After a while, Parker sighed and said, "Personally, I think the CISG was
full of crap. First contact wouldn't destroy us."
"I agree," Stefan said. "Their fallacy lies in comparing this situation
to our contact with primitive cultures. The difference is that we
aren't primitive. This will be the contact between one very advanced
culture and another super-advanced culture. The CISG believed if there
ever was contact it'd have to be concealed, if at all possible, and that
news of it would have to be broken to the public over ten or even twenty
years. But that's wrong, dead wrong, Parker. We can handle the shock.
Because we're ready for them to come. Oh, dear God, but we are so
desperately and longingly ready for them!"
"So ready," Parker agreed in a whisper.
For perhaps another minute they bumped and rocked along in silence,
unable to speak, unable to put in words exactly what it felt like to
know that mankind did not stand alone in creation.
Finally, Parker cleared his throat, checked the compass, and said,
"You're right on course, Stefan. Ought to be less than a mile to Vista
Valley Road. This man in Chicago that you mentioned a while ago ... Cal
Sharkle. What was it he yelled to the cops this morning?"
"He insisted he'd seen aliens land and that they were hostile. He was
afraid they were taking us over, that most of his neighbors had been
possessed. He said the aliens tried to take control of him by strapping
him in a bed and dripping themselves into his veins. Initially, I was
afraid maybe he was right, that what had come down here in Nevada was a
threat. But on the trip from Chicago, I had time to think about it. He
was confusing his incarceration and brainwashing with the landing of the
starship he'd seen. He thought it was aliens in pressurized space suits
who'd kept him captive and stuck him full of needles. He witnessed the
descent of a starship, and then these government men in decontamination
suits came, and by the time they'd rammed all that stuff into his
subconscious and weighted it down with a memory block, he was completely
mixed up. No aliens apprehended him. It was his fellow men who
mistreated him."
"You're saying government agents would've worn decontamination suits
until it was clear whether or not the alien contact carried a risk of
bacteriological contamination."
"Exactly," Stefan said. "Some guests at the Tranquility must've
approached the ship openly, so they had to be considered contaminated
until evidence to the contrary was turned up. And we know some at the
motel have distinctly remembered men inside decontamination suits: a few
soldiers, brainwashing specialists. So poor Calvin was driven insane by
a misconception arising from his inability to remember clearly."
"Must be less than half a mile to Vista Valley Road," Parker said,
studying the map in the light from the open glovecompartment door.
Snow drove relentlessly through the yellow cones of the headlights. Now
and then, when the wind faltered or briefly changed the angle of its
assault, short-lived forms of snow capered in arabesque dances, this way
and that, but always dispersing and vanishing like ghostly performers
the moment that the wind recovered its momentum and purpose.
As they started up a steep slope, Parker said softly, "Something came
down. . . . And if the government knew enough to close I-80 ahead of
the event, they must've been tracking the craft a long time. But I
still don't see how they could
know where it would come down. I mean, the crew of the ship might've
changed its course at any time."
"Unless it was crashing," Father Wycazik said. "Maybe it was picked up
by satellite observation far out in space, monitored for days or weeks.
If it approached on an undeviating course that would indicate it wasn't
traveling under control, there'd have been time to calculate its point
of impact."
"Oh, no. No. I don't want to think it crashed," Parker said.
"Nor do I."
When the Jeep Cherokee was halfway up the slope, the tires spun on an
especially icy patch of ground, then caught hold and propelled them
forward again with a jolt.
Parker said, "I want to believe Dom and the others didn't just see a
ship . . . but encountered whoever came in it. Imagine. Just
imagine. . ."
Father Wycazik said, "Whatever happened to them that night in July was
very strange indeed, a whole lot stranger than just seeing a ship from
another world."
"You mean . . . because of Brendan's and Dom's powers?"
"Yes. Something more happened, more than just contact."
They topped the crest of the hill and started down the other side. Even
through shifting curtains of the storm, Stefan saw the headlights of
four vehicles on Vista Valley Road below. All four were stopped and
angled every which way, and their blazing beams crisscrossed like
gleaming sabers in the snowbleeding darkness.
As he drove down toward the gathering, he quickly realized that he was
heading into trouble.
"Machine guns!" Parker said.
