The Earth In Peril by Donald A Wollheim (ed)

Author:Donald A Wollheim (ed)
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2013-06-10T04:00:00+00:00

I listened to the radio as we were flying back to Omaha, and wasn’t at all surprised. After baseball, the shining domes were the top news. Shining domes had been seen in twelve states. Some vibrated with a strange sound. They came in all colors and sizes. One had strange writing on it. One was transparent, and there were big green men and women inside. I caught a women’s mid-moming quiz show, and the M.C. kept gagging about the domes. One crack I remember was a switch on the “pointed head” joke. He made it “domeshaped head,” and the ladies in the audience laughed until they nearly burst.

We stopped in Little Rock for gas, and I picked up a couple of afternoon papers. The domes got banner heads on both of them. One carried the World Wireless lead, and had slapped in the bulletin on the disappearance of the domes. The other paper wasn’t a World Wireless client, but between its other services and “special correspondents”— phone calls to the general store at Rush City—it had kept practically abreast of us. Both papers had shining dome cartoons on their editorial pages, hastily drawn and slapped in. One paper, anti-administration, showed the President cautiously reaching out a finger to touch the dome of the

Capitol, which was rendered as a shining dome and labeled: “SHINING DOME OF CONGRESSIONAL IMMUNITY TO EXECUTIVE DICTATORSHIP.” A little man labeled "Mr. and Mrs. Plain, Self-Respecting Citizens of The United States of America” was in one comer of the cartoon saying: "CAREFUL, MR. PRESIDENT! , REMEMBER WHAT HAPPENED TO PINKNEY CRAWLES!”

The other paper, pro-administration, showed a shining dome that had the president’s face. A band of fat little men in Prince Albert coats, string ties and broad-brim hats labeled “CONGRESSIONAL SMEAR ARTISTS AND HATCHET-MEN” were creeping up on the dome with the President’s face, their hands reached out as if to strangle. Above the cartoon a cutline said “WHO’S GOING TO GET HURT?”

We landed at Omaha, and I checked into the office. Things were clicking right along. The clients were happily gobbling up our dome copy and sending wires asking for more. I dug into the morgue for the “Flying Disc” folder, and the “Huron Turtle” and the “Bayou Vampire” and a few others even further back. I spread out the old clippings and tried to shuffle and arrange them into some kind of underlying sense. I picked up the latest dispatch to come out of the tie-line printer from Western Union. It was from our man in Owosso, Michigan, and told how Mrs. Lettie Overholtzer, age 61, saw a shining dome in her own kitchen at midnight. It grew like a soap bubble until it was as big as her refrigerator, and then disappeared.

I went over to the desk man and told him: “Let’s have a downhold on stuff like Lettie Overholtzer. We can move a sprinkling of it, but I don’t want to run this into the ground. Those things might turn up again, and then we wouldn’t have any room left to play around with them.

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