"So now we're all but helpless," said Bill Thihling, wiping his mouth.
They had just finished three enormous platters of curried chicken at
an exotic Bengali restaurant on 49th Street. "Where there's life, et
cetera, but so long as the aliens control our very tongues, what can we
do? Echo answers, Nothing."
"I blame myself for it," growled Brave. "I should have gone on the
telecast; or Rob, maybe. We can withstand hypnotism, know how to fight
it, while Alan had already had one bad dose of it. It must have been
easy to recapture his mind."
"What about me?" objected Jim. "I've never been mesmerized before. I
didn't feel a thing, either, or hear voices, nor nothin'."
"Are you sure you haven't been hypnotized? Alan didn't know it till I
found out under mechanical-visual trance."
"Gad, maybe I have been, then," murmured Jim uncertainly.
"_They_ got to Alan and Mac," said Rob. "Had you or I tried it, Brave,
they'd have done something more violent; blasted the station off the
air, killed us. They undoubtedly have their eyes on us, and we can't
get in touch with humanity again. We're on an island surrounded by a
sea of cynical, sneering demons; they won't let us do anything but make
despairing futile signals to the mainland."
"Brother," said Win, "are we getting poetical in our sorrow! Listen,
I have a feeling we oughtn't to go back to Project Star. They must be
grouping to wipe us out by now. They know us, they're not dumb; they'll
be after us." She bent over the table and all the others did likewise.
"Suppose we go up to Central Park? Sit out there all night, loll on
the sward and talk. We won't be hunted there. And perhaps by morning
some solution will have occurred to us."
"That's the best thought any of us have had," said Rob Pope. "Fresh
night air! I know this washed and filtered stuff is the best atmosphere
for you, but I crave some real old-fashioned germ-polluted air."
So they took the station wagon up to the park, and walked onto the
grass that was already spangled with moisture under the moon; on a
knoll surrounded by trees they flung down blankets from the trunk of
the car, and stretched out and tasted the night that was brought to
them on a softly brisk little breeze; and Alan said, "Mother Nature!
You can't beat the old girl. She makes you see sparks of light where
you know there's nothing but the dark."
They lay there and talked and napped and drank and relaxed through the
night, till dawn rose gray and turned to blue and the sun came up. For
no reason but their physical comfortableness, they all felt good. Even
Unquote was gay and frisked like a kitten. Their fantastic trouble
seemed smaller and further away than it had ever been....
* * * * *
When the first great disk came down on the city, skimming the treetops
of Central Park, heading straight for the Times Square district at
that height and rising only when it seemed certain that it would smash
itself against one or another of the buildings of Manhattan, none of
them could speak for surprise. They stared up, amazed, as the whirling
silver surface caught their eyes with its glancing beams of sun
reflection; and it was incredible to them that the disk should be there
in the bright morning sky.
It vanished over Brooklyn, tilting on edge and shooting straight up
into emptiness.
"Well, if this isn't the feeble-minded pinnacle of idiocy," exclaimed
Don Mariner. "A test flight over the city itself! What drooling
sub-human intellect ordered that one?"
In the distance a muted babbling arose, as the city caught its breath
and began to talk excitedly about the flying saucer, the first (barring
some fugitive glimpses in the '40s and '50s which had never been
properly verified) that New York had seen.
Then the disk came back. It led a wobbling formation, two sister ships
just behind it and then a gap and three more, all going at a hawk-fast
clip and slanting down out of the eastern sky to zoom over the park
once more in an uncanny, wavering, noiseless line. Jim McEldownie
leaped to his feet, his narrow face, with the green eyes staring out,
a twisted mask of panic terror. Alan was shaken, as much by the lean
man's fear as by the sight of the disks. "Mac, Mac," he shouted, "what
is it?" For he could see nothing to dread that was worse than the thing
they had been living with for the past hours.
Jim stared after the disappearing ships. "They aren't ours," he said,
his voice gurgling and choking with the fear. "_They aren't ours!_"
"Of course they are," snapped Brave. He too had risen, and stood
like an age-old oak beside the quavering poplar that was McEldownie.
