Read Online When They Come from Space by Mark Clifton - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Mark Clifton
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shook off the stupidity and, in a kind of reluctance, forced myself to walk over to the French windows and out upon the balcony.
The July dusk had blended into night. Stars were clear and bright in the moonless sky. Street lights had been shut off in accord with some dusty, moulded plan of the past, but at the distant shopping center a neon glow suggested store owners hadn't been told about it; or maybe they were straining for one last sale before being blown to Kingdom Come.
Over downtown Washington, some eight miles to the southeast, a weird red haze was forming in the sky. Swiftly it swelled, and grew, and took shape; with formations of tongues of flame. And now the whole sky was a mass of red, leaping flames.
Out of the flames, as if against a backdrop on a stage, there silhouetted the dead black discs.
My gorge rose in revulsion, I fought for detachment; to still my atavistic fears; to remind myself that man had created the dread forces of Evil out of his own sick imaginings, even as he had created the forces of Good out of his noble aspirations. It did no good. This was materialization of something basically, inherently Evil, no sickness of the imagination.
Something seemed to go awry with my time sense. I seemed suspended in a kind of time vacuum, a new realization of how much we depend upon it for the sense of continuity. I could not tell whether things were happening simultaneously, instantaneously, or with long lapses of time in between.
The discs were maneuvering now at dazzling speed, sharply wheeling in one direction, veering with incredible violation of momentum's laws in another. Breaking, scattering, one moment in quantum-particle randomness; the next in circle, in boxed, or V, or straight-line formation; obeying some principle-pattern all their own, without meaning to me, to us, to man.
From the Earth crimson fingers of anti-aircraft fire reached up for the projectiles, seeming to connect the flames of the sky with those of Earth, all of a piece, until not only time was lost, but direction, orientation, sense of origin was lost, not to know whether the red flames were being hurtled downward from the ships or upward from our gun emplacements.
Now the night was slashed into flaming, crisscross patterns of white and red tracer-missile lines. But I saw no disc hesitate, falter, fall. At times of randomness some seemed hurtling toward Earth, and yet a second (a moment? an hour?) later, when they flashed into some unexpected formation, none were laggard from wounds, none a hairsbreadth out of line.
Perhaps our barrage was missing its target entirely, perhaps deflected by some force we could not know, perhaps passing through without harm. Who could know?
At times, some single disc, plunging downward toward me, toward us all, with crushing speed, and sending me cowering back against the window frame, seemed almost to fill the whole sky, incredibly huge, incomprehensibly massive; yet later (how much later?) no more than a black pin point against the flaming yellow and crimson sky. For they were maneuvering in depth as well as across the vault of our sky—in third dimension. And, for all we knew, in some mathematical fourth, as well?
How could we know? For surely no power on Earth had a science which could violate the laws of inertia with such impunity. And if not of Earth, then what Earthly logic could we calculate to apply?
We ceased streaking our futile anti-missile missiles at them now. The discs dominated the sky, alone.
As if out of some museum dedicated to the past, as if man were realizing in that peril that the human brain might, after all, creatively function on the spur of the moment to prove superior to the planned patterns of mechanical brains, and with some antiquated tools at hand prove yet superior to modern instruments, Air Force interceptors came up and into the sky.
As if to complement their tiny V, the discs formed a mighty V to stretch across the sky. I felt a sob quicken my throat,
The July dusk had blended into night. Stars were clear and bright in the moonless sky. Street lights had been shut off in accord with some dusty, moulded plan of the past, but at the distant shopping center a neon glow suggested store owners hadn't been told about it; or maybe they were straining for one last sale before being blown to Kingdom Come.
Over downtown Washington, some eight miles to the southeast, a weird red haze was forming in the sky. Swiftly it swelled, and grew, and took shape; with formations of tongues of flame. And now the whole sky was a mass of red, leaping flames.
Out of the flames, as if against a backdrop on a stage, there silhouetted the dead black discs.
My gorge rose in revulsion, I fought for detachment; to still my atavistic fears; to remind myself that man had created the dread forces of Evil out of his own sick imaginings, even as he had created the forces of Good out of his noble aspirations. It did no good. This was materialization of something basically, inherently Evil, no sickness of the imagination.
Something seemed to go awry with my time sense. I seemed suspended in a kind of time vacuum, a new realization of how much we depend upon it for the sense of continuity. I could not tell whether things were happening simultaneously, instantaneously, or with long lapses of time in between.
The discs were maneuvering now at dazzling speed, sharply wheeling in one direction, veering with incredible violation of momentum's laws in another. Breaking, scattering, one moment in quantum-particle randomness; the next in circle, in boxed, or V, or straight-line formation; obeying some principle-pattern all their own, without meaning to me, to us, to man.
From the Earth crimson fingers of anti-aircraft fire reached up for the projectiles, seeming to connect the flames of the sky with those of Earth, all of a piece, until not only time was lost, but direction, orientation, sense of origin was lost, not to know whether the red flames were being hurtled downward from the ships or upward from our gun emplacements.
Now the night was slashed into flaming, crisscross patterns of white and red tracer-missile lines. But I saw no disc hesitate, falter, fall. At times of randomness some seemed hurtling toward Earth, and yet a second (a moment? an hour?) later, when they flashed into some unexpected formation, none were laggard from wounds, none a hairsbreadth out of line.
Perhaps our barrage was missing its target entirely, perhaps deflected by some force we could not know, perhaps passing through without harm. Who could know?
At times, some single disc, plunging downward toward me, toward us all, with crushing speed, and sending me cowering back against the window frame, seemed almost to fill the whole sky, incredibly huge, incomprehensibly massive; yet later (how much later?) no more than a black pin point against the flaming yellow and crimson sky. For they were maneuvering in depth as well as across the vault of our sky—in third dimension. And, for all we knew, in some mathematical fourth, as well?
How could we know? For surely no power on Earth had a science which could violate the laws of inertia with such impunity. And if not of Earth, then what Earthly logic could we calculate to apply?
We ceased streaking our futile anti-missile missiles at them now. The discs dominated the sky, alone.
As if out of some museum dedicated to the past, as if man were realizing in that peril that the human brain might, after all, creatively function on the spur of the moment to prove superior to the planned patterns of mechanical brains, and with some antiquated tools at hand prove yet superior to modern instruments, Air Force interceptors came up and into the sky.
As if to complement their tiny V, the discs formed a mighty V to stretch across the sky. I felt a sob quicken my throat,
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