Troublemakers (6 page)

   
The General had come from wealthy Army parents, been sent through West Point and graduated with top honors. He had joined the Air Force when the Army and Air Corps were one and the same, and stayed on after the separation. He had served in the air, and risen in the ranks almost faster than the eye could see. Mostly through his father’s connections. The honors, the service duty, the medals...all through pull.

   
The man was a wealthy, sheltered, and vacillating individual, and the Adjutant had been making his decisions for three years. Alberts wondered what would happen when the rotation plan moved him to another job, next year. Would the new Adjutant catch on as fast as he had from the last one? Or would the General pull strings so he could stay on?

   
But that was all in the future, and this saucer decision was one the General had to make for himself. It wasn’t minor.

   
And the General was cracking. Badly.

   
“Now get up there and
do
something!” the General cried, slamming the empty desktop with a flattened hand.

   
His face was blotched with frustration and annoyance, and-naturally-Alberts saluted, swiveled, and left.

   
Thinking,
I hope the Pentagon lowers the boom right down his wattled throat, right down his gullet to his large colon!

One saucer was a dirty affair. Not with the dust and filth of an atmosphere, for the saucer had obviously not been very long in air, but with the pocks and blazes of space. Here a small cluster of pits, where the saucer had encountered a meteor swarm; there a bright smear of oxidized metal. Its markings were slovenly, and there were obvious patchings on its metal hull.

   
Somehow, it seemed out of place among all the bright, shining, marvelously-intricate, painted saucers. It seemed to be a rather poor relation, and never,
never
flickered out of existence. All the others might be subject to that strange disappearing act, but not the poor relation. It stayed where it was, somewhere above the Fairchild Desert of Nevada.

   
Once a civilian pilot from Las Vegas, disregarding the orders of the C.A.P., flew very close to the dirty saucer. The pilot buzzed the ship several times, swooping in and over and back around in huge, swinging arcs. By the time he had made his fourteenth Immelmann and decided to land atop the saucer, just for yuks, the hurry-up bleep was out to interceptors based near Reno and Winnemucca, and they caught him high, blasting him from the sky in a matter of minutes.

 
  
With the fate of a world hanging in the balance, there could be no time for: subtlety or reasoning with crackpots. He had been irrational, had defied the stay-grounded, keep-back orders, and so had fallen under the martial law which had ruled the country since the day after the five thousand had appeared.

   
Radio communication with the ships was impossibly fruitless.

   
Television transmission was equally worthless.

   
Bounced signals failed to come back; the metal of the ships sopped them up.

   
Telemetering devices brought back readings of the density-or
seeming
density-of the ships, and when they were reported, the situation looked bleaker than before.

   
The metal was, indeed, super-strong.

   
The only time things looked promising was when a philologist and a linguist were recruited to broadcast a complete course in English for thirty-six hours straight. The beam was directed at first one ship, then another, and finally when it was directed at the dirty saucer, was gulped in.

   
They continued broadcasting, till at the end of thirty-six hours, the dumpy, red-faced, runny-nosed, and sniffling Linguist, who had picked up his cold in the broadcasting shack, pushed back his chair, gathered his cashmere sweater from where it had fallen in the corner, and said there was no use.

   
No reply had come in. If the beings who had flown these saucers were intelligent enough to have gotten here, they would surely have been intelligent enough to have learned English by then. But there had been no reply, and spirits sank again.

   
Inter-channel memos slipped frantically down from President to Aide, to Secretary of Defense, to Undersecretary, to Chief of Staff, to the General, who passed the memos-bundled-to his Adjutant. Who worried.

It had been the only one where there was any slightest sign of contact. “Look, pilot, I want you to fly across that dirty one,” the Adjutant said.

   
“Begging the Captain’s permission...” the wide-eyed young pilot demanded, over his shoulder; he continued at the nod from Alberts “...but the last man who buzzed that big-O, sir, got himself scissored good and proper. What I mean, sir, is that we’re way off bounds, and if our clearances didn’t, uh, clear, we might have a flock of my buddies down our necks.” He spoke in a faint Texas drawl that seemed to ease from between his thin lips.

   
The Adjutant felt the adrenaline flowing erratically. He had been taking slop from the General for three weeks, and now to be forced into flying up himself, into the very jaws of death (as he phrased it to himself), to look over the situation...he would brook no backtalk from a whey-faced flight boy fresh out of Floyd Bennett.

   
Alberts shooed him off, directed him back to the stick. “Don’t worry yourself, pilot. “ He licked his lips, added, “They cleared, and all we have to worry about is that saucer line up ahead.”

   
The discs were rising out of the late evening Nevada haze. The clouds seemed to have lowered, and the fog seemed to have risen, and the two intermingled, giving a wavering, indistinct appearance to the metallic line of saucers, stretching off beyond the horizon.

