I spent forever looking around in the darkness beneath the apple tree. Then I went down from the terrace and went closer. It was whitish blue, scarcely discernable as a shine in the air around the tree’s trunk. Looking closer, I could make out the details of someone’s face. The ‘apparition’ appeared to be praying, his hands raised toward the sky.

There was no time to waste. I ran all the way to the monorail station and found a com to call Tokyo.

The entire operation took no more than five minutes.

It was only on the way back home that I remembered I had forgotten to put Alice to bed. I hurried.

The light on the terrace hadn’t been turned off.

Alice was there, showing her herbarium and collection of butterflies to a shortish, emaciated Japanese. The Japanese held a sauce pan in his hand and, not taking his eyes from Alice’s treasures, was delicately eating overdone maccaroni.

Seeing me, our ghost bowed quite low, and said.

“Professor Kuraki, your humble servant. You and your daughter have saved my life…”

“See, Papa. This is my parition.” Alice said. “Now do you believe me?”

“I certainly do.” I answered. “Delighted to make your acquaintance.”

The preparations for the meeting with the Labucillians were an enormous public spectacle. Never before had the Solar System hosted guests from so far away in space.

The Labucillians’ first signals were received by the station on Pluto, and three days later the Londel Radio Observatory established contact with them.

The Labucillians were still far out but the Sheremetevo Spaceport was ready to greet them. Girls from the “Red Rose” Nursery had decorated it with garlands of flowers, and students from an arts college were practicing a show for their arrival. All the embassies had reserved seats on the reviewing stands and the reporters were spending their nights in the space ports restaurants.

Alice was living not far from there, in our country house in Vnukovo, and was gathering flowers and plants for her herbarium. She wanted to have a collection far better than the one Vanya Spitz in the senior group had made. Therefore, Alice took no part in the preparations for the big meeting. She did not even know about it. Nor did I have any direct connection to the First Contact. My work would only begin when the Labucillians landed.

But in the mean time events developed in the following manner.

On March 8 the Labucillians advised us that they had made Earth orbit. At exactly that moment a tragic accident occurred. Instead of the Labucillian ship the station had locked onto a lost Swedish satellite, the “Nobel-29. When the error was finally noticed it turned out the Labucillian ship had vanished. It had gone on to its landing, and contact with it was temporarily lost.

On March 9 at 6:33 the Labucillians advised us they had landed in the area of 55 minutes 20 seconds north latitude and 37 minutes forty seconds east longitude in the terrestrial system of coordinates, with a possible error of 15 seconds. That is, not far from Moscow.

Further communication was cut off and with one exception about which I will say later, could not be re-established. It turned out that terrestrial radiation had seriously damaged the Labucillian’s communications equipment.

Immediately hundreds of machines and thousands of people rushed to our guests’ presumed landing area. The roads were clogged with those desiring to find the Labucillians. The spaceport at Sheremetevo emptied; not a single correspondent remained in the restaurants. The sky over Moscow was cluttered with helicopters and other rotary wing aircraft, ornithopers, whirlagons and anything else that could be up into the sky. It looked like thousands of enormous bugs were hovering over the city.

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.

At that moment there was more, unexpected, information came over NewsNet; they rebroadcast a transmission received by old style radio hams in Northern Australia. The transmission repeated the coordinates and then added the following words: “We are located in a forest. The first group has gone out in search of people. We continue to receive your broadcasts. We are astonished by the lack of contact….” At that moment contact was broken off entirely.

The idea that the visitors were invisible was immediately accepted by several score million more people.

I could see from my perch on the terrace the chain of people stop, turn, and head back again toward the forest. And at that moment Alice came up the steps with a small basket of strawberries in her hands.

“Why are they all running around?” She said before even saying hello.

“Who are ‘they?’ And one says ‘Hello’ if you haven’t yet seen your only paterfamilias since this morning.”

“Since last night. I was still sleeping when you left for work. Hello, papa. What’s going on?”

“The Labucillians have vanished.” I answered.

“I don’t know them.”

“No one knows them, yet.”

“Then how did they get lost?”

“They were flying to Earth. They flew here and got lost.”

I felt like I was talking nonsense. Alas, it was the simple truth.

Alice looked at me with suspicion.

“Does that happen all the time?”

“No, it doesn’t. Not usually.”

“And they couldn’t find the space port?”

“Evidently.”

“And where were they lost?”

“Somewhere in the area of Moscow. Maybe not very far from here.”

“And everyone’s looking for them on foot and from the air?”

“Yes.”

“And why don’t they just come themselves?”

“Then they must be waiting until people find them. It’s their first time on Earth. So they wouldn’t go very far from their ship.”

Alice was silent for a moment, as though she were content with my answer. She walked around the porch about two times, not letting the basket with strawberries out of her hands. Then she asked:

“Are they in the field or in the forest?”

“In the forest.”

“How do you know that?”

“They told us themselves. By radio.”