THE SHIP was sighted afew times, briefly and withouta good fix. It was spherical,the estimated diameter abouttwenty-seven miles, and was in anorbit approximately 3400 milesfrom the surface of the Earth. Noone observed the escape from it.
[p75]
The ship itself occasioned someexcitement, but back there at thetattered end of the 20th century,what was one visiting spaceshipmore or less? Others had appearedbefore, and gone away discouraged—orjust not bothering. 3-dimensionalTV was coming out of theexperimental stage. Soon anyonecould have Dora the Doll or theGrandson of Tarzan smack in hisown living-room. Besides, it was ahot summer.
The first knowledge of the escapecame when the region ofSeattle suffered an eclipse of thesun, which was not an eclipse buta near shadow, which was not ashadow but a thing. The darknessdrifted out of the northern Pacific.It generated thunder without lightningand without rain. When it hadmoved eastward and the hot sunreappeared, wind followed, a moderategale. The coast was batteredby sudden high waves, then hushedin a bewilderment of fog.
Before that appearance, radarhad gone crazy for an hour.
The atmosphere buzzed withaircraft. They went up in readinessto shoot, but after the first sightingreports only a few miles offshore,that order was vehemently canceled—someonein charge must have had a grain of sense. Thething was not a plane, rocket ormissile. It was an animal.
If you shoot an animal that resemblesan inflated gas-bag withwings, and the wingspread happensto be something over four miles tipto tip, and the carcass drops on acity—it’s not nice for the city.
The Office of Continental Defensedeplored the lack of precedent.But actually none wasneeded. You just don’t drop fourmiles of dead or dying alien fleshon Seattle or any other part of aswarming homeland. You wait tillit flies out over the ocean, if it will—themost commodious ocean inreach.
IT, or rather she, didn’t go backover the Pacific, perhaps becauseof the prevailing westerlies.After the Seattle incident sheclimbed to a great altitude abovethe Rockies, apparently using anupdraft with very little wing-motion.There was no means of calculatingher weight, or mass, or buoyancy.Dead or injured, drift mighthave carried her anywhere withinone or two hundred miles. Thenshe seemed to be following the lineof the Platte and the Missouri. Bythe end of the day she was circlinginterminably over the huge complexof St. Louis, hopelessly crying.
She had a head, drawn back mostof the time into the bloated massof the body but thrusting forwardnow and then on a short neck notmore than three hundred feet inlength. When she did that the bluntturtle-like head could be observed,...