Earth Has Been Found Read Online Free PDF

a thousand meters below, clear sky above. Both said they’d been practically dumbstruck at the appearance of the fighters and the order to shift frequency to Vorkuta approach control for landing instructions. Although they’d had thirty minutes to adjust, the landing they made had been far from steady.
    The airplane had been examined exhaustively, including the landing wheels; traces of tarmac that had been recovered matched the surface of the Moscow runway from which the plane had taken off; no unidentified material had been found.
    The scant evidence was not conclusive, but there were no signs to suggest the plane had landed anywhere. In another incredible way the story was the same as the F-4’s. Fuel and oil consumption fitted a correct flight, and the aircraft clock and the men’s watches were wrong, both having the same error.
    But there were two other features which could not have been noted in the F-4 case. Neither pilot nor copilot needed a shave or a haircut. And something else. Seven holes, each about two millimeters in diameter, had been found in the flight deck section of the fuselage. Distribution appeared to be random, their cause unknown; but two possibilities could be eliminated. In no case could any two holes be related as entry and exit points; all were uniform in diameter. Neither man had any injury, and no foreign matter had been found. That, concluded the Russian, ruled out any theories of cosmic particles or micrometeorites.
    *
    Red-eyed, exhausted, Arcasso sat sleepless on the return night flight, staring unseeingly out his window. Out there, beyond this tiny man-made capsule, something inexplicable had happened …
    Abruptly he drew the shade, gulped the lukewarm drink he’d clutched for an hour, and ordered another. It wouldn’t do much good, but —
    It was as if the stopper had been pulled from Sinbad’s flask. Black, formless clouds filled his imagination, clouds from which he feared, to the very depths of his being, a baleful genie would emerge …
    For Arcasso, the stopper in the flask was the seven tiny holes, circular and perfectly smooth in the dural skin, insulation, and plastic cladding of the Ilyushin’s cabin. That they existed at all was bad enough, but the fact that they had been found only in that area — not in the freight deck, the wings, tail plane, or engine cowlings — was significant.
    Significant and very sinister.
     

 
    VI.
     
    The staggering news of the Russian plane made surprisingly little impact in Washington, for one very simple reason: ICARUS had the tightest security wrap in history.
    Only ten Americans knew the details of both Events, and four of them were members of the ICARUS committee. The committee was chaired by Joseph Langbaum, a top CIA man, and included one representative from the State Department and one from the FBI, plus Arcasso. Their directive: to evaluate Case ICARUS material, and to report their findings and recommendations directly to the President.
    They met the day Arcasso returned from London. The first question was whether they believed the Soviet report; they did. They also knew that neither the U.S. nor NATO had any hand in the Ilyushin incident, and believed the Soviets had nothing to do with the F-4 — even supposing either side had the ability to engineer such bizarre and pointless action. That agreed, the similarities of the two Events were all too evident. Whatever agency had been responsible for the F-4 had to be responsible for the Ilyushin affair also. At that point progress ceased. The four men stared at one another blankly. Among them, they had access to all the intelligence of the Western world, plus that of the KGB, and no one had even the ghost of a rational explanation. Arcasso, who had lived the nightmare longer than anyone, urged they forget that for the moment. What had happened twice could happen again — if so, what action should be taken?
    Late into the night the four men hammered at the problem; the more they