When They Come from Space

by Mark Clifton

  Outside, another siren began to take up the wail, up and down, up and down in its modulations—as if, somehow, to make up for the silence on the screen; somehow to carry on the national mania, that none be subjected to silence and stillness, ever, lest he begin, once more, to think.

  The fax machine started to chatter again. Now the commentator was able to read the message as it appeared. His voice was clear but tense.

  "Bulletin ... London ... Unknown projectiles in large numbers are approaching up the Thames from the Channel Coast....

  "Bulletin ... Tokyo ... Missiles maneuvering at high altitudes near Yokohama...

  "Bulletin ... Moscow ... Anti-missile missiles released against enemy projectiles ... last warning to United States ... call off attack ... or we will press button....

  "Bulletin ... Omaha ... last warning to Russia ... call off attack or we will press button..."

  The machine stopped.

  The commentator stared at it, uncomprehending.

  "You can't stop there,” he said aloud to the machine.

  Clearly this was too much. He looked off-stage, as if appealing to the director for assistance; and the shrug he gave must have been a repetition of the shrug he received.

  Once again the fax machine chattered out a message. A very brief message.

  "Projectiles now over Washington."

  I stood up, uncertain, dazed, pondering the habit of getting my information from the screen versus going to see for myself. As if coming out of sleep I shook off the stupidity and, in a kind of reluctance, forced myself to walk over to the French windows and out upon the balcony.

  The July dusk had blended into night. Stars were clear and bright in the moonless sky. Street lights had been shut off in accord with some dusty, moulded plan of the past, but at the distant shopping center a neon glow suggested store owners hadn't been told about it; or maybe they were straining for one last sale before being blown to Kingdom Come.

  Over downtown Washington, some eight miles to the southeast, a weird red haze was forming in the sky. Swiftly it swelled, and grew, and took shape; with formations of tongues of flame. And now the whole sky was a mass of red, leaping flames.

  Out of the flames, as if against a backdrop on a stage, there silhouetted the dead black discs.

  My gorge rose in revulsion, I fought for detachment; to still my atavistic fears; to remind myself that man had created the dread forces of Evil out of his own sick imaginings, even as he had created the forces of Good out of his noble aspirations. It did no good. This was materialization of something basically, inherently Evil, no sickness of the imagination.

  Something seemed to go awry with my time sense. I seemed suspended in a kind of time vacuum, a new realization of how much we depend upon it for the sense of continuity. I could not tell whether things were happening simultaneously, instantaneously, or with long lapses of time in between.

  The discs were maneuvering now at dazzling speed, sharply wheeling in one direction, veering with incredible violation of momentum's laws in another. Breaking, scattering, one moment in quantum-particle randomness; the next in circle, in boxed, or V, or straight-line formation; obeying some principle-pattern all their own, without meaning to me, to us, to man.

  From the Earth crimson fingers of anti-aircraft fire reached up for the projectiles, seeming to connect the flames of the sky with those of Earth, all of a piece, until not only time was lost, but direction, orientation, sense of origin was lost, not to know whether the red flames were being hurtled downward from the ships or upward from our gun emplacements.

  Now the night was slashed into flaming, crisscross patterns of white and red tracer-missile lines. But I saw no disc hesitate, falter, fall. At times of randomness some seemed hurtling toward Earth, and yet a second (a moment? an hour?) later, when they flashed into some unexpected formation, none were laggard from wounds, none a hairsbreadth out of line.

  Perhaps our barrage was missing its target entirely, perhaps deflected by some force we could not know, perhaps passing through without harm. Who could know?

  At times, some single disc, plunging downward toward me, toward us all, with crushing speed, and sending me cowering back against the window frame, seemed almost to fill the whole sky, incredibly huge, incomprehensibly massive; yet later (how much later?) no more than a black pin point against the flaming yellow and crimson sky. For they were maneuvering in depth as well as across the vault of our sky—in third dimension. And, for all we knew, in some mathematical fourth, as well?

  How could we know? For surely no power on Earth had a science which could violate the laws of inertia with such impunity. And if not of Earth, then what Earthly logic could we calculate to apply?

  We ceased streaking our futile anti-missile missiles at them now. The discs dominated the sky, alone.

  As if out of some museum dedicated to the past, as if man were realizing in that peril that the human brain might, after all, creatively function on the spur of the moment to prove superior to the planned patterns of mechanical brains, and with some antiquated tools at hand prove yet superior to modern instruments, Air Force interceptors came up and into the sky.

  As if to complement their tiny V, the discs formed a mighty V to stretch across the sky. I felt a sob quicken my throat, admiration of such incredible bravery, shame that I was sometimes sardonic and cynical of man.

  "Goddam,” I heard myself saying over and over. “Goddam, goddam, goddam.” That such courage should be so futile.

  The blur of my grief for man streaked the lights. I dashed away the scintillating tears angrily. The clutches of wing missiles soared out ahead of the interceptors, the sonic booms shocked and roared and made puny the sounds of firing. Puny, too, the little V as it approached the apex of the gigantic one, but, goddam, how brave!

