Lake Michigan, a huge inland body of fresh water. We are now about one hundred kilometers from Chicago, moving southwesterly over Lake Michigan. Let’s move the camera to show what we, the correspondents and scientists and crew aboard this flight, are seeing directly. This special high-detail visual display screen is now showing the surface of Lake Michigan, absolutely smooth, very much like the surface of the ocean around the seaboard metropolitan areas. The grid is, I assume, for mapping purposes. Pardon my finger, but I may point out these peculiar features, seen before in the waters of the Hudson River, these peculiar and quite vivid yellow-green circles, or atolls, with the extremely complex radiating lines like the spokes of a wheel. No explanation for these formations is known, though satellite pictures have occasionally shown extensions of the spokes racing to the shore to connect with topographic changes taking place on the land.
Pardon me? Yes, I’ll move. We have, uh, been informed that some of these displays are classified, for our eyes only, as it were.
Now we have changed course and are swooping in an arc over Waukegan, Illinois. Illinois is renowned for its flatness, as well as for its automobiles, Detroit being in… no, Detroit is in Michigan. Yes. Illinois is renowned for its flat topography, and Chicago has been called the Windy City, because of winds blowing in from Lake Michigan. As we can see, the topography is now a network of ground very much like farmland, though instead of grids and squares, the divisions are ovoid-elliptical, I meaner circular, with smaller circles filling in between larger circles. In the center of each circle is a mound, a sort of point reminiscent of the central cone in lunar craters. These cones— yes, I see, they are actually cone-shaped pyramids, with concentric steps or tiers rising along the outside. The tips of these cones are orange, rather like the flight suit I am wearing. Day-glo orange, very striking.
We have slowed considerably. The swing-wings have been deployed, and we now pass at a comparatively leisured pace over Evanston, north of Chicago. Not a
We have decided to pass over Chicago because of satellite and high-altitude reconnaissance aircraft photographs showing a concentration of biological activity around this once-great city. As Chicago was once the capitol of the American heartland, now apparently it is serving as some kind of focus, a clearing house perhaps, for activity all around the country, from Canada to Mexico. Great pipeline-like structures can be seen flowing into Chicago from all directions. In some areas the pipelines open up into broad canals and we can actually see the rapid flow of a viscous green fluid… Yes. There. Can we…? Well, later in the broadcast. The canals must be a half kilometer wide. Amazing, awesome.
Rumors from major centers of military intelligence in Wiesbaden and in London and Scotland point to another and very different center of activity on the West Coast of the United States. Details are not available, but apparently Chicago shares with Southwestern California the distinction of being prime points of interest for investigators and researchers. We will not be flying to the West Coast, however; our aircraft does not have the range without refueling, and there are no refueling points that far across the continent.
We are now experiencing some acceleration as we make several sharp turns. Passing over the suburb of Oak Park, where, with reference to a map spread before me, not a single street or roadway can be identified. And now over Chicago itself, if I may judge by proportion perhaps just over Cicero Avenue, now out to the lake again, yes, that’s Montrose Harbor and Lake Shore Drive and Lincoln park, identifiable only by outline against the lake. More acceleration, a wide circle, over the area of the Museum of Science and Industry perhaps—we are all guessing here. And now I can see waterways, perhaps the original branches of the Ship Canal, and now we are down to approximately a thousand meters, a very perilous altitude, for we have no idea how high these biologicals may extend. Lord, I am frightened. We all are. We are now passing over…yes…
Jesus. Pardon me. They must have been the stockyards, Union Stocksyards. That’s what they must have been. We have just barely seen them, but the pilot has started us into a steep climb and we are now swinging due south. What we have seen…
Pardon me.
I am wiping my eyes, out of terror, awe, for I have seen nothing like this in all the hours we have been wandering over this nightmare land. Telephoto cameras showed us extensive detail of what must at one time have been the famed stockyard of Chicago. When we consider the enormous mass of creatures–pigs, cattle-concentrated in those regions, perhaps we should not be surprised or shocked. But the largest moving creatures I have seen have been whales, and these exceeded in size the largest whale by I know not precisely how much. Great brown and white eggs, could they have been hovering? Perhaps just on the ground. Greater than dinosaurs, yet with no discernible legs, head, tail. Not without features, however, extensions and elongations, tended or surrounded by polyhedrons, that is, icosahedrons or dodecahedrons—with insect-like legs, straight not jointed, legs that had to be two or three meters thick. The ovoid creatures or whatever they were could have easily spread across a rugby field.
Yes, yes—we have been told… we have just been informed there are airborne life forms, living things and that we have narrowly missed a couple of them, resembling gigantic manta rays stretched out, gliders or bats, also white and brown. Flowing in a stream southwest, as if forming a squadron or flock. Excuse me. Excuse me.
Cut the sound. Cut the sound, dammit. And turn that camera off me.
(Pause of five minutes.)
We’re back, and apologies for the delay. I am human and…well, at times liable to a touch of panic. I hope this will be understood. And I myself stand in amazement before the calm and expertise of the…uh…the officers and crew of this aircraft, professionals all, damned good men. We have just passed over Danville, Illinois and will shortly…a few seconds from now be over Indianapolis. We have seen changes in the character of the landscape, or if I may call it a bioscape, below us, changes in color and shape, but we are at a loss to interpret what we see. It is as if we have passed over an entirely new planet, and while our two scientists have been taking readings and scribbling notes furiously, they are much too busy to pass on whatever theories or hypotheses they may have.
Indianapolis is below us, and as indecipherable, as mysterious and…beautiful and alien as the other megaplexes. Some of the structures here appear to be as tall as the buildings they replaced, some perhaps a hundred to two hundred meters tall, casting shadows now in the afternoon light Soon time will reverse for us, as ft were, as we head east, southeast, and the sun will set The shadows lengthen on the bioscape, the atmosphere is remarkably clear no industry, no automobiles…yet who can say what sort of pollution a living landscape might cause? Whatever pollution there is is not passed on to the atmosphere.
Yes.
Yes, that is confirmed by our scientists. When we passed low over Chicago, the readings indicated virtually pure air, smoke-free, pollution-free, and that is reflected in the pure colors of the horizon. The air is also moist and, for this time of year, unseasonably warm. Winter may not come to North America this year, for by now Chicago and the cities we have passed over should be blanketed by at least light snowfalls. No snow. There is rain, warm and in large drops-we have passed over areas of dense overcast; but no snow, no ice.
Yes. Yes, I saw it too. What looked like a fireball, a meteor of some sort perhaps, remarkable— And several more, apparently—
(Voices in the background, quite loud, sound of alarms)
My God. That was apparently a re-entry vehicle or vehicles in the upper atmosphere, just dozens of kilometers away. Detectors aboard the aircraft are screaming warnings about radiation. The pilots and officers have activated all emergency systems and we are now in a steep climb away from the area, with… yes, with yes… no, we are in a dive, presenting I believe a posterior profile to whatever the object was-
There is talk here that the fireball was a matches the profile of a re-entry vehicle a nuclear missile an ICBM perhaps and that it did not repeat did not of course how would we be here?
(More voices, sounding puzzled; more alarms)
I believe we cannot pull out of the dive now. We have lost most instrumentation. The engines have quit and we are in a powerless dive. We still have radio communications but-
(End transmission RB-1H. End direct feed Lloyd Upton EBN. End scientific telemetry.)
