Vanguard of the Lost

A few hundred thousand people in New York saw the early video-news and thus immediately set themselves up as experts, having seen the New Delhi shots of the vast, hoary, slab-sided ships that floated like so many ridiculous balloons over the brown circus-ground landscape of India.

The early editions carried the telephotos and the newspapers were not at all reticent in their surmises. NEW RUSSIAN WEAPON said one. INVADERS FROM SPACE said another. MARTIANS ARRIVE, screamed the News.

It was a situation so altogether trite to the vast international clique of science fiction fandom, remembered from the opening paragraphs of half a thousand stories, that it gave most of them the feeling that they were reliving a dream.

And it gave fandom a chance to check reality against the surmises of the unhappy writers who had been forced to proceed entirely on assumptions.

But this was reality. Even as the atomic bomb had outlawed cataclysm in science fiction, this invasion from space threatened the demise of the space opera, since the more accurately fantasy anticipates actuality, the more carefully it signs its eventual death warrant.

Larry Graim, disconsolate statistician by day, avid author of science fiction by night, read the headlines, hit himself smartly in the forehead several times with the heel of his hand to make certain he was awake, and phoned news of a headache to his office. This was too great a day to be wasted in computing mean and median relationships.

Estimates of the number of ships varied wildly. With shoes not yet laced, Graim trotted down to the corner, took back editions of all the papers to his furnished room on Eighty-ninth Street.

The lowest estimate he read said seven hundred ships. He swallowed hard. In his epics there had only been three or at the most five ships from space. He felt better when he turned on the radio and heard that emergency meetings were being called involving the heads of governments. That, at least, followed his story lines.

Late bulletins reported small groups of the ships over the West Coast, over Europe, over South Africa, even over Australia. They traveled at an average height of three thousand feet. They were expected over New York in a matter of hours, or maybe minutes.

Graim lifted the pot off the electric coil, poured himself another cup of coffee. Then he thought of the roof. Forgetting the coffee he left his room, ran up the stairs and came out onto the flat roof of the five story building. The morning haze was lifting, was drifting east out to sea.

After searching every inch of the sky, taut with anticipation, seeing nothing, he looked around him. A dozen feet away a girl stood, looking at him with amusement. He had seen her many times on the stairs, had wondered and wondered how he could skillfully open a conversation with her. The heroes of his stories were always adequate for such situations. They were suave and worldly. Their conversations were sparkling and urbane.

“Uh... hello,” said Larry Graim.

“Hello yourself. Looking for Martians?” Her voice was low, warm, full of that secret amusement. The morning wind blew a strand of dark hair across her forehead. He wondered why he hadn’t made the heroines of his stories look like her. Or maybe he had. He grew conscious of his unlaced shoes, uncombed hair, unshaven jaw and shirt with button missing.

“They won’t be Martians,” he said firmly.

She raised one eyebrow. “Oh? Secret sources of information?”

“Martians are old hat. Canals are optical illusions.”

She laughed. “You’d better tell all these others. They’re looking for Martians.” She waved a hand lightly at the other roofs. Hundreds of people watched the sky.

He was suddenly annoyed with her attitude. “Don’t you know, young woman, that this may be the most important event in recorded history?”

“Of course! That’s why I want to see it. That’s why I’m taking the day off. And don’t call me young woman. My name is Alice Fiddler.”

“Larry Graim,” he said weakly. The faint flick of her anger had stung.

She frowned. “Graim. Graim. Oh, of course I Sideways in Space. Loom of Lural, Jenyeb, the Elder.”

And light dawned for him. “Alice Fiddler! You write... those letters! Those ghastly letters!”

“Of course. And I pan you, Graim, every chance I get. I’m the one who called you the poor man’s Kuttner and the cretin’s Van Vogt.”

He forgot the very attractive package the letter writer came in. He moved to within three feet of her, fists clenched and said, “I promised myself that if I ever met up with you I’d...”

She smiled warmly up at him. “You’d what, little man? Lay one of those lean brown paws on me and I’ll toss you off the roof. I couldn’t render a better service to my fellow readers.”

“Even Bradbury couldn’t make a heroine out of you!”

“And they pay you two cents a word! Imagine. I’ve seen better words written on fences.”

He heard distant shouts from the other roofs and a flick of movement half seen made him turn his head and look toward the west.

He saw them. His lean jaw sagged and his eyes bulged glassily. He made a wet sound, deep in the throat.

“See!” Alice Fiddler said. “See! Shiny and symmetric space ships! Indeed, Mr. Graim. Roaring jets! Indeed!”

He continued to gawp. There were nine of them and they were not in formation. They came blundering up from the horizon with same splendid disregard for order as brown cows drifting across a pasture. They were not shiny. They were made of a rough mottled dirty-looking substance. Jets did not roar. They wavered stubbornly and silently along, like escapees from Macy’s Christmas parade. And they were not symmetric. They were shaped as though a not-quite-bright child had labored to form vast fat cigars out of mud. Lumpy protuberances, like mammoth warts, protruded from their sides.

