debrief . . . well, it was not only unfair and cruel to you but a
really stupid waste of potential sources of data."
Ginger looked toward the open portal farther along the flank of the
vessel, at the top of the portable stairs. "If we go back inside now,
maybe the last of the memory block will crumble."
"That might help," Bennell agreed.
Looking up at the starship again, Jack said, "How'd you know it was
coming down out there along I-80?"
"Yeah," Dom said. "And why'd they think it should be covered up?"
"And the creatures who came in it," Jack said.
"God, yes," Ginger said, "where are they? What's happened to them?"
Interrupting, General Alvarado said, "Like Niles said, you'll get the
answers because you deserve them. But first, there's more urgent
business." He turned to Dom. "I suppose if you can levitate things and
create light out of thin air, there's no problem getting through an
electronic security system. And if you can get in, you ought to be able
to use your power to keep other people out. You think you could? Keep
both the blast doors and the smaller entrance from opening until we're
ready to open them?"
Dom was clearly as baffled by these questions as Ginger was. He said,
"Well, maybe. I don't know."
Bennell looked at the general. "Bob, if you keep the colonel out,
that'll be like lighting the fuse. He knows no one can control VIGILANT
but him. If he can't get in . . . it'll look like voodoo to him.
He'll be sure we're all infected."
"Infected?" Ginger said uneasily.
Alvarado said, "The colonel is convinced that we-you, me, Miles, all of
us-have been somehow possessed by alien beings, taken over like a bunch
of puppets, and that we're not human any more."
"That's insane," Jack said.
But with greater uneasiness, Ginger said, "Of course, we know we haven't
been. But is there reason to believe it could've happened?"
"Initially, yes, some small reason," Miles Bennell said, "but it didn't
happen. It's not true. And we understand now that it was never a
possibility. Just typical black-minded human nature . . . putting
the worst interpretation on everything. I'll explain later."
Ginger was about to demand an immediate explanation, but General
Alvarado said, "Please, hold the questions. We don't have much time.
Right now, we believe Falkirk is returning here, having taken your
friends into custody-"
"No," Dom said, "they got away before we did. They're gone."
"Never underestimate the colonel," Alvarado said. "But see, the thing
is-if Dom could use his power to shut down the entrances and keep
Falkirk out, maybe we'd have the time to find a way to blow this whole
story wide open. Because
if he gets in here . . . I'm afraid there's going to be bloodshed one
way or another."
Movement at the front of the chamber caught Ginger's attention, and she
gasped in dismay when she saw Jorja, Marcie, Brendan, and then all the
others coming in through the small door in the big door.
"Too late," Miles Bennell said. "Too late."
At the entrance to Thunder Hill Depository, the seven witnesses and
Parker Faine were taken out of the transport and grouped in the snow in
front of the smaller steel door. Lieutenant Horner's machine gun
discouraged flight and resistance.
Leland ordered the other DERO men back to Shenkfield, where they were to
bury Stefan Wycazik in an unmarked grave and await further orders. But
no orders would be forthcoming from Leland, for he would not be alive to
give them. It was not necessary to sacrifice the entire company, for
just he and one other man could control the prisoners and destroy the
entire Depository, and it was Lieutenant Horner's bad luck to be
second-in-command and have that responsibility fall upon his shoulders.
In the entrance tunnel, Leland was alarmed to see that the video cameras
under which VIGILANT was operating did not require visual ID for
admittance, for it would respond only to one key: the prints of the palm
and all the fingers on Leland's left hand. When he put his palm to the
glass panel beside the inner door, VIGILANT admitted him at once.
He and Horner took the eight prisoners down to the second level and
across The Hub to the cavern where Alvarado and Bennell waited. As
Leland stood back and watched them file through the man-sized door in
the huge wooden wall, he looked beyond them and saw the other
witnesses-Corvaisis, Weiss, and Twist-and although he did not know how
they had gotten here, he was exhilarated by the realization that,
contrary to expectations, he had the whole group exactly where he wanted
them.
He left Horner to follow the prisoners, while he hurried back to the
elevators. He could never trust poor Tom again,
not now that the lieutenant had been alone with people who might be
contaminated.
