DON'T PANIC!
By Geoff St. Reynard
January 9th, 1955 began like any normal
day on Earth. Then suddenly our planet tossed
in a death agony. The Green Men had landed....
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy
November 1954
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Despite conflicting reports, the Air Force believed in the flying
saucers. The scares began in 1947 and as a responsible agency the Air
Force had to start investigations. At various times they'd cautiously
release some information; then there would be some hysteria and they'd
hurriedly debunk the whole business as "mass hallucinations" and
"crackpot theories" until the public had regained its balance, when
they'd start letting out bits of truth once more. The nature and
implications of the saucer sightings made this on-again-off-again
policy necessary in dealing with such an unstable thing as a
war-nervous, tensed-up population. If the truth about the saucers
had been known, the entire truth, then the Air Force could have
published it and the country would have accepted it in stride; but the
mystery that clouded the strange ships was susceptible of too many
interpretations.
In December of 1952 a blue-lighted saucer was sighted, without a shadow
of a doubt, over Laredo, Texas. In January of '53 a whole V-formation
of blue objects appeared over Santa Ana, California. These were
military sightings and beyond question. There were many before and
even more afterward. Some of them mentioned blue lights and some other
colors, and the daylight viewings talked of silver metallic luster.
The first low-flying saucer to be reported authoritatively was that
which flew over the Capitol in Washington at 11:18 a.m. on Saturday,
Christmas Day, 1954. It was caught by the cameras that were making
a telecast at that time of the festivities in Washington, and
beamed without explanation all over the country. A few minutes later
the screens of America's viewers went blank and then the President
appeared to urge calmness and sanity. There was no question of mass
hallucination and crackpot theories any longer. The saucer was perhaps
three hundred feet broad; it was of the usual shape reported in
previous sightings, round with a central cabin, and it was green in
color. It had flown comparatively slowly, at an estimated 125 m.p.h. It
had disappeared over the Potomac.
At 2:24 p.m. the President was on tv again. There was some commotion
at the door of the room from which he was broadcasting. He turned his
head and nearly one hundred million people who were jammed before
television sets across the nation saw his jaw drop and his eyes bulge
slightly with irrepressible awe. In about nine seconds a very curious
group walked into camera range. There were half a dozen secret service
men with drawn guns, and in their midst, the target of those watchful
weapons, was the first of the green horde.
He was--the measurements were determined later--six feet seven and
one-half inches tall. He was dressed in a green shirt and trousers,
caught around the waist by a heavy belt on which were stitched a
number of cabalistic designs; on the left breast were more of the same,
a circle and three slim triangles. In a holster slung at the right side
of his belt was a large revolver or pistol. It was what had been known
in the old West as a half-breed holster, enabling the wearer to swing
up the muzzle and fire the gun without jerking it free of the leather.
The alien had his hands folded carefully across his chest. Had he made
a single motion toward the gun, he would have been blown in two.
In proportions and frame he was very like a human being. His chest
was deep and his legs and arms well muscled. His skin was a delicate,
olive-green in hue, as those viewers with color tv could see. His
face was normal, perhaps a bit stern in expression, but with the
ordinary features of a man, except that he had only one eye. It was
located immediately above the bridge of his nose; it was about four
times the area of a human eye and almost round in shape, and its small
pupil roamed swiftly to and fro as the alien walked slowly toward the
President. The pupil of the eye was like a tiny animal in a cage,
dashing from side to side, up and down, uncanny, incredible, and
horrifying.
* * * * *
The cameras did not show his feet. These were somewhat like those of an
ostrich, each having two enormous toes, naked, horny, and padded with
thick layers of green fatty matter on the soles.
The tint of his skin could have been accepted as a mutation of the
strictly human animal. The single eye, even, might have suggested a
humanoid sport or far-future development. But the feet were utterly
inhuman and even the most callous or most unimaginative among the
citizens who saw him personally that first day agreed that the feet
were terrifying.
The cameras were turned off after about twenty seconds. An announcer
came on and spluttered some drivel about keeping cool and not losing
our heads, spoiling the effect of these admonitions at once by a
piercing, hysterical giggle.
Before a quarter of an hour had elapsed, there were minor riots and
demonstrations throughout the continent. The worst of these were
sparked by fanatic groups claiming that the end of the world had come.
Others, scarcely less violent, went screaming that the Martians were
invading us, that the White House had been captured "right on the
television" and much more of such idiocies. In many places the militia
were called out to suppress waves of looting and street fighting.
