To the east Haystack Mountain rode in sunlight. On another day I would have enjoyed a view like this, but today its empty silence was oppressive.
There was no movement at all, no sound except the lazy rasping of grasshoppers. Away from the car the air smelled of hot, dry grass. I imagined cowboys riding this range, silent in the heat, restless for booze and poker. Fifty years ago that had been the norm. Fifty years, barely a generation. And here I was in a car and carrying an alien corpse in the backseat. What would they have thought? Would they even have begun to comprehend?
A sound startled me—echoing in the silence, carrying from far away. It rose, desperate, a woman's scream.
Sophie.
No. A rabbit being attacked by a hawk.
Then there came a buzzing, low at first and insistent, the kind of thing you felt in your chest rather than heard with your ears. I searched the skies, expecting to spot a small plane swimming from horizon to horizon.
When I saw that the sky was empty I had my first twinge of fear.
The sound got louder. I tried to identify it as something familiar. If not a plane, then what? Oh, God. I didn't want this to be happening. I wasn't going to be able to handle this.
Instinctively I clapped my hands to my head and ran for the car. What if they were coming after their fallen soldier? God help me. I was alone out here in the middle of nowhere. Who the hell knew how they regarded their dead.
How stupid I'd been to just take the thing and come out here like this. I was miles from Roswell and there wasn't another soul around.
The buzzing got louder, began to pulse in my ears. I grabbed at the car door, fought my way in. When I fumbled for the keys they seemed to hop out of the ignition on their own.
They jangled down under the seat. I bent, trying to force myself to be calm. The buzzing got louder and louder as I scrabbled. I sobbed and shook, fighting to control myself, to somehow grab—and then I had them. I had the keys.
All right, calmly now, put them in the ignition.
The buzzing became an angry whine.
Turn on the engine.
Now it was a roar, shattering, massive. Something huge was landing right on top of me.
The engine turned over once and then just plain died.
I screamed into the hell of noise as a huge shadow obscured the sun.
And a trailer truck loaded with sheep rumbled past, leaving the Chevy rocking in its wake.
A man can slip so easily over the edge.
I wished to God for talk. Just casual conversation. "How about Dewey? Think he's gonna announce?"
An SS officer had once said under interrogation, "You learned not to get near them when they were dying. A human being will do anything if he is dying. Once a girl was being hanged in the women's section. The bindings came loose. A female officer reached up to tighten them. Before anybody could stop her, the girl had torn the woman's arm off."
Where had that man been stationed? Was it Sobibor? Belsen? I can't remember if we hanged him or promoted him. I can't ever remember. What is justice?
The man's fate came to seem very, very important. I thought of his boots, of his black uniform, of the excessive politeness that marked him in my eyes as a killer.
I was hanging over the steering wheel with tears tickling my face. The car was a prison cell in an infinity of light.
Finally I sat up, took a deep breath, re-started the car. I could hear the engine nattering to itself, could hear the grasshoppers again, could hear my own breathing. I lit a cigarette and returned to the road. I flipped on the radio.
The first thing I heard was the Vaughn Monroe song "Ghost Riders in the Sky." I turned the damn thing off.
I started singing to myself like I had in Algiers and Marseilles when the Gestapo was breaking my networks. I would walk in the back streets and sing under my breath in English a song from childhood, "Oh, slow up, dogies, quit roaming around, you have wandered and trampled all over the ground. Oh, move slow, dogies, move slow."
My father seemed to be in the car with me, singing again on an early summer night. I was small and lying upon his lap and the whippoorwills were calling.
I had been safe then and, oh, how I longed for it now. I knew that somebody was talking to me as I drove. I had known it for some time. I just hadn't been ready to look at the fact that I was alone in a car with a dead body and someone was talking to me.
I remembered hide-and-seek in our enormous yard, laughter in the night, cool and mysterious, and where I hid somebody else hid, too. . . They touched me with cool hands, cool and little and white. I drove on and on, the tires pounding on the pavement. I was in a white world. My body was tingling. Some part of me told me that I was nowhere, not in the desert, not in the car. And yet I heard the engine throbbing, throbbing. . . .
Suddenly the shadows were long.
I'd driven all day and hardly noticed it. Where had the time gone?
I stepped on the gas. Fifty, sixty, beating toward Santa Fe and Los Alamos beyond. Los Alamos. It was Spanish for "the Cottonwoods," known to locals simply as "the Hill." A bastion of science and power hidden atop a mesa. It was my City of God, the place where the truth would be discovered. Why was this road so long?
I did not want to be out here in the dark, not with the thing in the backseat and the memory of what had happened last night still fresh.
I felt such an overwhelming poignance, as if in some secret part of myself I had touched my ancient childhood.
Evening became night and the road seemed to stretch ever longer. Soon my world was a glowing dashboard and a smear of light on the highway.
Outside the desert seemed to sigh, restless in the dark. It appears peaceful, the desert, but it is actually a place of endless terror. There is fierce competition in the desert, all the time. The snake stalks the mouse and the mouse captures the roach. And everything is always a little thirsty.
