"Now wait," Samshow interrupted. "We haven't got any information about the South Atlantic."
"Could this black hole, or whatever it is, cause substantial damage to the Earth?" Sand asked.
"It would eventually eat it up, swallow it completely," Kemp said.
"Then we'd better tell somebody," Samshow said.
Kemp and Sand looked at him like children chastised for being caught in a dirty game.
"Shouldn't we?" Samshow asked. "Who's going to San Francisco, to the American Geophysical Society convention?"
"I am," Kemp said.
"I'd like to," Samshow said, running on instincts now. Sand regarded him with some confusion. Perhaps he felt like backing down now, having carried things too far and seeing the Old Man take them all seriously. "Can we swing it, David?"
"I . . . want to try some calculations."
"We obviously don't have the expertise," Samshow said. "But somebody there will."
"Right," Kemp said. "I know just the fellow. Jonathan Post will be there."
The Furnace was now surrounded by three concentric wire fences, the innermost electrified. Troops patrolled the perimeter in Jeeps and helicopters. Beyond the barricades, hundreds of the curious sat idle in their cars, Jeeps, and trucks, binoculars trained on the black mound five miles or more distant. Still more hikers circled the forbidden area, none finding a way to get any closer.
A makeshift pressroom—little more than an unhealed shack—stood at the main gate to the Furnace. Here, nine preselected reporters waited in abject boredom for news releases.
Except for the ubiquitous helicopters, the site itself was quiet. In the steady late morning sun, the cinder cone loomed black and purple, lava boulders and flows still in place, nothing changed, all silent and eternal.
As the blades and turbines on Arthur's helicopter ride from Las Vegas slowed, Arthur climbed down from a hatch and approached Lieutenant Colonel Rogers across the salty sand and gravel landing strip. Rogers greeted him with a handshake and Arthur handed him a folder.
"What's this?" Rogers asked as they walked alone toward the electronics trailer.
"These are orders telling you and your men to stay out of the bogey and do nothing to disturb the site," Arthur said. "I received them in Las Vegas. They're from the office of the President."
"I already have orders to that effect," Rogers said. "Why send more?"
"The President wants to make sure you understand," Arthur said.
"Yes, sir. Tell him—"
"We aren't communicating regularly," Arthur said. He glanced around the area and put his hand on Rogers's shoulder. "We're going to have senators and congressmen all over this place in a few days. Senate subcommittees are inevitable. Congressional oversight committees. Anything you can imagine."
"I heard that senator from Louisiana, what's his name —Mac something."
"MacHenry."
"Yeah," the colonel said, shaking his head. "On the radio. Calling for impeachment."
"That's the President's problem," Arthur said coldly. "MacHenry's not alone." They stopped twenty yards from the trailer. A path had been cleared between the landing strip and the complex of Army equipment. Bored soldiers had bordered the path with uniformly sized, whitewashed lava boulders. "I have something important to ask you. In private. This seems to be as good a place as any."
"Yes, sir."
"Is there any way to destroy the bogey?" Arthur asked. Rogers stiffened. "That option hasn't been mentioned, sir."
"Could you do it?"
The colonel's face was a battleground of conflicting emotions. "My team can do damn near anything, sir, but it would take specific orders to even discuss such an option."
"This is off the record," Arthur said.
"Even off the record, sir."
Arthur nodded and looked away. "I'm only going to be here for a few hours," he said. "You have your orders— but frankly, I don't have any specific orders. And I believe my authority supersedes yours here, am I correct?"
"Yes, sir, except where you might contradict direct orders from the President."
"You have no orders to prevent me from entering the bogey, do you?"
Rogers thought that over. "No, sir."
"I'd like to do that."
"It's not difficult, sir," Rogers said.
"Only difficult if you're the first one in, right?"
Rogers smiled faintly.
"I'll have your lead to follow. Tell me what I need to know, and what sort of equipment will be necessary."
