Chapter I

It was warm that night with the breathless, enervating warmth before a summer storm--too warm certainly to sit below in the apartment in idle discussion, knowing that his brother and sister-in-law would have resented missing the TV shows which a modest purse made their sole entertainment.

Earlier George Winthrop had excused himself and gone to the apartment building's roof to watch the steady procession of planes coming in under the murky, threatening overcast over Jackson Heights--planes which swept spectacularly low over Grand Central Parkway to the runway, their throttled engines coughing loudly in the closeness of the night.

He leaned against the concrete and brick parapet, looking disinterestedly at the round red eyes of the airport's approach light lane staring unblinkingly at the threatening sky toward Brooklyn.

He was chokingly filled with thoughts of yesterday's work, and of his planned tomorrow, impatient with the enforced vacation of today.

His eyes wandered blindly toward the northern sky, and cleared suddenly, focussing.

Coming in over the airport at less than four hundred feet altitude was an unilluminated cylinder, pointed at the nose, bulbous at the stern. It was descending almost imperceptibly, moving with unbelievable slowness for its apparent size and lack of airfoils.

He knew at once that he beheld something the like of which no nation on Earth had presumed to make--except as a mockup on a picture lot.

_Spaceship_, his mind registered.

With mounting excitement he saw the object slowly crossing through the beam of the ceiling light pointing up from the airport's Administration Building. It moved without visible means of propulsion. Was it moving silently? He couldn't be sure, for several planes were noisily warming for takeoff between it and his vantage point.

He'd watched aircraft, V-2's and various missiles too long to miss the significance of the object's glide angle. Unless it lifted under power it would surely descend in the Flushing area. He turned, raced across the roof, and descended quickly to the street, his heart beating like a bass drum. Ten minutes later, as he swung his car toward Grand Central Parkway, he felt time's urgency, the beating pulse that had measured out minutes that so often could have been the _last_ minutes--when he'd perched upon high towers removing the connecting plugs of fission bombs that had failed to detonate--

_Oh, God! Not this stomach-wrenching nervousness again!_

His eyes flicked momentarily to the dashboard's vacant panel which had held the clock he'd smashed that day when time's pressure had grown too great....

_Forget it!_ he told himself almost frantically. _You're over that! You're well again!_

He sped past the airport, curved under the bridge where Northern Boulevard's eastbound lane crosses the parkway, and found the heavy late evening traffic out of Manhattan stalled, blocking all three lanes ahead.

_It must have landed in Flushing Meadow Park!_

On impulse, he swung right and up around to Northern Boulevard, crossing over the parkway. He cut left through a half-moon turn-around--the wrong way--and swung deftly through the westbound traffic into the Boat Basin, and then back under the boulevard on the undulating road through the park.

Passing under the towering elevated structure and the railroad overpass, he discovered with a strange mixture of exultation and apprehension that his deduction had been correct. The cylinder lay in smothering folds of darkness on the gently rising slope near The City of New York Building.

He stopped, leaving the car's motor running, its headlights on high beam. Quickly he took a Geiger counter from the glove compartment and, dismounting, approached the object.

The counter failed to respond. There was not even heat radiation. To his cautious touch the stern was neither warmer nor cooler than the night.

He gazed fascinatedly at the object's expanse. Two hundred feet long, he guessed, increasing from its pointed bow to about a thirty foot diameter at its midpoint. The diameter was constant back to a point thirty feet forward of the stern, then became abruptly bulbous. It resembled a monstrous gourd--_bearing what strange seeds?_

Undoubtedly this silent, implacable thing came from far beyond man's ken, a misshapen _Nautilus_ fitted out to probe the void. Had it come deliberately or had it blundered--a derelict?--to Earth?

The sultry night suddenly filled with sound. Awed and frightened motorists broke through the fence from Grand Central Parkway, and streamed across the park until a voice cried out authoritatively:

"Keep back! This is the Army! This is a restricted area!"

Other figures raced from within the park. Anti-aircraft crews, Winthrop thought.

The man who had shouted the orders was coming toward him.

"What are _you_ doing here?"

"It isn't just idle curiosity, lieutenant," Winthrop said, quickly. "I'm a physicist. Los Alamos and other places. I'm afraid I'm damnably curious when something unclassified drops into our ordered world."

"I see. All right, stick around, maybe you can help us classify it!"

The lieutenant smiled, and swung away.

Winthrop stood there alone as the soldiers got rid of the other civilians and established guardposts, then as prime movers urgently and noisily brought up ack-ack guns, searchlights, and engine generators.

There was a bawling of commands, a tense, noisy excitement. Under the encircling searchlights' glare guards walked short posts, sub-machine guns ready. The noise subsided.

Everything was in readiness and, Winthrop thought, God grant that everything would be enough!

Suddenly lightning forked across the sky. With the crashing thunder came a teeming rain which drove Winthrop hastily back to his car.

The radiator coolant was boiling murmurously amid the rain's driving tumult. Winthrop shut off the lights and engine, sat staring through the streaming windshield at the smooth, enigmatic surface of the cylinder on the slope.

There was a sleep-provoking magic in the downpour's prolonged pattern.

_Oh, ship of space, the rains of Earth will wash your surface clean!_