It is man alone who brings light to this world. Nature is dark, brooding and cruel. What compassion there is in the earth flows from the sterling heart of man.
Slit a man's throat and his dog will lap up the blood. Slit the dog's throat and the man will save him if he can.
What did we do with that SS officer?
I was hungry and thirsty. In fact I was so hungry and thirsty that I was shaking like a leaf.
There had been somebody in the car with me, somebody sitting right there on the seat beside me. A woman.
She was little and pale and I think in that moment I loved her enough to sweat blood. She'd been so sad!
A horrible thought crossed my mind, but when I pulled over and checked the bundle I found that everything was perfectly in order. My precious cargo hadn't been taken from me by some cunning deceit.
Still, I felt that the aliens had been with me. I knew they had. But when? Didn't my thoughts stretch back unbroken to morning. A long, hot day of driving . . .
There were lights down the road. Distances are deceiving, though, on a desert night, and it was another half hour before I reached the town of White Lakes.
There was a gas station and thank God a little place warmly lit that had a sign in the window, CAFE.
I pulled the Chevy up beside a couple of Fords and went inside. There were a few tables covered with checkered oilcloth and a counter. The place smelled of hamburgers and cigarettes and coffee.
"Burger basket, and gimme a Coke. Cherry pie and coffee after."
I was surprised at how crowded the place was, considering that it was nearly nine P.M. I had to take an end stool at the counter and I was lucky to get that. I'd already ordered my burger when I noticed the intense buzz of conversation around me.
"It was silver. Shiny."
"You seen it closer than me, then. I just saw a big disk."
"It was a blimp. One of them German airships like they had before the war."
Had I heard that right? "What's the stir?" I asked the man beside me.
"We seen one of them flying disks, that's what's the stir!"
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"Really?"
A woman at one of the tables chimed in. "It was unearthly!"
"Godless," her husband muttered.
"Big! It came up the highway not ten minutes ago. You musta seen it."
I knew my blood was draining from my face.
"You seen it, traveler?" a man called out. He had a Stetson on the back of his head. The homey country voices were getting mean.
I clung to my damp glass of Coca-Cola. It was a handle on the familiar world. Dark waters were engulfing me.
The cafe, the people, all began to slip away.
Had there been someone in the car with me? I thought—a woman. Yes . . . but I couldn't remember clearly.
My head was whirling, my ears ringing.
"Hey, traveler, you seen it? You were right out there on the road."
"I had—had—car trouble. I'm running late and flat-out tired. I don't think I could see fifty feet."
"Well, everybody in this town saw it. Yes, sir! It was as big as one of them blimps."
A blimp. My mind raced. Weren't they all in mothballs? I grasped at a straw. "Maybe that's what it was."
"Hell, this thing went up so fast you wouldn'ta believed it." The man who spoke wore a sloppy uniform. A local sheriffs deputy, I thought.
A woman spoke up. "I was lookin' at it outa my pickup, mister. I saw that car of yours. I saw you drivin' right under it."
The whole room became silent. Even the cook at the grill turned to look at me.
"Like I say, maybe it was there. I just didn't notice! I mean, who expects a thing like that!"
The woman from the pickup was regarding me with eyes like pins. "That Chevy of yours looked like it came down outa the thing."
Oh dear God, surely that couldn't be! If my car—no. It would mean that I was nothing more than a little trout being played on a line, played until I was tired.
"Maybe we oughtta have a look at that Chevy of yours, mister."
I had to get out of there.
I drank down my Coke and cranked up what was probably a pretty bad smile, "I didn't realize the time. I've really gotta be going!"
The cook glanced at one of his checks. "You got a hamburger comin'. I'm just gonna put it together."
"Oh, I'll pay."
The woman was like a snake. "He came outa that thing," she murmured to the deputy, who nodded. His hand was on his gun.
I put a dollar down on the counter. "Will this cover it? Keep the change!"
"You spend two bits and you leave a simoleon. That's real generous, mister. You take your burger basket with you." He laughed. "And you can keep the basket!"
I edged toward the door. In a moment I was outside. I started to open my car. The deputy had the movements of a jackal. He grabbed my wrist with a hard, thin hand. My fingers let go of the car door.
"Yes, Officer?"
"We all saw it. We saw your car come out of it. It came right out of the bottom and the thing flew away. I want to know what the hell you are, mister. What the hell was that thing? You like to scared us half to death!"
"I'm a federal officer," I said. I flashed my wallet at him, hoping that he'd be satisfied with a glimpse of a Washington, D.C., driver's license. "You saw secret military activity. You keep your mouth shut, and tell the rest of those folks to do the same."
He leaned back on his heels. "The hell."
"That was it!" I tried to get in the car.
"You're—"
"Let me go! You can't hold me like this!"
"Mister, I want to search this car."
"No! You have no cause."
"What's that smell, then? What stinks like that—you got something in there—what is it?" He peered into the backseat. "What's rolled up in that bag?"