Yet certain things about them did impress him. Their speed was considerable, in spite of the yawing movements they made. And they gave the impression of enormous weight and incalculable age. There was a loose discipline about their movement.

They came abreast, about a mile between each one, went on out to sea, wheeled back and, once again over land, went blundering on up the coast.

“What next, genius?” Alice Fiddler asked.

Graim straightened. At least he was certain of his ground there. He knew how the plot would unfold. “Attempts will be made to communicate with them. Those attempts- will be continued until they make some overt move, cause some damage. And then the air-force will attack. And, of course, all of our weapons will be powerless. But some young inventor will be working on something which, in the nick of time will drive them away.”

She clapped her hands. “Bravo! What’ll we name this yarn from the immortal pen of Lawrence Graim? Sideways in Space? You wrote that one already. Remember?”

“Oh, hush!” he said wearily. “Come on down and have some coffee and we’ll listen to the radio.”

She rested her hand on his arm for a moment. “Cheer up, Graim. After this you’ll have to find a new plot. I’m not as rough as I sound. Where’s your coffee?”

In his room they sat and listened to the excited tenor yelpings of the news analyst “At this moment it has been decided that the space ships did not originate anywhere on this planet. No one knows where they came from or what they want. Folks, they seem to be looking us over. All continents at once. A complete census is difficult because they all look alike and they stay in motion. But it is estimated that there are somewhere between two and three thousand of them, each one a good quarter mile long. Imagine that, folks! An airship or space ship or whatever about thirteen hundred feet long! There doesn’t seem to be any pattern in their movements. They stay at about three thousand feet and keep moving around in groups. We are awaiting a statement from the president. Ah, here it is. And I quote. ‘There is no cause for panic or alarm. Some intelligence is behind all this, and if they were unfriendly, we’d have known it by now. We are trying to communicate with them. The American public will be kept advised of our progress.’ ”

Alice Fiddler walked over and twisted the dial to turn the set off. “We know as much as they do, Graim. Good coffee, this.”

“This is a moment of enormous consequence. You can’t turn off our source of information like that and drink coffee. It isn’t part of the story line.”

“With a little practise, Graim, you could bore me good. Now hush up and have some more coffee. I’ll turn it back on to junior in a little while.”

“A story has to keep moving,” he said.

“But lambie, this isn’t a story! This is it.”

He looked at her. She sat comfortably in his best chair, one leg tucked under her. She looked at him over the rim of the cup and winked. He blushed.

“Shy, eh?” she said.

“Nobody would ever accuse you of that, Miss Fiddler.”

“For goodness sake, Graim, stop being stuffy. Apparently you took the day off too. Truce. What do you say?”

He grinned at her. “Truce Alice.”

“That’s better. You look almost human now. Go comb you hair and shave. When you get through we’ll see what’s new.”

As he looked at his long, sober face in the mirror, as he hacked at the beard, he tried vainly to disassociate himself with the fictions he had written and the reality of the present. It was useless. He had lived for so long in so many dream worlds of fantasy that he could not look on reality except as another figment of fantasy, another story line to be plotted to a happy conclusion.

“That’s better,” she said as he came back into the room. “Now we’ll see.” She turned on the radio and they soon had two new facts. One, that another ship, similar to the others, but enormously larger, was in orbit around the earth at the equator at an estimated height of three hundred miles. Two, that the smaller ships were conscientiously covering every kilometer of the land surface of the earth.

“Mapping,” he said.

She frowned. “For the first time, you make sense, Larry. Constant speed, constant height. All the land surface. For what?”

“Exploration party?”

“No. Too many of them.”

“Colonization?”

They stared at each other and the first cool touch of fear was on them. She lowered her voice as she said, “I hope not. I have a hunch that would be a bad, bad thing.”

They had lunch together in a white enamel restaurant on the corner. She insisted on paying for her own. At three o’clock in the afternoon there was more news. The ships all stopped where they were. A survey indicated that there was no town or hamlet, however small, over which the ships had not been seen. Technicians, searching the air waves had found that one end of the band was blanketed with shrill high screams. They had recorded these screams, slowed them down, found that they were signals, some sort of a communication code. The best linguists and code men had been assigned to work on the problem. But there was little hope of it being broken. One expert stated that, from the general structure of the code signals he was willing to venture a guess that it concerned mathematical measurements, but having no knowledge of the mathematical structure being used, he failed to see how it could be broken down.

Alice said, “Brother! It sounds like a Graim epic. But where’s the fearless hero who cracks both code and invader?”

“I thought we said truce,” Larry grumbled.

They listened to the news cast. No ships could be seen from metropolitan New York. The other ships were stationary. Two news services were broadcasting from aircraft circling the silent ships.

