the sun was shining
in a clear sky.

Jimmy knew a dangerous floodwater storm when he saw one. The sky had to
be dark with rain, and you had to feel scared, in fear of drowning.

Jimmy was scared, all right. That part of it rang true. But a hollow,
sick feeling in his chest couldn't mean anything by itself, he told
himself fiercely.

Pigtail Anne saw the disk before Jimmy did. She screamed and pointed
skyward, her twin braids standing straight out in the wind like the
ropes on a bale of cotton, when smokestacks collapse and a savage
howling sends the river ghosts scurrying for cover.

Straight down out of the sky the disk swooped, a huge, spinning shape
as flat as a buckwheat cake swimming in a golden haze of butterfat.

But the disk didn't remind Jimmy of a buckwheat cake. It made him think
instead of a slowly turning wheel in the pilot house of a rotting old
riverboat, a big, ghostly wheel manned by a steersman a century dead,
his eye sockets filled with flickering swamp lights.

It made Jimmy want to run and hide. Almost it made him want to cling to
his sister, content to let her wear the pants if only he could be spared
the horror.

For there was something so chilling about the downsweeping disk that
Jimmy's heart began leaping like a vinegar jug bobbing about in the wake
of a capsizing fishboat.

Lower and lower the disk swept, trailing plumes of white smoke, lashing
the water with a fearful blow. Straight down over the cypress wilderness
that fringed the opposite bank, and then out across the river with a
long-drawn whistling sound, louder than the air-sucking death gasps of a
thousand buffalo cats.

Jimmy didn't see the disk strike the shining broad shoulders of the
Father of Waters, for the bend around which the _Natchez Belle_ had
steamed so proudly hid the sky monster from view. But Jimmy did see the
waterspout, spiraling skyward like the atom bomb explosion he'd goggled
at in the pages of an old _Life_ magazine, all smudged now with oily
thumbprints.

Just a roaring for an instant--and a big white mushroom shooting
straight up into the sky. Then, slowly, the mushroom decayed and fell
back, and an awful stillness settled down over the river.

* * * * *

The stillness was broken by a shrill cry from Pigtail Anne. "It was a
flying saucer! Jimmy, we've seen one! We've seen one! We've--"

"Shut your mouth, Pigtail!"

Jimmy shaded his eyes and stared out across the ri