“I can tell you right now that you’re not going to find any seams on this thing. Anyway, it was built by the grays, not by your people. What if it’s completely different?”
“Let’s take a look.”
The black door of the elevator had a glass porthole in it, and when it opened, there was a hiss of escaping air, which told Flynn immediately that this was a deep shaft, more than a couple of stories.
As the door slid open, it revealed a space little bigger than a closet. There was enough room for only three people, and the three scientists went down first. From the sound of the lift and the amount of time involved, Flynn thought it was a drop of fifteen hundred feet. Unusual on an island, given that the water table was going to be at sea level. To build whatever was down there would have taken a lot of money and engineering skill. A lot.
The elevator returned again. Mac said, “Are you sure about this, Flynn?”
“No.”
“Then I don’t think we should do it.”
Flynn did not reply, but he stepped into the elevator. After a moment, the much more hesitant Mac followed. The elevator whined softly as it dropped.
“Why so deep?” Flynn asked.
“I don’t know,” Caruthers said.
Flynn smiled. “Of course you do.”
Caruthers shook his head. “You’re a real paranoid, aren’t you?”
“In our line of work, if you’re not paranoid, you’re not sane.”
The elevator door opened onto a concrete corridor, dimly lit by old-fashioned incandescent bulbs in hanging metal fixtures. As they walked down the hallway, Flynn could hear a distant sound of flowing water, and the deep, throbbing hum of powerful pumps. They were far below the water table, and it must take a great deal to keep the ocean out of this place.
“Do you have any fail-safes?”
“In what sense?”
“The pumps. If they go down, this place floods, and fast.”
“They can’t fail.”
“They’re mighty durable, then. What about the power?”
“There’s a reactor.”
A reactor wasn’t going to be used to power some godforsaken has-been program. Yet again, the mystery deepened.
They came to a wide steel rolling door. Caruthers punched a code into a keypad beside it, and the door began to rise. Caruthers had made no effort to conceal which keys he pressed, and Flynn took note of them. He also noted that he was once again being underestimated. Always a useful bit of information to store away.
And then he saw it. Its skin was a deep silver, as if a thin layer of diamond covered the metal. It hung in the air, an oval so perfect that it was impossible to turn away from its beauty. He felt its life, as if it had a heart and a mind, as if it were a living creature.
“Flynn … my God.”
The three scientists stood in a group, small beneath the bulk of the thing. It floated in absolute silence. In the center of its lower surface there glowed a single red light, and he thought it was an eye, and that it was looking into his soul.
“This was built by the grays,” Evans said, “or given life by them.”
“It’s nothing like what we’ve seen,” Flynn said. “This is like a—I don’t know—”
“A sacred object,” Caruthers said.
“A sacred being,” Flynn said.
Richard Dawkins said, “I’m the resident metallurgist. Let’s begin with the outer skin.” He gestured. “Come on over—it doesn’t bite.”
“We need to see under it,” Flynn said.
Mac strode over to it and put his hand on it, whereupon it folded inward like the wall of a tent. He drew his hand away and looked at it, leaning back. Then he touched it again, running his finger along it.
“It’s constructed like a kite,” Dawkins said. “The frame is balsa, the metal is basically tungsten, we think. It’s a tissue just a few hundredths of an inch thick. Interesting that it’s also the strongest substance known to man.”
Flynn was not interested in the metal. He bent down and went under it. In its center was a red light, glowing softly. “Does it work?”
“We’re not sure.”
“Mac, come down here.”
Mac crawled closer. “Doesn’t anything scare you?”
“Not this. Look along this surface—use those eyes of yours. See if you can spot a seam.”
They lay on their backs. Flynn pulled out his pocket LED flashlight and shone it along the surface. “See anything?”
“It’s featureless.”
“Take your time.”
“If this is a different model—”
“Keep looking.”
“Is it alive?”
Flynn moved the light slowly along the surface.
“Flynn, this isn’t a machine, this is a creature.”
“Keep looking.”
Evans called to them. “You guys still with us?” He sounded oddly far away.
“Wait,” Mac said, “roll the light back.”
Flynn moved the beam slightly.
“There. Got it.”
Flynn held the beam steady. “I don’t see a thing.”
“It’s there.” He reached up, extended a finger, then touched it. “See it now?”
There was the faintest indentation stretching away from Mac’s index finger, a line so narrow that Flynn wouldn’t have seen it on his own, not even if he’d had his nose up against the surface of the disk.
“That is finely machined,” he said. “Beautiful.”
Mac flattened himself back down onto the floor and stared up at the surface. “Man, I’m two feet away, and now I can’t see it at all. Shine your light again.”
It took them a full minute of searching to realize the truth. “It’s gone,” Mac said. “Disappeared as soon as I touched it.”
“You’re sure it’s gone?”
“I’m sure.”
They backed out. “There’s a seam, all right,” Flynn said, “but it disappeared when we touched it.”
“We hadn’t detected it before. A major error.”
