"Brother," said Win, "are we getting poetical in our sorrow! Listen, I have a feeling we oughtn't to go back to Project Star. They must be grouping to wipe us out by now. They know us, they're not dumb; they'll be after us." She bent over the table and all the others did likewise. "Suppose we go up to Central Park? Sit out there all night, loll on the sward and talk. We won't be hunted there. And perhaps by morning some solution will have occurred to us."
"That's the best thought any of us have had," said Rob Pope. "Fresh night air! I know this washed and filtered stuff is the best atmosphere for you, but I crave some real old-fashioned germ-polluted air."
So they took the station wagon up to the park, and walked onto the grass that was already spangled with moisture under the moon; on a knoll surrounded by trees they flung down blankets from the trunk of the car, and stretched out and tasted the night that was brought to them on a softly brisk little breeze; and Alan said, "Mother Nature! You can't beat the old girl. She makes you see sparks of light where you know there's nothing but the dark."
They lay there and talked and napped and drank and relaxed through the night, till dawn rose gray and turned to blue and the sun came up. For no reason but their physical comfortableness, they all felt good. Even Unquote was gay and frisked like a kitten. Their fantastic trouble seemed smaller and further away than it had ever been....
When the first great disk came down on the city, skimming the treetops of Central Park, heading straight for the Times Square district at that height and rising only when it seemed certain that it would smash itself against one or another of the buildings of Manhattan, none of them could speak for surprise. They stared up, amazed, as the whirling silver surface caught their eyes with its glancing beams of sun reflection; and it was incredible to them that the disk should be there in the bright morning sky.
It vanished over Brooklyn, tilting on edge and shooting straight up into emptiness.
"Well, if this isn't the feeble-minded pinnacle of idiocy," exclaimed Don Mariner. "A test flight over the city itself! What drooling sub-human intellect ordered that one?"
In the distance a muted babbling arose, as the city caught its breath and began to talk excitedly about the flying saucer, the first (barring some fugitive glimpses in the '40s and '50s which had never been properly verified) that New York had seen.
Then the disk came back. It led a wobbling formation, two sister ships just behind it and then a gap and three more, all going at a hawk-fast clip and slanting down out of the eastern sky to zoom over the park once more in an uncanny, wavering, noiseless line. Jim McEldownie leaped to his feet, his narrow face, with the green eyes staring out, a twisted mask of panic terror. Alan was shaken, as much by the lean man's fear as by the sight of the disks. "Mac, Mac," he shouted, "what is it?" For he could see nothing to dread that was worse than the thing they had been living with for the past hours.