Alice changed to another program. An excited voice said, “This is Mal McKay, folks. It’s a bright sunny afternoon up here at three thousand feet. Our copter is hovering over one of these monsters from space. It looks like the back of some huge prehistoric beast. I’ve given the pilot the word, folks. We’re settling toward it. Closer, closer. We’ve landed! You of the radio audience can no longer hear our motors. Folks, it’s quiet up here, what I mean quiet. And we’ll have to get a new word to indicate how still and motionless this space ship is. It is as though it were welded to a big pole that extends down to the center of the earth. I’ll have to admit that it gives me the shakes, folks. You can probably hear it in my voice.”

“The darn fool!” Alice muttered. She scowled.

The bright, eager voice continued. “Now for the hide of this beast, folks. It seems to be metallic and yet it has the look of old rock. It seems corroded. I stamp my heel and it’s like stamping on a boulder. Now I’m touching it with my hand. There is a bit of warmth to it, but no more than you’d expect as the results of this late afternoon sunshine. I can see the other ships to the north and to the west. They’re just as steady and inert as this one. When we came up we saw the thin lines against the sides of the beast indicating doors or ports or whatever. There’s something or somebody inside this thing I’m standing on, folks, and it would be interesting to know what it or they are, hey? I have a stethoscope with me. You know, one of those things the doc checks your heart with? There’ll be a few moments of air silence while I listen through the hide of this monster.”

“He’ll be giving it a nickname,” Graim said with disgust.

“The human race,” Alice said, “is a big puppy that goes charging and yapping and wagging its tail at everything new.”

There was new excitement in the announcer’s voice. “Well, I’ve heard it or them. Sounds like a busy office. A bunch of clickings down in there. Click, clack, click, clack. And that’s all.”

“Relays,” Graim said. “Why couldn’t they have put a scientist on top of that thing instead of a human airdale?”

“Now, folks, I am taking out of my pocket a Willow’s file. You’ve heard of Willow’s files. ‘Sharpest steel teeth in the world.’ With this file I am going to scrape off a sample of the hide of this thing from space. There is a little flaked bit here sticking up, like an enormous pock mark, as though something hit it a blow and bounced off after damaging the hide. Listen and you’ll hear me filing on it.”

Over the radio came a tiny grating sound. It continued on and on. Then it stopped. The announcer laughed nervously. “Well, I guess that the sharpest steel teeth in the world aren’t quite sharp enough for this baby. I seem to be wearing the teeth off the file and I haven’t even made a mark on the thin edge I was sawing on. I see by my Sweething Watch — time when you need it — that my air time is running out. This is Mal McKay, folks, your things-of-the-day reporter, signing off from a brand new spot, the top of one of the spaceships near Cleveland. Until this same time tomorrow...”

The network cut in with station identification and a spot commercial. This time Graim switched off the set.

He clenched his fists and glared down at the rug. “No dignity,” he muttered. “No respect. No awe. Just as if those ships were two-headed calves in a sideshow.”

“But don’t you see?” Alice said. “That’s been the trouble with your stories. Your people in fiction have been loaded with awe and respect and dignity. And so they weren’t people. They are all little cardboard annies that you yank around with strings.”

He looked at her bleakly. “There are supposed to be riots tonight. Fear all over the world. Sidewalk orators talking about the end of the world.”

“Nuts, my boy. Joe Citizen is going home after a hard day in the shop. He pecks at the wife, snarls at the kids, stretches out on the couch, unfolds the paper and says, ‘Whaddya know? Space ships!’ Then he reads the bowling league scores.”

“But some people are alarmed!”

“You and I are alarmed, Larry. And responsible heads of governments. And chronic worriers. A lot of smart men in a lot of labs all over the world are doing some constructive thought on what makes those brutes stay up in the air and where they could have come from and what they want and how to get in touch with them.”

“I want to do something,” he said.

Her tone was soft. “Sure you do, Larry. You’re identifying yourself with the heroic young men of your stories. You want to go steaming out and solve the great problem. Have you got a bank account?”

He gave her a puzzled stare. “A few hundred. Why?”

“Those ships are coming down somewhere. I have a beatup coupe in a garage around the corner. You’ll be miserable the rest of your life unless you get a good look at them. When they come down we’ll go take a look. Okay?”

He was suddenly excited. “That sounds wonderful!” Then he frowned. “But why do you care?”

“Have you ever had a woman give you an answer that gave herself away? Have you ever met a shameless woman?”

He swallowed hard. “I... I don’t know.”

She smiled. “Here’s your answer, lad. I care because you care.”

She stood up quickly and before he could make a sound she had left the room and closed the door behind her.

After giving her answer due consideration, Lawrence Graim stood up, arched his chest, squared his shoulders and walked pompously around his room until he found that he was running into the furniture. Then he sat down, wearing a wide, fatuous, indelible smile.