“What about controls and propulsion. How does it work?”
“Propulsion is my department,” Reese said. “Come on, we’ll need to enter the craft.”
As he stepped closer, it rose silently a few feet.
“Is it alive?” Flynn asked. “It feels alive.”
“There’s something going on here that’s real hard to understand. Do you believe in the soul?”
“I don’t know.”
“You work with the grays, you work with the soul.” He nodded toward the disk. “It has a consciousness. For want of a better word, we call it a soul.” He raised an arm, and a dark round hole appeared in its side, about midway along the curve of the bottom. “We know that approaching it like this works, but we don’t know why,” he said. “We’ve never been able to find any device or system inside that would account for doors appearing—or seams disappearing, for that matter. Not only that, but you can walk up to it like this from any angle, and an opening will always appear right in front of you as soon as you gesture like I did.”
Leaning down, he approached it, then stood up so that his head and shoulders were inside. “We call this a penetration,” he said. “It’s not like entering a plane—believe me.”
“Which one of us stays here?” Flynn asked Mac. “Your call.”
“That will be me.”
Flynn leaned down and joined Reese under the thing. As he did, the nature of the air around him seemed to change. It became subtly heavier. A silence fell, and it was a familiar one. When he was hunting aliens in a forest and came into a silence like this, he knew they were near.
He saw around him a gray, featureless exterior, like the inside of a tent. “There’s no room,” he said as he looked up. Reese’s body filled the hatch.
“Just stand up. It’ll open for you.”
He did as instructed. Instead of his head touching the metal of the fuselage, he felt a warmth and a sort of fluctuation
in pressure. Then he was face-to-face with Reese, the top half of his body inside the craft.
The interior air was warm and dry. There was a soft rose light that seemed to penetrate everywhere. Before them, he could see a huge ring made of white metal. Inside it was another ring made of black metal. They were separated by a closely packed row of silver ball bearings. Hanging in midair in the center of it and about three feet above it, was a crystal. It was an eight-sided figure, rose colored like the light that filled the space.
“What happens is that these two circles counterrotate. We know that. But what we don’t know is what powers them and why the counterrotation is so effective in driving the thing.”
The seam had to be between the inner and outer rings, so when they were rotating, it wasn’t going to disappear.
“Has anybody ever flown one?”
“No.”
“Flown in one, then?”
“Lots of people, I would think. A reading of the abductee literature would lead you to assume so.”
Flynn reached over and touched the outer metal ring. He grasped it and tried to make it turn.
“Not gonna happen. But we do know something about its operation. We’ve recorded the sound of spinning disks. Armed with knowledge of how this functions, and its size, we’ve determined that it would need to rotate at something on the order of a hundred sixty thousand revolutions per minute to emit a sound like that.”
“But you can’t make it turn?”
“We can’t find a power source. The two rings are oppositely polarized permanent magnets, but nothing we’ve done—feeding them powerful electric currents, attempting to heat or cool them, bombarding them with gamma rays—none of it has caused a single response. We have clocked disks just like this moving through the atmosphere at upwards of a hundred thousand miles an hour, but not leaving a sonic boom.”
“Where did you get this thing?”
“Caruthers knows more about that. Adam, can you hear us?”
From below, Caruthers’s voice drifted faintly up. He sounded as if he were a hundred yards away at least, and speaking softly. “This was found on the Plain of San Augustin in New Mexico. There were three extraterrestrial biological entities inside. All dead. Found in 1949.”
“What about controls?”
Reese said, “That’s Dawkins’s department. He’ll take you a little deeper.”
Before Flynn could respond, Reese had dropped out and Dawkins appeared and said, “Now, what will happen is, if you move straight up—push yourself higher—you’ll find that the thing morphs as you penetrate more deeply. Stay with me, though, because you can get lost in here, and I have to warn you, that’s happened.”
“Get lost? How? Where?”
“We don’t know, but some of the early explorers never came out. After a while, as I understand it, you could smell their decaying bodies. They’re dead in here somewhere. We don’t know where. Let’s go. Keep standing, stay within sight of me.”
Flynn found himself in a small room that contained three bucket seats and three consoles. There were no readouts and no controls, just indentations with small holes in them. The indentations were the shape and size of children’s hands, but designed for six fingers.
“You can sit down.”
“No, I can’t.”
“Do it. The seat will change to fit you.”
He could barely maneuver, humped over in the small space.
“Act like it’s all your size, and it will be. Go ahead.”
He straightened up, and the room did indeed grow larger, the seats along with it. When he sat in one, the console before him expanded, too.
“Now put your fingers in the controls.”
As he did so, they morphed into five-fingered control surfaces. They fit his hands so precisely that it felt as if they had been made just for him—which, in a sense, they had.
“This is just incredible.”
“We don’t understand any of it. Look down.”
When he did so, the floor beneath him became clear, and he could see down to the crystal and the ring below it, what looked like a distance of at least fifty feet, and yet he had come up only a few feet to reach this control room.
