When sunlight appeared on the peaks around them, he said detachedly, “You’ve had no rest for twenty-four hours and I doubt that you’ve had anything to eat.  Neither have I. If troops come up this highway we’ll hear the engines.  I think we’d better get off the highway and try to rest.  And I may be able to find something for us to eat.”

There are few wildernesses so desolate as to offer no food at all for one who knows what to look for.  There is usually some sort of berry available.  One kind of acorn is not bad to eat.  Shoots of bracken are not unlike asparagus.  There are some spiny wild plants whose leaves, if plucked young enough, will yield some nourishment and of course there are mushrooms.  Even on stone one can find liverish rock-tripe which is edible if one dries it to complete dessication before soaking it again to make a soup or broth.

Before he searched for food, though, Lockley said abruptly, “You said you saw the creatures and they weren’t men.  What did they look like?”

“They were a long way away,” Jill told him.  “I didn’t see them clearly.  They’re about the size of men but they just aren’t men.  Far away as they were, I could tell that!”

Lockley considered.  He shrugged and said, “Rest.  I’ll be back.”

He moved away.  He was hungry and he kept his eyes in motion, looking for something to take back to Jill.  But his mind struggled to form a picture of a creature who’d be the size of a man but would be known not to be a man even at a distance; whose difference from mankind couldn’t be described because seen at such great distance.  Presently he shook his head impatiently and gave all his attention to the search for food.

He found a patch of berries on a hillside where there was enough earth for berry bushes, but not for trees.  Bears had been at them, but there were many left.

He filled his hat with them and made his way back to Jill.  She had the pocket radio on again, but at the lowest possible volume.  He put the berry-filled hat down beside her.  She held up a warning hand.  Speckles of sunshine trickled down through the foliage and the tree trunks were spotted with yellow light.  They ate the berries as they heard the news.

A new official news release was out.  And now, twelve hours after the last, wholly reassuring bulletin, there was no longer any pretense that the thing in Boulder Lake was merely a meteorite.

The pretext that it was a natural object, said the news broadcaster, resuming, had been abandoned.  But reassurance continued.  Photographic planes had been attempting to get a picture of the alien ship as it floated in the lake.  So far no satisfactory image had been secured, but pictures of wreckage caused by an enormous wave generated in the lake by the alien spaceship’s arrival were sharp and clear.  Troops have been posted in a cordon about the Boulder Lake Park area to prevent unauthorized persons from