The Air Force, which had not been taken entirely unaware, since they
had privately come to the conclusion some time before that the flying
saucers were extraterrestrial, now flung a canopy of fighter planes,
both jet and motor-driven, over Washington, and, somewhat later,
Pittsburgh, Detroit, Birmingham and New York. Chicago, Los Angeles, and
other cities of strategic importance were likewise protected within a
period of two hours.
The rioting was subdued by evening. Army trucks equipped with public
address systems patrolled everywhere, repeating the warnings to keep
calm and do nothing until official word was broadcast of our intentions
toward the aliens and vice versa. Meanwhile the first of the green
horde was given a comfortable room in the Pentagon, where he was kept
under an unobtrusive but thorough twenty-four-hour-a-day guard, and
where means of communication with him were speedily sought for.
In a matter of a day and a half, or, to be precise, at two minutes
to midnight on Sunday the 26th of December, he articulated his first
English word. It was "Yes." Shortly he proved that he had absorbed
much more than this word, for he began making attempts at complete
sentences around 2:00 a.m. on the 27th. He had been under the constant
supervision and teaching of a corps of scientists, language experts,
and assorted brain-workers; he had shown no desire for sleep during
the thirty-six hours he had been on the ground, and had listened to
and worked with the teachers all that time. He showed now a good
rudimentary grasp of English. It was given as the official opinion that
he had shown in this the intelligence of a human genius, although not
of the very highest order, rating perhaps an I.Q. of 195.
* * * * *
In the eight-hour period following this he spoke with the President and
assured him, partly in words and partly in signs, that the folk of the
green saucers were friendly explorers from a distant galaxy. His voice
was throaty and rather unpleasant, with a tendency to crack in the
upper registers.
He expressed a desire to return to his saucer for some purpose which he
could not make plain with his basic English. This was at 10:17 a.m. on
the 27th. It was considered politic to allow him to enter the saucer
alone. He did so, by a method which was unfortunately not communicated
to the public later. Shortly the craft rose from the earth and shot
rapidly out of sight in the direction of Mount Vernon. There was no
jet exhaust detected in its take-off; it simply rose like an iron
filing to a magnet, soundless and abrupt. For three days thereafter
there were no reported sightings of saucers.
It was officially decided in this period that the green man with the
single eye and bird's feet was not intent on mischief; he had been
given an idea of how far we had progressed technically, in many fields,
but the information was only what he and his kind could have discovered
for themselves in the years'-long surveillance of the world which they
must have been making. No secrets had been imparted to him and he had
expressed nothing but cordiality and good will, though he had managed
to tell the interrogators only a little about himself and his race and
home planet, which when boiled down and analyzed came to this: his home
was far away (of course it would be) and he was friendly.
After the three-day lapse, saucers were detected on radar screens all
over the civilized world: rather too high for the usual reconnaissance,
they came and passed in greater numbers than ever before. No planes
reported them, their altitude being too great. This long-distance
traffic worried the governments of every nation. It was capable of so
many explanations that deduction was futile. The protective canopies
of fighter planes remained over key cities in the United States and
Canada, and to some extent over the capitals and industrial centers of
the world.
Eight days after the tremendous influx of saucers, Russia issued her
considered opinion. The green one-eyed man was a capitalistic hoax. No
such creature existed. The radar blips were "a" natural phenomenon,
"b" a secret weapon of the Soviet, "c" a secret weapon of America and
or Britain, "d" a capitalistic hoax. Somehow the masters of propaganda
made it appear that all four of these silly charges were true,
notwithstanding their mutual cancellation.
Two days thereafter the green horde launched its attack, at 11:34 a.m.
on Sunday, the 9th of January, 1955.
CHAPTER II
Although the great flights of fighter planes were continually aloft,
the reassuring program had gone on, the broadcasting trucks still
rumbling about the streets foghorning their messages of cheer and
optimism to a somewhat restive public. Some elements of the free
press had been warning direly of "unknown dangers" and "possible
treachery"--this causing some gimlet-eyed gentlemen in high places to
come out with bills and demands for suppression of a free press for the
duration of the so-called negotiations with the alien people. There
had been no negotiations whatever. In this case, as in many others,
the free press was perfectly right; but their warnings in the face of
official hopefulness served only to confuse and fret the public. Hence,
the tv lulled, the radio allayed, and the bellowing loudspeakers on the
cruising trucks attempted to quiet fear under a blanket of sound.
At the said moment of attack, 11:34 a.m., the green saucers swept down
with a perfection of simultaneity that made you think, as someone said
later, that the devil had murmured "Synchronize your watches, boys."