"Whose would they be?" he reasoned. "Do you suppose any country could
manufacture those things without our men on Albertus spying them out?"
"I tell you they aren't our ships!" cried Jim, taking the Indian by the
lapels. "I know our designs up and down, and those aren't ours! Tell
him, Mariner."
"He's right," said Don, white as paper. "The superstructure's all
wrong. And they're bigger, I think, than ours."
"Don't forget that Homo superior, or his cousins from the space lanes,
may have changed the plans without letting you in on it," said Bill
Thihling bitterly. "Great God! Nobody but a callous, egotistical mutant
or alien, unacquainted with pain and insensitive to our safety, would
fly a squadron of virtually untested disks over a crowded city. This is
misanthropy with a vengeance!"
Mac groaned. "You bumbling dinkey engines," he said, "can't you get
off that one track? I tell you these things don't come from Project
Star--they don't even come from Earth!"
Win spoke for the first time. She was still seated, the cat cradled
against her breast. "I think you're right," she said. "I feel it;
you're right. Those aren't human beings in those ships. They're from
black space somewhere. They know we are reaching out for the stars and
they've come to stop us." Her tone was level and wholly undramatic.
"We'd be a menace, rampaging through the systems. They won't let us
begin. Their spies here, Grady and his ilk, have called them down to
stop us."
Brave and Alan frowned at each other. Each asked the other wordlessly,
Where are these two getting such wild conceptions? What do they
see--what do they _know_, that we don't?
* * * * *
The saucers returned, in a different formation this time, like a V
of geese. Geese made of glittering blue-silver metal, round geese
traveling at eight hundred miles an hour. They roared overhead:
soundlessly, yes, but with so swift and terrible a movement that one
could call it nothing but a silent roar. In that instant Alan, staring
upward, felt his convictions dissolve. Mac was right. He did not know
enough about the design of Project Star's disks to say that these
were different; but he knew suddenly that there was an alien _feel_
to these things, an aura of irrelation, a stupendous pulsation that
pervaded the senses and forced the knowledge on him that here was
nothing terrestrial, nothing human or even superhuman.
Watching them shoot over, he tried weakly to find an analogy, to anchor
his wits to some concrete remembrance and save them from scattering
in panic. All he could think of was the night when he, aged six or
seven, had wakened to know positively and without question that there
was a ghost in the room with him. Even yet he was sure there had been
a ghost. And this sense of alienness that came from the flying disks
was the same as that he had felt in the night, when the invisible ghost
crouched in a corner and mowed at him. An outsider, said his blood and
viscera to him, a stranger from the cold hells of unknown space. An
alien, said the wisdom drawn out of nowhere by primeval instincts lying
in the murk at the bottom of his soul.
He moved to Brave and put a hand on one of the mighty arms and saw that
Brave knew it now too. "Grady's kin," said the Indian. No one else
spoke except Unquote, who gave a bizarre Siamese screech of rage.
Back they came, this time from the direction of Richmond, in a
strung-out dipping line; and out of the crystal bubble in the belly
of the leader there fell a shining golden egg, a tiny thing at this
distance, seen only because the sun caught at it and played along
its surface. It fell slowly, far too slowly for an Earth-hatched egg;
Thihling and Mariner automatically judged its descent at six or eight
feet per second. Either it was full of a light gas, or it had some form
of anti-gravity mechanism attached to it. Leisurely it dropped toward
Manhattan.
Then the people began to run.
All the millions who had been taught to act calmly and sanely in an
emergency lost their heads; they were suddenly so many witless chickens
who had caught sight of the axe. With the dropping of the golden egg,
the terror of alien danger had clutched at them all. So they fled.
There was no place to flee to, but they fled. Into subways and out
again, insane with the horror of dying underground. Into buildings, to
know the walls were collapsing on them, to run out once more. And the
egg fell lazily toward them. Now it had passed the spire of the tallest
skyscraper.
