"Lord!" he said.
He stared after it, stunned into immobility. Down in the street somewhere, a portable video was shrilling a popular song; after a moment he heard the faint swish of a tube car going past. Everything was normal. Nothing, on examination, seemed to have changed. But the world had grown suddenly unreal.
One part of his brain had been shocked into its shell. It was hiding from the thing that had hurt it, and it refused to respond. But the other part was going calmly, lucidly on, quite without his volition. It considered the possibility that he had gone temporarily insane, and decided that this was probable.
Hardly knowing what he did, he found a cigarette and lit it. His hands were shaking. He stared at them dully, and then he reached over to the newsbox on his desk, and switched it on.
There were flaring red headlines.
Relief washed over him, leaving him breathless. He was horrified, of course, but only abstractedly. For the moment he could only be glad that what he had seen was terrible reality rather than even more terrible illusion.
INVADERS APPEAR IN BOSTON.
200 DEAD
Then lines of type, and farther down:
50 CHILDREN DISAPPEAR FROM
PARIS MATERNITY CENTER
He pressed the stud. The roll was full of them.