Martia could not see the alien. Henry could. She felt him shudder.
Three women quietly passed out, but no one paid them any attention. Colonel Rogers and the Major stood there looking back at the creature in the same attitude of momentary shock paralysis as the others. The non-com soldiers and male passengers constituting the ambush on either side of the staircase were all white-faced, staring. "Scarface" stood apart, more or less facing the intruder.
Then—the alien spoke. The little beaks of his mouth moved, and a rather high-pitched voice spoke, laboriously, in a language which was gutteral, vaguely familiar, but nonetheless incomprehensible.
No one moved, but the men tensed, as though for action.
Henry recognized the menace of this creature, but he could not refrain from reflecting, during those brief, weirdly timeless seconds of inactivity, that to communicate with it might be worth a thousand Rosetta Stones. A single, intelligible conversation, and Man might conquer the stars! But this was the Unknown. Man, in his egotism, abhorred the Unknown as Nature abhorred a vacuum. Man had to reduce the Unknown to the level of his own understanding. "The only good Injun is a dead one!" This superman from out of space or time, this harbinger of wonders yet to be discovered, this mute, alien vessel of perhaps incalculable knowledge—was suspect, and condemned to be taken, dead or alive. Henry was aware of no sympathetic sentiments around him. He knew that the mass reaction was for violence. The judgment: Death!
Suddenly, the newsman took a picture and the flash bulb caused the alien to start and move one of his amazingly dextrous hands toward the control box at his waist.
The two babies screamed, and the stranger turned his cyclopean eye upon them for the first time. He moved down to the floor and started toward them.
It was then that Scarface whipped out a gun and fired, point blank. The loud report in that tensely silent place stimulated involuntary muscular reactions and the crowd seemed to jump as one body.
The bullet made a round, neat hole to the right of the chest orifice, and the alien stopped. Nobody wondered why Scarface happened to be carrying a loaded gun. They merely sensed relief when he fired the shot. A known element had entered the picture. Man had met the Unknown with a gun, and the gun could do harm. It was effective.