Thunderbird (28 page)

“Try visualizing the roller-coaster ride. You need to get it inside.”

“Okay. I'm trying.”

“You're standing close to it now?”

“I could almost reach up and touch it. And I'm doing the roller coaster. Whoooo, look out, baby.”

April had gotten only one speeding ticket in her life. Several years earlier, while traveling on I-29, an NPR broadcast of “The Ride of the Valkyries” had gotten her up close to ninety before she noticed. It was happening to her again.
Get your foot off the gas pedal.

“It's not responding, April. It's just sitting up there.”

“Is the door still open? To the Roundhouse?”

“Yes. And I think it's getting a bit drafty in there.”

“Okay. Stay with him. I'll be there as soon as I can.”

“What can
you
do that's any different?”

“I have no idea, George.”

•   •   •

J
OHNSON
'
S
R
IDGE
HAD
never seemed so far. George reported in every few minutes to tell her nothing had changed. Eventually, he'd gone back inside the Roundhouse. The door was still open, just barely ajar. Nobody was happy. He told her that Adam Sky had arrived. “He's out there now, but I don't think he's trying to talk to it. He's more inclined to yell at it. Thinks it's just an animal of some kind.”

The countryside was flat and empty except for an occasional farmhouse or barn. Finally, the land ahead began to rise, and Johnson's Ridge came into view.

George called again. “We had to close the door,” he said. “Everybody was freezing in here. And nothing was happening. There's just no point leaving it open.”

“Okay.”

“Where are you?”

“Ten minutes out.” A tractor-trailer rumbled past her, headed east. “He
is
still there, right?”

“Yes. He hasn't moved.”

She was approaching eighty. Way too fast for this road, especially at a time when it had icy stretches. She cut back down and tried to keep it below fifty.

And, finally, the access road came into view. Walker had been trying to persuade the local authorities to give it a name. This seemed to be the season for names, but he wanted something to make it easier for the flood of tourists to find it. It hadn't happened yet because there was an argument of some sort going on. Someone had suggested they were having trouble deciding which politician to honor.

She cleared the police, pulled onto the access road, and climbed toward the top of the ridge. Even at this late hour, a few cars were there, all slowing down as they approached the Roundhouse. One got off onto an embankment.
Its occupants started climbing out to get a better look. April passed the car, rode up to the gate, and saw a group of reporters and a couple of guys with TV cameras all looking up at Louie. He was not in a tree but simply adrift over the parking lot. Just barely visible. She showed her ID, rode into the parking area, and got out of the truck. Reporters immediately surrounded her.

“I can't talk right now,” she said. “Everybody please stay clear.”

They delivered a surprise by accommodating her. Except for a couple of questions about Louie, accompanied by laughter, they backed off. The name, obviously, was getting some attention. The Roundhouse door opened. Adam appeared and came out. And the chairman.

Walker came over to her and looked up at the slowly rotating mist. “I guess you've got a friend,” he said. “You think you can coax him inside?”

Her mind suddenly filled with images of long tunnels and the ringed planet.

She put a hand on Walker's arm. “Glad you could make it, James.”

“I wouldn't miss it. Are you seeing that?”

“The rings?”

“Yes. Lord, that's incredible.”

She raised her left hand. “Louie. It's good to see you again.” George came out and just stared. “Leave the door open,” she said. Then she returned her attention to Louie. “Come on, pal. Let's go inside.” She strolled toward the entrance as if she knew he would follow.

“He's coming,” said Walker.

“He's my buddy.” She was picking up images of Louie in the Maze tunnels. Or maybe it was another floater. And yes, it
was
another
floater
. She had no idea how she knew, but she
did
.

Paula was waiting inside, breaking into a broad attagirl smile as Louie followed her in.

“Careful,” said April. “Don't make any sudden moves. We don't want to scare him.” She stopped in the middle of the room. Louie was just inside the doorway. She picked up a sense of uncertainty.
You can trust me. This is the way back.

“How,” asked Walker, “did this thing become a
him
?”

“Don't know, James. Maybe it's a female.”

“That's not what I meant.” The chairman turned his attention back to the creature. “Go in, Louie. Go in and say hello.”

An owl hooted.

“
He
must realize,” said Walker, smiling as he delivered the pronoun, “that we can't do him any harm.”

“Not sure what he realizes.” April turned to Paula and Adam. “How about if you guys go into the conference room for a minute? And close the door behind you?”

Adam did an eye roll. But they both filed out of the transport area. The mist was still revolving, but it was barely noticeable.

The owl hooted again.

Walker stood by the front door. “You want me to close this?”

“No,” she said. “Let it be.” But Louie wasn't moving. Maybe there was too much light. She turned off three of the four lamps. The one she left on was near the grid, set on a table beside a copy of
Newsweek
. An astronaut was on the cover.

