“Five of six,” said Blake. Anything to get away from his thoughts. Secret head of the Fellowship, upon the Fall he had made a bid for power as the world’s first scientist-king. Only yesterday the crown had been so nearly within his hard grasp, now as fantastic and remote as the golden apples of the Hesperides. He, the strong man, the realist, had chased a rainbow; worse, Forbin knew it.
“What did you say?”
“Five of six.”
“Oh.” Forbin shook his head wearily. What did it matter? They would come, as surely as that majestic fireball was climbing the eastern sky. He contemplated the sun; interplanetary squabbles would mean nothing to it.
Even if the sun had a brain, it still would not care, well aware that in time it would engulf its attendant planets: a tiny flash of flame and goodbye Earth. With that most certain fate in store, what point in striving -
A quiet hissing, overlaid with a faint, pulsing sine-curve of sound, blotted out all static, a blank signal of infinite power-the Martian carrier-wave.
Although he had only heard the voice five times before, his mouth instantly dried up, his bowels loosened; he wanted to vomit.
“Forbin, we see you.” The voice was less aridly academic. “We are reducing speed. Shortly you will see us. Do not be alarmed.” The carrier stopped.
From somewhere Blake summoned up a trace of his old spirit and managed a grin, strained and unfunny. “Means well, I guess, but low on comfort!”
Forbin nodded, thinking. He walked swiftly across the terrace and the armorglas doors of his living room slid open. He crossed to his personal communication control panel.
“Now hear this! Director speaking. All staff are to remain in the complex until further orders.” He repeated the message, trying to hold his voice steady, glad he had the presence of mind not to switch in the video component. Right now he was not an inspiring sight. He walked back to Blake, a slightly portly figure, round-shouldered with fatigue, his gray uniform torn and dirty.
Blake, the hard man, was oddly touched by Forbin’s consideration for others. “Charles, just in case …” He shrugged. “I’m sorry … you know.”
Forbin glanced at him sharply. As an apology for trying to overthrow the supreme human under Colossus it was scarcely adequate, but Forbin was surprised it had been made at all. Blake made few mistakes, and in his own view, even fewer.
“Forget it.” Forbin forced a lopsided smile. “Don’t you go soft on me, Ted. Not now.” He looked back at the sky.
Northwards the mainland was shrouded in mist; south, in the direction of France, long cloud banks, dawn pink, stretched with few breaks to the east and west.
One break lay over St. Valery-en-Caux: the tramp had less than five minutes of miserable existence left.
Over the sea the sky was blue, the chaos of dawn color over. It was hard to believe that out of that beautiful morning sky, something was coining, something alien, sentient, hostile… .
“Dark glasses,” muttered Forbin, half to himself. “Perhaps -“
Again the carrier, thrusting, immensely powerful, and in milliseconds the voice, emotionless, metallic.
“Do not fear.” Nothing more.
Blake gulped and hurled his unlit cigar away, tense, watching.
Their scientific training afforded them some armor against fear. Whatever, they were witnessing a unique event. Forbin would watch until he incinerated, his blood boiled, or his mind blew.
“Come on! For Christ’s sake, come on!”
Blake’s half-prayer was answered with unimaginable speed.
The sun was clear of the horizon, five to ten degrees, gaining power, no longer to be affronted by man’s gaze save at the price of blindness. But the men did not look to the east; both concentrated on the zenith.
They saw it. Time took on a new and fearful dimension.
A black ball, the size of the sun, a ball that exploded gigantically at the speed of light, retaining symmetry. In microseconds a ball covering a hundred degrees, its edge lost in the clouds, north and south, the largest unnatural object ever seen by human eyes. Sunlight still shone on the clouds, but above and beyond the sky was filled with blackness.
“God!” Forbin repeated the word endlessly: Blake was half-crouching. They stared at the vast blackness beyond the clouds: after its silent, explosive expansion, the ball was static.
Five, ten seconds passed.
Forbin was not the best scientist of his generation for nothing. He saw a possible, yet impossible, answer. He realized that the ball was, at the very least, two thousand kilometers away, beyond the faintest trace of the earth’s envelope. Within it, the shock wave would have wrecked the world.
All physical laws he knew were stood on their head. He calculated rapidly: with a ninety-degree arc at, say, two thousand kilometers… .
