"But just suppose there are," he persisted, a little wildly. "Maybe--maybe it's not just the glasses. Maybe it's partly me, too; maybe I'm the only one who can see them; maybe that's why you didn't see the web. Maybe--" "Johnny, be sensible! If there were such monsters roaming around, don't you think they'd have been discovered by now?" "I don't know," he said, helplessly. "I don't know, and it's driving me crazy. You've probably wondered why I haven't slept very well for the past couple of weeks; well, that's the reason. I didn't want to say anything. I hardly dared put the glasses on, I was so afraid. Not of being thought crazy, but--but afraid of what _they_ might do if they knew they were discovered." "Look, Johnny. Even supposing you might be right, why wouldn't they show themselves? Why just stay up in the sky in a large web?" "Maybe they're sizing us up," Johnny said, trembling but not with cold. "After all, we've got a few weapons, too. Maybe a machine gun or an atomic bomb can hurt them, as well as humans." "Unless they're here for some good?" I suggested. Johnny laughed. "Spiders? Maybe they're hungry--and they think we're a bunch of flies down here. That's more likely." "Isn't this--rather fantastic?" "Of course it is. Why do you suppose I've been keeping quiet about it for the past two weeks? Why do you suppose I'm out trying to get drunk?" He added disgustedly: "I can't even do that." "C'mon," I said, "let's go to the room and we'll have some coffee. We can talk about it there." "Sure," he said, and his voice was suddenly subdued. "Sure, why not?" We went to the hotel room and I made some coffee, being careful to slip enough sleeping tablets in Johnny's cup. In a few minutes he was sprawled across the bed. I went to the window and looked at the glowing beads of traffic below. I looked at the sky--at the stars. Spiders in the sky; what a story that would make. The editor'd slap me in the booby hatch if I ever handed in a who-what-when-where like that. When I left for work the next morning, Johnny was still snoozing. Let him sleep it off. Do him good. He'd been working too hard at the lab, anyhow. I couldn't get back to the hotel room that morning, though I wanted to see if Johnny was okay. I was pretty busy writing a human interest yarn kidding the pants off some astronomer's notion that light waves coming from certain portions of the sky were being deflected or refracted slightly for no discernible reason. The amount of difference was microscopic, and I wrote it up to emphasize its ridiculous splitting of hairs and the fact that you can't take some of these crackpots seriously. Here the world is on the verge of coming apart at the seams, and they worry about wayward light rays. During the afternoon, I managed to drop into the hotel to see if Johnny had slept off the liquor and the sleeping tablets. He had, and he was sitting on the edge of the bed, looking grim--and a little perplexed.