Watching them shoot over, he tried weakly to find an analogy, to anchor his wits to some concrete remembrance and save them from scattering in panic. All he could think of was the night when he, aged six or seven, had wakened to know positively and without question that there was a ghost in the room with him. Even yet he was sure there had been a ghost. And this sense of alienness that came from the flying disks was the same as that he had felt in the night, when the invisible ghost crouched in a corner and mowed at him. An outsider, said his blood and viscera to him, a stranger from the cold hells of unknown space. An alien, said the wisdom drawn out of nowhere by primeval instincts lying in the murk at the bottom of his soul.

He moved to Brave and put a hand on one of the mighty arms and saw that Brave knew it now too. "Grady's kin," said the Indian. No one else spoke except Unquote, who gave a bizarre Siamese screech of rage.

Back they came, this time from the direction of Richmond, in a strung-out dipping line; and out of the crystal bubble in the belly of the leader there fell a shining golden egg, a tiny thing at this distance, seen only because the sun caught at it and played along its surface. It fell slowly, far too slowly for an Earth-hatched egg; Thihling and Mariner automatically judged its descent at six or eight feet per second. Either it was full of a light gas, or it had some form of anti-gravity mechanism attached to it. Leisurely it dropped toward Manhattan.

Then the people began to run.

All the millions who had been taught to act calmly and sanely in an emergency lost their heads; they were suddenly so many witless chickens who had caught sight of the axe. With the dropping of the golden egg, the terror of alien danger had clutched at them all. So they fled. There was no place to flee to, but they fled. Into subways and out again, insane with the horror of dying underground. Into buildings, to know the walls were collapsing on them, to run out once more. And the egg fell lazily toward them. Now it had passed the spire of the tallest skyscraper.

Up in the park, people were running too. Alan and his group stood together and watched them helplessly. "Like field mice from an owl," muttered Rob Pope. They saw a woman dash straight into a tree, carom off with a cry and go on. An elderly man came up to them, faltered, put a hand to his chest and pitched over at their feet. Bill turned him over. He was dead. "Heart attack. Poor devil."

Alan did not know why none of his friends ran. He repeated a random line that came into his head: "Stand and fight and see your slain, and take the bullet in your brain...."

Or the atomic blast, or the unimaginable projectile from the inconceivable weapon.

Then Jim McEldownie yelled, "On your faces, for God's sake!" and Alan turned from the city and flung himself down and covered his head with his arms.