At eight the next morning he was knocking on her door. She opened her door and he was so impressed with how good she could look in the morning that he forgot what he was about to say.

She said, “I heard it too, Larry. I’ll be down to your room in ten minutes. And then we’ll go. Make some of that coffee of yours. You’re going to make some happy girl a good wife.” She shut the door.

He went one floor past his room, walked back up. By the time the coffee was perking she came in carrying a small suitcase, a topcoat over her arm.

Over her coffee she said, “Every thrill seeker in Manhattan will be boiling out to take a look at the spot where they landed. We’ll have to avoid the crowd. They’re about eight miles northwest of Nyack. Everybody will be steaming up the parkway and crossing at the G. Washington Bridge. So we’ll take the tunnel and circle around and come in from the back. I know the back roads in that area. Okay?”

“Fine with me. But why the suitcase?”

“This might be just a little more than a jaunt, Larry.” He looked into her eyes and for a moment he shared her fear.

After the fourth back road they tried was blocked with a jammed stream of yapping cars, a crescendo of klaxons, they gave up. Larry turned back, found a place where the ditch was shallow and pulled well off into a clump of brush. They locked the car, leaving the bags inside. He walked behind her up the road, by the double line of cars, noting that she wore flat-heeled shoes, also noting that her walk was, to him, as intriguing as would be an intricate dance by any other woman.

Others were doing as they had done, and soon they were part of a long stream of pedestrians. Weary sweating men wearing self-consciously indifferent looks while their wives shepherded the kids. “Mommy, where’s the Martians?” “Just a little way further, honey.”

The feet stirred up dust from the shoulder. A little old lady sat with austere dignity in the back seat of a huge black sedan, trapped by lesser cars. A man had set up his pitch beside the road. “Getcher Martian balloons here! Balloons for the kiddies, lady? Watchem fly.”

Peanuts and popcorn and balloons and ice cream. Holiday atmosphere. It could have been the National Air Races, or the P.G.A. Tournament, or the big day at Indianapolis, or Barnum and Bailey come to town.

Alice said, “For goodness sake get the look off your face, as though you smelled something bad. Now you know what really happens when spaceships land.”

Troopers on motorcycles idled up through the crowds, motors thudding heavily, weary voices saying, “Stay in line. Stay in line.”

It was a two-mile walk to where the ships had landed. And when Alice and Larry got there, they could see nothing but the backs of the multitude. People standing and talking and laughing and holding the children on high. “See the Martians, honey?”

The ships had landed in a vast open stretch where there were only a few lightly wooded hummocks.

Larry pushed Alice sideways through the crowd. He whispered, “Over on the left there is a hill where we can see something.”

The hill turned out to be steeper than it had looked. They went up the back of the hill and it was necessary to grab at the small trees, clutch at roots. Alice went down onto the shale, taking the knees out of both stockings and staining her dress.

At last they came through the fringe of brush at the top and they could see the wide sunlit area, the vast crowd on the right in a huge semicircle. There were nine ships and they had landed in the form of a nine pointed star, but with a clear area in the center of the star about a half mile across. They were the fat, clumsy spokes of a vast wheel with an enormous hub. Larry once again got the impression of age so vast, so incredible, that the mere thought of it was dizzying.

He remembered something of the same feeling from an army stopover in Cairo, when he had gone out and looked at the pyramids. But this was intensified.

They were not mathematically spaced, but were subtly out of line, in keeping with their clumsiness in the air.

The bolder members of the crowd were right up next to the ships, shaded by the bulging overhang.

“I don’t like their being so close,” Alice said. “It makes me feel as though something were going to happen.”

“I don’t get it. They’ve landed in groups like this all over the world according to the radio. They’ve picked relatively level places. Like... well, like big slugs settling down on a ripe fruit.”

Alice shivered. “That’s almost too good, Graim. Save it for your next epic.”

“Want to go down there?”

“Uh uh. I like it here. I like it very much here.”

He moved to the side, found a grassy bank. They sat and smoked and looked at the thickening crowd, at the silent ships.

When a cloud moved across the face of the sun, Alice moved closer to Larry. It made him feel masculine and protective. He was tasting the delights of this new feeling when the side ports of the ships opened. They were rectangular sections, thirty yards wide, possibly fifty yards high. They were hinged along the bottom edge and the method of their opening was that they Tell open. They were enormously thick, and so heavy that when they fell against the soil, the top edge was imbedded deeply.

And, of course, the spectators who had been standing there were instantly smashed into the ground.

There was an instant of silence, and then an enormous roaring scream of fear from the huge crowd. Except for a few dazed and hardy souls who had the vague idea of extricating their loved ones from the pulped soil and who clawed at the fallen ports as effectually as ants struggling with a boulder, every man, woman and child turned and fled, wide-eyed, gasping with fear, trampling the weak and the slow.

