Hunt’s mouth dropped open as the raised bulges along its hull, ancillary housings swelling from its underside, fairings, pods, busterdomes, and turrets gradually revealed themselves in a steadily unfolding hierarchy of detail to give the first real hint of the craft’s awesome size. Gasps of wonder were coming from either side of him and behind, and the crowd outside seemed paralyzed. It must have been miles in length. . . tens of miles; there was no way of telling. It expanded above their heads to fill half the sky like some huge, mythical bird that seemed to be hanging over the entire state of Maryland. And still it might have been in the stratosphere, or even beyond that.
He had seen the Thurien power generators and been told they were thousands of miles across, but that had been out in empty space where there were no references. His senses had been spared the impact of direct confrontation, leaving only his imagination to grapple with what the numbers had meant. This was different. He was standing on Earth, surrounded by trees, buildings, and everything else that made up the world of the familiar and the unquestioned, in which intrusions like this were forbidden. Even the distance from one horizon to another, which he sensed unconsciously although it was not visible directly, set a perspective that defined the permissible, imposed rules, and forced limits. The Thurien spaceship had no place in that scheme. It belonged to a different order of magnitude, breaking every known rule and making nonsense of the usual limits. He felt like an insect that had just grasped the meaning of the toenail in front of it, or a microbe that had glimpsed an ocean. His mind had no model to accommodate it. His senses rebelled from taking in the totality of what he was seeing. His brain fought to reconcile it with something that was manageable within a lifetime’s stored experiences, couldn’t, and gave up.
At last a light moving across his field of view against the under-
side of the ship broke the hypnotic trance that had taken hold of him. The figures that had been frozen into immobility around him began stirring as they saw it too. Something was coming down, and was already much nearer than the ship; it had to have been descending for some time, and had only just become visible. It moved swiftly and silently on a direct line toward the center of the base and turned into a flattened, highly elongated effipsoid of pure gold, completely smooth except for two low, sharply swept fins projecting from its upper surface. It landed without a sound a short distance away, its nose pointing to where Hunt and the others were standing. For perhaps ten seconds not a sound or a movement disturbed the total stillness that had enveloped the base.
And then the forward section of the underside hinged slowly downward to form a broad, shallow ramp leading down to the ground. The point where the ramp entered the body was lost in a glow of brilliant yellow light. Lyn’s fingers found Hunt’s and squeezed as the first eight-foot-tall shapes appeared a dozen or so abreast out of the light and began moving down the ramp. At the bottom of the ramp, they halted to survey the waiting lines of Terrans.
In the center was Calazar, easily recognizable even without his familiar short silver cape and green tunic, and on one side of him were Frenua Showm, Porthik Eesyan, and Eesyan’s deputy, Morizal. Garuth was at Calazar’s other side, with Shilohin, Monchar, and other Ganymeans from the Shapieron whose light gray skins set them apart as a group from the darker, less heavily built Thuriens. The team that had gone to McClusky had been waiting a long time for this moment. For the first time since the perceptron’s landing and their first hesitant entry into it, they were not seeing the Thuriens via neural stimulations transmitted from light-years away. This time the Thuriens were real.
Massed bands had begun playing in the background. The crowd, stifi overwhelmed by the spectacle filling the sky above their heads, was quiet. Then with orderly, unhurried dignity the Ganymeans started moving again, and Caldwell stepped forward to lead the McClusky team to meet them at the halfway point.