Stefan saw that two of the men below were holding submachine guns on a
group of seven people-six adults and one child-who were lined up against
the side of a Cherokee that was different only in color from the one
Parker had just bought. Eight or ten other men were standing around, a
substantial force, obviously military because they were all dressed in
the same Arctic-issue uniforms. Stefan had no doubt that these were
some of the same forces involved in the closure of I-80 both tonight and
eighteen months ago.
They had turned toward him and were staring uphill, surprised at being
interrupted.
He wanted to swing the Jeep around, gun the engine, and flee, but
although he slowed down, he knew there was no point in running. They
would come after him.
Abruptly, he recognized a familiar Irish face among those lined up
against the Cherokee. "That's him, Parker! That's Brendan on the end
of the lineup."
"The others must be from the motel," Parker said, leaning forward to
peer anxiously through the windshield. "But I don't see Dom."
Now that he had spotted Brendan, Father Wycazik could not have turned
back even if God had opened the mountains for him and provided a highway
clear to Canada, as He had parted the Red Sea for Moses. On the other
hand, Stefan was unarmed. And as a priest, he would have had little use
for a gun even if he had possessed one. Having neither the means nor
desire to attack, yet unable to run, he let the Cherokee roll slowly
down the hill as he frantically wracked his mind for some course of
action that would turn the tables on the soldiers below.
The same concern had gripped Parker, for he said, "What in the devil are
we going to do?"
Their dilemma was resolved by the soldiers below. To Stefan's
astonishment, one of the men with a machine gun opened fire on them.
Dom watched as Jack Twist directed
the flashlight beam over the
chainlink fence, then up to the barbed-wire overhang that thrust out
above their heads. They were at that long length of Thunder Hill's
perimeter that ran through an open meadow, down toward the floor of the
valley. Windblown snow had stuck to large sections of the thick,
interlocking steel loops of the fence, but other areas were bare, and
those uncrusted links were what Jack studied most closely.
"The fence itself isn't electrified," Jack said above the shrieking
wind. "There aren't conducting wires woven through it, and the current
can't be carried by the links. No way. There'd be just too damn much
resistance because they're too thick and because the ends of some of
them don't make tight contact with each other."
Ginger said, "Then why the warning signs?"
"Partly to spook away amateurs," Jack said. He put the beam of the
flash on the overhang again. "However, there are conducting wires
strung carefully through the center of that barbed-wire roll, so you'd
get fried if you went over the top. We'll cut through the bottom."
Ginger held the flashlight while Dom dug into one of the canvas
rucksacks, found the acetylene torch, and passed it to Jack.
After he had slipped on a pair of tinted ski goggles, Jack lit the torch
and began to cut an entrance through the chainlink barrier. The fierce
hissing of the burning gas was audible even above the keening, moaning
wind. The intense bluewhite acetylene flame cast an eerie light that
struck a thousand jewel-bright glints in the snow.
They were not at a position where they risked being seen from the main
entrance of the Depository, which lay over the brow of a hill that
sloped up from the other side of the fence. However, Dom was sure the
weird acetylene light reached high enough into the night to be spotted
from the other side of that rise. If seen, it would draw guards this
way. But if Jack was right, if the Depository's security was largely
electronic, there would not be guards prowling the grounds tonight; and
in this weather, surveillance by video cameras was pretty much ruled
out, too, for their lenses would be iced-over or packed with snow.
Of course, though they wanted to get inside the Depository and have a
quick look around, it Would not be a tragedy if they were apprehended
here. After all, being taken into custody was part of Jack's plan for
focusing attention on Thunder Hill.
Dom, Ginger, and Jack were not armed. All the weapons had been for the
others, in the Cherokee, because their escape was essential. If they
were stopped, all was lost. Dom hoped they wouldn't need their guns,
and that they were already safely in Elko.
