First Contact

Countdown for blast off. X-5, 4, 3, 2, X-1. Fire. From the far horizons of the unknown, come transcribed tales of new dimensions in time and space. These are stories of the

future. Adventures in which you'll live in a million could be years on a thousand maybe worlds. The National Broadcasting Company in cooperation with Street and Smith, publishers of a sounding science fiction presents The Night Story Tonight Story, First Contact by Murray Leimster They had been in space six months now

Moving with the incredibly faster than light speed of the overdrive In six months, they had gone from earth outward and outward to the Crab-like Nebula with the twin stars a routine flight of exploration and scientific research Solid object about 90,000 miles away, sir.

Located door to exactly identify it. A small object, sir. Captain, I've never seen anything like this before. Whatever it is out there is coming tortoise at an incredible speed and retreating to zero just as rapidly.

What's the mass of the object, door? It varies with the distance from us, sir. Step up the scanners. Nothing, sir. Absolutely nothing shows out there. And yet there must be something those alarms are foolproof.

Action stations, man-all weapons, condition of extreme alert, and all departments immediately. Captain, what is it? Dort, I ran into the same thing once before on the Earth Mars run. We were being located by another ship, and their locator beam was the same frequency as ours.

Every time it hit it registered to something solid, and monstrous. Captain, we're the only Earth ship in eighteen-like years around, how? I didn't say it was another Earth ship out there, Dort. Another race? That's right.