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
Military Information Center in Denver. The Survey saw nothing unusual
in Lockley's being at his post, and other men at places corresponding
to his in the area which was to become Boulder Lake National Park. It
also seemed perfectly natural that there should be bulldozer
operators, surveyors, steelworkers, concrete men and so on, all
comfortably at breakfast in the construction camp for the project.
Everything seemed normal everywhere.

Up to the time the Alaskan installation reported something strange in
space, the state of things generally was neither alarming nor
consoling. But at 8:02 A.M. Pacific time, the situation