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Gully Foyle stands with Olivia Presteign watching the bombs falling from outer space. Olivia is blind to ordinary light, but she can see what you and I cannot.

They came in like meteor swarms; not so many, but far more deadly. They came in on the morning quadrant, that quarter of the globe in darkness from midnight to dawn. They collided head-on with the forward side of the Earth in its revolution around the Sun. They had been traveling a distance of four hundred million miles. Their excessive speed was matched by the rapidity of the Terran defense computers which traced and intercepted these New Year gifts from the Outer Satellites within the space of microseconds. A multitude of fierce new stars prickled in the sky and vanished; they were bombs detected and detonated five hundred miles above their target. But so narrow was the margin between speed of defense and speed of attack that some got through. They shot through the aurora level, the meteor level, the twilight limit, the stratosphere, and down to Earth. The invisible trajectories ended in titanic convulsions... [Olivia] "Come, be inspired. This is Armageddon. Flowering Monstrosity. Tell me what you see." "There's nothing much," [Foyle] answered, looking around and wincing. "There's light all over the horizon. Quick clouds of it. Above, there's a — a sort of sparkling effect. Like Christmas lights twinkling." "Oh, you see so little with your eyes! See what I see! There's a dome in the sky, a rainbow dome. The colors run from deep tang to brilliant burn. That's what I've named the colors I see. What would that dome be?" "The radar screen." "And then there are vasty shafts of fire thrusting up and swaying, weaving, dancing, sweeping. What are they?" "Interceptor beams. You're seeing the whole electronic* defense system." (Rainbow Dome in 'The Stars My Destination' by Alfred Bester) "And I can see the bombs coming down, too — swift streaks of what you call red. But not your red. Mine. Why can I see them?" "They're heated by air friction, but the inert lead casing doesn't show the color to us..." "And the explosions," she said breathlessly. "They're not just clouds of light. They're fabrics, webs, tapestries of meshing colors. So beautiful. Like exquisite shrouds."

Technovelgy from The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester. Published by Berkley in 1956 Additional resources -

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  More Ideas and Technology from The Stars My Destination
  More Ideas and Technology by Alfred Bester
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  Tech news articles related to works by Alfred Bester

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