accompanying panicky evacuations, had never been a feature of life in New York. New York’s specialty, then as always, was inconvenience rather than apocalypse, and that was how the invasion began, as simply one more goddamned New York inconvenience.
It was one of those glorious gold-and-blue dance-and-sing days that New York City provides in October, right after the season of hot-and-sticky has taken itself offstage and the season of cold-and-nasty is not quite ready to come on.
There were seventeen witnesses to the onset of the invasion. The point of initial disembarkation was the meadow near the southern end of Central Park. There were many more than seventeen people on the meadow when the aliens arrived, of course, but most of them didn’t seem to have been paying attention.
It had begun, so said the seventeen, with a strange pale blue shimmering about thirty feet off the ground. The shimmering rapidly became a churning, like water going down a drain. Then a light breeze started to blow and very quickly turned into a brisk gale. It lifted people’s hats and whirled them in a startling corkscrew spiral around the churning shimmering blue place. At the same time you had a sense of rising tension, a something’s-got-to-give feeling. All this lasted perhaps forty-five seconds.
Then came a pop and a whoosh and a ping and a thunk—everybody agreed on the sequence of the sound effects—and the instantly famous not-quite-egg-shaped spaceship of the invaders was there, hovering about in mid-air twenty yards above the surface of the grass, and gliding gently toward the ground. An absolutely unforgettable sight: the gleaming silvery skin of it, the disturbing angle of the slope from its wide top to its narrow bottom, the odd hieroglyphics on its flanks that tended to slide out of your field of vision if you stared at them for more than a moment.
A hatch opened and a dozen of the invaders stepped out. Or floated out, rather.
They looked strange. They looked exceedingly strange. Where humans have feet they had a single oval pedestal, maybe five inches thick and a yard in diameter. From this fleshy base their wraith-like bodies sprouted like tethered balloons. They had no arms, no legs, not even discernible heads: just a broad dome-shaped summit, dwindling away to a rope-like termination that was attached to the pedestal. Their lavender skins were glossy, with a metallic sheen. Dark eye-like spots sometimes formed on them but didn’t last long. There was no sign of mouths. As they moved about they seemed to exercise great care never to touch one another.
The first thing they did was to seize half a dozen squirrels, three stray dogs, a softball, and a baby carriage, unoccupied. No one will never know what the second thing was that they did, because no one stayed around to watch. The park emptied with impressive rapidity.
All of this created, naturally, no small degree of excitement in midtown Manhattan. Police sirens began to sound. Car horns were honking, too: not the ordinary routine everyday exasperated when-do-things-start-to-move random honkings that many cities experience, but the special rhythmic New York City oh-for-Christ’s-sake-what-now kind of honk that arouses terror in the hearts of visitors to the city. People with berserk expressions ran fleeing from the vicinity of the park as though King Kong had just emerged from the monkey house at the Central Park Zoo and was personally coming after them, and other people were running just as hard in the opposite direction, toward the park, as though they absolutely had to see what was happening. New Yorkers were like that.
But the police moved swiftly in to seal off the park, and for the next three hours the aliens had the meadow to themselves. Later in the day the video networks sent up spy-eyes that recorded the scene for the evening news. The aliens tolerated them for perhaps an hour, and then shot them down, casually, as if they were swatting flies, with spurts of pink light that emerged from the tip of their vehicle.
Until then it was possible for the viewers to see ghostly gleaming aliens wandering around within a radius of perhaps five hundred yards of their ship, collecting newspapers, soft-drink dispensers, discarded items of clothing, and something that was generally agreed to be a set of dentures. Whatever they picked up they wrapped in a sort of pillow made of a glowing fabric with the same shining texture as their own bodies, which immediately began floating off with its contents toward the hatch of the ship.
After the spy-eyes were shot down, New Yorkers were forced to rely for their information on government spy satellites monitoring the Earth from space, and on whatever observers equipped with binoculars could glimpse from the taller apartment houses and hotels bordering the park. Neither of these arrangements was entirely satisfactory. But it soon became apparent that a second spaceship had arrived just as the first one had, pop whoosh ping thunk, out of some pocket of hyperspace. More aliens emerged from this one.