“What has happened is that the interior of the craft expanded to fit us. But on the outside, your friend isn’t going to see a single change.”
“They’re a million years ahead of us.”
“Or they simply have better minds.”
He thought of the brutality and carnage he had witnessed, and could not reconcile them to the magnificent, elegant technology he was seeing here. Maybe the grays had better minds. Not Aeon.
“Could there be tramps? Thieves who could steal things like this? Alien thieves who maybe wouldn’t be able to work them all that well? Because what I’m dealing with is brutal and mean. My aliens sure as hell don’t square with anything as sophisticated and beautiful as this. Whoever created this thing touched the mind of God.”
Dawkins smiled gently. “Or maybe another mind, also magnificent, but not so sweet.”
As soon as Flynn rose from the chair, the distance down to the ring became short again.
“You go first, Flynn. Don’t want to get you lost.”
When Flynn looked down again, he could now see the opening they had come through, and below it the concrete floor not four feet underneath.
“Careful, now—everyone who’s disappeared in here has been on their way out.”
Flynn went to the edge of the opening and dropped his feet out.
“Reach back, please take my hand.”
Flynn felt Dawkins’s thin hand in his own. He dropped down, the scientist coming immediately behind him.
Dawkins stood with his head bowed, his face sheened with sweat. “That’s hard,” he said.
“I’m glad you made it out,” Evans said.
Flynn fought back any sign of the bitter disappointment he was feeling. The truth was, though, that this entire journey had been a waste of effort, and from the way these people were acting, dangerous on a whole lot of different levels.
It was time to cut and run. Except for one problem. “Where’s Mac?”
“He and Evans went up to the commissary a couple of hours ago, to eat and get you checked in to visitor quarters.”
“What are you talking about?”
Dawkins laughed a little. “That’s another reality in there, with a different time. I once worked in there for a day, trying to find some kind of connection between the control panels and the motor. When I came down, four weeks had passed, and two men had disappeared while searching for me.” He bowed his head and was silent for a moment. Then he said in a voice choked with pain. “One of them was my brother. We’re twins.” Then, lower, full of more trembling emotion, “We know he died. He’s one of the ones we could smell.”
The thought came to Flynn that they were like bugs trapped behind the mystery of a glass window, a mystery they could never hope to defeat and never hope to understand. Impossible not because they didn’t have the information, but because they didn’t have the raw brain capacity. Nothing could tell a fly what glass was. Nothing could tell a human being what this disk was.
“Are we finished, then?”
“Sure, Flynn. If you’re done. Any more questions?”
“No more. Not now.” But there was one. He’d save it for later, though, at just the right moment, or maybe by then there would be no point, and he would never ask it at all.
He had not gotten very far here. Not far at all. In fact, all his visit had done was confirm his worst fear, which was that the disks were so far beyond human understanding that there was no hope. If so, then Morris would soon rule this world of Earth. It would be free no more, a slave planet given over to whatever its master chose to do with it.
Fifty years after Cortés conquered Mexico, only one out of ten of the indigenous people were left alive. If Flynn’s battle failed, he knew that humanity would fare even worse. Our species would be lost to the egoman
iacal lusts of a psychopath.
He was a humble man. He’d never thought of himself as being particularly important, but in this moment, mankind’s future was clearly his to win or lose. And not more than a couple of hundred people on the whole planet, if that, even knew his name.
Was he up to this?
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
FLYNN SWALLOWED the acid of desperation back into his churning guts. He did not see how he could win this thing, not against technology so advanced that it seemed more like magic than like science. Was Morris’s disk equally advanced, a machine that might as well be a living thing? How could anybody ever damage a craft like that with a little chunk of lead, even if they did hit a seam?
On the way back to the main building, Flynn noticed that Mac was now quiet and withdrawn.
“Geri said we’re dealing with an old, primitive device—remember that.”
“The seam just disappeared. Then a door opens like some kind of magic is going on. I don’t know, man—no matter how primitive it is, maybe it’s not primitive enough for a jerk with a gun.”
When they returned to the main building and went inside, Flynn had an incredibly powerful sense of déjà vu. This hallway—wide with a black linoleum floor polished to a high gloss, its rows of office doors, each one locked like a safe—was as familiar to him as his own house in Menard. And yet, his mind was telling him he had never been here before.
As they approached the commissary, the smell of the food was incredibly familiar, sending a dagger of memory right through him. Not that it was good food—it was hardly that—it was just damn familiar.
He was certain now that he’d been subjected to hypnosis so that he wouldn’t think about this place. It was a security measure. Too bad it hadn’t helped Dr. Miller.
Frankly, he was excited about taking Mac to Bio. His friend had found a seam that was almost microscopic. As he was, the man had what was called exquisite vision. When they were kids, he’d been able to pick out the moons of Jupiter, not to mention see a tree rat crossing a wire at night and blow it to kingdom come at a distance of a couple of hundred yards. And leave the wire untouched.
“This is not food,” Mac said. They were passing down the steam table in the commissary.