hope that the event aroused.
"We went inside," Ginger said wonderingly.
'Yes," Jack said. "You, Dom, and Brendan."
"But," Ginger said, "I can't ... can't quite remember what happened to
us in there."
"Me neither," Dom said. "That part hasn't come back to me yet. I
recall everything up to the minute we went through the hatch, into that
golden light . . . then nothing."
For a moment they were oblivious of their perilous surroundings.
Ginger's lovely, delicate face was bone-white. Partly, it was the
bloodless look of fear. But not fear alone.
Dom now understood, as Ginger did, why they had responded to each other
so powerfully the instant that she had gotten off the plane at the Elko
County Airport on Sunday. That summer night, they went into the ship
together and shared something that had forever bonded them.
"The ship's here, inside Thunder Hill," she said. "It must be."
Dom agreed. "That's why the government took the land away from those
ranchers. They enlarged the grounds of the Depository to make it more
difficult for anyone to spot the truck that brought the ship in."
Jack said, "It would've been a hell of a big load."
"Like those huge trucks they haul the space shuttle on," Dom said.
Jack said, "Yeah, but why would they hide what happened?"
"I don't know," Dom said. He tapped the button that would summon the
elevator. "But maybe we can find out."
The elevator arrived with a quiet hum, and they rode down to the second
level. Judging from the length of the ride, the top two floors of the
installation were separated by several stories of solid rock.
The doors opened at last, and they stepped into an immense circular
cavern three hundred feet in diameter. From far above, the scaffolded
lights shed wintry beams on an odd collection of sheet-metal buildings
that hugged the walls most of the way around the chamber. Warmer light
shone at small windows in two of those structures; otherwise, they were
dark and appeared untenanted. Dom thought it looked a little like a
film crew on location, a bunch of dressing-room trailers. Four large
caverns branched from the main chamber, one of which was closed off by
huge wooden doors that were curiously primitive for an otherwise highly
modern facility. In the three adjacent open caverns, lights glowed, and
Dom saw stored equipment-Jeeps, troop carriers, trucks, helicopters, and
even jet aircraft-in addition to other trailer-like buildings with more
lights at the windows than those in the main chamber. Thunder Hill was
an enormous arsenal and a selfsustaining subterranean city, which Dom
had known, but he had not guessed at the immensity of it.
More mystifying than the Depository's many wonders was its air of
abandonment. The second level was as deserted and silent as the first.
No guards, no busy personnel, no voices or sounds of labor. True, the
caverns were slightly cool; and at this time of the evening, most of the
staff would probably keep to the heated living quarters. But a few
should have been in sight. And if most were off duty, there should have
been music, T-V, voluble poker-game conversations, and other muted
recreational sounds waiting from the farther reaches of the facility.
In a whisper so thin it was little more than a subvocalization, Ginger
said, "Are they all dead?"
"I told you," Jack said in an equally quiet voice, "something's wrong.
.. ."
Dom felt drawn toward the huge wooden doors-almost three stories high,
at least sixty feet wide-that sealed the entrance to the fourth cavern,
so he allowed his feelings to guide him. Followed by Ginger and Jack,
he walked as quietly as he could toward a smaller, man-sized door set in
the bottom of one of those giant wooden portals. It was ajar, and a
wedge of light, brighter than that in the main cavern, fell out onto the
stone floor. He put one hand upon the door to pull it open, then
stopped when he heard low voices inside. He listened until he
ascertained there were only two of them, both men. They were speaking
too softly for him to follow their conversation. Dom considered turning
back, but he had a hunch that if he had an opportunity to look into any
one room before being apprehended, he could do no better than this one.
He pulled open the small door in the huge door and walked through.
The ship was there.
Ginger stood with one hand on her breast, as if to restrain her heart
from hammering loose.
The cavern beyond the wooden doors was enormous, fully two hundred feet
long and varying between eighty and a hundred-twenty feet in width, with
a high domed ceiling. The rock floor had been chiseled, planed, and
abraded to form a level surface from wall to wall; all the deep holes
and crevices had been filled with concrete. Judging from scattered oil
and grease stains, and from recessed ringbolts in the floor, the chamber
had once been used for storing or servicing vehicles. To the right of
the entrance, along the wall, were more trailerlike buildings with small
windows and metal dbors, a dozen stretching almost to the end of the
chamber. Though probably used as offices or living quarters at one
time, they'd been converted to research facilities. Hand-lettered signs
were fixed to some doors: CHEM LAB, CHEM LIBRARY, PATHOLOGY, BIO LAB,
BIO LIBRARY, PHYSICS I, PHYSICS 2, ANTHROPOLOGY, and others too far away
to read. In addition, work tables and large machines-a conventional
X-ray unit, a large sound spectrograph of exactly the kind in use at
Boston Memorial Hospital, and many other pieces of equipment Ginger did
not recognize-stood in rows or clusters in the open area immediately in
front of the metal buildings, as if someone were conducting a sidewalk
sale of high-tech laboratory equipment. The amount of research to be
done had outstripped the available quarters, which was no surprise,
considering the object of the inquiry.