  The points of the tiny and the great merged. Our small was lost in the huge, swallowed in flaming radiance.

  But when the vast V wheeled away, majestically, the interceptors could be discerned once more; yes, there they were, zooming wildly, as if out of control, into space.

  Yet not out of control, no. I felt my caught breath return, hurting, when I saw them re-forming into attack groups. Section by trained section they peeled off, in traditional patterns preserved out of a long-dead past, they hurled in sonic-booming speeds toward the giant V. Small groups of us, attacking theirs, Them. At the sides of their apex instead of its point, cutting loose at them with ear-numbing barrages, and using the very forces of recoil to pull the interceptors up and out of their screaming power dives.

  And against all our unleashed might, not one single projectile wavered from the huge formation.

  Crouched there on the balcony, my back against—all right, all right, cowering against—the solid window frame, the only seeming solid thing in a boiling fluid world of noise and motion and light, I watched the fight go on.

  The fight?

  There was no fight. There was Man, spewing all his power, all his might, all the fierce, aggressive product of his brain and hand against his enemy. How had we known it enemy?

  But there was no fight.

  For the discs were not striking back. No red ray coruscated down and down to melt our City into flowing stone.

  My senses numbed.

  There had been not even falling shrapnel, broken pieces of missiles fired from our own at them. It was as if some unknown vacuum cleaner, electromagnet, sucked up the debris of battle as it occurred—to keep our people safe and our streets clean.

  I—don't—understand,” I said slowly, as if the formation of each word required the search of some unfamiliar glossary to translate my feelings into words.

  Spent interceptors returned to Earth, new waves of others arose to take their place—no less brave, no less determined.

  No more effective.

  Ignored now by the discs, they spent themselves in turn. The great V no longer paid us the compliment of wheeling massively to meet our charge. Rather now it seemed bent on some purpose
of its own, without regard.

  Yes, the far ends of the angle lines were curving inward, bending, bending inward until at last they met. A cloudiness appeared in circle at the center, and at its center an incredibly bright spot of pure crimson light. The cloudy haze coalesced, solidified, striated.

  A monstrous, pupil-pierced and piercing, bloodshot eye looked down upon the city.

  I later learned it was the common experience of each human being in the city, but at that moment I was convinced the piercing gaze seemed directed upon me, into me, through me.

  The eye, at first stretching almost from horizon to horizon, was smaller now. Now it filled but half the sky. And this before I had realized it was shrinking at all, so firm its hypnotic gaze. But now that I had realized it, the shrinking was accelerated; the eye was going away from us; faster and faster; out into space.

  Yet even to the last, that piercing pupil penetrated me, impaled me upon its malevolent beam of light. And then it, too, winked out.

  The flaming mists of the sky cleared. Here and there, the brighter stars began to shine through it. In the distance, over Rock Creek Park, I could see the last interceptors returning to Earth.

  There seemed no triumph in their flight.

  The sky was clear and black. The stars shone bright—and cold. No longer friendly stars, twinkling the planets at us as if with amusement at the foibles of man.

  No longer friendly sky, velvet soft and comforting.

  There were Things out there.

  Our tiny Earth was spinning through that cold, remorseless vacuum, alone.

  And nothing to hide behind.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  CHAPTER NINE

  For three days the Black Fleet appeared, and disappeared, and reappeared. Over every major city of the Earth. The Black Fleet? The many, many Black Fleets. So often, simultaneously, in so many places that the wildest sort of reckoning could not estimate their number.

  Now there was no thought of nation against nation, man against man; man taming other men to his service, submission, his pattern of the only Right.

  Now the discs had reappeared over New York City once more. But this time their pattern was different. They did not appear, play out their ominous and meaningless formations, wash the Earth below them in a stinking miasma of revolting, evil dread, and then disappear.

  They stayed. For seven hours now they had hovered and circled endlessly; as if they waited for momentous signal known only to them.

  The city below seemed virtually dead. On appearance, at noon this time, having seem them several times before, the New Yorker had cocked an eye heavenward, shrugged, and gone about his business. But the fleet had stayed, and, as if somewhere a valve had been opened to let off the steam, the city slowed, and died.

  No one knew where or how it started, but through the long afternoon the feeling grew universal that this time they meant business. This was it. And the waiting grew intolerable. The waiting grew intolerable for Mr. Harvey Strickland.

  He sat, robed in his purple dressing gown, on his high-backed and carved throne-chair, there in his penthouse atop one of his many newspaper buildings. He watched the television wall, and curled his lip in fury.

  It wasn't going over. With his expert, uncanny feel of mass reaction, he knew his organization was missing fire. They went through the motions of the formula, but too many of them were like that first announcer of the projectiles. Too many of them considered the stuff they spoke and printed as mere drivel. He'd fired the guy, of course, for letting the public see that he considered it so much nonsense, and ordinarily this would have been enough to make the rest of his organization men dig in with added display of enthusiasm, smacking their lips to show how much they enjoyed eating the crap. But they weren't.

  And the people weren't buying the crap.

