Old Mr. Emerson didn't go into the matter of air currents and turbu-lence, as Benson had. With him, it was all well below the surface.
He took the position that the Lord had removed his sight, and in return had given him another sense which would do for emergency use.
'You just try me out, son!' he piped angrily. 'You come stand over here, wait a while and put your hand up in front of my face. I’ll tell you when you do it, no matter how quiet you are!' He did it, too, three times, and then took me out into the main street of his little prairie town. There were several wagons drawn up before the grain elevator, and he put on a show for me by threading his way around and between them without touching once.
That—and Benson—seemed to prove that whatever the things were, they had some connection with the domes. I filed a thoughtful dis-patch on the blind-man angle, and got back to Omaha to find that it had been cleared through our desk but killed in New York before relay.
We tried to give the black spheres the usual ride, but it didn't last as long. The political cartoonists tired of it sooner, and fewer old maids saw them. People got to jeering at them as newspaper hysteria, and a couple of highbrow magazines ran articles on 'the irre-sponsible press.' Only the radio comedians tried to milk the new mania as usual, but they were disconcerted to find their ratings fall. A network edict went out to kill all sphere gags. People were getting sick of them.
'It makes sense,' Benson wrote to me. 'An occasional exercise of the sense of wonder is refreshing, but it can't last forever. That plus the ingrained American cynicism toward all sources of public infor-mation has worked against the black spheres being greeted with the same naive delight with which the domes were received. Nevertheless, I predict—and I'll thank you to remember that my predictions have been right so far 100 per cent of the time—that next summer will see another mystery comparable to the domes and the black things. And I also predict that the new phenomenon will be imperceptible to any blind person in the immediate vicinity, if there should be any.'
If, of course, he was wrong this time, it would only cut his average down to fifty per cent. I managed to wait out the year—the same in-terminable round I felt I could do in my sleep. Staffers got ulcers and resigned, staffers got tired and were fired, libel suits were filed and settled, one of our desk men got a Nieman Fellowship and went to Harvard, one of our telegraphers got his working hand mashed in a car door and jumped from a bridge but lived with a broken back.
In mid-August, when the weather bureau had been correctly pre-dicting 'fair and warmer' for sixteen straight days, it turned up. It wasn't anything on whose nature a blind man could provide a nega-tive check, but it had what I had come to think of as 'their' trade-mark.
A summer seminar was meeting outdoors, because of the frightful heat, at our own State University. Twelve trained school teachers testified that a series of perfectly circular pits opened up in the grass before them, one directly under the education professor teaching the seminar.
They testified further that the professor, with an astonished look and a heart-rending cry, plummeted down into that perfectly cir-cular pit.
They testified further that the pits remained there for some thirty seconds and then suddenly were there no longer. The scorched summer grass was back where it had been, the pits were gone, and so was the professor.
I interviewed every one of them. They weren't yokels, but grown men and women, all with Masters' degrees, working toward their doctorates during the summers. They agreed closely on their stories as I would expect trained and capable persons to do.
The police, however, did not expect agreement, being used to dealing with the lower-I.Q. brackets. They arrested the twelve on some technical charge—'obstructing peace officers in the perform-ance of their duties,' I believe—and were going to beat the living hell out of them when an attorney arrived with twelve writs of habeas corpus. The cops' unvoiced suspicion was that the teachers had conspired to murder their professor, but nobody ever tried to explain why they'd do a thing like that.
The cops' reaction was typical of the way the public took it.
Newspapers—which had reveled wildly in the shining domes story and less so in the black spheres story—were cautious. Some went over-board and gave the black pits a ride, in the old style, but they didn't pick up any sales that way. People declared that the press was insult-ing their intelligence, and also they were bored with marvels.
The few papers who played up the pits were soundly spanked in very dignified editorials printed by other sheets which played down the pits.
At World Wireless, we sent out a memo to all stringers: 'File no more enterpriser dispatches on black pit story. Mail queries should be sent to regional desk if a new angle breaks in your territory.' We got about ten mail queries, mostly from journalism students acting as string men, and we turned them all down. All the older hands got the pitch, and didn't bother to file it to us when the town drunk or the village old maid loudly reported that she saw a pit open up on High Street across from the drug store. They knew it was probably untrue, and that furthermore nobody cared.
I wrote Benson about all this, and humbly asked him what his pre-diction for next summer was. He replied, obviously having the time of his life, that there would be at least one more summer phenome-non like the last three, and possibly two more—but none after that.
It's so easy now to reconstruct, with our bitterly earned knowl-edge!
Any youngster could whisper now of Benson: 'Why, the damned fool!
Couldn't anybody with the brains of a louse see that they wouldn't keep it up for two years?' One did whisper that to me the other day, when I told this story to him. And I whispered back that, far from being a damned fool, Benson was the one person on the face of the earth, as far as I know, who had bridged with logic the widely separated phenomena with which this reminiscence deals.
Another year passed. I gained three pounds, drank too much, rowed incessantly with my staff, and got a tidy raise. A telegrapher took a swing at me midway through the office Christmas party, and I fired him. My wife and the kids didn't arrive in April when I ex-pected them.
I phoned Florida, and she gave me some excuse or other about missing the plane. After a few more missed planes and a few more phone calls, she got around to telling me that she didn't want to come back. That was okay with me. In my own intuitive way, I knew that the upcoming silly season was more important than who stayed married to whom.
In July, a dispatch arrived by wire while a new man was working the night desk. It was from Hood River, Oregon. Our stringer there reported that more than one hundred 'green capsules' about fifty yards long had appeared in and around an apple orchard. The new desk man was not so new that he did not recall the downhold policy on silly-season items.
He killed it, but left it on the spike for my amused inspection in the morning. I suppose exactly the same thing happened in every wire service newsroom in the region. I rolled in at 10:30 and riffled through the stuff on the spike. When I saw the 'green capsules' dispatch I tried to phone Portland, but couldn't get a connection. Then the phone buzzed and a correspondent of ours in Seattle began to yell at me, but the line went dead.
I shrugged and phoned Benson, in Fort Hicks. He was at the police station, and asked me: 'Is this it?'
'It is,' I told him. I read him the telegram from Hood River and told him about the line trouble to Seattle.
'So,' he said wonderingly, 'I called the turn, didn't I?'
'Called what turn?'
'On the invaders. I don't know who they are—but it's the story of the boy who cried wolf. Only this time, the wolves realized—' Then the phone went dead.
But he was right.
The people of the world were the sheep.
We newsmen—radio, TV, press, and wire services—were the boy, who should have been ready to sound the alarm.
But the cunning wolves had tricked us into sounding the alarm so many times that the villagers were weary, and would not come when there was real peril.
The wolves who then were burning their way through the Ozarks, utterly without opposition, the wolves were the Martians under whose yoke and lash we now endure our miserable existences.