The ship from another world lay to the left of the entrance. It looked
exactly as Ginger had recollected minutes ago, when the forbidden memory
had at last pushed through the block and returned to her: a cylinder
between fifty and sixty feet long, fifteen feet in diameter, rounded at
both ends. It had been set upon a series of five-foot-high steel
trestles to keep it off the floor, rather like a submarine in dry dock
for repairs. The only thing different from its appearance on the night
of July 6 was the absence of the eerie glow that had changed from
moon-white to scarlet to amber. It possessed no visible propulsion
system, no rockets. The hull was nearly as featureless as she recalled:
here, a ten-foot-long row of shallow depressions in the metal, each big
enough for her to insert her fist, but without evident purpose; there,
four protruding hemispheres like halves of cantaloupes, also without
apparent function; here and there, half a dozen circular elevations,
some as large as the lid of a trash can, some no bigger than the mouth
of a mayonnaise jar, none higher than three inches, all quite
mysterious.
Otherwise, but for the marks of wear and age, the long
curving hull was smooth over ninety-eight percent of its surface. Yet
its unspectacular design did not prevent it from being by far the most
spectacular thing Ginger had ever seen. She was simultaneously
terrified and joyous, overcome with a dread of the unknown yet exultant.
Two men were sitting at a table at the foot of portable stairs that led
up to an open hatch in the flank of the elevated spacecraft. The most
imposing was a lanky man in his forties, with curly black hair and
beard, wearing dark trousers, dark shirt, and white lab coat. The other
was in an Army uniform with the jacket unbuttoned, a somewhat portly man
ten years older than his bearded companion. Now, seeing their three
visitors, they fell silent, rose from their chairs, but did not shout
for guards or rush to trip an alarm switch. The two merely watched Dom,
Jack, and Ginger with interest, gauging their first reactions to the
trestled craft that loomed over them.
They were expecting us, Ginger thought.
That realization should have concerned her, but it did not. She had no
interest in anything but the ship.
With Dom close by her right side and Jack on her left, she moved with
them in silence to the nearest end of the cylindrical vessel. Although
her heart had begun beating hard and fast the moment she had entered the
chamber and seen the ship, its previous pounding was mild compared to
its current furious hammering. They stopped within an arm's length of
the hull and studied it with an attitude of wonder bordering on
veneration.
Random swirling patterns of fine-grain abrasion swept across the entire
curving bulk of it, as if it had persevered through clouds of cosmic
dust or particles of a type and origin as yet unknown to man. Random
nicks and small dents were scattered across the surface, clearly not
part of the design but inflicted by elements far more hostile than the
winds and storms that battered the ships of earth's seas and skies. The
hull was mottled gray-black-amber-brown as if bathed in a hundred
different acids and scorched in a thousand fires.
Aside from its intrinsic and powerful alienness, the strongest
impression Ginger got from the ship was a sense of great age. For all
she knew, it could have been built only a few years ago and could have
journeyed to Elko County at fasterthan-light speeds, arriving on the
night of July 6, just a few months or a year after being launched. But
she did not think that was the case. She could not ascertain the source
of her conviction-call it intuition-but she was certain that she was
standing in the shadow of an ancient vessel. And when she reached out
and touched the cool metal, letting her fingertips move lightly over its
scarred and finely abraded surface, she felt even more strongly that she
was in the presence of a venerable relic.
They had come such a long way. Such a very long way.
Following her lead, Dom and Jack had touched the hull, too. Dom took a
deep quaverous breath. His, "Ahhhhhhh," was more eloquent than any
words could have been.
"Oh, how I wish my father could have lived for this," Ginger said,
remembering dear Jacob the dreamer, Jacob the lufunentsch, who had
always loved tales of other worlds and distant times.
Jack said, "I wish Jenny'd lived longer ... just a little
longer.........