In which case, the range estimate was clearly wrong-or was it? Suppose it wasn’t a sphere, but an ovoid? Had they changed shape? What had happened with mass and volume made no sort of sense. He couldn’t believe they had increased mass and volume; no, the other way, volume and mass …
But why assume an ovoid? Might it not be a disc, thin as paper, or concave, a form of parachute?
Confronted with stabilization problems beyond human grasp, he could only watch, not think. Whatever, it was an entry procedure of incredible elegance.
At that instant fear was vanquished, lost in wonder. He remembered Lunar One’s report of the alien departure from the Martian orbit: another calculation showed the transit speed to have been at least a quarter the speed of light… . His mind raced; he was almost happy. Nothing that size could land - it would envelope the globe. The craft must reduce in size… .
He tried to grapple with the heat problem and gave up, surrendering to a wild ecstasy. That he should see such incomprehensible wonders! He could not expect to remotely understand; relatively less than an aboriginal savage, he appreciated that if he lived to be a thousand, he would not grasp how this miracle might be performed - but at least it was granted to him to know it could be done. Mad-eyed, he swung towards Blake, still half-crouching, his mouth slack, a figure of fear.
“Get up!” screamed Forbin, “Get up, man-and look!”
The tone, if not the words, penetrated. Blake hesitantly rose, his eyes mesmerized by the vision.
“Don’t you see!” Anger and joy drove Forbin. “Don’t you see? Watch .’”-His voice broke. “Stasis!” Forbin savored the Greek word. “Standing … wonderful!”
Untold aeons of time passed. He realized the blackness beyond the clouds could not be static, but was reducing volume as it approached, the major deceleration phase past. Yet perspective was fooling him: the craft had to be below the speed of sound, on the final approach-Blake cried out.
There were two black shapes, side by side, where the one had been, their total diameter, Forbin guessed, less than the original. The alien craft were shrinking fast, much closer.
Blake gave a half-strangled cry, and Forbin knew fear again.
A cloud boiled up and vanished. Another writhed swiftly upwards in long streamers and was gone, a process of seconds.
The aliens, perhaps twenty kilometers each in diameter, were through the upper clouds. Then came the worst moment: they were through the cloud base. That reflective layer lost, the scene changed from a bright summer morning to a blackness beyond the worst imaginable tropical thunderstorm, the sparkling sea transformed into sullen gray-black, side-lit by the sun in a way no man had ever seen. Totally nonreflective, the aliens seemed to absorb all light.
In the same instant the unearthly silence was broken. A flock of gulls, screeching their alarm signal, hurtled past the terrace; a wind was rising at unearthly speed. The sea kicked up in confusion; lines of foam raced inwards to two foci beneath the approaching shapes. The foam-form changed, spiraling inwards; at the center the sea humped, fell back, and humped again. Unsteadily, a twisting stalagmite of water rose, then another, both reaching up, twin columns of water, brilliant on the sunward side, pitchblack on the other. Forbin felt the near-gale-force wind on the back of his neck.
He estimated the angle of entry at seventy degrees, assuming the aliens had an exact course for the complex; it was hard to believe that beings with their technological expertise would heed anything so crude as course corrections, but as he watched they appeared to retreat, climbing, shrinking fast. The waterspouts hesitated, slowly buckled, lost form, and fell back in a giant puffball of glittering spray. Once again it was a summer’s day.
“Christ!” Blake’s shaky voice was stopped by the distant sullen roar of falling water.
“Look!” cried Forbin, pointing. “They’re moving!”
The aliens tracked straight for the complex, maintaining height. Forbin spotted the shimmering edge of a distant cloud as the craft passed before it.
“See that? D’you see that?”
With full day back and the objects much smaller, Blake had revived somewhat. ” Yeah. They must be white hot!”
Which started an uncomfortable train of thought: what creatures could possibly stand such temperatures?
“Must be surface heat only,” said Forbin unconvincingly. “Has to be.”
“Forbin.”
Frantically he lowered the volume, deafened by the Martian voice.
“We will descend to your present position in five minutes. Keep well clear.”
“Five minutes,” muttered Blake. “And how far is ‘well clear’?” He made unsteadily for the other end of the terrace.
