rld.

* * * * *

The noise stopped. Now a bright spot showed on each of the meteor-watch
radar's twin screens. The screen indicating height said that the source
of the dot was four miles high. The screen indicating line and distance
said that it bore 167 deg. true, and was eighty miles distant. The radar
said that some object had come into being from nothingness, out of
nowhere. It had not arrived. It had become. It was twenty thousand feet
high, eighty miles 167 deg. from the base, and its appearance had been
accompanied by such a burst of radio-noise as neither storm nor
lightning nor atomic explosion had ever made before.

And the thing which came from nowhere and therefore was quite
impossible, now moved toward the east at roughly three times the speed
of sound.

All manner of foreign voices came startledly out of the inter-base radio
speaker, asking what could it be? A Russian voice snapped suspiciously
that the Americans should be queried.

And the wave-guide radar followed a large object which had come out of
nowhere at all.

The sheer impossibility of the thing was only part of the problem it
presented. The radar followed it. Moving eastward, far away in the
frigid night, it seemed suddenly to put on brakes. According to the
radar, its original speed was close to mach 3, thirty-nine miles a
minute. Then it checked swiftly. It came to a complete stop. Then it
hurtled backward along the line it had followed. It wabbled momentarily
as if it had done a flip-flop four miles above the ground. It dived. It
stopped dead in mid-air for a full second and abruptly began to rise
once more in an insane, corkscrew course which ended abruptly in a
headlong fall toward the ground.

It dropped like a stone. It fell for long, long seconds. Once it
wavered, as if it made a final effort to continue its frenzy in the air.
But again it fell like a stone. It reached the horizon. It dropped
behind it.

Seconds later the ground trembled very, very slightly. Soames hit the
graph-machine case. The pens jiggled. He'd made a time-recording of an
earth-shock somewhere.

Now he read off the interval between the burst of screaming static and
the jog he'd made by striking the instrument. Earth-shock surface waves
travel at four miles per second. The radar had said the thing which
appeared in mid-air did so eighty miles away. The static-burst was
simultaneous. There was a twenty-second interval between