a pale gray sky.
There was complete cloud cover overhead. He smelled conifers and
woods-mould and mountain stone in the morning. He heard the faint
sound of tree branches moving in the wind. He noted the cloud cover.
The clouds were high, though. The air at ground level was perfectly
transparent. He turned his head and saw a prospect that made being in
the wilderness seem entirely reasonable and satisfying.
Mountains reared up in every direction. A valley lay some thousands of
feet below him, and beyond it other valleys, and somewhere a stream
rushed white water to an unknown destination. Not many wake to such a
scene.
Lockley regarded it, but without full attention. He was preoccupied
with thoughts of Jill Holmes, and unfortunately she was engaged to
marry Vale, who was also working in the park some thirty miles to the
northeast, near Boulder Lake itself. Lockley didn't know him well
since he was new in the Survey. He was up there to the northeast with
an electronic survey instrument like Lockley's and on the same job.
Jill had an assignment from some magazine or other to write an article
on how national parks are born, and she was staying at the
construction camp to gather material. She'd learned something from
Vale and much from the engineers while Lockley had tried to think of
interesting facts himself. He'd failed. When he thought about her, he
thought about the fact that she was engaged to Vale. That was an
unhappy thought. Then he tried to stop thinking about her altogether.
But his mind somehow lingered on the subject.
At ten minutes to eight Lockley began to dress, wilderness fashion. He
began by putting on his hat. It had lain on the pile of garments by
his bed. Then he donned the rest of his garments in the exact reverse
of the order in which he'd removed them.
At 8:00 he had a small fire going. He had no premonition that anything
out of the ordinary was going to happen that day. This was still
before the first Alaskan report. At 8:10 he had bacon sizzling and a
small coffeepot almost enveloped by the flames. Events occurred and he
knew nothing at all about them. For example, the Military Information
Center had been warned of what was later privately called Operation
Terror while Lockley was still tranquilly cooking breakfast and
thinking--frowning a little--about Jill.
Naturally he knew nothing of emergency orders sending all planes
aloft. He wasn't informed about something reported in space and
apparently headed for an impact point at Boulder Lake. As the computed
impact time arrived, Lockley obliviously dumped coffee into his tin
coffeepot and put it back on the flames.
At 8:13 instead of 8:14--this information is from the tape
records--there was an extremely small earth shock recorded by the
Berkeley, California, seismograph. It was a very minor shock, about
the intensity of the explosion of a hundred tons of high explosive a
very long distance away and barely strong enough to record its
location, which was Boulder Lake. The cause of that explosion or shock
was not observed visually. There'd been no time to alert observers,
and in any case the object should have been out of atmosphere until
the last few seconds of its fall, and where it was reported to fall
the cloud cover was unbroken. So nobody reported seeing it. Not at
once, anyhow, and then only one man.
Lockley did not feel the impact. He was drinking a cup of coffee and
thinking about his own problems. But a delicately balanced rock a
hundred yards below his camp site toppled over and slid downhill. It
started a miniature avalanche of stones and rocks. The loose stuff did
not travel far, but the original balanced rock bounced and rolled for
some distance before it came to rest.
Echoes rolled between the hillsides, but they were not very loud and
they soon ended. Lockley guessed automatically at half a dozen
possible causes for the small rock-slide, but he did not think at all
of an unperceived temblor from a shock like high explosives going off
thirty miles away.
Eight minutes later he heard a deep-toned roaring noise to the
northeast. It was unbelievably low-pitched. It rolled and reverberated
beyond the horizon. The detonation of a hundred tons of high
explosives or an equivalent impact can be heard for thirty miles, but
at that distance it doesn't sound much like an explosion.
He finished his breakfast without enjoyment. By that time well over
three-quarters of the Air Force on the Pacific Coast was airborne and
more planes shot skyward instant after instant. Inevitably the
multiplied air traffic was noted by civilians. Reporters began to
telephone airbases to ask whether a practice alert was on, or
something more serious.
