was startled to discover that they were beautiful. Awesome and immense, yes. Frightening, perhaps. But in the subtle opalescent shimmer of their glossy translucent integuments and the graceful eddying of their movements and the mellow liquid gaze of their great eyes there lay a potent and ineffable beauty—a delicacy of form, even—that surprised him with its benign impact.
You could disappear into the shining yellow seas of those eyes. You could vanish into the pulsing radiant luminosity of their powerful intelligences, which surrounded them like whirling capes of light, an aura that partook of something close to the divine. You were overwhelmed by that. You were amazed. You were humbled. You were suffused with a sensation that hovered bewilderingly midway between terror and love.
Kings of the universe, they were, lords of creation. And the new masters of Earth.
“Well,” the Colonel wanted to say, “here we are. We’re very happy to have been given the opportunity to —”
But he did not say that, or anything else. Nor did Leonards and Carlyle-Macavoy say anything. Nor did either of the aliens, at least not as we understand the meaning of the verb to say.
The meeting that took place in that vestibule of the starship was defined, mostly, by what did not happen.
The three human delegates were not asked their names, nor given any chance to offer them. The two Entities who had come forth to interview them likewise proffered no introductions. There was no pleasant little speech of welcome by the hosts nor expression of gratitude for the invitation by the delegates. Cocktails and canapes were not served. Ceremonial gifts were not exchanged. The visitors were not taken on a tour of the ship.
No questions were asked, no answers given.
Not a word, in fact, was spoken by either side in any language either human or alien.
What did happen was that the Colonel and his two companions stood side by side in awe and wonder and utter stunned silence before the two extraterrestrial titans for a long moment, an infinitely prolonged moment, during which nothing in particular seemed to be happening. And then, gradually, each of the three humans found himself dwindling away within, experiencing in the most excruciating fashion an utter diminution and devaluation of the sense of self-worth that he had painstakingly constructed during the course of a lifetime of hard work, study, and outstanding accomplishment. The Colonel felt dwarfed, and not just in the physical sense, by these eerie giants. The Colonel felt deflated and impaired—shriveled, almost. Reduced in every way.
It was like becoming a small child again, confronted by stern, vast, incomprehensible, omnipotent, and distinctly unloving parents. The Colonel felt utterly and completely disempowered. He was nothing. He was nobody.
This was the experience that had already become known to its recipients as the Touch. It was caused by the silent and non-verbal penetration of a human mind in some telepathic way by the mind of an Entity.
Had the Entities, the Colonel wondered afterward, really intended any such humiliation of their human guests? Perhaps that had been the whole purpose of the meeting: a reinforcement of the fact of their superiority. On the other hand, they had established that fact pretty damned thoroughly already. Why bother to make the point again in this fashion? When you’ve conquered a world overnight without lifting a tentacle in anger, you have no real need to rub it in. More likely the depressing effect of the meeting had merely been an inevitable thing: they are what they are, we are what we are, and when we stand before them we must unavoidably feel this way as an incidental by-product of the disparity in general puissance and all-around effectuality between one species and the other. And so, he concluded, they probably hadn’t meant them to come away from the meeting feeling quite as crappy as they did.
But understanding that did not make him feel much better, of course.
The Touch, the Colonel had already been informed, was usually followed by the Push. Which was the exertion of mental pressure by the infiltrating Entity against the infiltrated human mind, for the purpose of achieving something beneficial to the general welfare of the Entities.
That was what befell them next. The delegates from the California Army of Liberation now were subjected to the Push.
The Colonel felt something—he could not say what, but he felt it, felt himself somehow nudged, no, taken hold of and gently but firmly shoved, he knew not where—and then it was over. Over and gone and already becoming a non-event. But in the moment of that sensation the meeting, such as it had been, had reached its consummation. The Colonel saw that plainly. It was clear, from that point on, that they had already had whatever there was going to be, that the whole content of the meeting would be the Touch followed by the Push. A meeting of minds, indeed, in the most literal sense, but not a very satisfying one for the human delegates. No discussions of any sort. No exchange of statements, no discussion of aims and intents, most certainly no negotiations of any kind. The session was ended, though so far as the Colonel was concerned it had never really begun.
Another lengthy gray span of time without perceptible event went by in an unquantifiable way, one more timeless kind of period in which nothing in particular took place, an absence of incident or even awareness; and then he and Leonards and Macavoy found themselves standing outside the ship again, reeling like drunkards but gradually getting themselves under control.
For some while none of them spoke. Did not want to; perhaps could not.
“Well!” Leonards said, finally, or perhaps it was Carlyle-Macavoy who said it first. The monosyllable came out sounding profound. “And so now we know,” said Carlyle-Macavoy, and Leonards said the same thing half an instant later, just as profoundly. “Now we know, all right,” said the Colonel.
He found himself oddly unable to make eye contact with them; and they too were looking anywhere but straight at him. But then they all came together in a rush like the fellow survivors that they were; they wrapped their arms around each other’s shoulders, burly little Leonards in the middle and the two taller men close against him; and in a lurching, staggering way, not without laughter, they went blundering like some deranged six-legged creature across the barren brown field to the car that was waiting for them beyond the boundary of the Entities’ compound.
And that was that. The Colonel was glad to have escaped with his sanity and independence of mind intact, if indeed he had. And it had been a valuable meeting, in its fashion. He saw now even more clearly than before that the Entities could do as they pleased with us; that they had powers so supreme that it was impossible even to describe them, let alone to comprehend them, and certainly not to do battle against them. That would be pure madness, the Colonel thought, doing battle against such creatures as these.
And yet it was not in him to accept that idea. He still carried within himself, embedded in his awareness of the hopelessness of resistance, a congenital unwillingness to accede to the eternal slavery of mankind. Despite everything he had just experienced, he intended to fight on and on, in whatever fashion he could, against these invaders. Those were not compatible concepts, his awareness of the enemy’s utter supremacy and his desire to defeat them anyway. The Colonel found himself skewered by that irresolvable incompatibility. And knew that he must remain so skewered until the end of his days, forever denying within himself that thing which he knew beyond all doubt could not be denied.
Ronnie and Peggy stood side by side by the edge of the flagstone patio, facing outward, looking into the wooded canyon that led down to the city of Santa Barbara. It was just before midnight, a bright moonlit night. Dinner was long over and the others had gone to sleep, and he and she, the last ones left, had simply walked outside together without the need for either of them to make the formal suggestion. She stood now very close to him, almost but not quite touching him. The top of her head was barely armpit-high against him.
The air was clear and eerily mild, even for a Southern California December, as though the silvery moonlight were bathing the landscape in mysterious warmth. The red rooftops of the little city far below were glowing purple-black in the darkness. A soft wind blew from the sea, perhaps portending rain in a day or two.
For a time neither of them spoke. It was very pleasant, he thought, just standing here next to this small, lithe, pretty woman in the peace and quiet of the gentle winter night.
If he said anything, he knew, he would find himself automatically dropping into the kind of games, seductive, manipulative, that he invariably played when he encountered an attractive new woman. He wanted not to do that with her, though he was not sure why. So he remained silent. So did she. She seemed to be expecting him to make some sort of move, but he did not, and that appeared to puzzle her. It puzzled him, too. But he let the silence continue.
