The Visitors (v1.0)

21. THE UNITED STATES

They came down through the night, like homing birds, although they were not homing birds, but were settling on a terrain that was alien to them. They came seeking through the dark, although it was not dark to them, and picked out their landing places with a certain care. There was little interference, for there was nothing, at this time of night, to interfere with them. They kept in touch with one another, talking back and forth, and there was nothing that one sensed the others did not know.

They landed in the watery delta lands where the Mississippi flowed into the Gulf, on the broad plains of Texas, the deserts of the American Southwest, the sandy beaches of Florida, the wheatlands of the West, the rustling cornfields of the Central States, the commons of New England villages, in Southern cotton fields and sweet potato patches, on the concrete of large airports, astride the great highways that spa

ed the continent, along the Western seaboard, in the forests of Oregon, Washington and Maine, in the woodlots of Ohio and Indiana.

They came down and landed silently with no more noise than the whisper of the air disturbed by their passage. They landed softly, then rose an inch or two from where they had landed and floated just above the surface. They disturbed few of the sleeping millions they passed over and landed among. Only on occasion were they sighted and, except when they landed on airports or highways, that by accident.

They made a flurry of soft, fluttering, moth-like tracks across the screen in the war room of the Strategic Air Command, but there the watchers of the screens, maintaining an intent, militarily professional surveillance, had been warned and were prepared for them, their only real concern being that the coming of the visitors cluttered up the board and might mask other kinds of incoming objects.

In those instances where they ~anded in forested areas, they almost immediately set to work harvesting cellulose. In a suburban Virginia housing tract, not far from Washington, one of them, in lieu of trees, began the harvesting of houses. Another, in Oregon, landed adjacent to a huge lumberyard and began the chomping of stacked lumber. But the most of them, coming to rest in less productive areas, simply squatted down and waited.