Harlan Ellison: Troublemakers

It wasn’t just one sighting, or a covey, or a hundred. It was five thousand. Exactly five thousand of them, and all at the same time. They appeared in the skies over Earth instantaneously.

One instant the sky was empty and grey and flecked with cloud formations...the next they blotted out the clouds, and cast huge, elliptical shadows along the ground.

They were miles in diameter, and perfectly round, and there was no questioning-even for an incredulous second-that they were from outer space somewhere. They hung a mile above the Earth, over the 30th parallel. Over Los Angeles and the Sahara Desert and Baghdad and the Canary Islands and over Shanghai. There was no great empty space left between them, for they girdled the Earth with a band of discs. Where everyone could see them, so no one could doubt their power or their menace.

Yet they hung silently. As though waiting.

Waiting.

“The perplexing thing about it, General, is that every once in a while, one of them just goes flick! and disappears. In a little while another one flicks! and takes its place. Not the same one, either. We can tell. There are different markings on them. Nobody can figure it out.”

Alberts was a Captain, properly deferential to the Commanding General. He was short, but dapper; clothes hung well on him; hair thinning across his skull; eyes alert, and a weariness in the softness and line of his body: a man who had been too long in grade, too long as Captain, with Colonel’s rank out of reach. He folded his hands across his paunch, finished his speech, and settled back in the chair.

He stared across the desk at the General. The General steepled his blocky fingers, rocked back and forth in the big leather chair. He stared at his Adjutant with a veiled expression. Adjutant: the politically correct word for assistant, second-in-charge, gopher, the guy who actually got the job done. The General had found Alberts when he was a Second Looey, and knew he had a treasure when Alberts solved ten thorny problems in two days. He wasn’t about to upgrade this Captain...he needed him right there, serving the General’s needs. Adjutant: it sounded better than slave.

“How long-to the hour-have they been here now, Captain?” His tone was almost chiding, definitely aggressive.

He waited silently for an answer as the Adjutant leafed through a folder, consulted his watch, and closed his eyes in figuring. Finally the Adjutant leaned forward and said, “Three days, eight and one-half hours, General.”

“And nothing has been done about them yet,” the heavy-faced Air Force man replied. It was not a question; it was a statement, and one that demanded either an explanation or an alibi.

The Adjutant knew he had no explanation, so he offered the alibi. “But, General, what can we do? We don’t dare scramble a flight of interceptors. Those things are almost four miles around, and there’s no telling what they’d do if we made a hostile move...or even a move that looked hostile.

“We don’t know where they come from or what they want. Or what’s inside them. But if they were smart enough to get here, they’re surely smart enough to stop any offensive action we might take. We’re stuck, General. Our hands are tied.”

The General leaned forward, and his sharp blue eyes caught the Adjutant’s face in a vise-lock stare. “Captain, don’t you ever use that word around me. The first thing I learned, when I was a plebe at West Point, was that the hands of the United States Air Force are never tied. You understand that?”

The Captain shifted uneasily, made an accepting motion with his hand. “Yes, but, General...what...”

“I said never, Captain Alberts! And by that I mean you’d better get out there and do something, right now.”

The Adjutant rose hastily to his feet, slid the chair back an inch, and saluted briskly. Turning on his heel, he left the office, a frozen frown on his face. For the first time since he’d gotten this cushy job with the General, it looked as though there was going to be work involved. Worse, it might be dangerous.

Captain Harold Alberts, Adjutant, was terribly frightened, for the first time since he’d been appointed to the General’s staff.

The saucers seemed to be holding a tight formation. They hovered, and lowered not an inch. They were separated by a half mile of empty space on either side, but were easily close enough to pick off anyone flying between them...should that be their intent.

They were huge things, without conning bubbles or landing gear, without any visible projections of any sort. Their skins were of some non-reflective metal, for it could be seen that the sun was glinting on them, yet was casting no burst of radiance. It made the possibility that this was some super-strong metal seem even more possible. They were silent behemoths, around which the air lanes of the world had had to be shifted. They did not move, nor did they show evidence of life. They were two cymbals, laid dead face-on-face.

They were simply there, and what sort of contesting could there be to that?

Every few hours, at irregular intervals (with no pattern that could be clocked or computed) one of the ships would disappear. Over the wasted sands of the Sahara, or above the crowded streets of Shanghai, or high over the neon of Las Vegas, one of the ships would waver for an instant, as though being washed by some invisible wave, then flick! and it would be gone. And in that moment the sun would stream through, covering the area that had been shadowed by the elliptical darkness. Shortly thereafter-but only sometimes shortly; occasionally a full hour or two would elapse-another ship would appear in the vanished one’s spot. It would not be the same ship, because the one that had disappeared might have been ringed with blue lines, while this new one had a large green dot at its top-center.

But there it was, right in place, a half mile away from each neighbor on either side, and casting that fearful shadow along the ground.

Storm clouds formed above them, and spilled their contents down. The rain washed across their smooth, metallic tops, and ran off, to soak the ground a mile beneath.

They made no move, and they offered no hostility, but-as the hardware dealer in San Francisco said-”My God, the things could blast us at any second!” And-as the Berber tribesman, talking to his dromedary-mounted fellows said-”Even if they hang silent, they come from somewhere, and I’m frightened, terribly frightened.”

So it went, for a week, with the terror clogging the throats of Earthmen around the world. This was not some disaster that happened in Mississippi, so the people of Connecticut could read about it and shake their heads, then worry no more. This was something that affected everyone, and a great segment of the Earth’s population lived under those sleek metal vehicles from some far star.

This was terror incarnate.

Getting worse with each passing day.

The Adjutant felt his career frustration, his deep anger, his distaste for this pompous piss-ant of a General growing rapidly. He had worked as the General’s aide for three years now, and been quite happy with the assignment. The General was an important man, and it was therefore surprising how few actual top-rung decisions had to be made by him, without first being checked and double-checked by underlings.

The Captain knew his General thought of him as his pride-and-joy. Certainly he did; the Adjutant made most of the decisions, and all the General had to do was hand out the orders. Without ever letting the General know his work was being done for him by an aide, the Adjutant had become indispensable. “A good man, that Alberts,” the General said, at the Officers’ Club.