But these were of a different sort: monsters, behemoths. They looked like double-humped medium-sized bluish-gray mountains with legs. Their prodigious bodies were rounded, with a sort of valley a couple of feet deep running crosswise along their backs, and they were covered all over with a dense stiff growth midway in texture between fur and feathers. There were three yellow eyes the size of platters at one end and three rigid purple rod- like projections that stuck out seven or eight feet at the other.
The legs were their most elephantine feature—thick and rough-skinned, like tree trunks—and worked on some sort of telescoping principle, capable of being collapsed swiftly back up into the bodies of their owners. Eight was the normal number of legs, but as they moved about they always kept at least one pair withdrawn. From time to time they would let that pair descend and pull up another one, in what seemed to be a completely random way. Now and then they might withdraw two pairs at once, which would cause them to sink down to ground level at one end like a camel kneeling. The purpose of that, it seemed, was to feed. Their mouths were in their bellies; when they wanted to eat something, they simply collapsed all eight of their legs at the same time and sat down on it. It was a mouth big enough to swallow a very large animal at a single gulp—an animal as big as a bison, say. A little later on, when the smaller aliens had opened the cages in the park zoo, the big ones did just that.
Then, well along into the night, a third kind of alien made its appearance. These were wholly different from the other two: towering, tubular, purplish squid-like things that had rows of gleaming orange spots running up and down their sides. There were not many of this sort, and they seemed distinctly to be in charge: the two other kinds, at any rate, appeared to be taking orders from them. By now news was coming in about the alien landing that had occurred a little earlier that same day just west of Los Angeles. Only the squid type had been observed out there.
There had been landings in other places, too. Plenty of them, mostly major cities, though not exclusively. One ship came down in Serengeti National Park in Tanzania, on a broad grassy plain occupied only by a huge herd of wildebeests and a few hundred zebras, who paid little attention. One landing occurred in the midst of a raging sandstorm that was taking place in the Taklimakan Desert of central Asia, and the storm abruptly ceased, according to the mystified but essentially grateful drivers of a convoy of Chinese trucks who were the sole wayfarers in the vicinity at the time. A landing in Sicily, among the dry forlorn hills west of Catania, aroused interest only among some donkeys and sheep and the eighty-year-old owner of a scraggly grove of olive trees, who fell on his knees and crossed himself again and again and again, keeping his eyes shut all the while.
But the main action was in cities. Rio de Janeiro. Johannesburg. Moscow. Istanbul. Frankfurt. London. Oslo. Bombay. Melbourne. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. There were aliens all over the place, in fact, except for a few strikingly obvious places where they had somehow not bothered to land, like Washington, D.C., and Tokyo, and Beijing.
The ships they arrived in were of various kinds, driven by varying means of propulsion that ranged from noisy thrust-driven chemical rockets, as in Los Angeles, up to the mysterious and unfathomably silent. Some of the alien vessels came in on mighty trails of fire, like the big one that had landed near Los Angeles. Some just popped into view out of nowhere, as the one in New York City had done. Some landed right in the middle of big cities, like the one in Istanbul that set itself down on the grand plaza between Haghia Sophia and the Blue Mosque and the one in Rome that parked itself in front of St. Peter’s, but others chose suburban landing sites. In Johannesburg it was only the glistening spooky aliens that emerged, in Frankfurt only the behemoths, in Rio just the squids; elsewhere there were mixtures of the three kinds.
They made no announcements. They made no demands. They decreed no decrees. They offered no explanations. They didn’t say a thing.
They were simply here.
The meeting, the Colonel discovered, was taking place at the Pentagon, not at the White House. That seemed unusual. But why should anything be usual today, with hordes of alien beings wandering the face of the Earth?
It was quite all right with the Colonel to be plodding around in the vast but familiar corridors of the Pentagon
