CHAPTER VIII

"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!"