They hurtled from the skies over New York and Bangkok and Berlin and
London and Madrid and Shanghai, down upon Moscow and San Francisco and
Tokyo and Paris and Bombay. In the instant that the devastation hit
New Orleans it also smashed at Edinburgh and Nome and Minsk and Berne.
The first skyscraper toppled in Chicago as the first factory blew to
flinders in Rio de Janeiro.
It was curious that their weapons did not seem to include the atomic
variety. No A-bombs or H-bombs; rays, of incalculable destructive
power and unknown origin, lanced from the diving saucers and struck
the earth with the force of exploding bombs, but instead of crashing
and then echoing away, these explosions continued, like great rolls of
terrible thunder, for as long as the rays were aimed downward. One ray,
directed from the belly-port of a canting ship, would set the ground
a-shudder, crumple all structures in its path or near it, and create
an ear-shattering blast that kept on and on until the saucer, tilting
away, shut off the ray. So that each ray, in effect, was like an
unending and ever-replenished series of huge bombs--and from each ship
came a ray, and over each city there were hundreds of ships....
The mighty centers of civilization were obliterated. The great
concentrations of population over the globe died. Manufacturing cities
and cities which produced nothing of strategic value whatever were
smeared indiscriminately into blood and dust and muck. It was an
attack, not at man's weapons or production, but at man himself. It was
the beginning of man's end, a giant step toward his classification with
the dodo, the auk, the sabertooth tiger and the passenger pigeon.
One large eastern city in the United States presented a typical
picture during that hour of cataclysm. In the first fifteen minutes
its canopy of fighter planes was blown out of the sky; the weapons
they carried, some of them atomic, were as effective against the green
saucers as sling-shots on platinum. By noon the air had begun to
fill with billowing, drifting masses of smoke-yellow vapor, reeking
of sulphur and molten metal and burnt flesh and death. Those who had
been unlucky enough to live through the attack thus far were now so
nauseated by the odors of mankind's collapse that they stumbled among
the shattering streets, retching and vomiting, as eager to escape the
yellow hell-cloud's stink as they were to avoid the crumbling steel and
cement.
* * * * *
At the end of an hour, while the greater part of the two hundred and
twenty-eight saucers continued to raze the city, one alien ship made
a landing on a leveled field of the suburbs. Its entry port jawed
open, somewhat like a huge clamshell parting, and a single green man
emerged. He was six feet nine and his eye measured a good four inches
across. He carried a flag of red, white and green, on which the device
of a circle and three triangles which he wore on his left breast was
repeated. He strode away from the ship, gazing about with satisfaction.
Some distance off lay the wreckage of a broadcasting truck; its warped,
ruined loudspeakers yawned over the body of an Army sergeant, who still
held in a firm grip the microphone into which he had been talking when
the world was scuttled around him.
On the side of the demolished truck there remained a sign which read
DON'T PANIC--THEY'RE FRIENDLY!
There was blood on the sergeant's mouth and forehead and he had bled
from the nose. The blood was almost wholly dry now. His eyes were open.
The green conqueror looked at him and grinned. It remains one of the
most curious facts of the matter that both mankind and the bird-footed
beasts of the green horde expressed amusement and pleasure by turning
up the corners of the mouth....
The alien peered all about him, shading his eye with his right hand.
Nothing moved anywhere except the skimming saucers and the collapsing
city. He stepped forward and lifted his pennon high, to plant its
ten-foot staff in the dead body of the earthman. Holding it up, he
spoke a few words in his own language, a guttural cracking speech which
ranged up and down like that of an excited bird.
As he was about to stab the corpse with his flag, the corpse rolled
onto its back and contracted its body, shot up its feet and kicked the
alien square in the belly.
Catching the shaft of the flag, the erstwhile dead sergeant jerked it
out of the alien's grasp, immediately bounded to his feet, took a firm
two-handed grip of the thing--the sharp lance-head made it a splendid
weapon--and ran it with savage violence straight into the throat of the
green man, who died instantly and without sound.
Pausing only to shake his head once, because it ached fiercely, the
sergeant bent over the tall body, folded one big hand around the pistol
and its half-breed holster, and yanked. The retaining strap broke. The
sergeant turned and began to run in the opposite direction from the
grounded saucer, which continued to show no sign of life. Shortly he
had disappeared into the smoking, burning ruins of the city's edge.
And so at 12:46 p.m. on January 9th, 1955, a moribund world drew the
first blood from its extraterrestrial assassins.