He scowled at me across his glass desktop. "If it hadn't been for that hunter, you'd have brought that thing in to the Institute, right? What I thought. Then you've got to go out again, Eve. Get that hunter to help track it down, pay him what..."

  A red light blinked on his desktop amid an array of gadgets. The General glanced at it from under upraised brows. There is a DO NOT DISTURB sign—invisible—hanging on the door to his office whenever he has one of his agents in conference. This must be pretty damn important for Clarissa Hogsworth—hoggy to us agents—to bother him like this.

  Her voice came in, clear as an alarm bell. "You'd better hear this, sir. It's a broadcast on all radio channels. It's preempted everything..."

  There was wild excitement in her throat. I could see her practically hopping up and down on her plush typing chair. A control switch clicked.

  ...out beyond Jupiter and moving fast! The Pentagon is making crash preparations for trouble, the re serves are being called up, troops are being flown in from Fort Bragg and Fort Belvoir. The National Security Agency, in cooperation with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, is trying to establish contact with the spaceship now, but the Army wants to be ready for trouble.

  The General gaped, jaw dropping. “Spaceship?” he gurgled. I was a bit flabbergasted, myself.

  We turn you over to Edgar Mason, our science expert. Take it away, Ed!

  The high excitement was in the announcer's voice as well. I didn't blame him. After all the talk about flying saucers and UFO's and the speculation that they might come from planets outside our solar system, here, at last, we were being confronted with the real thing. My behind was on the edge of the chair and I was leaning forward, not even bothering to breathe.

  Back again, folks. Well, it's all true, believe it or not. That first communiqué we had from that spaceship—at one-fifteen eastern time, twelve-fifteen central time—is not quite believable.

  For you late tuners-in, that message read: Greetings to your planet, the third planet inward from the sun toward which we are speeding. We are the Andothalans, and we come on a journey of good will and friendship from the planet Andoth.

  That was all of it. It was in English, strangely enough, but it was monitored and recorded all over the world.

  We cannot tell what star-sun the planet Andoth circles at this point. We will have to wait and speak with the Andothalans first, before we can know this. But one thing we do know their science is far advanced, com pared to ours. The Andothalans possess spaceships that travel at speeds immeasurably greater than our own. As of now, their ship is passing Jupiter. Jupiter is three hundred million miles from Earth. Yet we have calculated that their ship will be circling above the airport in Washington to which we will direct them, by five o'clock this evening.

  The General gawked at me; I gawked back.

  He rasped, “We'll have to be there, Eve. I'm pulling you off the monster case pro tem, to act as part of our security guard. You're about the only agent I have on hand at such short notice."

  The science editor was talking again.

  How the people of Andoth are able to speak English is a moot question. We have surmised that the flying saucers we've been reading about for the past twenty years come from this same planet. I guess they wanted to familiarize themselves with us before they paid us a visit-like neighbors looking over the newcomers to a town before paying a welcome call.

  He went on and on while we sat mesmerized.

  This was the vision of Hugo Gernsbach coming to life, science fiction taking on flesh and blood qualities. Visitors from outer space! Coming to Earth! Ch, I'd read the old masters of the genre, I knew the way the plots ran. I told myself the writers were wrong. Wrong!

  There was no danger to Earth from this arrival cut of distant space. No plan to enslave the world. The Andothalans were bringing a cornucopia of good things for us Earth people; the wise use of nuclear or solar energies, the means to do away with all poverty and hunger on our planet, the reconstruction of our troubled cities, perhaps even a true understanding of the brotherhood of man.

  My heart beat with promised happiness. The dream of old Thomas More, he put forth in his Utopia, was upon us. This would be the golden age of Man, the coming of Nirvana, or the Elysian Fields of the ancient Greeks. Shangri-la and Eden reborn.