Within two minutes the ships had the vast area to themselves. Bodies lay where they had been trampled. A few moved feebly like half-crushed insects. The trampled grass was a litter of gum wrappers, empty cigarette packs, half-eaten sandwiches. Several toy balloons drifted forlornly toward the clouded sky.

Larry and Alice stood back from the grassy bank. His arm was around her waist and he felt the trembling of her body. “All those people,” she whispered. “All those people.”

“It wasn’t on purpose,” he said. “They were just in the way. It wasn’t on purpose.”

“That won’t help the dead ones. And a few million people are going to be screaming for the bombers.”

The ports were down. The sun came out but it cast little illumination into the interior of the ship they could see most clearly.

There was a distant clattering. From the dark interior of the ships corroded snouts were pushed out into the sunshine. They were very obviously machines. They teetered at the top of the ramp, then with a clattering of treads, they rolled down the ramps, out onto the grass. They seemed to be made of the same substance as the ships. Though they had rounded backs like beetles, there was an odd familiarity about them. Five came from each ship nearest them, and he counted four that came from one of the far ships. From two ships nothing emerged.

When they began work Larry snapped his fingers and said, “Of course! Bulldozers.”

There was a thin slanted blade at the front of each one, with the dark mouth of a narrow hopper above the blade. Each machine was roughly the size of a freight car. They lumbered into loose formation with some outside the circle of ships, others inside the circle. The blades dropped and they began to scrape the uneven soil.

They were amazingly efficient in their clumsiness. Larry watched in fascination, Alice completely forgotten. The dirt peeled up the edge of the blade into the hopper. And disappeared. There was no residue, no smoke, no elimination of any sort.

One of them went directly at a high mound and, with no reduction in speed, ate its way completely through the mound. The top of the mound collapsed onto the rounded back, fell off in chunks. The next scraper ate up the chunks and, in a few minutes, the hill was no more.

He saw one of the scrapers heading toward where several bodies were silent, a few more trying desperately to crawl away. He gagged and turned his head as the flesh slid up the blade into oblivion.

It was efficient, and yet clumsy. He saw two of the scrapers meet on a converging track, nudge each other and go off at a crazy angle. One of them headed directly into the side of one of the big ships. The treads continued to revolve as it dug itself down into the ground.

When the hub of the vast wheel was level and clear, all of the ships moved toward the center and the scrapers worked on the area where the ships had been, on the rounded depressions where the mammoth weight of the ships had smashed the earth.

The scraper that had dug itself into the ground was overturned when the ship moved. It lay on its side, treads still turning, moving it around and around, much like a beetle trying to get back onto its legs.

Some few of the throng, mostly men, had drifted back. They watched from a very respectful distance.

As though on some signal, all of the scrapers except two turned back to the ships, crawled up the ramps and disappeared inside. After they were in, the treads on the overturned one stopped. One scraper was left outside the circle, standing silently. Larry saw the scar on its side and knew that it was the one which had had the collision.

“You want to go?” he asked Alice.

Her face was pale, her jaw set. “We stay,” she said.

He looked at the cleared area. The scrapers had missed patches here and there. Not many. Just a few. Where they had worked, the ground was scraped raw, scraped level.

Two military aircraft appeared over the trees, slowly circled the area, light observation planes.

Other machines came down the ramp. If the others had looked like beetles, these looked like tall spiders, with wheels at the end of each leg. From the small body of the spider tubes pointed downward at the ground. They lined up in loose formation and suddenly the tubes erupted with a blue-white glare, a roar of flame that rendered both Larry and Alice temporarily blind.

When they could see again, they found that it was impossible to look down at the area. The flames made an almost metallic roar. The sound lasted for a full half hour and, even with their backs turned to it, they felt the heat, saw the ghastly illumination on the leaves in front of them.

He thought of the possibility of radiation burns, and they went over the crest of the hill. When the sound was gone they returned.

The raw dirt had been transformed to a flat, silvery floor. It looked oddly like a lake of silver. The last of the spider things was disappearing into the nearest ship. Where the scrapers had done their job poorly, there were humps in the silver lake. The overturned scraper was half melted. A spider thing lay on its side beside the scraper. The other scraper stood, unharmed, outside the wide silver area. He saw that the ships had moved again to permit the place where they rested to be silvered over.

The area still radiated heat. The ships were silent. Larry said, “If they’re going to do more, they’re going to have to wait for it to dry.”

Alice glanced at the fading day. “We better find the car.”

A hundred yards down the road they met the military guard. “Restricted area,” he said flatly. “Get out and stay out.”

“What goes on?” Larry asked.

“The airforce is going to give those killers a taste of some two-ton bombs.”

“But they didn’t kill anybody on purpose,” Larry said.

The guard spat, tucked his thumb in his belt and leaned toward Larry. “Mister, are you with us or against us? There’s a lot of you crack-pot Martian lovers crawling out of the woodwork.”

Alice tugged at his arm. “Come on, Larry.”