PERSPECTIVE
AP News Network in Brief,
November 17, 1996,
Washington, D.C.:
Representative Dale Berkshire, R-V., recommended before the full Congress today that the House Judiciary Committee begin hearings on President-elect Crockerman's actions with regard to the Death Valley spacecraft. "There is strong sentiment among my people for impeachment," Berkshire said. "Let the process begin here and now." Berkshire and numerous other congressmen have reportedly asked the House and Senate to delay the President-elect's inauguration ceremonies. No action on a delay has been taken at present.
30
November 17
Mary, the duty officer, greeted them over the intercom with a smile in her voice. "Rise and shine," she said. "You're getting out today. I just heard it from Colonel Phan."
Edward had been awake for hours. He had not been able to sleep much the last couple of days. The cool clean plastic smell of cubicle air filled his entire body; he could not remember what real air tasted like. Minelli had been worse than usual, babbling sometimes, weeping, and Edward's anger had curled up inside him, helpless, hot, yet anesthetic, slowing him down rather than pushing him to action. Action resulted in nothing.
"You're a liar, Mary, Mary," Minelli said. "We're prisoners for life." An Air Force psychologist had spoken with Minelli and concluded the man was suffering from "extreme cabin fever." So were they all.
"We're not security risks anymore?" Reslaw asked.
"I guess not. You're healthy and the President's announcement makes the rest pretty unnecessary, don't you think?"
"I've been thinking that for days," Reslaw said.
At ten A.M. Colonel Phan appeared with General Fulton. The isolation chamber window covers were withdrawn and Fulton greeted them all solemnly, apologizing for the inconvenience. Minelli said nothing.
"We've announced your release," Fulton said, "and made arrangements for a press conference at two this afternoon. We have new clothes for you and all your confiscated personal effects."
"A cheap suit and ten bucks in pocket," Minelli said.
Fulton smiled grimly. "You're free to say whatever you want. There's no sense our stonewalling; we've had perfectly good reasons for everything we did. I hope, even now, that you can see those reasons. I don't expect sympathy."
Edward bit his lip gently, eyes focused on Fulton's cap. Then he looked in the direction of Stella's window and saw her standing in the white fluorescent light, gaunt, almost ghostly. She had lost a lot of weight. So had Reslaw. Minelli, strangely, had become almost plump.
"I've taken the liberty of having Mr. Shaw's Land Cruiser given a thorough check-over at our motor pool garage. The oil's been changed, engine tuned, and a new set of tires put on. Think of it as the least we can do. We've also arranged for monetary compensation for your time here. Should you need any medical attention in the next few years, that's on us, too. I assume one or more of you will sue us." Fulton shrugged. "All right. Your hall doors will be opened in five minutes. If you're up to it, I'd like to thank each of you personally and shake your hand. My gratitude is sincere, but I won't require you to acknowledge."
"Shake the fucking President's hand," Minelli roared. "Ah, Christ, let me out."
Fulton walked with the watch supervisor down the connecting corridor between the cells, his face ashen. "This whole thing . . . has become the worst screwup ... of my entire career," he said, eyes half closed.
Wit
hin half an hour, the four stood in sunshine outside the smooth concrete walls of the Experimental Receiving Laboratory, blinking. Edward made a point of keeping close to Stella. She seemed frail, excessively quiet, her face drawn and haunted like that of a starved child.
"You going to make it?" Edward asked.
"I want to go home. I'm clean, but I want to take a shower at home. Does that make sense?"
"Perfect sense," Edward said. "Wash off all the prison cooties."
She smiled broadly, then opened her arms wide and held them out to the sky, making an ecstatic feline wriggle. "God. The sun."
Minelli covered his eyes with one hand against the sun, stretching the other hand out palm-up to catch the rays. "Beautiful," he said.
"What do you want to do, Edward?" Stella asked.
"Take a hike," Edward said without hesitating. "Get back out to the desert."