  Then I remembered something. The Un-human! I sat there with my eyes wide. The Drann! His golden finger had been pointed at the sky. Did he want to indicate the space out of which the people of Andoth were approaching? And the Drann; were they the Andothalans? They meant no good to Earth if the Un-human were to be believed.

  I opened my mouth to say something of this to my boss.

  He shushed me with a waved hand as he came bounding out of his chair. "No time for chitchat now, Eve. Let's get with it. On the ball and all that sort of thing. You'll come with me to Washington, of course, in the service helicopter. We ought to get there in no time at all."

  I had no opportunity in the elevator, nor in the lobby of our L.U.S.T. building compound, to give my side of the argument. I had to make do with a brief suggestion in the luxurious limousine that whipped us through the traffic toward La Guardia.

  The General stared at me, horrified.

  "Stop them? Are you mad? On the say-so of an animal? Besides, you're not at all sure that's what he meant."

  He had me there. I defended my female instincts all the way to the airport, but he only brushed away my protests.

  "What can I do, Eve?” he asked, reasonably enough. "Shoot them down in cold blood? You must guess at their tremendous technological advances. Surely they'll have weapons that will cut us down like tenpins if we make an aggressive move."

  "You could arrest them!”

  “You're pulling my leg! And make ourselves the world's laughing stock? Russia is green with envy that they're landing here as it is. So's France and Great Britain! Some of the smaller members of the United Nations are sounding off about why one of the most privileged countries in the world gets to act for the rest of the planet.”

  “No, no. We're going to behave ourselves. If that damn Un-human thing shows up, you're going to kill it with a well-placed bullet. Understand?"

  I understood, all right. But I argued all the way to the airport and inside the helicopter, and then while we were in the air.

  I got absolutely no place.

  A second limousine was on hand at Washington Airport to whisk us out of the ordinary run of air traffic toward a section of the vast, roped-off field for the landing of the spaceship. The mob at the airport was frightening in its size; everybody in the District of Columbia was on hand to greet our cousins from space, it seemed.

  Congressmen were a dime a dozen; there was high brass from the Pentagon, navy admirals in blue and gold, senators and their wives, newspapermen, television cameras and reporters. Hoary-headed scientists and astronomers, plus a couple of famous astrologers, could be picked out of the crowd. Marines in dress uniform, rifles at attention, guarded the sanctum sanctorum of the landing site.

  Everybody waited breathlessly, Me, more than anybody. Because my mind kept telling me that these were the Drann and they intended something fearful to us Earth people, if the Un-human could be believed. They had to be! Nothing else made any sense. Now at long last, I understood the beast man!

  A loudspeaker blared to life.

  "Attention, please! The alien spaceship is speeding past the moon, coming Earthward at tremendous speed. In fifteen minutes it will be landing according to a message just received."

  Talk buzzed all around me, the bigwigs just as gossipy about what was going to happen as the people. The President was speaking in low tones to the Secretary of State, with the Secret Service men hemming them in somewhat nervously. After all, who knew how an alien might shoot? Or what.

  Then there was a faint silvery dot in the sky. The dot grew larger, larger.

  I don't know what we all expected to see. Maybe a different version of one of the Apollo spacecraft that had touched down on the moon. Or a flying saucer. A silver ball, maybe. Or a cigar-shape that would tower a hundred and fifty stories high, bigger even than our largest skyscraper.

  The reality was a bit startling.

  It was a box about five hundred feet high, five hundred feet wide; a square, like a child's block in solid silver, magnified a great number of times. It soared downward with the lightness of a feather, sunlight reflecting off its highly polished surfaces with almost blinding brilliance.

  The only concession to the fact that it was a spaceship, so far as my eyes could detect, were a number of round holes on the bottom of the thing.

  Somebody muttered, “I'll bet it utilizes gravity to travel out there in space."

  “Yeah, or maybe its entire surface captures and translates solar energy into some kind of fuel."

  “You know how fast it was traveling?”

  “I know, I know..."

