Project Gutenberg's Operation Terror, by William Fitzgerald Jenkins

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Title: Operation Terror

Author: William Fitzgerald Jenkins

Release Date: February 27, 2006 [EBook #17870]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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OPERATION
TERROR

Murray Leinster

CHAPTER 1

On the morning the radar reported something odd out in space, Lockley
awoke at about twenty minutes to eight. That was usual. He'd slept in
a sleeping bag on a mountain-flank with other mountains all around.
That was not unprecedented. He was there to make a base line
measurement for a detailed map of the Boulder Lake National Park,
whose facilities were now being built. Measuring a base line, even
with the newest of electronic apparatus, was more or less a
commonplace job for Lockley.

This morning, though, he woke and realized gloomily that he'd dreamed
about Jill Holmes again, which was becoming a habit he ought to break.
He'd only met her four times and she was going to marry somebody else.
He had to stop.

He stirred, preparatory to getting up. At the same moment, certain
things were happening in places far away from him. As yet, no unusual
object in space had been observed. That would come later. But far away
up at the Alaskan radar complex a man on duty watch was relieved by
another. The relief man took over the monitoring of the giant,
football-field-sized radar antenna that recorded its detections on
magnetic tape. It happened that on this particular morning only one
other radar watched the skies along a long stretch of the Pacific
Coast. There was the Alaskan installation, and the other was in Oregon.
It was extremely unusual for only those two to be operating. The
people who knew about it, or most of them, thought that official
orders had somehow gone astray. Where the orders were issued, nothing
out of the ordinary appeared. All was normal, for example, in the
Milit