First contact... The new millennium has barely begun when, undetected by any satellite or telescope, a vast fleet of alien vesseis descends on the Earth. Some starships blaze mighty trails of fire, like the big one that lends near Los Angeles, where the grass is tinder-dry. In New York one pops into view out of nowhere, mysterious and unfathomably silent. Some land in the midle of big cities - outside the Blue Mosque in Istanbul, in front of St Peter's in Rome. In Johannesburg a glistening, spooky kind of alien emerges; in Frankfurt, behemonths; in Rio, the aliens look like huge walking squid; elsewhere there are mixtures of the three kinds. None responds in any way to the many attempts at communication made by the awe-struck peoples of Earth. For their pains, wide-eyed, UFOlogists who rush to welcome the superior beings from the sky are scooped up like bugs collected for study. Among them is Cindy Carmichael. Her new-age optimism has not been dented by years of steely disapproval from her military in-laws, and now her hour has come...

