I
It was warm that night with the breathless, enervating warmth before a summer storm—too warm certainly to sit below in the apartment in idle discussion, knowing that his brother and sister-in-law would have resented missing the TV shows which a modest purse made their sole entertainment.
Earlier George Winthrop had excused himself and gone to the apartment building's roof to watch the steady procession of planes coming in under the murky, threatening overcast over Jackson Heights—planes which swept spectacularly low over Grand Central Parkway to the runway, their throttled engines coughing loudly in the closeness of the night.
He leaned against the concrete and brick parapet, looking disinterestedly at the round red eyes of the airport's approach light lane staring unblinkingly at the threatening sky toward Brooklyn.
He was chokingly filled with thoughts of yesterday's work, and of his planned tomorrow, impatient with the enforced vacation of today.
His eyes wandered blindly toward the northern sky, and cleared suddenly, focussing.
Coming in over the airport at less than four hundred feet altitude was an unilluminated cylinder, pointed at the nose, bulbous at the stern. It was descending almost imperceptibly, moving with unbelievable slowness for its apparent size and lack of airfoils.
He knew at once that he beheld something the like of which no nation on Earth had presumed to make—except as a mockup on a picture lot.
Spaceship, his mind registered.
With mounting excitement he saw the object slowly crossing through the beam of the ceiling light pointing up from the airport's Administration Building. It moved without visible means of propulsion. Was it moving silently? He couldn't be sure, for several planes were noisily warming for takeoff between it and his vantage point.