Strangers

"The jets came over, and the fourth one blew across the roof of the motel, so low it almost took the top off the building, and by that time we were all out of the diner, people were coming over from the motel, but the shaking was still going on. The ground vibrating just like in a quake. The air vibrating too." Her tone of voice was a peculiar mix of delight and trepidation, both joyful and haunted. In the darkness everyone fell silent to hear what she had to say. "Then Dom… I didn't know his name then, but it was Dom, all right… he turned away from the jets and looked up and back across the roof of the diner, and he shouted: "The moon! The moon!" We all turned… and there was a moon, brighter than usual, creepy-bright, and for a moment it seemed to be falling on us. Oh, don't you remember? Don't you remember what it felt like to look up and see the moon falling on us?"
        "Yes," Ernie said softly, almost reverently. "I remember."
        "I remember," Brendan said.
        And Jorja had a glimmer of memory: the recollected image of a lambent moon, eerily bright, rushing toward them…
        Sandy said, "Some people screamed, and some started to run, we were so scared, all of us. And the powerful shaking and roaring got louder, you could feel it in your bones, a sound like kettledrums and shotgun blasts all mixed up with the greatest wind you ever heard, though there was no wind. But there was the other sound, too, the queer whistling, warbling, fluty sort of sound under the thunder, getting louder by the second… The moon got very bright all of a sudden. These beams came down from it, lit up the parking lot with a frosty sort of glow… and then changed. The moon turned red, blood-red! Then we all knew it wasn't the moon, not the moon, but something else."
        Jorja saw, in memory, the lunar form turning from frost-white to scarlet. With that recollection, barriers implanted by the mind-control specialists began to crumble like sand castles under the assault of a high tide. She wondered how she could have looked so often at Marcie's album of moons and not have been nudged toward understanding. Now understanding came in a flood, and she began to tremble with fear of the unknown and with an indescribable exultation.
        "Then it came over the diner," Sandy said, with such awe in her voice that she might have been seeing the starship descend right now, not in memory but in reality and for the first time. "It came in as low as the jet that had gone before it, but it wasn't moving nearly as fast as the jet… slow… slow… hardly faster than the Goodyear blimp. Which seemed impossible because you could tell it was heavy, not like a blimp. Ever-so-heavy. Yet it drifted across us so slow, so beautiful and slow, and in that instant we all knew what it was, what it had to be, because it was nothing that had ever been made on this world… "
        Jorja's tremors grew as the memory returned with greater vividness. She recalled standing in the parking lot of the Tranquility Grille, with Marcie in her arms, looking up at the craft. It glided through the warm July night above and would have looked almost serene except for the thunderous sounds and base vibrations that accompanied it. As Sandy had said - once the misapprehension of a falling moon was dispelled, they knew instantly what they were seeing. Yet the ship looked nothing like the flying saucers and rockets seen in a thousand movies and television shows. There was nothing dazzling about it - other than the very fact of its existence! - no coruscating bands of multicolored lights, no weirdly extruding spines and nodules, no inexplicable excrescences in its design, no unearthly sheen of unknown metal or peculiarly positioned viewports or blazing exhausts or strange wicked-looking armaments. The enveloping scarlet glow was apparently an energy field by which it remained aloft and propelled itself. Otherwise, it was quite plain: a cylinder of considerable size, though not even as large as, say, the fuselage of an old DC-3, perhaps only fifty feet long and twelve or fifteen feet in diameter; it was rounded at each end, rather like two well-worn tubes of lipstick welded together at their bases; through the shining energy field, a hull was visible, though it was singularly unimpressive, with few features and none of them dramatic, somewhat mottled as if by time and great tribulation. In memory, Jorja watched it descend again, across the diner, toward I-80,