Had the Labucillians’ ship crashed and embedded itself in the ground the people in the air would have observed the crater.

No one found it.

Not a single local inhabitant saw the ship come down. And this was passing strange; at that moment a nearly all the inhabitants of Moscow and the surrounding countryside were looking up at the sky.

This indicated there had been an error. Somewhere.

Toward evening when I returned from my work to the country house the entire work-a-day life of the planet had been altered. People were afraid that something untoward had happened to our guests.

“Maybe they were antimatter?” Someone argued on the monorail. “When they entered Earth’s atmosphere they would have gone poof!”

“Without a visible explosion, or any trace at all? Idiot!”

“And just how much do we know about the nature of antimatter?”

“Then who radioed their landing coordinates?”

“Maybe a practical joker?”

“Not a chance! How did they fake the communications with Pluto station?”

“Well, they could have….”

But it was the version about the invisibility of our guests that won the most adherents.

I was sitting on the veranda, looking over my overgrown lawn, and thinking as well; what if they had landed close by, in the next field? Could the poor aliens be standing around now outside their ship, wondering why people were paying them no attention. Might they get angry and depart? I was wanting already to go down and set out for the that very field when I saw a file of people exiting the forest. It was my neighbors from the next house over. They were holding hands like children playing a game. I realized they had reached the same conclusion I had, but earlier, and were trying to locate our presumably invisible visitors by touch.