: The ghost planet by Leinster Murray - Science fiction; Human-alien encounters Fiction

@FreeBooksThu 08 Jun, 2023

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on the Eastern coast. At that time Tom Drake worked obliviously in McGuire's laboratory. He did not even hear the spot news announcement. The dawn traveled westward and the cities woke in their turn. Buffalo woke, and Cleveland, and Detroit and Chicago.

The dawn went on toward the Rockies. It crossed them. And Tom, in Pasadena, blinked wearily at the new-risen sun in the Pacific time-zone when the globes took their first specific overt action against a human being.

It was in Cleveland at a quarter to nine, local time. The morning rush to work was in full swing. Away downtown, where Euclid Avenue runs into Lincoln Square, the sidewalks were crammed with workbound pedestrians. It was an extraordinarily bright and sunshiny morning for the city of Cleveland.

The air was utterly clear and the look of things was normal in every possible way. Hurrying, crowding people--stenographers, bookkeepers, minor executives--salesgirls, porters, typists, clerks. The sidewalks were crowded and the pavements between were jammed with traffic.

Even the walkways around the very ugly Lincoln Monument were filled with people using them as short cuts across the square. Everything was exactly as it had been ten thousand mornings before and could reasonably be expected to be for ten thousand mornings after.

But suddenly, above the noise of feet on concrete walks and the sounds of traffic in the streets, there came a high shrill scream.

Other figures shrank away from him, clearing a space and staring at him. There was absolutely nothing that they could see at first to account for the pudgy man's panic. He screamed again and again and a policeman shouldered through the crowd toward him.

Then the crowd noticed that his screams grew thinner. Standing there before them in a ten-foot cleared space, the little man's shrieking grew muted as if far away. His mouth was open and his body was rigid in a paralyzed horror. But his voice grew thinner.

Perhaps, at this time, some of those about him began to notice that the clarity of the morning air had faded a little. The sky was not quite so blue and the sunlight was dimmer. But they noticed first that his body began to grow translucent. His screams had only the volume of whispers then, but they were high pitched and penetrating.

They saw Mr. Handmetter become more and more translucent and then become transparent--still making the faintest of shrill screams--and finally he faded into nothingness in the deep shadow which had fallen imperceptibly upon the square as he vanished.

When he had gone--then quite all of the square and blocks of Euclid Avenue itself and other blocks of other streets opening into the square became like madhouses. Those who had known only of something strange occurring in the square and had been craning their necks saw more than they had bargained for.

They saw a great, thousand-foot globe acquire the seeming of substance, bit by bit. At the beginning it was so thin and so tenuous that none really saw it. But as the substance of Mr. Handmetter diminished the substance of the wraith increased.

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