  The words flew all around me but I was concerned only with that big silver box that was slowly settling to the tarmac. All the planes normally landing at Washington Airport had been re-routed elsewhere to clear a space for this first interplanetary landing on Earth in all history.

  Nobody said anything now. Everybody was too over come with emotion, with awe, with curiosity. What would they be like, these Andothalans? Humanoid, like us? Or would they be reptilian, or perhaps simian like the monkeys? Maybe they were bright globes of pulsing matter, or thin tendrils hanging from a central core, like Portuguese men-of-war.

  With a faint thunk the ship settled down. We waited, not speaking.

  Sunlight quivered on a square of the box side facing me. A darkness grew inside that square. I realized the silver—or whatever substance it was—was quivering out of existence. This was no ordinary door at which I stared. It was an egress, yes; a way to exit and enter the ship. But it was more of a force field than a door.

  It took time to break down that force field. Then the blackness itself quivered and—was gone. Something moved where the blackness had been.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A man came out of the spaceship.

  He was tall, lean; his golden hair shone in the sun light. He was handsome as a movie star, graceful as an Olympic athlete as he began his walk toward us. A black uniform with gold trim clung to his chest and torso and those fine, handsome legs; his feet were en cased in black boots.

  His smile was devastating. It included us all, it told us without a word that Mankind had come to Earth from out of the stars and that he had come with his hands bearing mighty gifts that would awe us all. What difference did it make if his technology was far superior to ours? He was one of us, he was a man.

  The welcoming roar was like an atomic blast. It stirred the air around us, it rose upward toward the blue skies of Earth as no sound has ever risen. It was relief, delight, unadulterated welcome, utter happiness. I even found myself yelling until my throat was raw.

  The man from the spaceship paused at that bellow. His face broke into a laugh. He raised both arms upward and a little apart, as if he knew what we were thinking and hoping. He made a magnificent sight in that uniform. It was like seeing a long-lost lover come home from the wars. After all, he was our brother, in a manner of speaking.

  I was swept up in the maelstrom of emotion, you understand. Forgotten were my own dread surmises and suspicions. The Drann that the Un-human had mentioned was eclipsed before the reality of this handsome man. I told myself he couldn't have meant this demigod with the curling golden hair, so tall and arrow straight before us all.

  He was mistaken. Or I was.

  One of us had to be. This specimen of humanity was no conqueror. His face was alight with friendship, with pleasure at his welcome. His hands that waved so happily to the mob would deliver strange and awesome gifts to all of us. The eyes that glinted with intelligence would look upon our many problems and his mind would dismiss them as of no moment, while his tongue would explain the ways and means of overcoming them.

  The President was advancing with out-held hand. “Welcome,” his clarion voice was saying. "Welcome to Earth in the name of all its peoples."

  “For this greeting, I give thanks,” the man said. "I am Suradar Selm, the commander of our expedition."

  His hand caught that of the President. They stood like that while flashbulbs popped and cameras clicked and television cameras zoomed in on them. Suradar Selm put his arm about the President, hugging him; the President beamed and hugged in turn.

  Four more Andothalans came out of the open space that had been a force-field door. Two of them were men, two were women. I guess I stared at the women with disbelieving eyes, as did every other female within eyeball range. These dolls were something out of a movie or maybe a Playboy Club bunny list. They were graceful, their hips swayed with just the right amount of sexiness, their breasts were full and firm, their waists no more than twenty-two.

  They wore a feminine version of the black and gold uniform of their commander. They came forward between the tall men flanking them, right up to the President, and they kissed him...on the lips yet.

  He laughed excitedly. The men shook his hand.

  "May I present my seconds in command," said Suradar Selm. "These girls are young, but they are captains. Grethlin Fort. Mayhal Athnor. And my other captains, Drindon Holm, Effern Tablot."