   
The Adjutant looked out through the curving bubble of the helicopter’s control country, and felt the same twinges of fear rippling the hair along his neck that he had felt when the General had started putting the screws to him.

   
The Sikorsky rescue copter windmilled in toward the saucer, its rotors
flap-flap-flap-flapping
overhead.

   
The pilot sticked-in on the dirty saucer. It rose out of the mist abruptly, and they were close enough to see that there really
was
dust streaked with dirt along the dull metal surface of the ship.
Probably from one of these Nevada windstorms,
the Adjutant thought.

   
They scaled down, and came to a hovering stop two feet above the empty metal face of the disc.

   
“See anything?” the Adjutant asked.

   
The pilot craned off to one side, swept his gaze around, then turned on the searchbeam. The pole of light watered across the sleek saucer bulk, and picked up nothing. Not even a line of rivets, not even a break in the construction. Nothing but dirt and pockmarks, and what might be considered patches, were this a tire or an ordinary ship.

   
“Nothing, sir.”

   
“Take us over there, right there, will you, pilot?”

   
The Adjutant indicated a lighter place on the metal of the ship. It seemed to be a different shade of chrome-color. The Sikorsky jerked, lifted a few inches, and slid over. The pilot brought it back down, and they looked over the hull of the saucer at that point.

   
It was, indeed, lighter in shade.

   
“This
could
be something, pi-”

   
The shaft rose up directly in front of the Sikorsky before he could finish the word.

   
It was a column of transparent, almost glass-like material, with a metal disc sealing off the top. It was rising out of the metal where there had been no break in the skin, and it kept rising till it towered over them.

   
“M-m-m-” the Adjutant struggled to get the word loose.

   
“Move!”
More a snarl than a command. But before they could whip away, the
person
stepped up inside the column, stared straight out, his gigantic face on a line with their cab.

   
He must have been thirty feet tall, and completely covered with reddish-brown hair. His ears were pointed, and set almost atop his head. The eyes were pocketed by deep ridges of matted hair, and his nose was a pair of breather-slits. His hands hung far below his indrawn waist, and they were eight-fingered. Each finger was a tentacle that writhed with a separate life of its own. He wore a loose-fitting and wrinkled, dirty sort of toga affair, patched and covered with stains.

   
He stared at them unblinking. For he had no eyelids.

   
“Gawd Almighty!”
the pilot squawked, and fumbled blindly at his controls for an instant, unable to tear his eyes away from the being before them. Finally his hand met the controls, and the Sikorsky bucked backward, tipped, and rose rapidly above the saucer, spiraling away into the night as fast as the rotors would windmill. In a minute the copter was gone.

   
The glassite pillar atop the dirty saucer remained raised for a few minutes, then slowly sank back into the ship.

   
No mark was left where it had risen.

Somehow, news of the
person
leaked out. And from then on, telescopes across the world were trained on the unbroken band of discs circling the Earth. They watched in shifts, not wanting to miss a thing, but there was nothing more to see. No further contact was made, in person or by radio.

   
There was no sign of. life anywhere along the chain of discs. They could have been empty for all anyone knew. Going into the eighth week, no one knew any more about them than on the day they had arrived.

   
No government would venture an exploratory party, for the slightest hint of a wrong move or word might turn the unleashed wrath of the saucers on the Earth.

   
Stocks fell quickly and crazily. Shipping was slowed to a standstill, and production fell off terrifically in factories. No one wanted to work when they might be blown up at any moment. People began a disorganized exodus to the hills and swamps and lost places of the planet. If the saucers were going to wash the cities with fire and death, no one wanted to be there when it happened.

   
They were not hostile, and that, was what kept the world moving in its cultural tracks; but they were
alien,
they were from the
stars!
And that made them objects of terror.

   
Tempers were short; memos had long since been replaced by curses and demands. Allegations were thrown back and forth across the oceans. Dereliction of duty proceedings were begun on dozens of persons in high places.

   
The situation was worsening every moment. In the tenth week the nasty remarks ceased, and there were rumors of a court-martial. And a firing squad.

“Got to
do
something, Alberts. Got to do something!”

   
The Adjutant watched the spectacle of his superior shattering with something akin to sorrow. There went the cushy job.

   
“But what, General?” He kept his voice low and modulated. No sense sending the old boy into another tantrum.

   
“I-I want to go up there...see what he looks like... see what I can d-do...”

   
An hour later the Sikorsky carried the General to the Maginot Line of silent saucers.

   
Twenty minutes later he was back, bathed in sweat, and white as a fish-belly. “Horrible. All hair and eyes. Horrible. Horrible.” He croaked a few more words, and sank into a chair.