by FRANK M. ROBINSON

(Illustrations by Lawrence)

Scientists with considerable standing, such as Dr. Donald H. Menzel, acting director of Harvard College Observatory, have gone to great pains to disprove every variety of visual and scientific sightings of flying “objects.” Most discouraging to the layman is the fact that these “objects” apparently never land, and seem almost purposeless in their endless flying and maneuvering. Frank M. Robinson, who was a radar man in the Navy, and knows a little about radar saucer sightings, ponders this last thought in this unusual and provoking short story.

WE WERE UP IN CIC, running through a few practice plots, when Schulman picked up the object on the air search radar.

“Bogle! Zero three eight, fifty-five miles!”

Ensign Harry Piper turned on the light under the air plot and marked the position with a grease pencil. “You don’t think we’ve been assigned an air cover, do you, Lieutenant?”

“It wasn’t in the operations order,” I said. “And besides, we’re too far out.” We wouldn’t have rated one even if we had been closer to the coast, I thought. There was only our ship, the Lorraine, and the Bollard Reefer—two obsolete amphibious ships wallowing back across the Atlantic from an assignment with the Sixth Fleet.

Piper marked another position, then said quietly: “You should have picked it up further out, Schulman. That gear’s supposed to have a range of four hundred miles.”

Ensign Piper was my junior CIC officer, a somewhat brash youngster—great for discipline—just out of CIC school where they teach you with the latest equipment kept in topnotch condition. He wasn’t used to the frustration of working on a reconverted cargo ship where the gear was left over from the last war and topnotch condition meant an overworked technician had blown the dust off the tubes a week ago.

“I reported it as soon as it came on the scope, sir. Should I call the technician?” Schulman’s voice was filled with that certain mixture of contempt and respect that enlisted men reserve for officious ensigns.

“Don’t bother,” I said. “Just give us the plots as you get them.”

“Yes sir, Lieutenant!”

Piper gave me a dirty look and went back to his plotting. Five minutes later he threw down his pencil and relaxed. “It’s circling, just outside the fifty-mile mark.”

I raised my eyebrows. “Circling? A thousand miles out over the Atlantic?”

“Take a look for yourself.”

I watched him while he tracked the plane—or whatever it was—for five more minutes. It was circling, all right. Finally I said, “Keep an eye on it, Schulman,” and turned to Piper. “Let’s take a break.”

We walked out to the small porch just aft of the radar shack and lit up. It was a chill, fall day, the sea a dull bottle-green. There was a faint scud of clouds on the horizon and I could tell by the wind that it wouldn’t be long before the sea became choppy and foamed with white-caps. Below us, on the main deck, the deck apes were taking down the high-line over which we had just exchanged observers with the Bollard Reefer. The Bollard had been pulling steadily away for the last fifteen minutes and was now a good two thousand yards off our port bow.

“You know anything about this Ensign Daugherty?” Piper asked casually.

Daugherty was one of the Bollard’s observers. As a CIC officer, he had been assigned to Piper and myself, to watch us simulate air plotting and tracking that afternoon.

“He won’t be rough. After all, one of us will be his observer tomorrow.”

“I’m not worried,” Piper lied. “Just curious.”

He finished his cigarette in silence and dropped the butt down a deck drain. “Mark,” he started, then hesitated. I glanced at him out of the corner of my eye and wondered what he was leading up to.

“Yeah?”

“What do you think we ought to do with Schulman?”

I thought to myself that if Piper had studied people as long as I had, he wouldn’t be asking me that. “Why do you ask?”

“He’s getting too wise.”

Piper sensed that I didn’t sympathize with him and changed the subject. “Everybody’s getting discharged. Every time I turn around, somebody else is getting out.” He spat ever the railing and watched it disappear where the dull-green sea creamed against the hull. “When are you going home, Mark?”

“I don’t know. One of these days.” I walked away from the railing and turned up my collar against the chill sea air. I would be glad to go home, I thought. I had done as much as I was able, I had learned as much as I could.

“You got a family?” Piper asked, offhand.

“A wife and kid. They’ve both been pretty sick.”

“Really loaded down with troubles, huh?”

Piper wasn’t actually interested—he was just buttering up a superior officer.

“Everybody has them.”

Schulman’s thick physique suddenly appeared in the hatchway. He looked worried.

“You want to take a look at this, Lieutenant? It doesn’t look right.”

We went back inside. Schulman had the sweep on the radar revolving at high speed so that the picture on the scope was almost continuous. I studied the blob of light that represented the target. It was creeping around in a circle; a circle that had a radius of fifty miles with our ship as the center. And it was moving much too fast.