Such questions were natural, these days. All the world had the
jitters. To the ordinary observer, the prospects looked bad for
everything but disaster. There was a crisis in the United Nations,
which had been reorganized once and might need to be shuffled again.
There was a dispute between the United States and Russia over
satellites recently placed in orbit. They were suspected of carrying
fusion bombs ready to dive at selected targets on signal. The Russians
accused the Americans, and the Americans accused the Russians, and
both may have been right.
The world had been so edgy for so long that there were fallout
shelters from Chillicothe, Ohio, to Singapore, Malaya, and back again.
There were permanent trouble spots at various places where practically
anything was likely to happen at any instant. The people of every
nation were jumpy. There was constant pressure on governments and on
political parties so that all governments looked shaky and all
parties helpless. Nobody could look forward to a peaceful old age, and
most hardly hoped to reach middle age. The arrival of an object from
outer space was nicely calculated to blow the emotional fuses of whole
populations.
But Lockley ate his breakfast without premonitions. Breezes blew and
from every airbase along the coast fighting planes shot into the air
and into formations designed to intercept anything that flew on wings
or to launch atom-headed rockets at anything their radars could detect
that didn't.
At eight-twenty, Lockley went to the electronic base line instrument
which he was to use this morning. It was a modification of the devices
used to clock artificial satellites in their orbits and measure their
distance within inches from hundreds of miles away. The purpose was to
make a really accurate map of the park. There were other instruments
in other line-of-sight positions, very far away. Lockley's schedule
called for them to measure their distances from each other some time
this morning. Two were carefully placed on bench marks of the
continental grid. In twenty minutes or so of cooperation, the
distances of six such instruments could be measured with astonishing
precision and tied in to the bench marks already scattered over the
continent. Presently photographing planes would fly overhead, taking
overlapping pictures from thirty thousand feet. They would show the
survey points and the measurements between them would be exact, the
photos could be used as stereo-pairs to take off contour lines, and in
a few days there would be a map--a veritable cartographer's dream for
accuracy and detail.
That was the intention. But though Lockley hadn't heard of it yet,
something was reported to have landed from space, and a shock like an
impact was recorded, and all conditions would shortly be changed. It
would be noted from the beginning, however, that an impact equal to a
hundred-ton explosion was a very small shock for the landing of a
bolide. It would add to the plausibility of reported deceleration,
though, and would arouse acute suspicion. Justly so.
At 8:20, Lockley called Sattell who was southeast of him. The
measuring instruments used microwaves and gave readings of distance by
counting cycles and reading phase differences. As a matter of
convenience the microwaves could be modulated by a microphone, so the
same instrument could be used for communication while measurements
went on. But the microwaves were directed in a very tight beam. The
device had to be aimed exactly right and a suitable reception
instrument had to be at the target if it was to be used at all. Also,
there was no signal to call a man to listen. He had to be listening
beforehand, and with his instrument aimed right, too.
So Lockley flipped the modulator switch and turned on the instrument.
He said patiently, "Calling Sattell. Calling Sattell. Lockley calling
Sattell."
He repeated it some dozens of times. He was about to give it up and
call Vale instead when Sattell answered. He'd slept a little later
than Lockley. It was now close to nine o'clock. But Sattell had
expected the call. They checked the functioning of their instruments
against each other.
"Right!" said Lockley at last. "I'll check with Vale and on out of the
park, and then we'll put it all together and wrap it up and take it
home."
Sattell agreed. Lockley, rather absurdly, felt uncomfortable because
he was going to have to talk to Vale. He had nothing against the man,
but Vale was, in a way, his rival although Jill didn't know of his
folly and Vale could hardly guess it.
He signed off to Sattell and swung the base line instrument to make a
similar check with Vale. It was now ten minutes after nine. He aligned
the instrument accurately, flipped the switch, and began to say as
patiently as before, "Calling Vale. Calling Vale. Lockley calling
Vale. Over."