As Jack cut a crawl-through opening in the fence, the eldritch light of
the acetylene torch increasingly captivated Dom and, suddenly, made a
connection with the past, hurtling him back once more in memory:
The third jet roared over the roof of the diner, so low that he threw
himself flat on the parking lot, certain the airplane was crashing on
top of him, but it swooped past, leaving shattered air and a blast of
engine heat in its wake; he started to get up, and a fourth jet boomed
over the roof of the motel, a huge half-glimpsed shadowy shape, its
running lights carving white and red wounds through the night as it
thundered south and angled east, out across the barrens beyond I-80,
where the thirdjet had gone, and now the first two craft, which
hadpassed over at a greater altitude, were far out there, swinging back,
one to the east and one to the west;, yet still the earth shook and the
night was filled with a great rumble like an ongoing and never-ending
explosion, and he thought there must be more jets coming, even though
the queer electronic oscillation that had throbbed under the roar was
now getting louder and shriller and stranger and was unlike anything
jets would produce; he shoved up onto his feet and turned, and there was
Ginger Weiss and Jorja and Marcie, and there was Jack running over from
the motel, and Ernie and Faye coming out from the office, and others,
all the others, Ned and Sandy; the rumble was now like the crash of
Niagara Falls combined with the base-throb pounding of a thousand
timpani; the ululant electronic whistle made him feel as if the top of
his head was going to be sliced off by a bandsaw; there was frost-silver
light of a peculiar kind; he looked up, away from the jets that had gone
past, over the roof of the diner, looked up toward the light,- he
pointed and said, "The moon! The moon!" Others looked where he pointed;
he was filled with a sudden terror, and he cried, "The moon! The moon!"
and staggered back several steps in surprise and fear; someone
screamed.. . .
"The moon!" he gasped.
He was down in the snow, driven to his knees by the shock of the
memory-flash, and Ginger was kneeling in front of him, holding him by
the shoulders. "Dom? Dom, are you okay?"
"Remembered," he said numbly as the wind rushed between their faces and
tore their smoking breath out of their mouths. "Something . . . the
moon . . . but I didn't quite get enough."
Beyond them, having cut a crawl-through in the chainlink fence, Jack
switched off the acetylene torch. The darkness folded around them again
like the wings of a great bat.
"Come on," Jack said, turning to Dom and Ginger. "Let's go in. Quickly
now."
"Can you make it?" Ginger asked Dom.
"Yeah," he said, though there was an icy cramping in his guts and a
tightness in his chest. "But all of a sudden ... I'm scared."
"We're all scared," she said.
"I don't mean scared of getting caught. No. It's something else.
Something I almost remembered just then. And I'm . . .
shaking like a leaf, for God's sake."
Brendan gasped in disbelief when Colonel Falkirk ordered one of his men
to open fire on the Jeep that was approaching Vista Valley Road from the
hillside above. The madman didn't know who was in the vehicle. The
soldier given the order also thought it was out of line, for he did not
immediately raise his weapon. But Falkirk took a menacing step toward
him and shouted: "I told you to open fire, Corporal! This is an urgent
national security matter. Whoever's in that vehicle is no friend of
yours, mine, or our country. You think any innocent civilians would be
driving overland, sneaking around the roadblock, in a goddamn blizzard
like this? Fire! Waste them!"
This time, the corporal obeyed. The clatter of automatic gunfire
hammered the night, briefly overpowering the voice of the raging wind.
Up on the hillside, the headlights of the oncoming Jeep blew out. The
two hundred hard cracks of two hundred bullets erupting in a murderous
stream from the muzzle of the machine gun were augmented by the sound of
slugs tearing through sheet metal and smacking onto more solid barriers.
The windshield imploded under raining lead, and the Jeep, which had
braked immediately after topping the crest of the hill and had been
descending slowly, abruptly gained speed and rushe
d down at them, then
angled left when its wheels jolted over a lateral hump that extended
across most of the slope. Obviously no longer under anyone's control,
it started to slow again, hit another bump, slid sideways, almost tipped
over, almost rolled, but finally came to rest just forty feet away in
the already drifting snow.
Five minutes ago, when Ned had driven over the hill on the other side of
Vista Valley Road and had turned south, only to encounter the colonel
and his men waiting less than a half-mile south, it had been instantly
clear that all the shot guns and handguns-and even the Uzi that Jack had
provided-would be of no help. Considering that their lives depended on
their escape from Elko County, they would have made a stand against a
smaller force. But Falkirk was accompanied by too many men, all heavily
armed. Resistance would have been purest folly.
And Brendan had been filled with frustration because he had not dared
use his special power to ensure their freedom. He felt he ought to be
able to apply his telekinetic talent to the situation. If he
concentrated hard enough, perhaps he could cause the guns to fly out of
the soldiers' hands. He sensed he had that much-and more-power in him,
but he did not know how to bring it to bear effectively. He could not
forget how the experiment in the diner had gotten entirely out of hand
last night; they had been fortunate that none of them had been hurt by
the careening salt and pepper shakers, and the violently levitating
chairs. If he used his power to wrench the weapons from the soldiers,
he might not be able to disarm all of them simultaneously, in which case