Carrying his submachine gun at the ready, Leland took a smaller elevator
down to the third level. He intended to kill anyone who moved toward
him. And if they rushed him in great numbers, he would turn the gun on
himself. He wouldn't let- himself be changed. Through childhood and
adolescence, his parents had striven to change him into one of them: a
shouter-and-wailer-in-churches, a self-flagellator, a God-terrorized
speaker of tongues. He had resisted the changes his parents would have
wrought in him, and he would not be changed now. They had been after
him all his life, in one guise or another, and they would not get him
after he had come this far with his identity and dignity intact.
The bottom level of Thunder Hill Depository was given over entirely to
the storage of supplies, munitions, and explosives. Staff members all
lived on the second level and most worked there as well. However, at
any hour of the day, a few workers and a guard were usually on duty on
the third and lowest floor. When Leland stepped out of the elevator,
into the central cavern off which other chambers openedan arrangement
much like that on the second floor-he was pleased to see the basement
was deserted tonight. General Alvarado had obeyed Leland's orders and
had sent all of his people to their quarters.
Alvarado probably thought that, by cooperating, he could convince Leland
that he and all his people were unquestionably human. But Leland was
not naive enough to be taken in by such a ruse. His own parents had
been capable of behaving like normal human beings, too-oh, yes, smiles
and plenty of sweet-talk, oaths of love and affection-and )*ust when you
started to think they actually cared about you and wanted the best for
you, they'd suddenly reveal ' themselves for what they really were. They
would get out the leather strap or the Ping-Pong paddle in which the old
man had drilled holes, and the beatings would be administered in the
name of God. Leland Falkirk couldn't be easily deceived by a masquerade
of humanity, for at an early age he had learned to look for-in fact, to
exp
ect-an inhuman presence below the skin of normality.
Crossing the main cavern to the massive steel blast door that sealed off
the munitions room, Leland looked nervously left and right and up into
the darkness between the lights. One of his punishments, as a child, had
been long imprisonments in a windowless coal cellar.
Leland pressed his left hand to the glass panel beside the door, which
rolled open. Banks of lights flickered on automatically down the length
of a room piled twenty feet high with anchored crates and drums and
racks that contained live ammunition, mortar shells, grenades, mines,
and other instruments of destruction.
At the end of the long chamber was a twenty-foot-square vault that also
required a palm ID to be opened. The weapons within were of such deadly
magnitude that only eight people out of the hundreds in Thunder Hill
were authorized to enter, and no one of them alone could open the vault.
The system required three of the eight to apply their palms to the glass
panel, one after another, within one minute, before access would be
granted. But this also was overseen by VIGILANT, and the computer's new
program, designed by Leland, made him the sole keeper of the
Depository's tactical nuclear arsenal. He put his palm to the cool
glass, and fifteen seconds later the many-layered, steel MacGruder vault
door swung slowly open with a hum of electric motors.
To the right of the vault door, twenty backpack nukes hung on wall pegs,
missing only their primary detonators and their binary packages of
explosive material. The detonators were stored in drawers along the
back wall. To the left of the door, in lead-lined cabinets, the binary
packages lay waiting for Armageddon.
DERO training included familiarization with a variety of nuclear devices
that terrorists might conceivably plant in American cities, so Leland
knew how to assemble, arm, and disarm The Bomb in virtually all of its
design permutations. He got the components from the cabinets, took two
backpackbomb frames down from the wall pegs, and put together both
weapons in only eight minutes, glancing nervously at the door as he
worked. He breathed easier only when he had set the timers on both
detonators for fifteen minutes and had started the clocks.
He slung his submachine gun over his shoulder, slipped each arm into the
straps of a backpack nuke. Each device weighed sixty-nine pounds. He
heaved both off the floor and lurched out of the vault, bent like a
hunchback and grunting under that apocalyptic weight.
Another man might have had to stop two or three times during the journey
back through the immense munitions room. Any other man might have been
forced to pause, put the bombs down, catch his breath, and stretch his
muscles before going on. But not Leland Falkirk. That dead weight
wrenched his back and pulled at his shoulders and made his arms ache,
but he grew happier as the pain intensified.
In the main cavern into which the elevators opened, he put one of the
backpack nukes on the center of the floor. He looked around at the
solid rock walls and up at the granite ceiling with a feeling of
satisfaction. If there were any faults at all in the rock strata-and
surely there were-the place would cave in, bringing everything above
down with it. But even if the mighty stone chambers could contain and
withstand the blast, no one who tried to take refuge on this level would
survive. Not even an alien lifeform of great adaptability could
reconstitute itself after being vapotized in a nuclear heat and reduced
to random atoms.