He turned the control for reception. Vale's voice came instantly,
scratchy and hoarse and frantic.
"_Lockley! Listen to me! There's no time to tell me anything. I've got
to tell you. Something came down out of the sky here nearly an hour
ago. It landed in Boulder Lake, and at the last instant there was a
terrific explosion and a monstrous wave swept up the shores of the
lake. The thing that came down vanished under water. I saw it,
Lockley!_"
Lockley blinked. "Wha-a-at?"
"_A thing came down out of the sky!_" panted Vale. "_It landed in the
lake with a terrific explosion. It went under. Then it came up to the
surface minutes later. It floated. It stuck things up and out of
itself, pipes or wires. Then it moved around the lake and came in to
the shore. A thing like a hatch opened and ... creatures got out of
it. Not men!_"
Lockley blinked again. "Look here--"
"_Dammit, listen!_" said Vale shrilly, "_I'm telling you what I've
seen. Things out of the sky. Creatures that aren't men. They landed
and set up something on the shore. I don't know what it is. Do you
understand? The thing is down there in the lake now. Floating. I can
see it!_"
Lockley swallowed. He couldn't believe this immediately. He knew
nothing of radar reports or the seismograph record. He'd seen a barely
balanced rock roll down the mountainside below him, and he'd heard a
growling bass rumble behind the horizon, but things like that didn't
add up to a conclusion like this! His first conviction was that Vale
was out of his head.
"Listen," said Lockley carefully. "There's a short wave set over at
the construction camp. They use it all the time for orders and reports
and so on. You go there and report officially what you've seen. To the
Park Service first, and then try to get a connection through to the
Army."
Vale's voice came through again, at once raging and despairing, "_They
won't believe me. They'll think I'm a crackpot. You get the news to
somebody who'll investigate. I see the thing, Lockley. I can see it
now. At this instant. And Jill's over at the construction camp_--"
Lockley was unreasonably relieved. If Jill was at the camp, at least
she wasn't alone with a man gone out of his mind. The reaction was
normal. Lockley had seen nothing out of the ordinary, so Vale's report
seemed insane.
"_Listen here!_" panted Vale again. "_The thing came down. There was a
terrific explosion. It vanished. Nothing happened for a while. Then it
came up and found a place where it could come to shore. Things came
out of it. I can't describe them. They're motes even in my binoculars.
But they aren't human! A lot of them came out. They began to land
things. Equipment. They set it up. I don't know what it is. Some of
them went exploring. I saw a puff of steam where something moved.
Lockley?_"
"I'm listening," said Lockley. "Go on!"
"_Report this!_" ordered Vale feverishly. "_Get it to Military
Information in Denver, or somewhere! The party of creatures that went
off exploring hasn't come back. I'm watching. I'll report whatever I
see. Get this to the government. This is real. I can't believe it, but
I see it. Report it, quick!_"
His voice stopped. Lockley painfully realigned the instrument again
for Sattell, thirty miles to the southeast.
Sattell surprisingly answered the first call. He said in an astonished
voice, "_Hello! I just got a call from Survey. It seems that the Army
knew there was a Survey team in here, and they called to say that
radars had spotted something coming down from space, right after eight
o'clock. They wanted to know if any of us supposedly sane observers
noticed anything peculiar about that time._"
Lockley's scalp crawled suddenly. Vale's report had disturbed him, but
more for the man's sanity than anything else. But it could be true!
And instantly he remembered that Jill was very near the place where
frighteningly impossible things were happening.
"Vale just told me," said Lockley, his voice unsteady, "that he saw
something come down. His story was so wild I didn't believe it. But
you pass it on and say that Vale's watching it. He's waiting for
instructions. He'll report everything he sees. I'm thirty miles from
him, but he can see the thing that came down. Maybe the creatures in
it can see him. Listen!"
