Some five thousand feet up in the night was a gleaming ship. There were rows of portholes that shone twinkling against the black sky – portholes in multiple rows on the side. The craft was inconceivably huge. Formless and dim of outline in the darkness, its vast bulk was unmistakable.
And as they watched with staring, incredulous eyes, it seemed to take alarm as if it sensed the parting of its concealing cloud blanket. It shot with dizzy speed and the roar of a mighty meteor straight up into the night. The gleam of its twinkling lights merged to a distant star that dwindled, shrank and vanished in the heights.
The men were wordless and open-mouthed. They stared at each other in disbelief of what their eyes had registered.
"A liner!" gasped Captain Blake. "A – a – liner! Mac, there is no such thing."
McGuire pointed where the real cause of their visitor's departure appeared. A plane with engine wide open came tearing down through the clouds. It swung in a great spiral down over the field and dropped a white flare as it straightened away; then returned for the landing. It taxied at reckless speed toward the hangars and stopped a short distance from the men. The pilot threw himself out of the cockpit and raced drunkenly toward them.
"Did you see it?" he shouted, his voice a cracked scream. "Did you see it?"
"We saw it," said Captain Blake; "yes, we saw it. Big as – " He sought vainly for a proper comparison, then repeated his former words: "Big as an ocean liner!"
The pilot nodded; he was breathing heavily.
"Any markings?" asked his superior. "Anything to identify it?"
"Yes, there were markings, but I don't know what they mean. There was a circle painted on her bow and marks like clouds around it, but I didn't have time to see much. I came out of a cloud, and there the thing was. I was flying at five thousand, and they hung there dead ahead. I couldn't believe it; it was monstrous; tremendous. Then they sighted me, I guess, and they up-ended that ship in mid-air and shot straight up till they were out of sight."
It was the captain's turn to nod mutely.
"There's your miracle," said Lieutenant McGuire softly.
"Miracle is right," agreed Captain Blake; "nothing less! But it is no miracle of ours, and I am betting it doesn't mean any good to us. Some other country has got the jump on us."
To the pilot he ordered: "Say nothing of this – not a word – get that? Let me have a written report: full details, but concise as possible."
He went back to the radio room, and the operator there received the same instructions.
"What are you going to do?" the lieutenant questioned.
Captain Blake was reaching for a head-set. "Listen in," he said briefly; "try to link up that impossible ship with those messages, then report at once to the colonel and whoever he calls in. I'll want you along, Mac, to swear I am sober."
He had a head-set adjusted, and McGuire took up the other. Again the room was still, and again from the far reaches of space the dark night sent to them its quavering call.
The weird shrillness cried less loudly now, and the men listened in strained silence to the go and come of that variable shriek. Musical at times as it leaped from one clear note to another, again it would merge into discordant blendings of half-tones that sent shivers of nervous reaction up the listeners' spines.
"Listen," said McGuire abruptly. "Check me on this. There are two of them, one loud and one faint – right?"
"Right," said Captain Blake.
"Now notice the time intervals – there! The faint one stops, and the big boy cuts in immediately. No waiting; he answers quickly. He does it every time."
"Well?" the captain asked.
"Listen when he stops and see how long before the faint one answers. Call the loud one the ship and the faint one the station… There! The ship is through!"
There was pause; some seconds elapsed before the answer that whispered so faintly in their ears came out of the night.
"You are right, sir," the operator said in corroboration of McGuire's remark. "There is that wait every time."
"The ship answers at once," said McGuire; "the station only after a wait."
"Meaning – ?" inquired the captain.
"Meaning, as I take it, that there is time required for the message to go from the ship to the station and for them to reply."
"An appreciable time like that," Captain Blake exclaimed, " – with radio! Why, a few seconds, even, would carry it around the world a score of times!"
Lieutenant McGuire hesitated a moment. "It happens every time," he reminded the captain: "it is no coincidence. And if that other station is out in space – another ship perhaps, relaying the messages to yet others between here and – Venus, let us say…"
He left the thought unfinished. Captain Blake was staring at him as one who beholds a fellow-man suddenly insane. But the look in his eyes changed slowly, and his lips that had been opened in remonstrance came gradually in a firm, straight line.
"Crazy!" he said, but it was apparent that he was speaking as much to himself as to McGuire. "Plumb, raving crazy!.. Yet that ship did go straight up out of sight – an acceleration in the upper air beyond anything we know. It might be – " And he, too, stopped at the actual voicing of the wild surmise. He shook his head sharply as if to rid it of intruding, unwelcome thoughts.
"Forget that!" he told McGuire, and repeated it in a less commanding tone. "Forget it, Mac: we've got to render a report to sane men, you and I. What we know will be hard enough for them to believe without any wild guesses.
"That new craft is real. It has got it all over us for size and speed and potential offensive action. Who made it? Who mans it? Red Russia? Japan? That's what the brass hats will be wondering; that's what they will want to find out.
"Not a word!" he repeated to the radio man. "You will keep mum on this."
He took McGuire with him as he left to seek out his colonel. But it was a disturbed and shaken man, instead of the cool, methodical Captain Blake of ordinary days, who went in search of his commanding officer. And he clung to McGuire for corroboration of his impossible story.
There was a group of officers to whom Blake made his full report. Colonel Boynton had heard but little when he halted his subordinate curtly and reached for a phone. And his words over that instrument brought a quick conference of officers and a quiet man whom McGuire did not recognize. The "brass hats," as Blake had foreseen, were avid for details.
The pilot of the incoming plane was there, too, and the radio man. Their stories were told in a disconcerting silence, broken only by some officer's abrupt and skeptical question on one point and another.
"Now, for heaven's sake, shut up about Venus," McGuire had been told. But he did not need Captain Blake's warning to hold himself strictly to what he had seen and let the others draw their own conclusions.
Lieutenant McGuire was the last one to speak. There was silence in the office of Colonel Boynton as he finished, a silence that almost echoed from the grim walls. And the faces of the men who gathered there were carefully masked from any expression that might betray their thoughts.
It was the quiet man in civilian attire who spoke first. He sat beside another whose insignia proclaimed him of general's rank, but he addressed himself to Colonel Boynton.
"I am very glad," he said quietly, "very glad. Colonel, that my unofficial visit came at just this time. I should like to ask some few questions."
Colonel Boynton shifted the responsibility with a gesture almost of relief. "It is in your hands. Mr. Secretary," he said. "You and General Clinton have dropped in opportunely. There is something here that will tax all our minds."
The man in civilian clothes nodded assent. He turned to Captain Blake.
"Captain,"