CHAPTER II

Although the great flights of fighter planes were continually aloft, the reassuring program had gone on, the broadcasting trucks still rumbling about the streets foghorning their messages of cheer and optimism to a somewhat restive public. Some elements of the free press had been warning direly of "unknown dangers" and "possible treachery"—this causing some gimlet-eyed gentlemen in high places to come out with bills and demands for suppression of a free press for the duration of the so-called negotiations with the alien people. There had been no negotiations whatever. In this case, as in many others, the free press was perfectly right; but their warnings in the face of official hopefulness served only to confuse and fret the public. Hence, the tv lulled, the radio allayed, and the bellowing loudspeakers on the cruising trucks attempted to quiet fear under a blanket of sound.

At the said moment of attack, 11:34 a.m., the green saucers swept down with a perfection of simultaneity that made you think, as someone said later, that the devil had murmured "Synchronize your watches, boys." They hurtled from the skies over New York and Bangkok and Berlin and London and Madrid and Shanghai, down upon Moscow and San Francisco and Tokyo and Paris and Bombay. In the instant that the devastation hit New Orleans it also smashed at Edinburgh and Nome and Minsk and Berne. The first skyscraper toppled in Chicago as the first factory blew to flinders in Rio de Janeiro.

It was curious that their weapons did not seem to include the atomic variety. No A-bombs or H-bombs; rays, of incalculable destructive power and unknown origin, lanced from the diving saucers and struck the earth with the force of exploding bombs, but instead of crashing and then echoing away, these explosions continued, like great rolls of terrible thunder, for as long as the rays were aimed downward. One ray, directed from the belly-port of a canting ship, would set the ground a-shudder, crumple all structures in its path or near it, and create an ear-shattering blast that kept on and on until the saucer, tilting away, shut off the ray. So that each ray, in effect, was like an unending and ever-replenished series of huge bombs—and from each ship came a ray, and over each city there were hundreds of ships....

The mighty centers of civilization were obliterated. The great concentrations of population over the globe died. Manufacturing cities and cities which produced nothing of strategic value whatever were smeared indiscriminately into blood and dust and muck. It was an attack, not at man's weapons or production, but at man himself. It was the beginning of man's end, a giant step toward his classification with the dodo, the auk, the sabertooth tiger and the passenger pigeon.

One large eastern city in the United States presented a typical picture during that hour of cataclysm. In the first fifteen minutes its canopy of fighter planes was blown out of the sky; the weapons they carried, some of them atomic, were as effective against the green saucers as sling-shots on platinum. By noon the air had begun to fill with billowing, drifting masses of smoke-yellow vapor, reeking of sulphur and molten metal and burnt flesh and death. Those who had been unlucky enough to live through the attack thus far were now so nauseated by the odors of mankind's collapse that they stumbled among the shattering streets, retching and vomiting, as eager to escape the yellow hell-cloud's stink as they were to avoid the crumbling steel and cement.

At the end of an hour, while the greater part of the two hundred and twenty-eight saucers continued to raze the city, one alien ship made a landing on a leveled field of the suburbs. Its entry port jawed open, somewhat like a huge clamshell parting, and a single green man emerged. He was six feet nine and his eye measured a good four inches across. He carried a flag of red, white and green, on which the device of a circle and three triangles which he wore on his left breast was repeated. He strode away from the ship, gazing about with satisfaction. Some distance off lay the wreckage of a broadcasting truck; its warped, ruined loudspeakers yawned over the body of an Army sergeant, who still held in a firm grip the microphone into which he had been talking when the world was scuttled around him.

On the side of the demolished truck there remained a sign which read DON'T PANIC—THEY'RE FRIENDLY!

There was blood on the sergeant's mouth and forehead and he had bled from the nose. The blood was almost wholly dry now. His eyes were open.

The green conqueror looked at him and grinned. It remains one of the most curious facts of the matter that both mankind and the bird-footed beasts of the green horde expressed amusement and pleasure by turning up the corners of the mouth....

The alien peered all about him, shading his eye with his right hand. Nothing moved anywhere except the skimming saucers and the collapsing city. He stepped forward and lifted his pennon high, to plant its ten-foot staff in the dead body of the earthman. Holding it up, he spoke a few words in his own language, a guttural cracking speech which ranged up and down like that of an excited bird.

As he was about to stab the corpse with his flag, the corpse rolled onto its back and contracted its body, shot up its feet and kicked the alien square in the belly.

Catching the shaft of the flag, the erstwhile dead sergeant jerked it out of the alien's grasp, immediately bounded to his feet, took a firm two-handed grip of the thing—the sharp lance-head made it a splendid weapon—and ran it with savage violence straight into the throat of the green man, who died instantly and without sound.

Pausing only to shake his head once, because it ached fiercely, the sergeant bent over the tall body, folded one big hand around the pistol and its half-breed holster, and yanked. The retaining strap broke. The sergeant turned and began to run in the opposite direction from the grounded saucer, which continued to show no sign of life. Shortly he had disappeared into the smoking, burning ruins of the city's edge.

And so at 12:46 p.m. on January 9th, 1955, a moribund world drew the first blood from its extraterrestrial assassins.