* * * * *
Up in the park, people were running too. Alan and his group stood
together and watched them helplessly. "Like field mice from an owl,"
muttered Rob Pope. They saw a woman dash straight into a tree, carom
off with a cry and go on. An elderly man came up to them, faltered, put
a hand to his chest and pitched over at their feet. Bill turned him
over. He was dead. "Heart attack. Poor devil."
Alan did not know why none of his friends ran. He repeated a random
line that came into his head: "Stand and fight and see your slain, and
take the bullet in your brain...."
Or the atomic blast, or the unimaginable projectile from the
inconceivable weapon.
Then Jim McEldownie yelled, "On your faces, for God's sake!" and Alan
turned from the city and flung himself down and covered his head with
his arms.
And the world opened up and a mushroom from Hell sprouted over
Manhattan, and the buildings rocked and tottered and crashed to earth.
The sky went black and the great white-yellow cloud, perimetered with
blood-scarlet, arose against it; the universe shook and shattered
and then came together and righted itself and sailed on. The Empire
State was the last of the tall structures to hit ground. Clear at
the northern tip of Central Park they felt that final smashing, a
postscript to a letter from Lucifer.
From Fulton Street to 53rd, from the North River to Stuyvesant Town,
nothing lived. In that terrible instant of fission, caught where ever
they were, whatever they were doing, working at desks, peering from
windows, running down deserted alleys or pushing madly against the
press of maniac crowds on Broadway and Fifth and Madison, score upon
score of thousands of men and women died; died screaming or weeping
or fighting for breath, praying to their gods or cursing or dumb with
dismay.
They died in subways, never having known that the silver ships of the
enemy were sailing above their great town. They died asleep in their
hotel rooms, lifting forkfuls of breakfast eggs to their mouths, typing
words on paper, making love, staring at the sky.
Very few of them wanted to die. Some of them expected to live for many
years. Some of them did not really expect to die at all. Many of them
could accept the fact that death would come for every man in the world
some day ... except themselves; that was incredible and not to be
thought of at all.
But they all died.
It came so quick, so quick; and even those who believed the golden egg
to be a bomb never knew when it struck and smashed out at them and
obliterated them, for the quickness was that of death, the swiftest
thing that walks the universe.
Beyond the huge area of instant perfect destruction, many others
died. Tall buildings collapsed on them, or they fell into the splits
and great fissures that opened in the earth; they were hurled to the
pavements and their brains spilled out, or the noise and the fearful
rush of air got into their heads and tore their cerebra to tatters.
Some of them could not bear the appalling horror of the bomb, and
slit their own throats or put guns into their mouths and pulled the
triggers. Some went so totally mad that their life forces disintegrated
and they died where they stood, of madness and panic and the terrible
knowledge of their impotence.
Men lived, too: lived blind and wounded and lamed and torn asunder,
lived without minds and minds strangely contorted and warped. No one
who had been in Manhattan that day survived without scars of body and
brain left by the death of the city.
The golden egg had hatched its chick of death at eight-fifty-three of a
Friday morning in June of 1970.
* * * * *
After a while, when the hurricane had dropped away and the earth had
stilled its shaking, Alan sat up and looked toward the heart of the
city. The disks were gone--and so were the people and the buildings,
the life and the fine aspiring skyline of Manhattan. Nothing was left
but a leveled, broken, sawtoothed waste, over which hovered the direful
mushroom cloud.
Grotesquely, irrelevantly, all his mind could focus on in that moment
of near-insanity was his cat. "Where's Unquote?" he asked harshly.
"Where's little Unquote?"
The cat spoke furiously above his head. She had flown into a tree
at the blast. He coaxed her down as the others stood and brushed
themselves off and stared at the atomic cloud. At last she bounced
from a crotch of the tree into his arms. She was shivering with terror.
Bill said urgently, his voice no more than a croak, "Let's make tracks.
Lord knows what scuds of radioactivity will be blowing our way soon, if
that wind didn't bring 'em already."
"All those people," whispered Win. Now the screams and howls of
survivors could be heard where they stood. "All those poor people."
"The wagon's liable to be stolen if we don't get to it," said Don.
