The Visitors

"I think it's another visitor," said Garrison. "Like the one up

north."

"Oh, my God!" the woman shrilled. "Let's get out of here."

The man behind the wheel said, "Take it easy, Gladys. It may

not be a visitor."

He got out of the car and joined Garrison, who had walked out ahead of the cars, standing in the glare of the headlights. He ranged himself alongside Garrison and stood staring at the thing that loomed on the road ahead.

"How sure are you?" he asked.

"Not entirely," Garrison told him. "It looks like one. It popped

into my mind it could be one of them."

"It's big," said the other man. "I read about the one up north

and saw pictures of it. But I had no idea it could be that big."

It was big. It blocked both the traffic lanes and the grassy median that ran between them. It was black and rectangular and loomed high against the sky. Once having settled, it did not move. It sat there, a lump of blackness.

The woman had gotten out of the car and came up to them.

"Let's turn around and get out of here," she said. "I don't like

it."

"Goddammit, Gladys," said the man, "quit your caterwauling.

There's nothing to be afraid of. That one up north never hurt no one.

"It killed a man. That's what it did."

"After he shot at it. We ain't shooting at it. We're not going to bother it."

It must be a visitor, Garrison told himself. It had the square blockiness that the photos had shown. It was exactly as Kathy had described the one at Lone Pine. Except for its size; he was not intellectually prepared for the sheer, overwhelming size of it.

Two other cars had come up behind them and stopped, the people in them getting out to walk up the road to where the three of them stood. Another car came along, but did not stop. It ran off the road, crossed the median, gained the eastward traffic lanes and went roaring off.

The NASA a

He started walking up the road toward the visitor. Looking back over his shoulder, he saw that only one of the others who had been standing with him was following. With only a quick glance at the follower, he could not be sure which one of them it was. Perhaps, he thought, he should slow down and let the other man catch up with him, but decided against it. He did not feel like engaging in the meaningless chit chat that would come from the other, filled with questioning and wonder. Why do you think it landed here? What does it want? What kind of thing is it? ‘Where do you think it's from?

He increased his stride, almost ru

Standing there, with his spread out hand against the warmness of the hide, a sudden chill ran through him, a chill that set his teeth on edge and made his face feel, for a moment, stiff and hard, as if it might be changing into stone. And, even as he felt the chill, his suddenly racing brain launched into a frantic scurry to analyze the chill. Not fear, said the analysis, not terror, not panic, no inclination to burst out screaming, no urge to run, no buckling of the knees—only that terrible coldness which was not the coldness of the body only, but a coldness of the mind, and a coldness of the mind that the mind could not understand.

Slowly he pulled his hand away from the hide and there was no need to pull it, for nothing held it there.

He let his arm drop to his side, but, otherwise, he made no movement and he felt the chill ebb out of him, not going quickly, but draining slowly from him until it was gone, although the memory of how it had been stayed with him.

A touch of strange, he thought, but more than a touch of strange. Rather a brush against something that he could not understand, that no human might be able to understand. A touch that was composed of the coldness and the vastness of deep space, of the glare of distant suns, of dark planets that were unlike the Earth, and the incomprehensibility of a life that had been spawned in the darkness of those planets. As if he had been hurled into a place that he did not know and perhaps could never know, that he could not even begin to know no matter how long a time he spent there. Incomprehensibility, that was it, he thought.

And, yet, the damn thing looked so ordinary, was so unspectacular, an almost old shoe structure.

He backed away from it, staring up at the great black wall of it that rose so high above him. And the hell of it was, he found, that he wanted once again to step close to it and lay his hand against it so that he again could feel the warmness of it, and perhaps the chill as well.

But he did not step closer to it, did not lay his hand against it. He backed a few steps away from it, then turned around and hurried back the way that he had come. Not ru

Out on the highway and clear of the visitor, he saw that several other cars had stopped and the cluster of people standing in the road had grown. He did not see the man who had followed him. Even had he seen him, he would not have recognized him, for he had caught only that one, quick, over-the-shoulder glimpse of him.

One man stepped out of the cluster to intercept him as he

came down the road. "What did you see?" the man asked. "Is

there anything going on?"

"Why don't you go and look?" Garrison asked him brusquely,

brushing swiftly past him.

It was strange, Garrison thought, that there was so little panic. If there was fear, it was being hidden. What was it about the visitors that seemed to inspire no fear? Maybe it was because the big black box had so few alien co

His car was standing with the headlights burning and the engine ru

Gold answered, his voice slightly flustered, on the second ring.