A sense of confusion and remorse settled over her. As if she'd done something irrevocably wrong. Or dumb. Like letting the only guy she'd loved, whom she'd married, walk out of her life because she couldn't balance her marriage with her career.

Mike. Where the hell are you now?

She was fighting back tears mixed with a sense of victory. Then Louie began to float toward her. But he stayed near the overhead, out of reach. Walker and George followed. Neither made any move to close the door.

April tried again to frame the roller coaster and the giant moon in her mind while she climbed onto the grid and looked back at Louie.

Come on, pal.

It was coming toward her. Descending, until she could have reached out and touched it.

Follow me.
She pressed the g-clef and waited for the light to come.
Stay where you are. Please.

She was still seeing Mike. The Mike from the good times.

She waited, looking at the place where the transport beam would form. And finally it ignited. April took a step toward it, waiting for Louie to come closer. He did, and she backed into the illumination, still facing him. He became hard to see, blended with the light. She couldn't be certain whether Louie had come far enough, but as the interior of the Roundhouse faded, she felt a sense of triumph. Then she was in the Maze, in the same bleak chamber.
And Louie was with her.

She stepped down off the grid, and he came, too. Beautiful. She would have hugged him had she been able.

“I'm going back, pal,” she said. “Thanks for what you've done. You've made a lot of friends on the other side. If you ever want to come back, we'd be happy to see you. There'll be visitors here. All you'd have to do is just follow somebody out.” He hovered, barely moving, a few feet from her. “So long, Louie.”

She raised a hand to say good-bye, got back on the grid, and pressed the stag's head. He was still floating there when the chamber faded, and she returned to the Roundhouse.

Solitude, the safeguard of mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter where molt the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars.

—Ralph Waldo Emerson,
The Conduct of Life
, 1860

C
NN
REPORTED
THAT
the floater had been sent back to its place of origin. Everyone was grateful, the network said, because a serious danger had been removed. It was good news as far as the chairman was concerned. One less thing to worry about. The experts on the various cable talk shows agreed with his assessment. But, as Walker got ready to leave for the office, there were some dissenting voices. Calvin Woodward, on
First Strike
, commented that the alien had given every indication of being friendly, had in fact attracted assistance for several people who'd gotten into trouble. While Walker drove over to Fort Totten, he turned on
Grand Forks Live
, and the first caller he heard asked Brad who could ever forget Jeri Tully?

By the time he'd arrived at the Blue Building, it had turned into a catfight. Well, however it played out, it was over. And he was grateful for that.

He had a relatively quiet morning. There were some congratulatory calls, others from scientific groups asking when he would allow them to send someone to the space station, and a request that he do another appearance on
Dakota Brief
. He didn't like doing TV interviews, where it was so
easy to say the wrong thing. But this was a critical time, so he accepted. He was about to go out for lunch with a couple of the council members when his secure phone sounded.

President Taylor never called with good news. Usually, he was being pressed for tickets through the Roundhouse by the head of the biology department at Princeton or somebody who had put together the Primal Simulation Theory. Or fielding calls from the Republicans, fearing what the alien technologies would do to the economy, wanting him to shut down all operations.

Walker was confronted regularly by the same people, who could not understand why they couldn't buy him. They thought he was holding out for the maximum amount of money to be wrung from the discoveries.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd had a decent night's sleep. In the beginning, when the Roundhouse was first uncovered, he had been juggling tribal concerns. How best could he manage things for the general welfare of the Mni Wakan Oyate? That alone had been enough to cost him any sense of tranquility. Now, however, the stakes had risen astronomically. It wasn't just the tribe at stake. It was the planet. Advanced technologies were almost certainly available. But what would the side effects be? They'd already experienced the fallout from the presence of
one
alien, who had never really shown any sign of hostility. What if something from outside came to take over? Or if they simply appeared and were more generous, more reliable, more truthful than we were? Would that be a good thing?

“Yes, Mr. President,” he said. “What can I do for you?”

“Hello, James. How is it going?”

“About the same, sir. Do we have a problem?”

Taylor laughed. “How could we have a problem? James, I wanted to be first to congratulate you on arranging to have our visitor sent back.”

“Thank you, sir. Actually, I was pretty much a bystander for that operation. It was carried out by April.”

“The result is all that matters. Also, I promised I'd get back to you on the medical question.”

“You mean about the possibility of a plague coming through?”

“Yes. The experts tell me there's no certain answer. But they don't think any disease arriving from an alien biological system would be likely to do us any harm.”

“Well, that's good to know.”

“Keep in mind it's only an opinion.”

“I understand.”