I watched it a moment more, then slid into the operator’s seat. “Plot these, Harry.” I read off three sets of bearings and ranges. “What’s the course and speed?”

“He’s circling around us, fifty miles out. Speed I get is around twelve hundred.”

“Do you know anything that has a speed of twelve hundred?” I asked in a brittle voice.

“There are experimental planes …”

“They’re at Muroc,” I said. “On the West Coast. There’s nothing operational like that on this side.” “How about a foreign plane?”

“It would come as quite a shock to the CIA,” I said. “But I don’t think it is. They wouldn’t have been circling, for one thing, and they wouldn’t be bothering with us for another.”

I got up from the radar. “Here, you read them off and I’ll plot.”

I got twelve hundred, too. But my course was slightly different; the circle was getting smaller. I looked at Piper. He was sweating and I could feel my own sweat pop out under my arms and on my forehead.

I flicked the intercom switch to notify the bridge, and the Old Man gave me a blast for not reporting it sooner. Then he asked for a repeat on the speed and when I said twelve hundred, he got off a few choice words about incorrect plotting procedures by his junior officers and ordered that we go through it again. I didn’t argue.

We had just started in once more when Piper looked up from the plotting board, frowning. “Where’s Daugherty, Mark?”

Ensign Daugherty, I suddenly remembered, should have reported to CIC twenty minutes ago.

THE OLD MAN stormed into CIC when I reported the object at thirty miles and repeated the speed figure of twelve hundred.

“I thought you knew how to pilot, Evans!” Captain Woxvold was a big, weatherbeaten man with thirty years of service behind him; one of the few human beings I knew whose bark was bad enough but whose bite was even worse.

“That’s how the figures come out, Captain,” I said evenly.

He shouldered in beside me and watched while I plotted the next few positions. Finally he took a message blank, wrote on it, and handed it to me. “See that this gets out immediately.” His voice had toned down a lot.

The message was to be sent to the Naval Operating Base at Norfolk; it described the incident and gave our position and time. I read it over the intercom to the radio shack and requested immediate action. They delayed in answering and when they did, the voice sounded close to hysteria.

“Something’s wrong with the transmitter, sir. We can’t raise Norfolk. We can’t even raise the Bollard!” “Try another transmitter!” I snapped.

“All equipment’s gone dead, sir! We can’t get out on anything!”

I notified the bridge of the communications breakdown, then turned back to the plotting board. “I can’t imagine everything going haywire all at once,” I muttered.

Piper wiped his sweating face with a big, khaki-colored handkerchief. “Maybe it isn’t us. Maybe it’s them. Some kind of field they could broadcast that would smother our communications.”

“That’s a little too fantastic,” I said. “There’s no plane on Earth that could do that.”

“It doesn’t have to be a plane.”

“Careful, son,” I grunted. “You’re letting it run away with you.” I wondered where Daugherty was.

We tracked the object in to twenty miles and a few minutes after that the lookout on the flying bridge picked it up. His voice over the intercom was a thin, nervous squeak.

“Plane off the starboard bow!”

There was a pause and I could imagine the lookout adjusting his binoculars for a better view.

“Can’t identify. No wings …” The voice stuttered. “No wings!”

I could almost hear the Captain and the Exec rush out of the wheelhouse to take a look for themselves. A moment later the brassy danger of the GQ gong started, and the PA system crackled into life.

“General quarters, general quarters! All hands, man your battle stations! Gun crews, on the double!”

I took a chance and flipped the intercom switch again. “CIC does not recommend taking offensive action! Unknown object may not be hostile!”

Even over the intercom I could feel the coldness in the Old Man’s voice. “I’m in command of this ship, Mr. Evans!”

I sagged back on my stool. The Captain was a member in good standing of the shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later school, and nothing I could say would change his mind.

The phone talker on the same circuit as the flying bridge repeated the lookout’s words in a low, tense voice. “Object circling ship, estimated range ten miles.”

I looked around at the faces in the darkened cabin and it came to me that they weren’t separate faces, they were all one face. A white, frightened face, thin-lipped and shiny with sweat.

“Object closing! Range eight …”

I glanced at the radar screen just in time to see the blob of light quit circling and dart toward the center of the scope.

There was a thin, roaring sound overhead. “All gun crews, fire at will!”