"If any of you wants to spend some time in Shoshone ..." Stella paused. "It might be silly, you probably want to get as far away from here as possible, but you can stay at our house. I realize you must have other things to do."
"We're at loose ends," Reslaw said. "I am, anyway."
They passed General Fulton and Colonel Phan as the watch supervisor escorted them into a small auditorium near the base public information office. An Air Force lawyer talked to them about their immediate future and offered legal assistance, including the agenting of book and movie offers, without fee. "I think I'm pretty good, and so does the Air Force," he said. "Nothing mandatory, of course. If you don't like me, the service will pay for any lawyer you choose, within reason."
The press conference, though an ordeal, was mercifully brief—only half an hour. They sat alone at a long table while approximately three hundred reporters competed to ask questions, one at a time, through remote microphones. For Edward, the questions blurred into one another: How did you find the alien? Were you actually looking for spaceships and aliens? Are you going to sue the Air Force or the United States government? ("I don't know," Edward replied.) What do you think of the Australian spaceship? Of the President's address to the nation? ("If we are being invaded," Minelli said, "I think his message sucks.") Bernice Morgan, Stella's mother, sat in a roped-off section. She wore a belted print dress and carried a broad white sun hat. Her face was calm. Beside her sat the Morgan family lawyer, older and much more grizzled than the military counsel, in a dark blue suit, clutching a briefcase.
By three, they were back in the auditorium. Stella stood beside her mother while their lawyer discussed the circumstances of their release. He then offered to represent all four of the detainees, as he referred to them.
A staff sergeant handed Edward a bag containing the keys to his Jeep, and they were all given their packets of personal effects. "I can drive you all right out of here," Edward said. "If we can avoid the reporters ..."
"That's going to be difficult. If you'd like an escort ..." the military counsel offered.
"No thanks. We'll manage."
Reslaw and Minelli went with Edward. Stella accompanied her mother to the lawyer's limousine. "Where are we going?" she asked Edward.
"I'll take up your offer if it's still open," Edward said. Minelli and Reslaw agreed.
"Open to all."
The Jeep and the limousine pulled away from Vanden-berg's main eastern gate, away from the crush of reporters. A few valiant camera trucks and press cars followed them, but Edward managed to shake them off by taking a devious route through Lompoc.
The climb up the shaft was not difficult; Rogers had indicated it was a much more impressive journey mentally than physically. Yet Arthur was not entirely certain why he was making the trip. What could the hollow interior tell him, that he hadn't already seen in Rogers's photographs and video?
Still, he had to do it. His inner confusion had to be resolved. He half hoped for some intuitive breakthrough. And perhaps something would have changed—a change that might indicate where the truth actually lay.
Arthur clambered around the second bend and crawled on all fours along the last stretch of tunnel. In a few minutes, he emerged into the broad cylindrical antechamber, switching on the video camera mounted over his ear.
His lamps played off the complex faceting of the opposite side of the main chamber. Walking to the lip of the antechamber, circling the beam of his torch over the faceted cathedral vastness, he tried to make out the red light Rogers had photographed. He couldn't see it. Taking a deep breath—as he imagined Rogers had done before— he turned off all his lights and settled into a squat a couple of meters from the edge.
Circular. Designed for weightless conditions? How could all this crystalline structure survive planetfall? What in hell is the function? After five minutes, he still couldn't make out a red light in the vastness. "One change, at least," he noted aloud for the recorder.
He switched on the torch again and scrutinized the faceting intently, moving his eyes a few degrees, then again, trying to discern some pattern or evident function. It was beautiful, which implied a pattern, but beyond that...
Could all the facets be used to focus some sort of radiation drive? If so, then was the throat of the drive where he was now standing, in the (presently) closed antechamber? Would the tunnel into the mound then represent a kind of relief valve, left open to evacuate the contents of the chamber after landing? There were no traces of hot exhaust blast outside. Perhaps all that had been obscured after the landing, during the time the craft was camouflaged.
