Her first sight was of a tan wing or platform covered with strange writing, and hanging just overhead. Instinct made her shrink back. The thing looked so low she could almost touch it. Then, as the fog parted into golden shreds of cloud, she saw a long, tapering antenna pointing straight toward about where Polk Gulch was. The thing was maybe two hundred feet overhead, and the tip of the antenna looked as if somebody standing, say, on Nob Hill, would be just about even with it.

She tried to read the inscription, but it was not in any alphabet she had ever before seen. It was blocky, maybe Korean. Something Asian, anyway. No USAF marking was on it anywhere, and no NASA logo. Also, it was way below where it should be. You never saw anything this low over San Francisco.

It was just damn creepy and she decided that she did not want to be out here one more second and went back into the building and up to the studio. Zack was nowhere to be seen, so she took his seat at the board and waited.

“Give it up,” he muttered as he returned, “you’ll never be a director.”

“Yeah, thanks for your faith. And by the way, that thing is huge.” She concealed her stupid fear.

“What thing?”

“That, like, thing you sent me out to see. It’s huge.”

Zack thought this over. The switchboard hadn’t bothered him for a while, so maybe—hopefully—the public had lost interest. He called downstairs for a report and discovered that he hadn’t heard anything from them because they were too busy even to alert him.

He turned on Kelly. “Jesus, you moron, get a camera out there! Do it now!”

“All right, don’t have a hissy fit!”

“Go!”

She ran into the studio. “Mike, Zack wants a camera on the street. There’s some kind of a thing going on with some weird plane.”

“You got it,” Mike said.

Kelly thought him profoundly cool. He’d been mostly in TV, but he’d done cinematography on a couple of indie features, which gave him interesting connections. She had also detected the probability of a pretty spectacular show down below, but nice girls didn’t think about that sort of thing, did they?

Yes. They. Did.

She followed him down the back stairs.

“Um, actually, you can’t see it from back here. It’s, like, over Polk.”

“It’s a plane and it’s ‘over Polk’? What’s that mean, it’s not flying?”

“It’s sitting there in the air. Um, a blimp, sort of.”

He frowned slightly, then hefted the HD camera onto his shoulder and went through the rat’s maze of the station to the front entrance. She followed.