"I didn't mean to assume command on the strength of my war record," said Brave seriously. "I simply figured I had the biggest voice and no matter what happens you'll probably be able to hear me. Okay, here we go. Guns at the ready."
They walked out onto the flattened waste that had been New York.
Nothing happened.
When they had been walking for eternity and six days longer, as Alan judged it, figures appeared below the huge disk, coming down the inclined steps or plane in the crystal bubble, grouping on the ground. The Earthmen were then just over an eighth of a mile from the ship.
The aliens looked human; it was difficult to see differences in their structure and that of a man; and they wore clothing that glistened as they moved in the sun. They were setting up three small pieces of machinery beneath the disk. Alan could not guess what they might be.
Then the men in the lead, Brave and Bill and Alan, ran into an unseen wall that knocked them staggering from the force of their own motion. The aliens had set up a screen around their ship.
"Here's where I yell out the plan, I guess," said Brave ruefully. "The plan is to make faces, men. That seems to be the only thing we can do of a warlike nature. God, a force wall! We might have known."
Alan, who had sat down abruptly when he struck it, jarring the tied-down cat on his shoulder and causing her to sink her claws through the coat into his skin with anger, stood up and felt the air before his face.
"Amazing. Touch this thing, you fellows. It feels like a sheet of hard rubber. It's perfectly tangible. I can almost feel a grain in the thing."