“One other thing: You know I'm taking a major beating from the Republicans. They're all over me for not taking control of this issue.”

“I know that, Mr. President. But they should understand that the U.S. government doesn't
own
Johnson's Ridge.”

“Oh, there are steps I could take. There's a public-safety issue for one thing. We need to let people see that we're working together on this. The scientific community is still pushing very hard for us to find out where else we can go. You mentioned a new mission or two. What's coming up? Are we going somewhere new?”

The chairman hadn't made up his mind yet. But he gave the president what he wanted. “I can arrange one, sir, if you like.”

“Good. Put something together. When you do, I have a couple of names for you. People I'd like to see go along. If you can accommodate them, it'll take some of the pressure off.”

•   •   •

T
HE
DAY
AFTER
Louie had reached home, Walker took April to dinner. “I didn't think you'd be able to pull it off,” he said. “You know, I experienced some of that telepathic stuff myself when I got near it.” They were sitting in Culver's, in Grand Forks, drinking coffee, waiting for a couple of steaks to arrive. “I wouldn't have believed we'd actually be able to get rid of that thing.” He couldn't bring himself to refer routinely to the alien as Louie, even though the name had gone viral overnight.

“James,” she said, “how's Dolly doing with Solya?”

“It's still pretty early in the process. You know they have an alphabet, right? The Arkons?”

“Yes, James. I was aware.”

“Well, she's concentrating right now on getting the spoken language down. Once she has that, she's going to try to learn to read. But it'll take a while.” He shook his head. “I don't know how she does it. I've looked at that book. How anybody could ever make sense out of it—? Anyway, it's time to move on.”

“What did you have in mind?”

“I want to get another mission out. The president has a couple of people he wants included, which I will do, naturally. Are you interested in leading it?”

“Another mission where?”

“I thought we'd use the transport system at the space station.”

“That sounds interesting. Who are the president's people?”

He pulled out a notebook. “Patrick McGruder. He's an astrophysicist from MIT. And Lynda Russell, a biologist from Wesleyan. Do you know either of them?”

“I've heard of McGruder.”

“Okay. They'll probably be in touch with you. I'll forward their e-mail addresses.”

•   •   •

A
PRIL
WASN
'
T
SURPRISED
to receive a call from Brad. “I hear you're heading out again,” he said.

“Yes. We're going to use one of the space-station links.”

“Well, I'm glad to hear it. Be careful.”

“We will.”

“Will the astronauts be going with you?”

“Yes.”

“That's good. Melissa and Boots know what they're doing.” He hesitated. “I have a favor to ask.”

“You want to come, too?”

“How'd you know?” She couldn't miss the energy in his voice. “Can you arrange it?”

“For the big star of the Sunday talk shows? I think we can do that.”

“Beautiful. When do we leave?”

•   •   •

P
AULA
WOULD
HAVE
enjoyed being included in the space-station mission, but so would most of the other Sioux security people. In any case, she had a conflicting assignment as one of the two Eden escorts. One stayed with Professor Proffitt at Solya's cabin, and the other remained in the Cupola to provide a connection with the Roundhouse. That would be Paula.

She'd been there about two hours when John Colmar called from the cabin. “Everythng's going okay,” he said.

“Are they making any progress, John?”

“I guess so. When Solya and Dolly sit down to talk I can't understand a word they say. Anyway, just wanted to check in. Nothing's changed.”

She'd thought about bringing a book with her, but that would have raised some eyebrows. The instructions were to remember that she was on a strange world and maintain constant vigilance. It was just past midnight on Eden. Both moons were in the sky. She took a chair outside and sat down.

She couldn't resist taking a minute to scout through the radio frequencies on the off chance she might pick up something. Someone had undoubtedly tried that by now. And she knew that the Arkons were not supposed to have electrical power, but you never really knew. She would have loved to take that kind of surprise back to the Roundhouse. An artificial radio signal. Maybe a domestic comedy, performed by gorillas. Umm. By Arkons. Unfortunately, she picked up nothing.

It was painful. They were making such a big deal about a couple of these creatures in a cabin and paying no attention to the high-tech civilization at Riverwalk.
That
was what she really cared about, and so did everybody else. It drove her crazy that the chairman wasn't doing anything. It made her wonder why Walker had taken a chance, trusted her, and even put her back at the Cupola. She'd love to travel back and go
outside on the walkway and say hello to a few of the inhabitants. They didn't look at all threatening. But there was no way she'd betray that trust.

The sky was clear, and the stars glittered. One of the moons floated directly overhead, and the other was hanging out near the western horizon. The only sounds were the wind in the trees and the gentle rumble of the retreating surf. She wondered what had happened at the place where she'd almost drowned? Rising oceans, maybe? Or simply the worst plumbing in the universe?