"Come on. Please."
There were still men and women running through the park, some shouting
with fear, some white and sick and mute. A couple passed them, their
eyes round and horrified, the man's coat torn and the girl's green
dress ripped off one shoulder. They must have fallen, or been caught in
a fight. There were two men brawling over by the reservoir.
There seemed to be no balance or reason left in mankind, save for
the seven on the knoll, who clung to their sanity only by conscious
physical effort.
Now they ran for the station wagon, to find its windows broken, the
upholstery slashed by a knife, the windshield shattered. "Berserk,"
said Rob Pope. "They've all gone berserk."
"It does that to me, too," said Don. "I want to sink my teeth into
something and worry it. I can't touch the enemy and so I want to take
it out on something I _can_ touch." He shrugged. "If you were lost in
Hell, and found a car, and couldn't start it because you didn't have
the key, wouldn't you get sore enough to wreck it? How are the tires?"
Brave said, "Okay. He was too mad to think of them." He knocked the
remaining shards of windshield from the frame and got in behind the
wheel. They all piled in. He started it and it rolled off northward.
McEldownie said, "No, Brave. Go down towards town. I want to get to a
radio or TV station. We've got to try to establish contact with the
rest of the world. This may have happened in other cities too." He
leaned forward and put his hand on Brave's shoulder. "I don't think
we need worry about radioactivity," he said. "These are beings from
another planet, obviously much farther advanced than we are. Their
weapons, though producing an apparently atomic cloud, would probably be
without post-explosion danger. They'd have eliminated the radioactive
dust because they'd want to land and take over at once, or at least
quite soon. Let's take a chance. Let's go down toward Times Square."
* * * * *
Brave glanced back at him. The argument was specious, as a basis for
action it wouldn't hold water. But Alan said, "I think so too, Brave.
It sounds logical." Win and Don agreed. Brave looked at them. He was
about to argue and then the fatalism of his ancient race seemed to grip
him. They ought to get to a radio station, true; and if the city were
radioactive, what did it matter in the long run? They were only seven
people and a cat; ranged against them on one hand stood the ranks of
shadowy supermen and aliens, on the other the unknown disk-people. The
world was in chaos. He could not dredge up enough ego to believe that
he and Alan and the others would be very important in the ordering
of that chaos. He shucked off his science and his civilized thought
processes and he said, "All right. We'll go down." Stoically, the very
incarnation of his thrice-great grandfather Pony Sees-the-Sky, he
wheeled the car around and sent it hurtling toward Times Square.
Broadway was a shambles. As far up as Columbus Circle all the windows
were gone, the light standards had been curved by the blast, autos were
overturned and leaking gas and oil. There were cracks in the paving.
Occasional men and women staggered along northward, and bodies lay
in the gutters, across the thresholds. The wreckage of an air taxi
half-blocked the way, corpses spilt halfway out of its doors.
"How many weapons have we?" asked Mac suddenly. "There's a sporting
goods store. We ought to load up on guns. There's no telling what
maniacs we'll be meeting; and if there's an occupation, we might have
to be guerrillas." He pulled back his coat. "I have a grenade pistol,
for a start."
Brave had one, and an automatic for longer range work. Don Mariner
carried another grenade pistol. Win had her derringer-sized automatic
in her purse. That was all they had. Brave pulled to the curb. He and
Alan got out.
The store had lost its windows. Brave stepped through onto the display
ledge and dropped inside. A voice in the gloom said, "Stand right
there, mister." The proprietor, white and tense, leaned over his
counter and held a .45 revolver steadily, its muzzle looking at the
Indian's chest. "One more step and you join them." Brave saw there were
bodies on the floor.
"I'm no looter, man," he said sharply. "I'll buy guns."
The fellow considered that. "By God, you sound sane. And you look
like a good man. Everybody's crazy out there. You come back and pick
yourself out something. We're going to need sane men with guns in this
mess."
"Men are fighting each other," nodded Brave. "The blast drove them
crazy."
"Can't tell me anything about that. One of those bodies was my brother.