The forties aft of the superstructure broke into a roaring chatter and I could make out the thinner, more nervous sound of the twenties on the flying bridge. The blob of light on the scope had merged with the center spot; I watched it but it showed no sign of moving away when the firing started. I guessed that the gun crews were firing at almost point-blank range.

The firing kept up for a solid ten minutes, then gradually died away to an apprehensive silence. A moment later the Old Man came in, his face grey. He pointed to Schulman. “You! Open the port.”

Schulman fumbled hastily with the dogs, then swung the metal cover plate back against the bulkhead. The Captain, Piper, and I crowded to the, port.

The sea was choppy now. The clouds had closed in and it had started to rain, a fine drizzling mist that cut visibility down to practically nothing. The object we had tracked was hovering low over the water, barely a hundred yards away. No factory on Earth had turned out that squat, black shape, I thought. It bulked huge in the mist, more tubular than oval shaped, more menacing than I had imagined.

“The guns had no effect,” the Captain said, “and we couldn’t possibly have missed.”

We watched the object pace alongside us, the gray, light through the port revealing the calculating shrewdness in the Old Man’s face and the glistening sweat on Piper’s and my own. It seemed to be coming closer to the Lorraine, cautiously edging nearer to us through the mist.

“I wonder what it wants,” the Captain mused. It was Piper who first offered an answer.

“Watch its movements,” he said slowly. “It looks tike it was trying to match our course and speed. Reminds me a lot of the Bollard coming alongside this morning to send over observers.”

The Captain mulled it over for a moment. The implication was fantastic, but so was the alien ship out there in the mist. He finally shook his head. “That’s too far-fetched; they couldn’t get away with anything like that.”

“Maybe they’re thinking of picking up one of their men,” Piper insisted.

“That sounds fantastic, too,” I said.

“I don’t think so,” Piper objected. “If there are other races besides ourselves in the Universe, then it’s logical that they might have observers on Earth, isn’t it?”

I couldn’t argue with what I saw outside the port. He had a point. And what better place to plant them than in the Navy, and what more practical way of picking them up off a lonely cargo ship steaming across the Atlantic?

“We’re assuming that the ship out there is dangerous,” I said. “We could be wrong you know.”

The old man looked at me as if I had just crawled out from under a rock. “I wouldn’t give it odds, Evans. They could have approached us outright, you know. They didn’t have to plant spies.” He turned back to Piper. “If there’s an observer on board, then he’s dangerous to us—to everybody—because he knows too damned much. And that observer could be anybody, couldn’t it?”

Piper had another inspiration. “Who’s the most unusual member of the crew?” he asked slowly. “Who differs the most from the rest of us? Maybe he’s given himself away by something he’s done in the past, something that was out of character.”

It was then that I remembered Daugherty.

“It doesn’t have to be one of our men,” I said. “The observer could be from the Bollard.”

“Nice reasoning, except for one thing, Mr. Evans,” the Captain said bitingly. That alien vessel is following us, not the Bollard.”

“We’ve got some of the Bollard’s men on board,” I persisted. “Ensign Daugherty, for one. He’s been missing for almost two hours.”

“You should have told us sooner, Mr. Evans,” the Captain said with a deceptive softness.

“We were pretty busy,” I said stiffly. “We had a lot to do.”

He decided not to press it. “You think he might be hiding on board, waiting for a chance to—transfer?”

“It’s just a guess, but we can’t afford to pass it up.”

“Then we’ll have to find him,” the Old Man said grimly. “Soon.”

Ensign Daugherty, report to CIC immediately!”

THE ECHOES from the PA system faded away, leaving myself and nine other men sweating in the gloom of CIC. I cracked my knuckles and counted the seconds to myself. The seconds mounted up to minutes but no shamefaced ensign showed up with a cock-and-bull story about where he had been. Somehow, I knew that he wasn’t going to.

“How do we find him if he’s hiding on board?” Piper asked. “With everybody at GQ, below decks is practically deserted.”

“There are the damage control parties,” I said. “They’ll have to go over the ship compartment by compartment, hold by hold.”

Outside the port, I could see the black wet side of the alien ship hovering three feet away from the rail.

“How much of a menace do you think they are?” Piper asked suddenly.

“They’re alien,” I said shortly. “They’re from Outside. They have a different set of values, a different code by which they live. Any alien race would differ radically from us, and that difference would make them the enemy—by definition.”

Piper almost shivered. That was what he had expected me to say and I hadn’t disappointed him. “Daugherty will probably be lugging a satchel full of papers when he tries to make the transfer, won’t he?” I looked at him blankly. “Why?”

