“All the more reason to call in the AF and quit. We can’t get in there anyhow. What do you mean, it isn’t human?
It’s a Red, that’s all.”
“No, it isn’t,” MeDonough said evenly. Now that he thought he knew what they had found, he had stopped trembling. He was still terrified, but it was a different kind of terror: the fright of a man who has at last gotten a clear idea of what it is he is up against. “Human beings just don’t broadcast like this. Especially not when they’re near dying.
And they don’t remember huge blue sheep with cat’s heads on them, or red grass, or a white sky. Not even if they come from the USSR. Whoever it is in there comes from some place else.”
“You read too much. What about the star on the nose?”
MeDonough drew a deep breath. “What about it?” he said steadily. “It isn’t the insignia of the Red Air Force. I saw that it stopped you, too. No air force I ever heard of flies a red asterisk. It isn’t a cocarde at all. It’s just what it is.”
“An asterisk?” Martinson said angrily.
“No, Marty, I think it’s a star. A symbol for a real star.
The AF’s gone and knocked us down a spaceship.” He pushed the goggles up and carefully withdrew the electrode net from the hole in the battered fuselage.
“And,” he said carefully, “the pilot, whatever he is, is still aliveand thinking about home, wherever that is.”
Though the Air Force had been duly notified by the radio net of McDonough’s preposterous discovery, it took its own time about getting a technical crew over to Otisville. It had to, regardless of how much stock it took in the theory. The nearest source of advanced Air Force EEG equipment yas just outside Newburgh, at Stewart Field, and it would have to be driven to Otisville by truck; no AF plane slow enough to duplicate Martinson’s landing on the road could have handled the necessary payload.