If he stood on tiptoes, he still could not hold the torch high enough to put it in the focal center of the antechamber cylinder, which was about two meters above the greatest stretch of his arms. A simple stepladder . . . and he could see if the facets reflected the beam directly back at him.
Even from where he stood, that didn't seem likely.
What would Marty think, knowing his daddy was even now standing inside an alien spacecraft? What would Francine think?
If it is a spacecraft. Everybody seems to assume that. Perhaps the spacecraft left machines to construct this, and it was never in space at all. If so, why?
The cool dark quiet was profound, almost comforting. Reminds me of an anechoic chamber. Maybe the facets are dampers of some sort. He whistled sharply. The whistle returned, muted but clear. His voice, however, did not return. He shut off the microphone and shouted several times to make that point. The first two shouts were wordless, mere yells, apelike, and somehow he felt better after them. The third shout came out of him so rapidly he had no time to think.
"What the hell are you doing here? What are you doing to us, goddammit?"
Embarrassed, his face hot, Arthur approached the lip again and pointed his torch at the facets directly below. He thought of the Guest's triple sherry-colored eyes, protruding from the surrounding dusty gray-green flesh. What a nightmare. All of it. Day by day we learn and it means nothing, has no pattern. We are befuddled being befuddled. Deliberate.
He tried to subdue his unreasoning rage. Surely there were ways to bring a nuclear weapon into this chamber. Backpack nukes hadn't been manufactured for twenty years, and had never been field-tested. What else was in the arsenal that could be hauled into the chamber by one or at most two men?
Lieutenant Colonel Rogers knew. He had thought of just such a contingency before Arthur had broached the subject. His reaction—immediate, brusque—made that clear. If two were thinking of it, then others were, as well. How could they circumvent Crockerman's authority over all nuclear weapons?
What good would it do?
"I'd like to ask you a few more questions," he said, leaving the mike off. "Just between one human individual and whatever, whoever you are. Are we no more to you than a nest of ants? You go to the trouble to create an artificial being . . ." He was convinced of that, though the proof was not absolute. "You feed us two stories, maybe more. What are you telling the Russians in Mongolia? Are you telling them the universe is run on socialist principles? We thought, years past ... we thought the arr
ival of something like you would change us all. You've taken advantage of that. You seem to know us better than we know ourselves. Or are we just so simple you can predict our behavior? If you're superior, then why are you torturing us? How many civilizations have you destroyed?"
He did not expect an answer. The circular gray-faceted cathedral interior gloomed around him, silent and implacable, unreal despite his intense scrutiny.
"You're going to eat the Earth, and spit it out, and move on," he continued, his voice trembling. His rage was almost overwhelming; he wanted to smash things. With some haste, he retreated to the tunnel, to reach the outside before his decorum vanished completely and he wept in frustration.
Once through the twisted tunnel and standing in the desert sun, he immediately faced Rogers and two sergeants and weeping was again out of the question.
"Your red light has gone out," he said, doffing his gear. "Nothing else has changed."
"How did it feel, sir?" Rogers asked softly.
"Like I was of no consequence whatsoever," Arthur said.
The officer smiled grim agreement and helped him remove the camera.
PERSPECTIVE
New York Times editorial,
November 20, 1996:
The election of President William D. Crockerman may have been a colossal blunder. Had the nation been given the complete facts about the present situation—facts concerning the existence of yet another alien device in Death Valley, California—and had we been informed about the President's attitude to these alien devices, how many Americans would have voted for a President who seems to accept impending destruction with open arms? Perhaps there is no hope. Perhaps the Earth is doomed. But for the President of the United States to admit defeat and urge us all to say our prayers is—and we do not hesitate to use the word—treasonous.
The Times Editorial Board is unanimous in recommending that the House Judiciary Committee investigate the President-elect's actions, and vote on whether or not to recommend impeachment.