He repeated just what Vale had told him. Somehow, telling it to
someone else, it seemed at once even less real but more horrifying as
a possible danger to Jill. It didn't strike him forcibly that other
people were endangered, too.
When Sattell signed off to forward the report, Lockley found himself
sweating a little. Something had come down out of space. The fact
seemed to him dangerous and appalling. His mind revolted at the idea
of non-human creatures who could build ships and travel through space,
but radars had reported the arrival of a ship, and there were official
inquiries that nearly matched Vale's account, which was therefore not
a mere crackpot claim to have seen the incredible. Something had
happened and more was likely to, and Jill was in the middle of it.
He swung the instrument back to Vale's position. His hands shook,
though a part of his mind insisted obstinately that alarms were
commonplace these days, and in common sense one had to treat them as
false cries of "Wolf!" But one knew that some day the wolf might
really come. Perhaps it had....
Lockley found it difficult to align the carrier beam to Vale's exact
location. He assured himself that he was a fool to be afraid; that if
disaster were to come it would be by the imbecilities of men rather
than through creatures from beyond the stars. And therefore....
But there were other men at other places who felt less skepticism. The
report from Vale went to the Military Information Center and thence to
the Pentagon. Meanwhile the Information Center ordered a
photo-reconnaissance plane to photograph Boulder Lake from aloft. In
the Pentagon, hastily alerted staff officers began to draft orders to
be issued if the report of two radars and one eye-witness should be
further substantiated. There were such-and-such trucks available here,
and such-and-such troops available there. Complicated paper work was
involved in the organization of any movement of troops, but especially
to carry out a plan not at all usual in the United States.
Everything, though, depended on what the reconnaissance plane
photographs might show.
Lockley did not see the plane nor consciously hear it. There was the
faintest of murmuring noises in the sky. It moved swiftly toward the
north, tending eastward. The plane that made the noise was invisible.
It flew above the cloud cover which still blotted out nearly all the
blue overhead. It went on and on and presently died out beyond the
mountains toward Boulder Lake.
Lockley tried to get Vale back, to tell him that radars had verified
his report and that it would be acted on by the military. But though
he called and called, there was no answer.
An agonizingly long time later the faint and disregarded sound of the
plane swept back across the heavens. Lockley still did not notice it.
He was too busy with his attempts to reach Vale again, and with grisly
imaginings of what might be done by aliens from another world when
they found the workmen near the lake--and Jill among them. He pictured
alien monsters committing atrocities in what they might consider
scientific examination of terrestrial fauna. But somehow even that was
less horrible than the images that followed an assumption that the
occupants of the spaceship might be men.
"Calling Vale ... Vale, come in!" He fiercely repeated the call into
the instrument's microphone. "Lockley calling Vale! Come in, man! Come
in!"
He flipped the switch and listened. And Vale's voice came.
"_I'm here._" The voice shook. "_I've been trying to find where that
exploring party went._"
Lockley threw the speech switch and said sharply, "The Army asked
Survey if any of us had seen anything come down from the sky. I gave
Sattell your report to be forwarded. It's gone to the Pentagon now.
Two radars reported tracking the thing down to a landing near you. Now
listen! You go to the construction camp. Most likely they'll get
orders to clear out, by short wave. But you go there! Make sure Jill's
all right. See her to safety."
The switch once more. Vale's voice was desperate.
"_A ... while ago a party of the creatures started away from the lake.
An exploring party, I think. Once I saw a puff of steam as if they'd
used a weapon. I'm afraid they may find the construction camp, and
Jill_...."
Lockley ground his teeth. Vale said unsteadily, "_I ... can't find
where they went.... A little while ago their ship backed out into the
lake and sank. Deliberately! I don't know why. But there's a party of
those ... creatures out exploring! I don't know what they'll do_...."