“Do like the lady says, bud, or I’ll drop on you like the door on a space ship.”

Larry went down the road with her. It was dusk. They got in the car and turned on the radio.

“...martial law declared to cover those areas within the continental United States where the enemy ships have landed. Our observers report that the enemy ships are setting up defense areas, clearing the ground, paving it. It will be many days before the complete casualty figures are available, but the best estimates state that, in the sixty-three known places within our borders where the enemy has landed, average casualties were one hundred. Thus, nearly seven thousand have already died. This is the first time in the history of modern warfare that there have been civilian deaths within the borders of the United States. All attempts to communicate with the invader have failed. This Wednesday will go down in our history as the day when a great nation girded itself for a battle to the death against...”

Alice turned it off. “It’s beginning to sound like one of your yarns, Larry.”

“Thanks,” he said dryly.

“But did you get the impression I did? I mean about their efficiency?”

He frowned as he started the motor, backed the car out. “Yes. The people from space should be horribly efficient and deadly. Those gimmicks of theirs are effective enough, but they use them the way a child would play with a ten-ton truck. The whole picture seems to be sort of out of focus.”

“What do you think about the air force?”

“I think their.bombs will rattle off those hulls like peas off a plate glass window. I think they’ll have to break out the atomic bomb.”

“That would be an approved part of the plot, eh?”

He slowed the car, gave her an odd look and said, “Alice, this may sound silly, but would you please pinch me? Hard.”

She reached over and got a fold of flesh just above his knee between finger and thumb.

“Hey!” he yelled.

“Feel better?”

“I could still have been working too hard. Maybe when you’re in a mental institution and you imagine you get pinched, it hurts.”

“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.”

“That’s because I don’t like it this way. I wanted it to be official. They thought I was a nut. So I have to get us smuggled in here by a newspaper that wants an exclusive. Did you see the look on their faces? They think we’re never coming out.”

“They are not alone,” Alice said.

“You don’t have to come with me.”

“I don’t want to, but I have to. Look! What are they doing now?”

It was barely bright enough to see. A new group of machines were at work. All of the ships had moved outside the silvery platform. The new machines were plasterers. The rectangular buildings were completed. The new machines were in a vast circle around the entire area. Their myriad mechanical arms terminated in flat fingerless hands the size of the top of a small table. Each machine was roughly the shape of a sitting Buddha, with, in place of the stomach, and open cauldron effect. The flat hands dipped into the cauldron, scooping out what looked like molten glass. They patted it into a growing transparent wall. As the wall increased in height the machines, with every evidence of weightlessness floated up with the wall.

“Damn!” Larry said. “Now we can’t get to the buildings. No. Wait! Do you see what I see?”

A third of the way around the circle one of the plastering machines worked busily, but with an empty cauldron. Thus the wall it was building existed only in its mechanical reflexes.

He took Alice by the wrist and hurried her down onto the flats. As they neared the floating machine she dug her heels in. She gasped, “Do you really know what this is all...”

“Just trust me. Come on.” He gave one timid look up at the machine which floated fifteen feet in the air. He ducked instinctively as he ran under it. The silver floor was firm and hard underfoot. The morning sun, just appearing in the east, cast long rays across the compound.

The first building was fifty feet distant. There was a door in the side of it, a door but four and a half feet high. “Little guys,” he said.

They ducked and went in. Her hand was like ice in his. He gave her a reassuring smile. “Standard attribute of intelligence. Desire for privacy and shelter. Probably true everywhere.”

“They won’t mind us poking around, friend?”

“Mind? Of course not.”

The windows were oval and set very low, unglassed. The interior of the building was one room with a ceiling ten feet high. One comer of the room leaned crazily and some of the bricks lay on the inside floor, an open crack extending to the ceiling.

In a far corner was a larger cube, two feet on a side. The top of it glowed softly. Larry approached it, held his hand out, smiled at Alice. “Desire for warmth. Maybe also a constant. Could cook on this thing. I guess that all primitives start civilization by learning about combustion. Lightning did it here on earth. Wonder what did it on their world?”

“Do you have to act like a man renting an apartment?”

“No furniture,” he said. “Hmmm. Notice the softness of the floor in. here. Seems to be a sort of rubbery film. Sprayed on, maybe. Luxury, eh?”

“May we please get out of here now before something bricks up that doorway?”

He shrugged. “No chance of their doing that. I want a look at the central building, the big one, and then we’ll go visiting.”

The doors were larger leading to the big building. It was silent, deserted, and but half constructed. There were many rooms, all empty. On the north side the wall was missing and the unsupported ceiling sagged dangerously at that point.

“Could you break down and start talking sense?” Alice asked.

“This all makes sense,” he said firmly. “I’ll let you figure it out.”

The floating machine was a good ten feet higher when they left the area. It worked busily on the empty air, slapping, patting, smoothing. They could see that the transparent walls, a good yard thick at the base, were tapering slightly and leaning toward the center.