  The Marines and police were having a hard time keeping back the crowd. They wanted to come closer to these newcomers from Andoth. The newsmen and cameramen had been allowed through the barriers, but nobody else. And they were having a field day. The Andothalans were not averse to the publicity. They posed with each other and with the President.

  "I invite all your crew to land on Earth and be its guests," said the President after a time.

  Suradar Selm shook his head even as he smiled. "I am afraid not. We do not permit planet leave for our crew, not on a strange planet, at least. You see,” he went on chummily, "we don't want to start anything that might leave a bad taste in the mouths of the Earth people. Just as your own soldiers or sailors, or these fine warriors here," and he gestured at the Marines in their dress uniforms, "might want to let loose a bit of energy after being cooped up for so long a time, so too with my crew.

  "Perhaps another time.”

  Nobody quarreled with him; the President voiced his regret and suggested that at a later date they might be given permission to stretch their legs.

  A big black limousine came forward, the Presidential car. A Secret Service man opened its door. The President was bowing to Suradar Selm, gesturing him into the back seat.

  A flash of golden lightning caught my eye.

  It sped through the crowd, pushing men and women apart as though they were not already crushed to sardine tightness, so closely were they packed. It broke the ring of Marines, it sped across the tarmac, almost too fast for the eyes to see.

  A roar went up from the crowd. Nobody knew what was happening—except me. This was the Un-human, come to—what?

  Sure, The General had told me I was coming here as a security guard, but a guard for—whom? I assumed I was to protect the President, he'd said nothing about the aliens. So I watched that furry monster streaking across the field—with everybody shouting and yelling a warning—with my hand on my Belgian Bulldog. But the revolver stayed inside my coat pocket.

  The President and the Andothalans turned. I. watched the expressions on the faces of the aliens. There was fear, horror, a realization of—what? I just couldn't read every nuance of those expressive faces.

  Then the President acted for his world. He leaped forward between the newcomers and the Un-human, spreading his arms wide and yelling to his Secret Ser vice men to shoot. They moved fast, but not so fast as the hairy golden beast-man. He was on top of the little group before a gun could come out on an underarm holster.

  A huge, hairy hand reached past the President. It closed iron fingers on the face of the alien named Effern Tablot. It squeezed.

  Effern Tablot screamed. A gun fired. The body of the Un-human jerked.

  He screamed gutturally, in frustrated rage. His great eyes roamed the group, saw all the Secret Service men with their revolvers out in the open. They hesitated about firing any more because they didn't want to spray a fan of bullets around the President. One man tried it, firing carefully. A second bullet hole appeared on the beast-man's golden hide.

  Then the Un-human was gone. He went so swiftly that nobody else could really get a bead on him. A blur he was, of hairy gold flying across the tarmac. His feet seemed scarcely to touch the ground. Then he was gone.

  The President was mopping his face as the crowd bellowed. He was trying to make apologies. For the first time he had lost the tremendous cool that had swept him into office on a landslide of votes.

  Commander Suradar Selm was equal to the moment. Captain Effern Tablot was being led away toward the silver ship by one of the girls as he turned to the President, putting an arm about him and giving him a hug. At the same time he blew a kiss on his other hand to the mob. They ate it up. They bellowed and shouted in delight.

  The President found his tongue. "Commander Selm, I can find no words properly to convey my apologies for what has happened. This matter shall be looked into, believe me. Whatever that thing was—man or animal, I couldn't tell..."

  The limousine door slammed on him and his three visitors from another planet. I sagged with relief. Captain Effern Tablot had had his face mangled a little, but not too seriously. There had been no real harm done.

  Oh, yeah?

  “Miss Drum!” bellowed The General, right in my ear. “What in hell's the matter with you? Why didn't you shoot that thing? You knew what it was! You even told me it called those Andothalans—drann. It knew about them. You knew about its hatred for them. So why in hell didn't you shoot?”

  I said, “There were so many people..."

  “Not when it got to the President. Before, girl. Be—fore! While it was running across the field?”

 

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