Her Timex Ironman watch read 6:18 but it seemed much earlier. Anna closed her eyes and tried to drift back to sleep when again she heard it. Somewhere in that fuzzy little space between waking and sleeping, there it was—the same, persistent sound. Familiar, although, try as she might, she couldn’t exactly place it. A thin, feeble drone that rose and fell, almost like a hungry mosquito, not quite real enough to swat, but not exactly a dream, either.
Suddenly, Anna sat bolt upright in her cot. This was no dream and that was certainly no mosquito.
Within seconds the whole Quonset hut began to shudder. The metal roof vibrated. The glass slides for the microscope chattered in their cases. And a whole family of Pyrex beakers skated off the edge of the workbench where they shattered on the roug
