The Orbs by John Watney1 (New Worlds SF #159, February 1966) begins with the female narrator, Julia, telling of the appearance of huge floating “orbs,” (think of a much larger, longitudinal version of the spaceships in the movie Arrival) that appeared decades previously over certain parts of the Earth. After an initial period, where they provided better weather as well as a sense of general well-being for the humans below, they descended and sucked up all the people and other loose debris underneath them. This was repeated at intervals thereafter.
Julia’s tells of her grandfather’s memories of this day, and how one woman fell back down onto a tree, living long enough to describe what had happened to her:
“She screamed. ‘There’s no-one there,’ she said, ‘just cold invisible hands, taking your clothes off, hanging you upside down, and the water swishing at you from all sides. I slipped off the hook. I don’t know how. I lay in a sort of gutter. The water was swishing over me all the time. I could hardly breathe.
I was being pushed along by the water. The bodies were above. They were being split open like fish by invisible knives. Everything was falling down on top of me. The bodies swung away on the line. I fell down a chute’.”
The woman died. But there have always been a few survivors, and their accounts, incoherent though they have been, have always been much the same: the invisible hands and knives, the continuous water, the bodies swinging emptily away into the interior of the Orb. Of course, the accounts come only from the early days when the victims were not anaesthetised, when indeed no-one knew the rhythm of the Orbs and were not able to calculate in advance the exact moment they would descend in search of their prey. p. 51
The final part of the story (spoiler) reveals that Julia has been selected as part of the next sacrificial group, and we learn of the system that developed after Earth’s initial failed resistance. The story closes with Julia’s calm participation in a sacrifice ceremony.
The weakest part of this is the alien abattoir part in the middle of the story, a silly idea that should probably have been left in the 1930’s pulp magazines. But the beginning of this is okay, as is the ending which describes human society’s adaptation (beauty contests are one of the ways the best are selected for the orbs). Julia’s dutiful acceptance of her fate is a particularly interesting (and novel) aspect of the story.
** (Average). 5,050 words.
1. This was John Watney’s only story, although it looks from his ISFDB page that he wrote a biography or book about Mervyn Peake (who may possibly have been his connection to Michael Moorcock, the editor of New Worlds).