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innocence does not know secrets and it does not know fear. But mankind is not the only earthly creation that fears death. Everything fears it. And when there is resurrection every living thing will be delivered, from the crawlers in the mud to the high bishops, and fear will be swept from the earth forever. When they came, everything was afraid.
    Birds awoke as they passed over, and fluttered nervously. Coons and bobcats screamed, opossums hissed.
    Babies shrieked in the night.
    When they came it was midnight in Washington. Will Stone was a young man then, struggling to create a postwar career for himself in the Central Intelligence Group, soon to become the C.I.A. He knew nothing of what was happening in distant New Mexico.
    His memory of what he was doing that night is nevertheless vivid. This shouldn't be surprising; we tend to recall exactly where we were at moments of great crisis.
    A familiar wartime question: "What were you doing when you heard about Pearl Harbor?" Will Stone remembered: he was standing in a department store looking at some ties. "Where were you when the Japs surrendered?" He was drunk in Algiers. What was he doing on the night of July 2, 1947? He was lying in bed in his apartment worrying about the fact that he was having political problems at the office. Instead of working on the Russian desk he was off in a backwater, helping the Algerians put an end to French colonialism.
    Betty and Sam White were sitting on their porch in Roswell sipping lemonade and watching the sky. It was a beautiful night, with storms off to the west and stars overhead.
    I know just what they said, just how they acted. I've read their files - and all the other files that Will has -
    many times over.
    I've tried and tried to see where Will and the others went wrong, to understand if there is anything in God's world that might help us now.
    "What's that," Sam asked his wife back on that lost night. "I'm not real sure," she replied in her twangy voice.
    "I'm gonna call the sheriff." He got up from his chair with a creak of porch boards and a grunt.
    The object was round and brightly lit - glowing, in fact. It made no sound as it swept northwestward across Roswell.
    Beneath its thin blue light people went about their business. Except for the Whites, nobody noticed a thing.
    At the Army Air Field the radar operators did not glance up from their glowing screens. The lookout on the tower was facing the other way, and never broke the imaginary monologue he was delivering to Dorothy Lamour.
    Bob Ungar, on his ranch seventy miles northwest of Roswell, watched the storms with a critical and uneasy eye. He was totally unaware of what was approaching from the direction of town. Bob’s concern was the dimmed clouds.
    They could drop hail us big us a sheep's eye. Hail like that could knot a man's skull or butter his animals until they were crazy. He'd also found his share of sheep braised by lightning, lying stiff in the scrub.
    The worst part was the way they'd bunch up on the fences during a bad storm, frightened by the thunder and trying to shelter from the rain. You'd find them in heaps, and the ones at the bottom would be smothered.
    Bob pitied the poor, dumb things. I know he did, because I know exactly what kind of a man he was. I admire him unabashedly.
    He died in the sixties, old and dried to straw by the desert.
    Walking the path of Will Stone I spoke to Bob's wife, Ellie, now a very old woman. She lives in an adobe cottage - really little more than a hut. Of course she's been wracked by time, but there is within her a light such as you don't often see. I spoke to her of her husband, and their old house that is in ruins now, and a long time ago.
    I can imagine Bob standing on his back porch on that night, squinting into the dark west.
    A long, cool gust swirled out of the dark. The air grew eerie. The last five nights he'd saddled up his horse, Sadie, and gone out to help the sheep. It hadn't made a lick of difference. They'd