The Greks Bring Gifts

Начало книги

We who remember the coming of the Greks find it hard to explain to a later generation just how terrifying that coming was, and why we acted as we did. After all, even at the beginning and for a really considerable time, the Greks made no menacing move. Their ship simply came casually around the edge of the moon and moved off some thousands of miles to one side. Then it stopped. It lay there motionless in space, as if looking us over and debating what to do about us, or with us. It could not be said that the ship made any alarming move or gave any evidence of untoward intentions. But we had hysterics.

Mainly, perhaps, that was because the Grek ship was monstrous. It was fully a quarter of a mile long, and thick in proportion. It glittered with a total-reflection surface material which kept it from either radiating heat to the emptiness of between-the-stars, or from absorbing heat when close to a white-hot sun. It was huge beyond imagining. We humans had sent probes to Mars and Venus, but we hadn't yet landed a working party on the moon. The only space drive we could imagine was rockets, and we'd gotten rockets to do about all they could. Which wasn't much. Until we saw the Grek ship, we couldn't conceive of anything as gigantic, as powerful, and as deadly as that seemed to be.

Читать дальше →