Produced by Greg Weeks, David Wilson and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net +--------------------------------------------------------------+ | | | Transcriber's note. | | | | This story was published in _Galaxy_ magazine, June 1960. | | Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the | | U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. | | | +--------------------------------------------------------------+ By EDGAR PANGBORN The Good Neighbors You can't blame an alien for a little inconvenience--as long as he makes up for it! Illustrated by WOOD The ship was sighted a few times, briefly and without a good fix. It was spherical, the estimated diameter about twenty-seven miles, and was in an orbit approximately 3400 miles from the surface of the Earth. No one observed the escape from it. The ship itself occasioned some excitement, but back there at the tattered end of the 20th century, what was one visiting spaceship more or less? Others had appeared before, and gone away discouraged--or just not bothering. 3-dimensional TV was coming out of the experimental stage. Soon anyone could have Dora the Doll or the Grandson of Tarzan smack in his own living-room. Besides, it was a hot summer. The first knowledge of the escape came when the region of Seattle suffered an eclipse of the sun, which was not an eclipse but a near shadow, which was not a shadow but a thing. The darkness drifted out of the northern Pacific. It generated thunder without lightning and without rain. When it had moved eastward and the hot sun reappeared, wind followed, a moderate gale. The coast was battered by sudden high waves, then hushed in a bewilderment of fog. Before that appearance, radar had gone crazy for an hour. The atmosphere buzzed with aircraft. They went up in readiness to shoot, but after the first sighting reports only a few miles offshore, that order was vehemently canceled--someone in charge must have had a grain of sense. The thing was not a plane, rocket or missile. It was an animal. If you shoot an animal that resembles an inflated gas-bag with wings, and the wingspread happens to be something over four miles tip to tip, and the carcass drops on a city--it's not nice for the city. The Office of Continental Defense deplored the lack of precedent. But actually none was needed. You just don't drop four miles of dead or dying alien flesh on Seattle or any other part of a swarming homeland. You wait till it flies out over the ocean, if it will--the most commodious ocean in reach.