Nuclear pain.
He would not be able to survive it, but he would prove that he had the
nerve to contemplate and endure it. Only a fraction of a second of
blinding agony. Not bad, actually. In fact, not as bad as vigorous and
drawn-out beatings with a leather strap or with a Ping-Pong paddle that
had been drilled full of holes to increase the sting.
Still holding the second nuke by its straps, Leland smiled down at the
changing numbers on the first bomb's digitaldisplay clock, which was
already counting toward Ragnarok. The nicest thing about backpack nukes
was that, once armed, they could not be disarmed. He did not have to
worry that someone could undo his work.
He entered the elevator and rode up to the second level.
Carrying Marcie, Jorja crossed directly to Jack Twist and stood beside
him, looking up at the ship cradled on trestles. Although the collapse
of her memory block and the inrushing recollections had more or less
prepared her for this sight, she was overcome with an awe as powerful as
that which had seized her in the troop transport, when the astounding
truth had first been revealed. She reached out to touch the mottled
hull, and a shiver-part fear, part wonder, part delightcoursed through
her when her fingertips made contact with the scorched and abraded
metal.
Whether following her mother's lead or acting on an impulse of her own,
Marcie reached forward, too. When her small tentative hand pressed
against the hull, she said, "The moon. The moon."
"Yes," Jorja said immediately. "Yes, honey. This is what you saw come
down. Remember? It wasn't the moon falling. It was this, glowing white
like the moon, then red, then amber."
"Moon," the child said softly, sliding her tiny hand back and forth
across the flank of the vessel, as if she were trying to clean off the
mottled film of age and tribulation and, thereby, also clean off the
clouded surface of her own memory. "Moon fell down."
"Not the moon, honey. A ship. A very special ship. A spaceship like
in the movies, baby."
Marcie turned and looked at Jorja, actually looked at her, with eyes
that were no longer out of focus or turned inward. "Like Captain Kirk
and Mr. Spock?"
Jorja smiled and hugged her tighter. "Yes, honey, like Captain Kirk and
Mr. Spock."
"Like Luke Skywalker," Jack said, leaning forward and pushing a lock of
hair out of the girl's eyes.
"Luke," Marcie said.
"And Han Solo," Jack said.
The child's eyes blurred out of focus. She had returned to her private
place to contemplate the news she had just received.
Jack smiled at Jorja and said, "She's going to be all right. It may take
time, but she'll be all right because her whole obsession was a struggle
to remember. Now, she's begun to remember, and she doesn't need to
struggle any more."
As usual, Jorja was reassured merely by his presence, by his aura of
calm competence. "She'll be all right-if we can get out of here alive
and with our memories intact."
"We will," Jack said. "Somehow."
A rush of warm emotion filled Dom when he saw Parker. He embraced the
stocky artist and said, "How in God's name did you wind up here, my
friend?"
"It's a long story," Parker said. A sorrow in his face and eyes said,
better than words, that at least part of the story was bleak.
"I didn't mean to get you so deep in this trouble," Dom said.
Looking up at th
e starship, Parker said, "I wouldn't have missed it for
the world."
"What happened to your beard?"
"When this kind of company's coming," Parker said, gesturing at the
ship, "they're worth shaving for."
Ernie moved along the side of the starship, staring, touching.
Faye stayed with Brendan, for she was concerned about him. Months ago,
he had lost his faith-or had thought he'd lost it, which was just as bad
for him. And tonight he had lost Father Wycazik, a blow that had left
him hollow-eyed and shaky.
"Faye," he said, looking up at the ship, "it's truly wonderful, isn't
it?"
"Yes," she said. "I never was one for stories about other worlds, never
gave much thought to what it would mean. . . .
But it's the end of everything and the start of something new. Wonderful
and new."
"But it's not God," he said, "and in my heart, that's what I'd hoped it
would be."
She took his hand. "Remember the message that Parker brought you from
Father Wycazik? What he told you in the truck? Father Wycazik knew
what had happened, what had come down that night, and for him it was a
reaffirmation of his faith."
Brendan smiled forlornly. "For him, everything was a reaffirmation of
his faith."
"Then it'll also be a reaffirmation for you," she told him. "You just
need time, a little time to think about it. Then you'll see it the same
way Father Wycazik did because, though you aren't aware of it, you are a