the Pentagon. Meanwhile the Information Center ordered a
photo-reconnaissance plane to photograph Boulder Lake from aloft. In
the Pentagon, hastily alerted staff officers began to draft orders to
be issued if the report of two radars and one eye-witness should be
further substantiated. There were such-and-such trucks available here,
and such-and-such troops available there. Complicated paper work was
involved in the organization of any movement of troops, but especially
to carry out a plan not at all usual in the United States.

Everything, though, depended on what the reconnaissance plane
photographs might show.

Lockley did not see the plane nor consciously hear it. There was the
faintest of murmuring noises in the sky. It moved swiftly toward the
north, tending eastward. The plane that made the noise was invisible.
It flew above the cloud cover which still blotted out nearly all the
blue overhead. It went on and on and presently died out beyond the
mountains toward Boulder Lake.

Lockley tried to get Vale back, to tell him that radars had verified
his report and that it would be acted on by the military. But though
he called and called, there was no answer.

An agonizingly long time later the faint and disregarded sound of the
plane swept back across the heavens. Lockley still did not notice it.
He was too busy with his attempts to reach Vale again, and with grisly
imaginings of what might be done by aliens from another world when
they found the workmen near the lake--and Jill among them. He pictured
alien monsters committing atrocities in what they might consider
scientific examination of terrestrial fauna. But somehow even that was