“What’s the matter?” Martinson’s voice said. “Get anything? Are you sick?”
“No,” McDonough muttered. “Nothing.”
‘Then let’s beat it. Do you make a noise like that over nothing every day? My Uncle Crosby did, but then, he had asthma.”
Tentatively, McDonough lowered the goggles again. The scene came back, still in the same impossible colors, and almost completely without motion. Now that he was able to look at it again, however, he saw that the blue animals were not sheep; they were too large, and they had faces rather like those of kittens. Nor were the enormously slow-moving birds actually birds at all, except that they did seem to be flying in unlikely straight lines, with slow, mathematically even flappings of unwinglike wings; there was something vegetable about them. The red field was only a dazzling blur, hazing the feet of the blue animals with the huge, innocent kitten’s faces. As for the sky, it hardly seemed to be there at all; it was as white as paper.
“Come on,” Martinson muttered, his voice edged with irritation. “What’s the sense of staying in this hole any more?
You bucking for pneumonia?”
“There’s … something alive in there.”
“Not a chance,” Martinson said. His voice was noticeably more ragged. “You’re dreaming. You said yourself you couldn’t pick up”
“I know what I’m doing,” MeDonough insisted, watching the scene in the goggles. “There’s a live brain in there. Something nobody’s ever hit before. It’s powerfulno mind in the books ever put out a broadcast like this. It isn’t human.”