“Inside!” shouted Forbin. “Get inside!” His neck ached horribly. Following Blake, grit stung his face; miniature dust devils whipped across the stone flags, to be sucked up to the heat column above the static Martians.
In the calm of the living room Forbin glanced at his watch, pleased and amazed at his own self-control, his ability to do anything so practical as note the time. He moved to the sideboard, slopping brandy generously into two tumblers. Returning to Blake, his shaking hands spilled some, the finest cognac in the world, reserved solely for him by order of the Master. For all he now cared, it might have been two cents a barrel.
“Here.” He thrust a glass into Blake’s eager two-handed grip. Both drank it like water. They stared unseeingly at each other, blind to everything except their own thoughts.
“Incredible,” said Forbin at last, “utterly incredible! To think that I should have lived to see -“
“Christalmighty! Stop being so goddam calm!”
“Me?” His surprise was not entirely genuine. “Do we have any option?” He went on in a harder tone. “Two minutes thirty.”
Blake made the trip to the decanter.
“They have to be infinitely superior beings,” said Forbin, thinking aloud. “Propulsion, gravity and thermal control, and the ability to metamorphosize-“
“Can it!” shouted Blake savagely. “Don’t try your lecture out on me! You tell me what we do!
“
“We keep our heads, do as we’re told, and learn all we can. This could be only a visit.”
“And maybe not! Stop kidding yourself!”
“We’ll soon find out.” Forbin finished his drink; the glass clattered as he put it down. “You can do as you please, but I’m going to meet them.”
“Go right ahead, be the hero!” But after a moment’s irresolution, Blake followed.
“Keep your back to the balustrade,” advised Forbin. The fierce wind had dropped to a steady breeze. “And hold on. The wind may become quite strong.”
“Quite strong!” Blake mimicked bitterly. “You ought to be a bloody Brit!”
Forbin did not hear, watching intently. Still lacking a yardstick, he had no firm idea of their size - or shape. He thought they were spheres, but the completely light-absorbent surface held no highlights or shadows. They were just intensely black. Forbin thought that such must be the very stuff of deep space… .
“Now we come. If the heat is too great, go.”
Forbin swallowed hard. Visually he detected nothing, but his neck muscles told him they were approaching very slowly. Fascination had previously overcome fear, now pride came to his aid: this was the first meeting between man and extraplanetary life - and he represented mankind.
Certainly they were much lower, yet seemed the same size; they had to be contracting, which meant an increase in heat loss… .
His theory was confirmed by the rising wind. He gripped the coping behind him.
Lower now, much lower. Angle, say thirty degrees, range in azimuth around thirty meters, size two, three degrees? No, more; perhaps five?
Forbin gave it up; did it matter? The wind neared gale force. A snatched glance showed Blake was sweating, and no comfort.
It was hotter - or was it? Radiant heat and fear have much the same effect. Elevation less than twenty degrees; still no real evidence of their true shape - and what awful figures would emerge when they did land?
Fervently Forbin prayed for strength to bear whatever he might see. Endlessly he repeated, his voice lost in the screaming wind, “God, give me strength.”
Blake tugged his sleeve, pointing away from the aliens.
On the white wall of the residence were two black shadows. The strangers were spheres.
Forbin felt new strength; they had gained one small item which the aliens, locked in their craft, could not know - an estimate of their size, a little less than two meters in diameter.
Blake ripped his collar open, then grabbed the coping again.
Sweat blinded Forbin. Tightening his hold with one hand, he sought a handkerchief. Instantly it was torn from his grasp by the wind, sucked towards the Martians. Short of them it flashed upwards in a puff of weak yellow flame, the ashes gone before he could blink.
The spheres were level with the top of the balustrade, less than a meter in diameter, surrounded by swirling dust and burning leaves. They stopped, rock steady, as if mounted on granite pillars.
Blake stumbled, almost fell, saved by Forbin. Both men leaned against the solid wall of wind.
“Hold on!” yelled Forbin. “It can’t last!”
As he shouted, in perfect unison, the spheres increased in size: eighty centimeters, one meter. Magically the wind dropped to a strong breeze and the heat decreased, the silence broken only by whipcracks from the flaking stone beneath the hovering Martians.