I couldn't let even my brother loose in this hell with a gun, not when
he'd gone out of his head. Tried to kill me for a gun." The face was
drawn and cold. "How about a .30-'06?" he asked. "Stop a grizzly if
you're good enough. Heavy though."
"I wasn't looking for an air rifle," said Brave. Alan came in through
the window. "He's with me. We have five others outside."
"You can have guns for 'em all. Sorry I don't have grenade pistols or
flamers. This is a sporting goods store." He handed a .30-'06 across
the counter. "Take this. I'll give you all the ammo I have for it. You
put it to good use when the Russkis come."
"It wasn't Russians," said Alan, "It was flying saucers."
"Russkis in flying saucers. They'll be coming on the ground pretty
soon. Didn't I see 'em come in in Germany in the big war? Take these
boxes. Enough ammo to stand a good siege here. Save it all you can.
We're going to be at war a long, long, time."
Shortly they came out into the morning air, carrying armloads of heavy
rifles, four revolvers, and what seemed half a ton of ammunition.
The owner had at first refused payment, then taken only the wholesale
cost. At the last minute he had given each of them a long hunting
knife. "You were in Argentina, eh? You can use these. Give 'em
what-for, boys." They had offered to take him with them. "I stick,"
he'd said. "This is my store."
* * * * *
They looked up and down the street. There were more people now, and the
worst faction was evident--the looters, the sly lurkers who stole from
the dead and exhausted and mad, the bestial men on the prowl for women,
the ones who had gone lunatic and were bent on senseless destruction. A
policeman, his uniform bloody, came toward them as they handed the guns
into the station wagon; suddenly he whipped out his pistol and fired. A
teen-aged boy came flopping and shrieking out of a store window, where
he had been filling his pockets with candy and jacknives and junk.
The cop came abreast of them, his eyes lit with insane anger. Brave
reached out and hit him on the jaw and he fell. "There was no call to
shoot that kid," said Brave. He picked up the pistol and threw it into
a drain. From up and down Broadway came scattered yells and sounds of
gunfire.
They got into the wagon and Brave drove down to 57th Street. There was
a mob of maddened men who fought each other and ran howling toward
the car when they saw it. "Turn right," said Jim urgently. "There's a
little independent radio station about two blocks away. With luck we
can get in--and out to the rest of the country. Unless that damned bomb
smashed the place." They drew quickly away from the mob, which went
back to fighting among themselves.
They found the station apparently safe; many of the smaller buildings
here had been protected by the larger from the force of the blast. With
Don left to guard the wagon and guns, they ran into the place. The
elevators had stopped. The men, with Win, trotted up four flights, to
find a door marked with radio call letters. "This is it."
At the opening of the door three men turned swiftly from their work,
grenade pistols and flamers--flame-throwing handguns--in their fists.
"Hold it," said the lanky Jim urgently.
"Bless us all," said one of the men, lowering his weapon, "it's
McEldownie! What the hell are you doing in a _radio_ station, Mac?"
"I'll eat crow for it, but right now I want to get out on the air," he
said. "Can I?"
"God knows. We've sweat blood over the thing. Our own generators are
okay, but the city's power is off, and the antennae got mashed up some.
Couple of boys up on the roof now, worrying at it. Do you suppose we're
loony for staying here?" he asked. Obviously he valued McEldownie's
opinion. Alan realized for the first time what a reputation the
scarecrow-like announcer had.
"No. There seems to be no danger of radioactivity; either the bomb
burst in air, or it's a new kind. We've got to get communication
established as soon as possible. You're almost the only sane people
we've seen."
"Most of our gang went out to try and get home. We're all bachelors
and we figured it was up to us to stay." He ran a hand through his
hair. "Who is it, Mac? Who hit us?"
"Martians," said Win.
"Venusians," said Rob Pope.
"Who are all these guys, Mac?"
"Scientists from Project Star." The three radio men opened their eyes
respectfully. "Pounce onto it, will you!" roared Mac. "We've got to get
out. We've got to learn what's happened to the world!"