Lockley said savagely, "Get to the camp and look after Jill! The
workmen may have panicked. The Army'll know by this time what's
happened. They'll send copters to get you out. They'll send help of
some sort, somehow. But you look after Jill!"
Vale's voice changed.
"_Wait. I heard something. Wait!_"
Silence. Around Lockley there were the usual sounds of the wilderness.
Insects made chirping noises. Birds called. There were those small
whispering and rustling and high-pitched sounds which in the wild
constitute stillness.
A scraping sound from the speaker. Vale's voice, frantic.
"_That ... exploring party. It's here! They must have picked up our
beams. They're looking for me. They've sighted me! They're coming_...."
There was a crashing sound as if Vale had dropped the communicator.
There were pantings, and the sound of blows, and gasped
profanity--horror-filled profanity--in Vale's voice. Then something
roared.
Lockley listened, his hands clenched in fury at his own helplessness.
He thought he heard movements. Once he was sure he heard a sound like
the unshod hoof of an animal on bare stone. Then, quite distinctly, he
heard squeakings. He knew that someone or something had picked up
Vale's communicator. More squeakings, somehow querulous. Then
something pounded the communicator on the ground. There was a crash.
Then silence.
Almost calmly Lockley swung his instrument around and lined it up for
Sattell's post. He called in a steady voice until Sattell answered. He
reported with meticulous care just what Vale had said, and what he'd
heard after Vale stopped speaking--the roaring, the sound of blows and
gasps, then the squeakings and the destruction of the instrument
intended for the measurement of base lines for an accurate map of the
Park.
Sattell grew agitated. At Lockley's insistence, he wrote down every
word. Then he said nervously that orders had come from Survey. The
Army wanted everybody out of the Boulder Lake area. Vale was to have
been ordered out. The workmen were ordered out. Lockley was to get out
of the area as soon as possible.
When Sattell signed off, Lockley switched off the communicator. He put
it where it would be relatively safe from the weather. He abandoned
his camping equipment. A mile downhill and four miles west there was a
highway leading to Boulder Lake. When the Park was opened to the
public it would be well used, but the last traffic he'd seen was the
big trailer-truck of the Wild Life Control service. That huge vehicle
had gone up to Boulder Lake the day before.
He made his way to the highway, following a footpath to the spot where
he'd left his own car parked. He got into it and started the motor. He
moved with a certain dogged deliberation. He knew, of course, that
what he was going to do was useless. It was hopeless. It was possibly
suicidal. But he went ahead.
He headed northward, pushing the little car to its top speed. This was
not following his instructions. He wasn't leaving the Park area. He
was heading for Boulder Lake. Jill was there and he would feel
ashamed for all time if he acted like a sensible man and got to safety
as he was ordered.
Miles along the highway, something occurred to him. The base line
instrument had to be aimed exactly right for Vale or Sattell to pick
up his voice as carried by its beam. Vale's or Sattell's instruments
had to be aimed as accurately to convey their voices to him. Yet after
the struggle he'd overheard, and after Vale had been either subdued or
killed, someone or something seemed to have picked up the
communicator, and Lockley had heard squeakings, and then he had heard
the instrument smashed.
It was not easy to understand how the beam had been kept perfectly
aligned while it was picked up and squeaked at. Still less was it
understandable that it remained aimed just right so he could hear when
it was flung down and crushed.
But somehow this oddity did not change his feelings. Jill could be in
danger from creatures Vale said were not human. Lockley didn't wholly
accept that non-human angle, but something was happening there and
Jill was in the middle of it. So he went to see about it for the sake
of his self-respect. And Jill. It was not reasonable behavior. It was
emotional. He didn't stop to question what was believable and what
wasn't. Lockley didn't even give any attention to the problem of how a
microwave beam could stay pointed exactly right while the instrument
that sent it was picked up, and squeaked at, and smashed. He gave that
particular matter no thought at all.
He jammed down the accelerator of the car and headed for Boulder
Lake.