In 1958 an airliner (these were the days of prop-driven airliners and the aircraft is a DC-7B) takes off on a scheduled flight to Chicago. For various reasons (Including a UFO scare) there are very few passengers. About half a dozen. There’s a crew of three including just one stewardess.
The flight crew have been told to watch for anything strange. Long-range radar has picked up some odd blips. But nobody is concerned. That’s happening all the time. It always turns out to be a radar malfunction.
For the crew it’s all very routine until the captain spots four flying saucers headed straight for them. The UFOs try to evade the airliner but they’ve left it too late.
The airliner is so badly damaged that it can’t remain airborne for more than a few more minutes. The cabin was depressurised as a result of the collision and the passengers were all sucked out through gaping holes in the fuselage. The members of the flight crew know they have just minutes to live.
But they don’t die. And those passengers sucked out of the aircraft don’t die either. One passenger who remained in the cabin was killed but he’s the only fatality.
It’s the beginning of quite an adventure for these people.
This is obviously going to be a standard alien invasion story but that’s not how it pans out. You also expect the aliens to be bug-eyed monsters or something similar but that’s not how it pans out either.
It’s not the passengers and crew of the airliner are not going to face problems, and dangers. They are in fact facing a frightening bewildering future.
The aliens have their troubles as well. This wasn’t supposed to happen.
This is a first contact story but it doesn’t conform to expectations on that count either.
It’s interesting that in 1957 writers were already trying to avoid the obvious clichés of the alien invasion sub-genre, just as that sub-genre was becoming hugely popular. Budrys obviously realised that some twists needed to be added to the formula. The best way to do that was to introduce some doubts about the actual intentions of the aliens. One way to do that was to cast the aliens as the good guys, arriving on Earth to save us from ourselves. A more interesting twist was to make the intentions of the aliens ambiguous and mysterious.
Even better was to suggest that the aliens’ plan to save us might not be very pleasant for us. Or that the aliens might not even be sure themselves how they feel about us. Or that there might be fundamental misunderstandings on both sides, with possible unfortunate consequences.
In this case Budrys plays around with all of these ideas. We’re not sure until the end whether the arrival of the aliens is a good thing or a bad thing. And we’re not sure how the passengers and crew of that airliner will react to the encounter.
Budrys makes things more interesting by having various members of the passenger and crew react in different ways, based on their own personal agendas and hopes and fears.
This is not one of the great alien invasion stories but it has a few intriguing elements that make it worth a look.
Armchair Fiction have reissued the novella in a two-novel paperback edition, paired with F.L. Wallace’s 1955 novel Address: Centauri.
The late Budrys was one of the best new writers of sf in the 1950s, and remains one of the best...but this was sold by him under a pseudonym to the then-bottom-of-the-market magazine AMAZING, under its arguably worst editor Paul Fairman, for a "special" flying saucer issue...sf in the magazines was basically leaning toward becoming art in '50s, but ambition didn't always pan out, and quick-buck editors such as Fairman weren't helping much.
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