ARRIVAL

LIGHT was soaking out of the sky when they drove up to Bouldershaw Fell. Judy sat beside the Professor in the back of the staff car as it slid up the road from Bouldershaw town to the open moor: she peered hopefully out of the windows, but they were nearly at the crest of the hill before they could see the radio-telescope.

Suddenly it stood in front of them: three huge pillars curving together at the top to form a triangular arch, dark and stark against the ebbing sky. Hollowed out of the ground between the uprights lay a concrete bowl the size of a sports arena, and above, suspended from the top of the arch, a smaller metal bowl looked downwards and pointed a long antenna at the ground. The size of the whole thing did not strike the eye at first; it simply looked out of proportion to the landscape. Only when the car had drawn up and parked beneath it did Judy begin to realize how big it was. It was quite unlike anything else she had seen — as completely and intensely itself as a piece of sculpture.

Yet, for all its strangeness, there was nothing particularly sinister about the tall, looming structure to warn them of the extraordinary and disastrous future that was to emerge from it.

Out of the car, they stood for a moment with the soft, sweet air filling their heads and lungs, and gazed up at the three huge pylons, at the metal reflector that glistened high above them, and at the p