“It’s going to be a big dome,” he said. “Pressure affair. Controlled atmosphere.”

“Oh, fine!”

“Come on. We’ll visit that one over there.”

They went to the foot of the ramp. Larry pulled the two flashlights out of his jacket pocket, handed her one. She looked fearfully up into the dark interior of the ship. He said, “Now act the same way you would crossing 42nd Street in the middle of the block at five thirty in the afternoon. When anything starts moving toward you, just get out of the way.”

“I don’t want anything moving toward me.”

“Come on. There’s nothing in here that wants to hurt you.”

She took a deep breath. “Lead on.”

The ramp led up into a room so vast that their lights barely illuminated the far walls. The floor was pitted and worn.

Larry walked slowly, speaking with the relaxed manner of a licensed guide. “Here, as you can see is the main equipment room. Those arches at either end probably lead to equipment storage. Let’s take a look. Ah, yes. Those jobs over there. They’re the scrapers.”

He led her over. He looked closely and with curiosity at the worn condition of the treads, the pitted blade, the hopper over the slanted blade.

A wide ramp led down from one side of the second room. Below they found the spider creatures which had silvered the raw earth.

Gradually she began to lose her fear. They could not decide the use of some of the equipment. Everything had a look of age, of hard use, of countless centuries of blind toil.

Some of the more delicate machines, made of a different class of metal had crumpled where they stood. He picked up a bit of metal, flaked it between his fingers. “This was a poor specification,” he said.

Back in the main room where the daylight shone in, he stopped, looked all around and said, “Over here. The little ramp.”

They had missed it before. It went up the side wall to a small door at the top. It was but two feet wide and the door at the top was less than five feet high.

Halfway up the ramp she hung back as she heard the busy clacking coming from the little room.

“It’s them!” she gasped.

“I hardly think so,” he said. “You can wait here.”

“No, I’ll come along if... if you’re really going in there.”

The room was but twenty feet square, the walls solid with odd wiring, transparent tubular relays, duplicated in the boards which were erected from the floor in the middle of the room. The clacking came from one of the panel boards. Larry walked over, held his light on the tiny relays.

In his occupation, Larry had become familiar with mechanical accounting and computing equipment. Though the materials were alien, the wiring a nightmare, there was yet a comfortable familiarity about the panel boards. Alice clung with both hands to his left arm, her fingers digging in just above his elbow.

“Sounds like a knitting contest in here,” she said, a shake in her voice.

Larry threw his shoulders back and said resonantly, “Aha!”

Her grip loosened and she stepped back. “Oh, come now! You’re cribbing lines. That’s what the fictional hero says when at last he outwits the invader. Aren’t you getting a shade ahead of yourself?”

Larry gave her a superior smile. He enveloped her in his long thin arms and attempted to kiss her roughly. The kiss landed next to her ear. A high heel thudded against his chin, an elbow drove most of the wind out of him and her forehead thumped him smartly under the eye.

“Now look...” he said indigantly.

“Not like that,” she whispered. “Like this!”

The merry little panel boards clicked and clucked and Larry Graim had the unmistakable sensation that the ship had taken off in the general direction of Alpha Centauri. When the too brief moments ended, he was surprised to find that the space ship was at rest.

He said, “I guess I was feeling masterful or something. You see, for once I’m the hero of my own yarn and I’ve figured the plot line out. It has to be this way. It will give the newspaper that hired me to sneak in here a tremendous scoop, and it will make me rich and famous and I can marry you.”

“After you ask me, maybe. But tell me what this is all about.”

“You see, darling, mankind has had an enormous fear of these things, but actually the truth of the matter is that...”

“Bud, would you kindly move the love scene over into that corner out of the way?” a strange voice said.

Larry turned quickly, and saw a weary-looking man in a white smock and a tool apron standing just inside the doorway.

“Now see here!” Larry said. The man ignored him. He turned and shouted down the ramp. “Hey, Al!” he yelled. “Tell Joe and Charlie to keep an eye on those potbellies on the north side.”

The weary one brushed by Larry and Alice, setting his gasoline lantern down, pulling a pair of pliers out of his tool apron. With the pliers he deftly opened four scimitar-shaped knife switches, wedged little strips of bake-lite across the contact points so that the switches could not close.

There was a distant shout. The weary one went to the doorway. “What’s that? Did the trick? Okay, tell Mr. Sweeney that I’m deactivating the whole works.”

The weary one went back to the board and whistled softly between his teeth as he blocked the major control switches across the top of the panels. Slowly the clicking died out. The room became silent.

“May I ask the meaning of this?” Larry inquired with all the dignity he could muster.

“How’d you two get in here? Didn’t you see the signs?”

“I am employed by the Express Courier and, at the risk of my life, sir, I came in here to...”

