Pattern

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Miss Macy sniffed. “Why is everyone worrying so? They’re not doing anything to us, are they?”

In the cities, elsewhere, there was blind panic. But not in Miss Macy’s garden. She looked up calmly at the monstrous mile-high figures of the invaders.

A week ago, they’d landed, in a spaceship a hundred miles long that had settled down gently in the Arizona desert. Almost a thousand of them had come out of that spaceship and were now walking around.

But, as Miss Macy pointed out, they hadn’t hurt anything or anybody. They weren’t quite substantial enough to affect people. When one stepped on you or stepped on a house you were in, there was sudden darkness and until he moved his foot and walked on you couldn’t see; that was all.

They had paid no attention to human beings and all attempts to communicate with them had failed, as had all attacks on them by the army and the air force. Shells fired at them exploded right inside them and didn’t hurt them. Not even the H-bomb dropped on one of them while he was crossing a desert area had bothered him in the slightest.

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