Rushing from the white dome of the Contact Center, Dr. Karen Polandres-Behr flashed her credentials and commandeered a place aboard one of the helicopters rising from the nearby airstrip. Voices yammered frantic questions in her ear via a secure link to other members of her team, assembled in New York.
“I don’t know anything yet!” she shouted as the chopper pilot set blades spinning. “The tripod stands just south of here, right over the town! No, we haven’t heard a peep from the lander. Has there been anything from the Mother Ship?”
“Nothing at all.”
Lifting off, the copter soon gave her a better perspective. The alien tower-platform had seemed impressive last Saturday, standing beside Manhattan’s skyscrapers. Now, above the open desert, it resembled a mountain, a stool for gods, a giant fork stuck in the Earth. Air force planes and news copters buzzing nearby only drove home the scale of the thing. They were mosquitoes. Less than mosquitoes.
“Oh dear lord,” she murmured as they gained enough altitude to look down — at an angle — upon the little city of Twenty-Nine Palms. “It’s standing right over my daughter’s school.”
The helicopter pitched and bucked.
“Keep it still!” One of Karen’s associates demanded, trying to aim instruments at the spacecraft. It was doing something — manipulating mighty forces. The detector device on her lap told her that much, before every dial went into redline, reached its max value or simply burned out.
“Something’s screwing the electronics,” the pilot snapped. Karen noticed several cockpit meters twitching to the same rhythm of static she heard in her headset, a rhythm that seemed also to penetrate her skin.
Despite the noise, New York kept hurling frantic questions.
“I don’t know!” She repeated. “But I think something’s about to happen!”
More frenzied queries rattled her ears, but she could only answer with a low cry as the Garubis lander shuddered, causing the tripod to tremble visibly. It changed color before her eyes, sliding along the spectrum from reddish toward yellow, green and finally intense blue.
Then, from the vessel’s rim, there fell a curtain of dazzling light, dripping slowly as if liquid.
In terrified dismay, Karen saw the radiant cone broaden — catching two nearby earthling aircraft in its hem, melting their rotors and tossing them like gnats, sending them a-tumble toward the Mojave dunes. Then the curtain tightened inward, narrowing to fit snugly within the trio of legs. It was hard to peer at the fierce illumination, which seemed to solidify somehow, into a bubble of palpable brilliance.
A jolt shook the chopper. The pilot struggled, throwing his throttle to full and climbing even as a shock wave — visible as a ripple in the air — caught up and plowed into them. Roaring, dazzling brilliance heaved around her. Karen held on for dear life as the helicopter dipped, rattled and shook. Alarms wailed. The control panel erupted with red lights. Technicians protected precious instruments with their bodies.
For a minute, it seemed all was lost. Next stop, the hard Earth.
Then, abruptly, the sensation of powerful energies simply vanished. In seconds the air calmed, releasing her pilot to sob in relief. And Karen’s head was out the door, turning and peering frantically.
The first thing she saw was a pillar of smoke rising from flaming wreckage — an aircraft, probably one of the experimental fighter planes, lay in a crumpled heap at one end of a city street, with a trail of torn autos in its wake. That was awful enough. But she wasted no time turning the other way, to find —
— a pall of sparkling dust hanging over the part of town near Olympic and Rimpau, obscuring everything beneath. Out of this fog, the last few bits and flying components of the landing tripod could be seen rushing skyward, joining their fellows in the belly of the giant, hovering disk. Soon they were all recovered and the big hatch closed.
The great vessel began climbing away.
“What happened? What happened? What happened?”
For a moment Karen could not tell where the question came from. It was almost a simultaneous chant, emitted from her headphones, from everyone in the chopper, and from her own dazzled mind.
Then, as the alien vessel started moving, an amplified voice took over the radio waves.
Thus, repayment is accomplished.
With this gift, the debt is erased.
Where the tripod had been, just minutes before, a stiffening breeze now tugged at the dust cloud, unraveling it — along with every shred of hope Karen had been vainly clutching. For under the clearing haze, she now saw that the whole area now lay empty.
Worse than empty.
The high school and several city blocks… were gone! Just a crater remained, circular, smooth-sided, and uniformly several meters deep.
A quiet, crystal clarity settled upon Karen’s senses. Over headphones she heard someone in authority shout a protest that was immediately translated into Garubis chatter-gabble as it chased after the fast-departing vessel.
“You ugly alien bastards! You call THIS a gift?”
The answer came almost immediately.
It is more than adequate, chosen from the
Wish List for Ambitious Upstarts.
Now we can wipe our feet clean of your dross.
When we next meet, it will be without a burden of debt.
On our terms.
Earth’s spokesman retorted in anger, speaking for a shocked human race.
“This meeting isn’t over, you sons of bitches. Nobody disintegrates our kids and gets away with it!”
Glittering reflections off metal. Angry jets converging, racing, kicked in their afterburners to catch up with the fast-receding alien craft … but Karen saw it was hopeless. All the fighter planes could do was launch a few missiles that streaked vengefully after the Garubis disk, then fell away as the vessel accelerated blithely, indifferently, toward space.
Karen had already dismissed the idea of revenge, at least for now. Tomorrow there would be work to do, analyzing what weapon had done this thing, and beginning the hard process of arming humankind for life in a hostile universe. A cosmos where the rules of “debt” and “honor” were apparently far weirder than any Earthling had formerly imagined.
One where slaying a thousand adolescents was ‘repayment’ for an act of hospitality.
For now though, all she could do was stare at the steaming crater — its smooth floor now stained with liquids pouring from severed utility pipes. Water. Gasoline. Sewage. Soon, sparks from a broken electric line set the puddles ablaze.
Karen felt certain that she could put out the flames with her tears.