ind
followed, a moderate gale. The coast was battered by sudden high waves,
then hushed in a bewilderment of fog.

Before that appearance, radar had gone crazy for an hour.

The atmosphere buzzed with aircraft. They went up in readiness to shoot,
but after the first sighting reports only a few miles offshore, that
order was vehemently canceled--someone in charge must have had a grain
of sense. The thing was not a plane, rocket or missile. It was an
animal.

If you shoot an animal that resembles an inflated gas-bag with wings,
and the wingspread happens to be something over four miles tip to tip,
and the carcass drops on a city--it's not nice for the city.

The Office of Continental Defense deplored the lack of precedent. But
actually none was needed. You just don't drop four miles of dead or
dying alien flesh on Seattle or any other part of a swarming homeland.
You wait till it flies out over the ocean, if it will--the most
commodious ocean in reach.

It, or rather she, didn't go back over the Pacific, perhaps because of
the prevailing westerlies. After the Seattle incident she climbed to a
great altitude above the Rockies, apparently using an updraft with very
little wing-motion. There was no means of calculating her weight, or
mass, or buoyancy. Dead or injured, drift might have carried her
anywhere within one or two hundred miles. Then she seemed to be
following the line of the Platte and the Missouri. By the end of the day
she was circling interminably over the huge complex of St. Louis,
hopelessly crying.

[Illustration]

She had a head, drawn back most of the time into the bloated mass of the
body but thrusting forward now and then on a short neck not more than
three hundred feet in length. When she did that the blunt turtle-like
head could be observed, the gaping, toothless, suffering mouth from
which the thunder came, and the soft-shining purple eyes that searched
the ground but found nothing answering her need. The skin-color was
mud-brown with some dull iridescence and many peculiar marks resembling
weals or blisters. Along the belly some observers saw half a mile of
paired protuberances that looked like teats.

She was unquestionably the equivalent of a vertebrate. Two web-footed
legs were drawn up close against the cigar-shaped body. The vast, rather
narrow, inflated wings could not have been held or moved in flight
without a strong internal skeleton and musculature. Theorists later
argued that