Free When They Come from Space by Mark Clifton

flight.
    The sky was clear and black. The stars shone bright—and cold. No longer friendly stars, twinkling the planets at us as if with amusement at the foibles of man.
    No longer friendly sky, velvet soft and comforting.
    There were Things out there.
    Our tiny Earth was spinning through that cold, remorseless vacuum, alone.
    And nothing to hide behind.
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CHAPTER NINE
    For three days the Black Fleet appeared, and disappeared, and reappeared. Over every major city of the Earth. The Black Fleet? The many, many Black Fleets. So often, simultaneously, in so many places that the wildest sort of reckoning could not estimate their number.
    Now there was no thought of nation against nation, man against man; man taming other men to his service, submission, his pattern of the only Right.
    Now the discs had reappeared over New York City once more. But this time their pattern was different. They did not appear, play out their ominous and meaningless formations, wash the Earth below them in a stinking miasma of revolting, evil dread, and then disappear.
    They stayed. For seven hours now they had hovered and circled endlessly; as if they waited for momentous signal known only to them.
    The city below seemed virtually dead. On appearance, at noon this time, having seem them several times before, the New Yorker had cocked an eye heavenward, shrugged, and gone about his business. But the fleet had stayed, and, as if somewhere a valve had been opened to let off the steam, the city slowed, and died.
    No one knew where or how it started, but through the long afternoon the feeling grew universal that this time they meant business. This was it. And the waiting grew intolerable. The waiting grew intolerable for Mr. Harvey Strickland.
    He sat, robed in his purple dressing gown, on his high-backed and carved throne-chair, there in his penthouse atop one of his many newspaper buildings. He watched the television wall, and curled his lip in fury.
    It wasn't going over. With his expert, uncanny feel of mass reaction, he knew his organization was missing fire. They went through the motions of the formula, but too many of them were like that first announcer of the projectiles. Too many of them considered the stuff they spoke and printed as mere drivel. He'd fired the guy, of course, for letting the public see that he considered it so much nonsense, and ordinarily this would have been enough to make the rest of his organization men dig in with added display of enthusiasm, smacking their lips to show how much they enjoyed eating the crap. But they weren't.
    And the people weren't buying the crap.
    There was little traffic, little movement in the streets; and that little was hasty, furtive; rats scurrying from one hole to another. The people congregated in sheltered places, crowded under awnings, overhanging canopies, in doorways, at windows; and to heighten the similarity of wary rodents, they packed in the subway entrances where they could scurry downward into tunnels burrowed in the Earth when the menace came too near.
    Instead of watching his television screens and reading his newspapers for their interpretation, the goddam people were seeing for themselves!
    His radio and television channels were blanketed with Harvey Strickland's own subsidized extorters who pleaded, stormed, raged, and threatened the people to get down on their knees, bow their heads in humility.
    His scornful lip lifted from his lengthened, yellow teeth. Humility! He knew it, the Harvey Stricklands had always known that humility was the basest, most ignoble, unworthy posture a man can find; but it was the formula which had brought man back to groveling in the dust again and again. Subservient to the Harvey Stricklands, serving their ends.
    The formula just wasn't going over!
    The goddam rabbits sat in their warrens and cowered from the hunters above them—and the hunters, this time, were not controlled by Harvey Strickland. There should be processions.