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No nation could imagine another allowing spies to operate if it could detect them. So a raging guess began to spread among the anti-American peoples of the world. The guess was that the broadcast was a lie. Nobody doubted the landing of a spaceship, of course. The static and the earth-shock were evidence, and the Russians had photographs. But the children were too suspiciously like human children.
It made an earth-shock and a concussion wave, and it battered your ship until it went out of control. It would seem to make sense that the tumult and the shouting would appear here, where plain force was operating without much guidance, but not in your time where the machinery and the controls were operating.
About twenty minutes after the first earth-shock the sea was seen to retire, as if about to leave the shores wholly dry; but presently its waters returned with tremendous force. A mighty wave, whose length seemed immeasurable, was seen advancing like a dark wall upon the unfortunate town, a large part of which was overwhelmed by it.
Seconds later the ground trembled very, very slightly. Soames hit the graph-machine case. The pens jiggled. He'd made a time-recording of an earth-shock somewhere. Now he read off the interval between the burst of screaming static and the jog he'd made by striking the instrument. Earth-shock surface waves travel at four miles per second.
With equipment at both ends, there should be no static, no earth-shock, no concussion, nothing but a very peaceful transfer." Soames' expression became sardonic. "Which I am prepared to prevent at any cost," he added. "Yet I've some responsibility to you, Fran. I think I'm getting an idea of a kind of bluff that we might pull off, if we could get the other kids safe away.
In no instance has it ever before been known that a well-marked wave of enormous proportions should have been propagated over the largest ocean tract on our globe by an earth-shock whose direct action was limited to a relatively small region, and that region not situated in the centre, but on one side of the wide area traversed by the wave.
But it was rather far from a probable thing. There were lines hollows where gusts had blown at the snow's surface. They were spiral lines, tending toward a center. They had not the faintest resemblance to the crater of an explosion which might have made an earth-shock. Soames took a camera out of its place in the 'copter. Gail stared down. "I've seen something like that," she said puzzledly.
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