I took the moment to jump into the car. Frantically I inserted the key and hit the starter. He grabbed into the window, clutched my shoulder. "You're under arrest!"
"I'm a federal officer!"
"Get out that thing."
I slammed it into reverse and jammed the gas pedal down so hard his strong grip was instantly broken.
I slurried into the highway and stepped on it.
For a long time I saw a flashing red light behind me, but he couldn't overtake me/Mobile radios hadn't penetrated to small New Mexico sheriffs' departments in those days, so he wasn't able to call for help.
But he was tenacious as hell and he drove well. No matter how fast I went he kept getting gradually closer.
And he knew every slight bend in the road.
I couldn't arrive at the Hill with an infuriated hick sheriff on my tail.
In desperation I cut my lights. We were entering the mountains south of Santa Fe and the road was beginning to twist and turn a good bit. I jammed the gas pedal to the floor and started taking bends on two wheels.
Finally I found what I was looking for—a dirt road leading off the main highway. I turned hard, sliding into it amid a cloud of dust.
Then I backed right out into the highway and tore off around the next bend.
It was a trick I'd learned during the war. He saw the dust I'd left and took off down the side road.
I almost wept as I pulled up an hour later to the main gate at Los Alamos. I had never in my life been so glad to see armed men and lights and to hear my credentials questioned.
I was reassured to see that the guards were wearing snappy new Atomic Energy Commission uniforms, blue like cops rather than khaki soldiers' things.
I had challenged the night and won, or so it seemed to me. Actually, I was more like an ant who finds the poison the housewife has laid. Delighted with its sweetness he carries a piece of it deep into his nest.
Because it is so good he hides it away at the back of the food tunnels.
That way only the best and brightest ants may feast on the treasure.
Part Three
CONGRESS OF LIES
They know not, neither will they understand;
they walk on in darkness: all the foundations
of the earth are out of course.
- psalm 82
Chapter Nineteen
The same night that Will arrived at Los Alamos, Roscoe Hillenkoetter seems to have become personally involved with the others. Nobody, least of all Hilly, realized that anything like this had happened until 1960, when the old man, retired now, suddenly threw caution aside and called for a congressional investigation into unidentified flying objects.
It was a direct attack on Will and his agency—an agency that Hillenkoetter had literally created during a midnight session with Truman.
By 1960 Hilly was long retired. After making his statement he very publicly joined a group called the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. Will says that he was forced to infiltrate it, take it over and ultimately destroy it.
In order to get Hillenkoetter to back down Will finally briefed him. He saw at once their predicament and left NICAP, commenting quite correctly that the government had revealed all it could and it was up to the "aliens"
to tell the rest of the story.
During that time MAJIC interviewed the former CIA director. When he was placed under hypnosis the first thing he remembered was the remarkable night that he conceived of the new agency.
Hilly's encounter was not simply a matter of a flying disk landing in his backyard. Like all the most profound encounters with the others, it was also an encounter with a powerful aspect of self.
Roscoe Hillenkoetter was not sleeping well on that night. His dreams were troubled by familiar storms. He was having a ship nightmare of a kind that had dogged him since he'd gone through Pearl. This time he was on the bridge of a tired old cruiser somewhere in the South China Sea. She burned coal and every seam sweated. The wind was screaming and there were Jap subs about. He didn't like the flying whitecaps or the evil green sky. He listened to the distant laboring of the engines and gave an order to come about into the wind.
Then he noticed that the steersman was a twelve-year-old. He was
shocked beyond words. How the hell had a kid like that gotten into the Navy!
He shouted for his first officer. A high, piping voice replied. This one was ten! Then he saw babies crawling on the deck, hundreds of them, and women in the rigging, little girls on watch without lifejackets!
They were singing sea shanties while the typhoon came down on them. Nurses, babies, children. An elderly couple covered with coal dust helped each other up from the engine room, looking for a breath of air.
His ship was crewed by the innocent and the old. And then he saw three white torpedo tracks dissolving in the crest of a wave. "Hard a-starboard," he screamed, "flank speed!" As the ship heeled a box of pickup sticks fell to the floor of the bridge and went scattering reds and greens and yellows down the ladder.
Then the ship took the first torpedo. A geyser of water burst up, and in the rocking, plunging aftermath all the hatches flew open and screaming crowds of children poured up from below like a desperate horde of ants.
She took the second fish and he felt the shuddering snap of the keel and knew she was going down.
He was half out of bed and running for the pumps when he finally came awake.
"Lord God almighty!"
He dropped back onto the bed. What a hell of a nightmare. Damn the war that it left a man with dreams.
He turned over and plumped his pillow, then closed his eyes and tried to fall back to sleep. He was shaking.
He deliberated about waking his wife. But he was too old to admit even to her that he'd been frightened by a dream.
He was methodically calming himself down when he began to get the feeling that there was somebody in the room.
He opened his eyes but didn't move. A prowler? Surely not. But then who? He wasn't a man given to flights of fancy. There was damn well somebody here. He could hear them breathing right over by the closet door. In and out, in and out. Breathing as regularly as a damn machine.