Dean Devlin - Independence Day

Independence Day by Dean Devlin & Roland Emmerich and Stephen Molstad July 2nd.Atmospheric phenomena begin to appear all around the world;the skies are ablaze. Satellite communications are interrupted without explanation, and fear grips the cities of the world.As the phenomena cool down, it is clear that a force of incredible magnitude has arrived.Their mission-to eliminate all human life.Over the course of the next three days in July,the world will be changed,forever. The countdown to the end of the world has begun. Independence Day,once a joyous day of freedom and celebration,now takes on an entirely new and absolutely unpredictable meaning. First published in the UK in 1996 by BoxtreeLimited Broadwall House,21 Broadwall, London SE1 9PL. New York . New York . New York .

USA First published in the USA in 1996 by Harper Paperbacks, Division of HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd St. , New York , N.Y. 10022 ISBN 0 7522 0281 2 Copyright ~ 1996 by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation Cover art copyright ~ 1996 by Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation 10987654321 All rights reserved This publication may not be reproduced, transmitted or held in a retrieval system in part or in whole in any form or using any electronic, mechanical, photocopying or recording process or any other process without the publisher having first given permission in writing. Except in the U.S.A. , this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior permission in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on a subsequent Purchaser. This is a work of fiction.

The characters, incidents, and dialogues are products of the author's imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons. living or dead, is entirely coincidental. Printed and bound in Great Britain by Cox & Wyman Ltd. Reading, Berkshire A CIP catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library Special thanks to Elizabeth "Little Bit" Ostrom and Dionne!\1cNeff for their invaluable n~ i~2~nn~ The sea of Tranquillity was an eerily still wasteland, a silent crater-shaped outdoor tomb of ashes and stone. Two sets of footprints /were etched into the powdery gray soil surrounding the landing site, each one as freshly cut as the day it was made.

On the horizon, a curved sliver of the bright esuth was rising into the sky, the vivid blue of its oceans a stark contrast to the colorless valley. Hammered into the lunar surface were the sensor rods of a seismometer, a square box capable of detecting the crash of a sea-sized meteor at a distance of fifty miles, and on the far side of the camp, an American flag waving proudly in a nonexistent breeze. The entire site was littered with debris: scientific experiments and the cartons which had carried them, the unused plastic bags used to gather soil samples, and a handful of commemorative trinkets. This equipment, carelessly scattered around an area the size of a baseball infield, had been imported by the astronauts of Apollo 11, the first two humans to set foot on the moon. When they left, they jettisoned everything deemed nonessential for the ride back home. Armstrong and AIdrin had taken one giant step for man, and left behind a ton of garbage for moonkind.

Their decades-old footprints marched fifteen paces out toward the horizon in every direction before tunling back to the center of the camp. Seen from high above, they formed a pattern in the sand like a large, misshapen daisy. At the eye of this flower stood the gleaming Lunar Landing Platform, a fourfooted framework of tubes and gold foil which looked like a jungle gym on a hastily abandoned campground. Marooned deep in a sea of silence, the spot had the creepy aspect of a long-ago pichic which had come to an abrupt and terrifying end, as if there had been no time for the visitors to pack up their belongings. Only enough time to turn and run for safety. Nothing, not a single grain of sand, had moved in all the years since the earthlings' departure.

But something was beginning to change. Gradually, an infinitesimal churning began to engulf the area. For many hours, it was nothing more perceptible than the disturbance caused by the fluttering of a moth's wings at a distance of a thousand paces. But it grew steadily, inexorably, into a tremble. The electric needles inside the seismometer skittered to life. The machine's sensors shot awake and began to scream their warning to the scientists on earth.

But the moon's extremes of heat and cold had disabled its radio transmitter within days of it first being planted. Like a night watchman with his tongue cut out, the small device struggled hour after hour to sound the alarm as the rumbling grew. A single grain of sand tumbled down the edge of a footprint, then another, and another. As the quaking blossomed into a deep rumble, the stiff wire sewn into the bottom seam of the American flag began to wobble back and forth. The footprints began to shake apart and disintegrate in the vibrating sand. Then a vast shadow moved across the sky.

It passed directly overhead, eclipsing the sun and plunging the entire crater into an unnatural darkness. The moonquake intensified as the thing moved closer. Whatever it was, it was much too large to have been sent from earth. of the New Mexico desert could feel as alien and inhospitable as the moon. On a dark night when the moon was new, this was one of the quietest places on the planet: a thousand miles of blood-red desert, its clay hills baked hard and smooth. At one o'clock in the morning on July 2, jackrabbits and lizards, drawn by the warmth of the pavement, were gathered on a thin strip of asphalt in a valley where a dirt road snaked its way out of the foothills and down to the main highway.

The only discernible movement came from the inedible profusion of insects, a thousand species of them that had adapted to this harsh environment. Where the dirt road ran up toward the crest of some hills, there was a wooden sign half-hidden in the sagebrush. - It read "NATIONAL AERONAUTICS ANO SPACE ADMINISTRATION, SETI." Those whofollowed the road with or without permissionto the top of the rise were rewarded with a spectacular sight. On the other side were two dozen enormous signal-collecting dishes, each one well over one hundred feet in diameter. Precision-built from curved steel beams painted white, these giant bowls dominated a long narrow valley. Because the moon was new, the only light on them was the red glow of the beacon lamps attached to the collector rods suspended over the center of each dish.

The beacons were a precaution against curious or hopelessly lost pilots hitting the equipment with their planes and tangling themselves into the steel beams, like flies caught in the strands of a spiderweb. SE, the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence, was a government-funded, NASA-administered scientific project and the field of giant radio telescopes was its primary laboratory. Far from the noise pollution that blanketed the cities, scientists had erected this mile-wide listening post to search for clues that would help solve a riddle almost as old as human imagination: Are we alone in the universe? The telescopes picked up the noise emitted by a billion stars, quasars, and black holes, sounds that were not only very faint, but mind-bogglingly old. Traveling at the speed of light, radio emissions from the sun reach the earth after a delay of eight minutes, while those coming from the next nearest star take over four years. Most of the cosmic noise splashing into the dishes was several million years old, with a signal strength of less than a quadrillionth of a watt. Taken together and added up, all the radio energy ever received by earth amounted to less energy than a single snowflake striking the ground.