There are other selectivities—weather radar, harbor radar, and so forth. The point is none of them sees objects at speeds over ten miles per second . . . with the single exception of meteor-count radars in the space stations, which are not military but a research concession granted by the U.N. to the Association for the Advancement of Science.
Consequently the “giant meteor” was recorded as such and was not associated with flying saucers until later.
But the Pass Christian saucer was seen to land. The submersible cruiser U.N.S. Robert Fulton on routine patrol of Zone Red out of Mobile was ten miles off Gulfport with only her receptors showing when the saucer decelerated and landed. The spaceship popped up on the screens of the cruiser as it dropped from outer-space speed (around fifty-three miles per second by the space station record) to a speed the cruiser’s radars would accept.
It came out of nothing, slowed to zero, and disappeared from the screen—but the operator had a fix on the last blip, less than twenty miles away on the Mississippi coast. The cruiser’s skipper was puzzled. The radar track surely could not be a ship, since ships don’t decelerate at fifty gravities. It did not occur to him that g’s might not matter to a slug. He swung his ship over and took a look.
His first dispatch read: SPACESHIP LANDED BEACH WEST OF PASS CHRISTIAN MISSISSIPPI. His second was: LANDING FORCE BEACHING TO CAPTURE.
If I had not been in the Section offices I suppose I would have been left out of the party. As it was my phone shrilled so, that I bumped my head on the study machine I was using and swore. The Old Man said, “Come at once. Move!”
It was the same party we had started with so many weeks—or was it years?—before, the Old Man, Mary, and myself. We were in the air and heading south at emergency maximum, paying no attention to block controls and with our transponder sending out the police warning, before the Old Man told us why.
When he did tell us, I said, “Why the family group? You need a full-scale air task force.”
“It will be there,” he answered grimly. Then he grinned, his old wicked grin, an expression I had not seen since it started. “What do you care?” he jibed. “The ‘Cavanaughs’ are riding again. Eh, Mary?”
I snorted. “If you want that sister-and-brother routine, you had better get another boy.”
“Just the part where you protect her from dogs and strange men,” he answered soberly. “And I do mean dogs and I do mean strange men, very strange men. This may be the payoff, son.”
I started to ask him more but he went into the operator’s compartment, closed the panel, and got busy at the communicator. I turned to Mary. She snuggled up with a little sigh and said, “Howdy, Bud.”
I grabbed her. “Don’t give me that ‘Bud’ stuff or somebody’s going to get a paddling.”
XXVII
We were almost shot down by our own boys, then we picked up an escort of two Black Angels who throttled back and managed to stay with us. They turned us over to the command ship from which Air Marshal Rexton was watching the action. The command ship matched speeds with us and took us inboard with an anchor loop—I had never had that done before; it’s disconcerting.
Rexton wanted to spank us and send us home, since we were technically civilians—but spanking the Old Man is a chore. They finally unloaded us and I squatted our car down on the sea-wall roadway which borders the Gulf along there—scared out of my wits, I should add, for we were buffeted by A.A. on the way down. There was fighting going on above and all around us, but there was a curious calm near the saucer itself.
The outlander ship loomed up almost over us, not fifty yards away. It was as convincing and as ominous as the plastic-board fake in Iowa had been phony. It was a discus in shape and of great size; it was tilled slightly toward us, for it had grounded partly on one of the magnificent high-stilted old mansions which line that coast. The house had collapsed but the saucer was partly supported by the wreckage and by the six-foot-thick trunk of a tree that had shaded the house.