"Do you remember Greer?" His voice was analytically thoughtful. "He was the little astronomer who made those startlingly radical predictions about a year ago. Remember how we all checked his data? No one could find anything of the sort, even though we checked and re-checked a dozen times. The conclusion was the only one that could be drawn under such circumstances; Greer was suffering from delusions. So he was cured by the psychiatry department."
Her nose wrinkled in concentration. "Greer? Wasn't he the one who claimed to have discovered a sort of gaseous cloud in space? Our system was supposed to be approaching it; when it reached our atmosphere, it would prove a deadly poison to all life-forms on this planet."
"Yes—that's it. Well, it seems he was right. It's come—the green cloud. All I could see out that window was the nauseous swirls of it, and the people where they'd fallen in the streets. Neither of us can leave this building." He snapped on the tele-screen. It lit up; he could hear the faint hum of the machinery, but no images appeared. "Dead!"
All I could see out the window was green whirls of it—and people where they had fallen!
"Eric, it couldn't be."
He paced up and down the floor, clasping and unclasping his hands. "I don't know. It came without warning on a night when nearly everyone was out celebrating. No one in the streets or parks could have been prepared for it. Most of the dwellings were probably left with windows opened. It's only sheer luck that it wasn't the case here. And luck again that we came back early."
"Please sit down," she begged. He looked at her a moment, then shrugged, came over to the sofa, and sat beside her. "There must have been some, Eric," she said.