[bksvol-discuss] Just Submitted

  • From: "Gary Petraccaro" <garyp130@xxxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: <bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
  • Date: Mon, 04 Jun 2012 01:12:44 -0400

Just submitted a BSO of The Visitors
Clifford D. Simak
Headers removed, split words joined, fonts not changed.



A CLOSE ENCOUNTER

OF THE

MOST AMAZING KIND ...

 

Some of them, having set down, stayed where they were. Some, after a time, 
floated into the air and set about their observations. They cruised back and 
forth over industrial plants, they circled and recircled cities, they made 
sweeps of vast stretches of farmlands.

 

Others sought out forests and settled down to eat. They gobbled up a number of 
lumberyards.

In the St. Louis area, three of them landed in a parking lot, ate a dozen or so 
cars and then took off.

They did little actual harm. Most people with whom they came in contact were 
only marginally inconvenienced; no one was killed.

The highway accidents, few of them more than fender-benders, fell off as 
motorists became accustomed to the sight of the great black boxes floating in 
the sky, coming at last to pay out slight attention to them.

The visitors qualified as first-class nuisances ...


It looked like a big black box—perhaps fifty feet high, two hundred long. And 
it had settled squarely on forestry student Jerry Conklin's car, parked next to 
a fishing stream outside Lone Pine, Minnesota.

The townspeople of Lone Pine were the first to see it—and one of them was the 
first and only human to shoot at it, He paid for his rashness with instant 
death.

Within hours the press, the government and the public knew something strange 
had happened in Lone Pine and were beginning to face the incredible possibility 
that Earth now harbored something from outer space. A machine? An intelligent 
being? There was no way to know.

But Jerry Conklin knew. The visitor had scooped him up, held him prisoner for 
hours, then let him go—and he had sensed its thoughts and feelings. Jerry knew 
the visitor was a living, intelligent creature.

Then more of the giant black boxes descended to Earth, almost all in the United 
States. And they began eating ... and reproducing. The visitors seemed harmless 
if left alone, but their powers of defense, and their very existence, 
threatened world stability. The public, the nation's allies—and its 
enemies—demanded more information.

But there was none.

Then Jerry followed up on a rumor and made one more discovery. The visitors 
were paying for their food and lodging with fantastic gifts. And that payment 
could destroy Earth's civilization.

In The Visitors Clifford Simak presents one of the most original concepts of 
alien contact yet in this multilevel novel of human intelligence and emotion in 
a close encounter with truly non-human beings!


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