The weary one chuckled. “Sweeney catch you in here and it will be at the risk of your life, bud. How about shoving off and taking your dolly with you, eh?”

“We’ve been in here for over an hour and...”

“Oh, I guess the signs weren’t up then. Take a look at them on your way out.”

Woodenly Larry Graim ducked under the low door frame and went down the ramp, Alice following him. She made an odd sound in her throat. He glared furiously at her and she worked so hard to keep her face straight that she nearly strangled. They stood at the top of the ramp that led out to the ground. All activity had ceased. The pot bellied plasterers had stopped applying the transparent liquid. They sat in a ragged circle, their spatulate hands folded.

Four trucks stood near the partially completed dome. A jeep roared over and skidded to a stop. An oversized man with crimson hair and a face like broken concrete piled out and roared, “Can’t you read? Git offa the area, you two.”

Larry pulled himself up. “Sir, I want to have it known that I...”

“Do you git or do I take the slack of your pants and see how far I can throw you?”

Alice tugged at Larry. He walked along with her, half dazed. A hundred feet beyond the ships that formed the spokes of a huge wheel, with the dome as the hub, they found the perimeter signs.

“They can’t do this to me,” Larry said. “It spoils the plot!”

Again she had to pull him along. The Express Courier representative was gone. They went, in Alice’s car, down to the newspaper building. Together, they went up to the news room. The city editor was roaring at copy boys, at the reporters, at the switch-board girl. The slot man on the copy desk was roaring at the men on the rim.

After twelve minutes the city editor noticed Larry Graim. “Well, whadda you want? Who are you?”

“I’m Lawrence Graim and I was hired to...”

“Graim? Oh sure, Graim. Look, kid. It just didn’t pan out, see? Tell you what you do. Hack out a feature. Maybe we can use it in a few days. We’ll pay space rates. Come back Tuesday.”

“Could you please tell me what has happened?”

“Buy a paper, kid. It’s all in there.”

Larry Graim and Alice sat in his room. She had her shoes off, her legs tucked under her. “You make the best darn coffee, honey,” she said.

“Intrepid young hero’s claim to fame,” he said with bitterness.

“Good coffee is something useful.”

“Oh, dandy. I was such a smart guy. And all the time the Samson organization had figured it out and they were quietly buying up the land where the ships had taken over before they moved in. Now they’ve turned one complete installation over to the government, just as a public relations gesture. They’re working on the control devices and within a few weeks they hope to have that automatic equipment doing anything they tell it to. See their ads? They’ll pave so cheap that they’ll be low bidder on every road contract they want. Yeah, I was a real smart guy.”

“Who were they, Larry?” she asked softly. “The ones who started it all?”

He shrugged. “We’ll probably never know. Maybe they’re all dead by now. Some wise old race at the other end of the universe. They were expanding. They needed new planets. So they set up a fleet for completely automatic preparation. The brain ship — that big baby in orbit around us — led the others like a hen with several thousand baby chicks. Find the planet, map it, pick the spots, build the domes, and the buildings and move along. Then when the actual bosses arrived, there were the housing projects all set for them. But that fleet has been going a million years too long. Or a billion. We don’t even know that. It must have been a frighteningly efficient project at first. Now it is just blundering along. And so long as there is one ship left, it will keep on going. We could have stopped it if we could have grabbed the brain ship.”

The soft radio music stopped and a man began to speak with excitement in his tone. Larry turned it higher.

“...that’s right, folks. Every ship all over the world that hasn’t been immobilized lifted about nine minutes ago. Already, on the sunny side of the earth, they are so high that they can’t be seen. A report has come in that, in Egypt, there are two domes, complete and perfect in every respect. The United States, with a head start, contains the greatest number of immobilized ships. And, believe me, we’re going to find out all the secrets of those ships. The President today said that the world should be thankful for this technological gift from some unknown...”

Larry clicked the radio off. “Gone,” he said dolefully.

“Gone to find a new planet. The ten thousandth planet, or the hundred thousandth,” she said. “When we get to Mars, we’ll probably find there the domes that they built.”

He looked at her and smiled. It wasn’t much of a smile. “And so tomorrow I go back to the method of least squares and the geometric graph paper. How thrilling! There I was, with the plot all figured out...”

She came over to him and curled into his lap, warm and soft as a kitten. She kissed the angle of his jaw. “You’ve still got the gal, darling.”

“Yes, but...” he said.

She stopped his lips in an entertaining manner.

“Yes, but...” he said again.

Again she rendered speech improbable.

“I begin to see what you mean,” he said shakily.

She sighed. “Besides, Lambie, you need me. You need a fresh viewpoint. You’ve been writing the same tired old story for years. Now, of course, space ships are out, the same as the atomic bomb. In the next story we write, how about a theme based on a culture where...”

He stared at her. “The next story we write?”

“Of course! I’m marrying you because it is the duty of every fan to help improve the level of science fiction.”