"E eis! O pássaro", um conto 1950 de Nelson S. Bond, também foi a resposta para a pergunta Pássaro gigante no espaço. Você pode ter lido em um dos essas compilações. Inspirou a capa de este:
A história começa com a sensação global de um objeto maciço entrando em nosso sistema solar a partir do espaço interestelar.
A história é narrada pelo repórter de jornal que quebrou a história. Nesta passagem, ele está entrevistando o astrônomo que fez a descoberta:
"A bird," he said.
I glanced at him in swift surprise. "A bird?" I felt like smiling, but the look in his eyes did not encourage mirth.
"A bird," he repeated. "Far in the depths of space. The telescope was directed toward Pluto, farthermost planet of our solar system. A body almost four thousand millions of miles from Earth.
"And at that distance—" he spoke with a painful deliberation—"at that incredible distance, I saw a bird!"
O alienígena freia em uma órbita solar e combina sua órbita com Mercúrio. A humanidade assiste, imaginando o que está fazendo, e então a crosta de Mercúrio começa a rachar. Toda a crosta é desalojada, e uma versão menor do alienígena abre suas asas.
I saw the first thin splitting of Mercury's shell, and the curious fluid ichor which seeped from a dying world. I watched the grisly emergence of that small, wet, scrawny thing—raw simulacrum of its monstrous parent—from the egg in which it had lain for whatever incalculable era was the gestation period of a creature vast as space and as old as time. I saw the mother bird stretch forth its giant beak and help its fledgling rid itself of a peeling, needless shell; stood horrified to watch the younger bird emerge and flap its new, uncertain wings, drying them in the burning rays of the star which had been its incubator.
Projetos maciços são iniciados para perfurar a crosta terrestre e acionar bombas de hidrogênio na esperança de matar o filhote antes que ele destrua a Terra.
"I believe," he told a special emergency committee appointed by the President, "the bird has come to hatch the brood of young it deposited God knows how many centuries ago about that incubating warmth which is our sun. Its wisdom or instinct tells it that the time of emergence is now; it has come to help its fledglings shed their shells.
"But we know that mother birds, alone and unaided, do not hatch their young. They will aid a struggling chick to crack its shell, but they will never begin the liberating action. With an uncanny second sense, they seem to know which eggs have failed to develop life within them. Such eggs they never disturb.
"Therein, gentlemen, lies our only hope. The shell of Earth is forty miles in thickness. We have our engineers and technicians; we have the atomic bomb. If mankind is to live, the host to which we are but parasites must die. That is my only solution. I leave the rest to you."
[. . . .]
In the flat desertland of America was frantically thrown together the mechanism for mankind's greatest project—Operation Life. To this desert flew the miners, the construction engineers, the nuclear physicists, the men skilled in deep-drilling operations. There they began their task, working night and day with a speed which heretofore had been called impossible. There they are working now, this minute, as I write, fighting desperately against each passing second of time, striving with every means and method they know to reach and destroy, before the bird comes, the life within our world.
A história termina com o narrador dizendo algo como "esta manhã a Terra começou a bater".
So there is no real ending to this story. As I said before, I don't know why I'm bothering to write it. The answer is not ready to be given. If we succeed, there will be ample time to tell the tale properly—the whole great story, fully documented, of the battle being waged on the hot Arizona sands. And if we fail—well, then there will be no reason for this writing. There will be none to read it.
The bird is not the greatest of our fears. If when it comes from Venus it finds here a quiet, lifeless, unresponsive shell, it will move outward—we believe and pray—to Mars, then Jupiter, and thence beyond.
That is the end we hope to bring about. Soon, now, our probing needles will penetrate Earth's shell, will dip beneath the crust and into the tegument of that horror which sleeps within us.
But we have another more tormenting fear. It is that before the mother bird approaches us the fledgling may awake and seek to gain its freedom from the shell encasing it. If this should happen, Abramson has warned, our work must then proceed with lightning speed. For let that fledgling once begin to knock, then it must die—or all mankind is doomed.
That is the other reason why I write. To keep from thinking thoughts I dare not think. Because:
Because early this morning, Earth began to knock. . . .