Ginger suddenly realized that Jack did not mean the same thing she
meant, that he was not saying he wished his Jenny had lived to see this
vessel. He was wishing she had lived through these events because, as a
result of this extraterrestrial contact, Brendan and Dom had acquired
the power to heal her. If she had not succumbed on Christmas Day, they
might have been able to go back to her-assuming they got out of Thunder
Hill alive-and might have knit up her damaged brain, bringing her out of
her coma, returning her to the arms of her devoted husband. That
jolting moment of comprehension made Ginger aware that she had hardly
begun to grasp the implications of this incredible event.
The portly man in the military uniform and the bearded man in the lab
coat had walked over from the table near the ship's portal. The
civilian put his hand to the hull, which Ginger and Dom and Jack were
still exploring. He said, "An alloy of some kind. Harder than any
steel produced on this world. Harder than diamond, yet extremely light
and with surprising flexibility. You're Dom Corvaisis."
"Yes," Dom said, offering his hand to the stranger, a courtesy that
would have surprised Ginger if she had not also sensed that this
mild-spoken scientist and the military man with him were not their
enemies.
"I'm Miles Bennell, director of the team studying this . . . wonderful
event. And this is General Alvarado, commanding officer of Thunder
Hill. I can't tell you how deeply I regret what's been done to you.
This shouldn't be a secret possessed by a few. It belongs to the world.
Bennell shook Jack's and Ginger's hands, too.
Ginger said, "We have questions......
"And you deserve answers," Bennell said. "I'll tell you everything
we've been able to learn. But we might as well wait until everyone's
assembled. Where are the others?"
"What others?" Dom asked.
And Ginger said, "You mean from the motel? They're not with us."
Bennell blinked in surprise. "You mean most of them managed to slip
through Colonel Falkirk's hands?"
"Falkirk?" Jack said. "Do you think he brought us here?"
Bennell said, "If not Falkirk-who?"
"We came in ourselves," Dom said.
Ginger saw the shock of that news register with both Bennell and General
Alvarado. They looked at each other in surprise, and then a light of
hope lit both their faces.
Alvarado said, "You're not telling us you found a way through the
Depository's security? But that's not possible!"
"Have you read the file on Jack?" Bennell asked his friend. "Yes? Well,
just remember his Ranger training and what he's been doing for a living
these past eight years or so."
Jack shook his head. "I can't take all the credit. Yeah, I got us
through the perimeter, across the grounds, and past the first door, but
it was Dom who actually got us inside."
"Dom?" Bennell said, turning in surprise to the writer. "But what do you
know about security systems? Unless . . .
of course! This strange damn power of yours! Since that experience in
Lomack's house and since the light you generated when Cronin first
arrived at the Tranquility, you must've discovered the power wasn't
external. You must know now that it's actually in you."
Ginger realized that Bennell's statement had revealed that their
conversations at the Tranquility had, indeed, been monitored. But it
also revealed that their discussions and strategy sessions in the diner,
after Jack's arrival, had not been penetrated. Otherwise Bennell would
have known about the experiment last night in which bo
th Dom and Brendan
had learned that their apparently mystical experiences were, in fact,
events of their own creation.
"Yes," Dom said. "We know the power's in us-me and Brendan. But where
does it come from Doctor Bennell?"
"You don't know?"
"I think it has something to do with what happened to us when we went in
the ship, but I can't remember. Can't you tell me?"
"No," Miles Bennell said. "Not really. It was known that three of you
went into the vessel, but we didn't know that anything ... peculiar had
happened to you in there. You'd come out just as the helicopters with
DERO troops and scientific observers began to arrive on the site, and no
one figured you'd been in there more than a couple minutes. When you
were taken into custody, you didn't tell anyone that something important
had happened while you'd been aboard. I believe you said you'd just
looked around. And for ease of handling, you were all sedated
immediately after being arrested and conveyed back to the Tranquility.
So even if you'd changed your mind and decided to tell us what happened,
you didn't have a chance." Excited, the lanky scientist absentmindedly
began to comb his long fingers through his curly black beard as he
talked. "When the decision was made to put a lid on the event, to
brainwash every civilian who'd seen it, there wasn't time for a thorough
debriefing of all the witnesses. In fact, you were never brought out of
sedation; you were moved directly onto the drug program that was part of
your memory-wipe. That's one reason I was opposed to the cover-up. I
felt that by brainwashing you without giving us plenty of time to