“He’ll want to take plans back with him,” Piper said thoughtfully. “Information about our science, machinery, that sort of thing.”

The talker broke in and started detailing the report of damage-control party one.

“Number one hold clean. We’re welding the hatches shut so that … nothing … can get out.”

“Damage-control party two. After living quarters clear. Securing hatches.”

I felt something cold and hard being pushed into my hands. I looked up. The captain was offering me a pistol. I hadn’t even heard him come in.

“He might be hiding almost any place,” the old man said in a tight voice. “Places where we might never think to look. But sooner or later he’s going to have to make a break for it. Any suspicious movement on deck—shoot.”

Piper opened the after hatch and we stationed ourselves stiffly on either side, watching the decks below. From where I stood I could make out the wire potato locker and the small sheet-metal movie projection booth almost directly beneath us. Further aft, the LCM’s on deck obscured the view. My eyes caught the end of the king boom, snug against the superstructure, and followed it back to the big trestle mast. There were more M boats aft of the mast; the gun tubs for the forty-millimeter antiaircraft guns hid the fantail. There were a thousand places where Daugherty could hide.

But the only movement was that of the men in the gun tubs.

“Damage-control party three. Number five hold all right. We’re stationing an armed guard at the hatch.”

The Lorraine was beginning to pitch in the choppy sea; the huge shape beside it, half hidden in the misting rain, pitched with it, matching each tortuous twist of the ship with one of its own. Its distance from the rail didn’t vary by more than a foot.

I glanced back in CIC. The men were still frozen at their GQ stations. Schulman was at the air-search radar, frantically scanning the screen for any companions to the black-hulled monster outside. The others were clustered about the plotting table, intently listening to the drone of the talker as he reported the progress of the damage-control parties combing the Lorraine rivet by rivet.

“Mark, look!”

Twenty feet away, just off the porch, a small section of the alien ship had slid back and a tongue of metal projected out of the opening. A man on board the Lorraine could vault the porch rail and step onto the tongue with no difficulty at all.

The opening itself was blinding bright; I could see nothing beyond the curtain of light.

The minutes rolled by. My muscles ached from the tension.

“Damage-control party two. Engine room and shaft alley clear.”

I braced myself against the roll of the ship and wiped the sweat off my palms, so I would have a better grip on the pistol. I looked across the hatch at Piper. He had lost all of his brashness now. He was breathing hard and his face was sweaty and a little green. The huge ship out there was the Unknown, the first contact with the Outside. What they were like, what they could, what they would do, he had no way of knowing. And hidden on board was one of their observers.

We had crouched by the open hatch for an hour, smelling the wet salt air and letting the chill wind dry the sweat on our faces, when the talker’s voice suddenly exploded from a dull drone to an excited chatter. “Damage-control party one. Ensign Daugherty found at bottom number two hold. Unconscious, leg broken. Bleeding internally. Send a corpsman immediately!” A hatch can open over a darkened hold, I thought. A man who was unfamiliar with the ship could step through and plummet forty feet to the bottom. It’s happened before. It had happened this time.

“The ship’s still out there,” Piper said thinly. “If it isn’t Daugherty, then it must be somebody else on board.”

I stared at him for a long moment, then made up my mind. “We’ll have to plug that opening,” I said with a grimness that I didn’t feel.

Before Piper could object, I was racing across the porch, the heavy rain plastering my clothes against my skin. I heard somebody screaming curses behind me. It sounded like the Old Man but I didn’t stop. I vaulted the rail. A second later I was balancing on the metal gangway of the alien ship.

There was a noise behind me. Piper had leaped over the railing and was running toward me. He still had his pistol in his hand.

I paused at the bright opening and turned to face him. I wanted to tell him that we had had it all wrong, that being an observer involved an impersonation not just for a few months, but one that covered years. That instead of being unusual, the observer would more than likely be the most average of average men, a man who was very much married and with very real troubles. And that such an observer would study people not to take away information as to what they did or what they made, but to gather the much more vital information as to how they lived and how they thought. I stood there on the metal bridge, fighting to keep my balance against the wind and the roll and pitch of the ships. It was getting dark and the spattering rain almost hid Piper standing at the end of the bridge a few feet away.

He raised his pistol and took aim, roaring in a bull voice that was almost lost in the crashing of the sea. “Where the hell do you think you’re going, Lieutenant?”

I smiled, knowing that Piper was a prisoner of his own sense of discipline, that he couldn’t bring himself to shoot his superior officer.

“I’m going home,” I said as the brilliant light snapped off and the metal tongue of my trajector-ship shut tight.