Invasion

stopped."
        "Maybe. But don't count on it. We'll leave at first light, and we'll expect the weather to be against us every step of the way."
        "What about sleep?" Connie asked.
        "I'm not sleepy," Toby said. "I slept last night, and then Mom doped me up this morning. I'm just getting awake."
        "Well, you'll have to try to sleep anyway," I said. "When we start out tomorrow, you'll need to be refreshed." I turned to Connie, who, like me, had bags under her eyes. She'd had only one hour of sleep in the last thirty-six hours, and I had not had much more than that, perhaps three hours. We were both on the verge of collapse. "We'll sleep in shifts again," I told her. "You go first. I'll go down to the basement and see about the tarp."
        "Can I come along?"
        Toby asked.
        Getting up from the table, I said, "Sure. You've got to give me a hand with this job."
        Connie got up, came into my arms, and hugged me for a moment. Then she kissed my neck and stepped back, turned, started toward the living room arch.
        "I'll wake you in three hours," I said.
        She turned. "Sooner than that. You've had a rougher time of it than I have. Besides, you've always needed more sleep than me."
        "Three hours, and don't argue," I said. "Go hurry up and sleep. Morning's coming too fast."

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    18.
        
        This method has become compulsive: this careful step-by-step breakdown of that most crucial hour of my life, this prolonged narrative of events which certainly moved much more swiftly than this in real life. (Yes, in fact it had all happened much too fast.) But there is no other way that I can tell it, obsessed with it as I am, ruled by it as I am, broken and destroyed by it as I am… Once more, therefore, let the imagination flow, look outside the farmhouse and return to the barn where the alien now stands at the open door looking inside:
        The buck lowered its antlers. It snorted and pawed at the earthen floor much like a bull will stroke the arena as a warning to the matador.
        The generator hummed.
        The buck charged the machinery.
        The collision was solid, brutal, and noisy: a loud, reverberating gong.
        The buck rebounded. It fell backwards on its haunches and made a miserable noise.
        The alien soothed the animal mind.
        The buck rose. It shook its head.
        The generator was still functioning.
        The buck charged again. The gong sounded. A piece of the magnificent antlers broke off and fell on top of the machinery.
        The generator hummed.
        (If the aliens understood the purpose of the generator-and it is clear that they must have understood it, for they knew exactly why it must be destroyed-then why couldn't they grasp the fact that we were members of an intelligent race and not merely dumb beasts like the buck? Why? In all the science fiction novels I read when I was a kid, the aliens and the humans always recognized the intelligence in each other, no matter what physical differences they might have had. In those books the aliens and the humans worked together to build better universes-or they fought each other for control of the galaxies-or they struggled to at least live together in mutual tolerance or- Well, why wasn't it like that in real life, when the first beings from the stars met the first men (us)? Well, that's easy to answer, Hanlon. They might have known what a generator was- and yet not think of it as the product of a civilized culture.
        To them it might seem unbelievably crude, the symbol of a culture as primitive to them as apes are to us. The generator, obviously, did not make us worthy of their concern. And is that so difficult to grasp? Don't the ants build elaborate cities, stage trials of their "criminals", and elect queens? Hasn't that been studied and recorded by hundreds of entomologists? Sure. But we step on them all the same, don't we? We crush them by the tens of thousands with no thought given to their tiny civilization.)
        Turning to face the stable door, the buck put its back to the machinery. It began to kick out like a bronco, slamming its hooves into the metal housing that protected the moving parts.
        The sheet steel bent.
        The glass face of a gauge shattered.
        Something went ping! like a ricocheting bullet.
        The animal kicked out again.
        The metal clanged! and buckled.
        Another