His voice stopped.  Lockley painfully realigned the instrument again for Sattell, thirty miles to the southeast.

Sattell surprisingly answered the first call.  He said in an astonished voice, “Hello!  I just got a call from Survey.  It seems that the Army knew there was a Survey team in here, and they called to say that radars had spotted something coming down from space, right after eight o’clock.  They wanted to know if any of us supposedly sane observers noticed anything peculiar about that time.”

Lockley’s scalp crawled suddenly.  Vale’s report had disturbed him, but more for the man’s sanity than anything else.  But it could be true!  And instantly he remembered that Jill was very near the place where frighteningly impossible things were happening.

“Vale just told me,” said Lockley, his voice unsteady, “that he saw something come down.  His story was so wild I didn’t believe it.  But you pass it on and say that Vale’s watching it.  He’s waiting for instructions.  He’ll report everything he sees.  I’m thirty miles from him, but he can see the thing that came down.  Maybe the creatures in it can see him.  Listen!”

He repeated just what Vale had told him.  Somehow, telling it to someone else, it seemed at once even less real but more horrifying as a possible danger to Jill.  It didn’t strike him forcibly that other people were endangered, too.

When Sattell signed off to forward the report, Lockley found himself sweating a little.  Something had come down out of space.  The fact seemed to him dangerous and appalling.  His mind revolted at the idea of non-human creatures who could build ships and travel through space, but radars had reported the arrival of a ship, and there were official inquiries that nearly matched Vale’s account, which was therefore not a mere crackpot claim to have seen the incredible.  Something had happened and more was likely to, and Jill was in the middle of it.

He swung the instrument back to Vale’s position.  His hands shook, though a part of his mind insisted obstinately that alarms were commonplace these days, and in common sense one had to treat them as false cries of “Wolf!” But one knew that some day the wolf might really come.  Perhaps it had....

Lockley found it difficult to align the carrier beam to Vale’s exact location.  He assured himself that he was a fool to be afraid; that if disaster were to come it would be by the imbecilities of men rather than through creatures from beyond the stars.  And therefore....

But there were other men at other places who felt less skepticism.  The report from Vale went to the Military Information Center and thence to 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.