  There was little traffic, little movement in the streets; and that little was hasty, furtive; rats scurrying from one hole to another. The people congregated in sheltered places, crowded under awnings, overhanging canopies, in doorways, at windows; and to heighten the similarity of wary rodents, they packed in the subway entrances where they could scurry downward into tunnels burrowed in the Earth when the menace came too near.

  Instead of watching his television screens and reading his newspapers for their interpretation, the goddam people were seeing for themselves!

  His radio and television channels were blanketed with Harvey Strickland's own subsidized extorters who pleaded, stormed, raged, and threatened the people to get down on their knees, bow their heads in humility.

  His scornful lip lifted from his lengthened, yellow teeth. Humility! He knew it, the Harvey Stricklands had always known that humility was the basest, most ignoble, unworthy posture a man can find; but it was the formula which had brought man back to groveling in the dust again and again. Subservient to the Harvey Stricklands, serving their ends.

  The formula just wasn't going over!

  The goddam rabbits sat in their warrens and cowered from the hunters above them—and the hunters, this time, were not controlled by Harvey Strickland. There should be processions. There should be martyred songs of defiance. There should be marching people. There should be line-up and clamor for self-destruction. The formula was guaranteed.

  And what did the goddam rabbits do? They sat in their holes and trembled!

  Trouble was, this time, there wasn't anything they could pick on, nothing weaker than themselves.

  He pushed his massive body, groaning under the weight of fat, out of his throne chair and began to pace the floor in sudden fury. Goddam it, he'd missed his cue. He should have set up a scapegoat, a whole bunch of scapegoats. He should have manufactured some victims for the majority to persecute. Hell, that was the simplest formula in the book. The stupidest mayor of a stinking country town knew that one. Some niggers here, some Jews there, Catholics here, Protestants there, Irishmen, Swedes, Polacks, wops, kooks, commies and homosexuals everywhere. Hell, with just a little twist of words, any and all of these could be made to look responsible for the Black Fleet. It always worked.

  And he'd slipped on it.

  He knew damn well that humans would never go out and tackle anything stronger than they were. They had to feel they were in the majority; they had to feel that the opinion of the majority was behind them—no matter what hypocritical false front they put on for public consumption—before they would dare to stand up and be counted. Oh they were strong on crusading for perfectly safe subjects, these humans; but they had to have something weak and running in fear before they'd change over from rabbits to dogs and run baying after it in furious, frenzied chase.

  But, goddam it, he hadn't had time. Nobody had tipped him off to expect the Black Fleet. What was the matter with that Pentagon? Why hadn't they tipped him off? Wasn't it their business to know, to anticipate? And weren't they completely dependent upon him to shape the mass mind for them? Trouble was, they were so goddam engrossed in strutting around upstaging one another with their silly little brass and braid symbols, they'd forgot what they were there for—and who kept ‘em there.

  And why hadn't his own direct organization men been on their toes, and, even without warning, put the formula into motion without waiting to be told? Hell, he'd trained them well enough. They'd been pampered and spoiled with the high wages he paid them, the silly little status levels he'd granted them, to the point that they would sacrifice anything, anything at all to keep their position. That was his technique. He'd seen to it that all his independent editors, on both sides of every fence, said what he wanted them to say; the pro faction coming out strong, the con faction advancing such weak arguments against that even a child could see the only possible Right way to look at the question. Every damn one of his free and fearless commentators and columnists said exactly what he wanted them to say. They didn't get hired unless their past opinions showed they could be trusted. They didn't work for him if they didn't go on freely and independently coming to the conclusions favorable t
o Mr. Harvey Strickland. Hell, they couldn't work anywhere if they didn't do that

  So now, in a real emergency, they'd sat on their overstuffed duffs and let the Black Fleet take over without making one move to capitalize on it to strengthen his position.

  Angrily, he waddled over to the television monitors and flipped the switch to turn them off—a symbolic destruction of them all. He turned to do the same thing to the battery of fax machines lined up along the wall, but paused to read the latest messages.

  The same thing was happening everywhere, over all the large cities of America, over every large city in the world.

  Everywhere, the discs hovered, and wheeled in formation, and waited.

  An unbidden doubt tried to force its way into his mind that there might be no opportunity in this to tighten his hold on the mass mind still more; that this might be something beyond his capacity to turn to his own advantage. He shook his massive head angrily, and shrugged off the weakness. He would not, he could not allow such an idea to take full form in his mind. He would be no better than the goddam rabbits he despised if he did.

  But there could be no doubt about one thing. The Black Fleet was getting ready for the kill. And he didn't see one single angle for getting in on the winning end of it, somehow.

  If there were only some way he could get next to the projectiles, deal with them. They must want something. They had to want something. There must be minds inside those discs. And where there were minds capable of all this, there were also minds capable of working the angles. Patriots and enemies? These were rabbit words, dog words. Humans, men, real men, the boys on top, they negotiated and dealt and worked the angles among themselves. They dealt themselves in and divided up the pot, each one grabbing all he could, and recognizing each other's right to take what he could get.

  There must be minds like that in those discs. Capable of dominating the whole Earth in three days, as these were, they should also be capable of recognizing one of their own, and his right to be in the pot—himself, accustomed to dominating, one Harvey Strickland.