Unassigned Territory (26 page)

The cover of the magazine Harlan found himself looking at contained the colored drawing of a fantastic creature—something like a two-headed lizard from whose back sprouted half a dozen pairs of delicate, batlike wings. The heads were mostly mouths and eyes. The mouths were filled with dripping fangs, the eyes with lust. The object of the monster’s desire was a scantily clad blond woman with very large breasts. She was trying to run but was caught already by what appeared to be the monster’s tail. She screamed in terror.

There were more magazines. More monsters and more women. Two of the crates were filled with such nonsense. The magazines bore titles like
Fantastic Tales
and
Weird Creations.
In another crate, however, Harlan found something more to his liking. He found what had the look of being the entire canon of
UFO Alert!

The light in the workroom was bad and Harlan decided to take the crate out to the porch. Not only would he have more light, he could keep an eye on the road as well. There was something quite exhilarating about this find, Harlan thought, and he was surprised by the amount of enthusiasm with which he set about dragging the thing out into the light—as though he were really on to something.

He eventually discovered two items of interest in the crate. He found the article the brother from New York had mentioned on the phone. It was entitled “Whose Mind Is It? Magnetism and Mind Control,” by Leonard Maxwell. For the most part, Harlan found the article unreadable. He scanned it for several minutes, wading through such magnetic definitions as “Magnetic Hysteresis—occurs when a ferromagnetic substance is subjected to a varying magnetic field and causes the magnetic induction to lag behind the changes in magnetizing force.”

That evil was in fact a magnetic phenomenon appeared to be an idea which had sprung from Maxwell’s contemplation of the work of a man by the name of Mesmer in the field of animal gravitation, or animal magnetism—the magnetic tides of attraction Mesmer had found to be moving in and around all living things. It was the ability to influence and alter such tidal flows which provided the Controllers with their power. The Controllers went unnamed in the article, but Harlan took them to be the Ancients of current Sons cosmology.

The other two items of interest were found together. One was a pamphlet, one the page to which the magazine containing the pamphlet fell open when Harlan picked it up. What Harlan saw on the page was a photograph of Ceton Verity, the editor of
UFO Alert!,
the benefactor of Leonard Maxwell.

The man in the photograph had a big, well-fed look about him. Facially, there was a vague resemblance to W. C. Fields. The expression with which he stared into the camera suggested a certain blend of arrogance and determination. He looked, Harlan thought, like a man who knew what he was about. He wore a safari jacket and wire-rimmed glasses. At his back a landscape much like the one now before Harlan spread itself across the page. Beneath the photograph was a caption: “The Author at the site of his proposed Electro-Magnetron in the Mojave Desert.”

The pamphlet which marked the photograph was of immediate interest since its cover bore the symbol Harlan now associated with the Sons of Elijah. The tract was folded up like a small accordion and when Harlan spread it open he found that it produced a puzzle. It was one of those puzzles that link certain images which, when added up properly, generally reproduced some common saying. At least that was how Harlan had seen similar puzzles used in the past. There were several questions accompanying the puzzle, however, and the questions suggested that the meaning of the puzzle Harlan now held lay in knowing what the symbols stood for and how they related to one another. If you knew that, you would presumably know what they added up to, for the symbols were linked by plus signs, followed by an equals sign and a question mark. The questions were as follows:

Can you identify these symbols?

 

Do you know what Magnetic Secrets were covered by Nazi mining operations?

 

Do you know why the United States government closed mining operations in the Mojave Desert in 1942?

 

What does it mean that the President of the United States has recently reversed that decision?

 

How does the puzzle affect your future?

The symbols themselves were these:

A swastika, a bar (Harlan thought that possibly it was a gold bar, or a magnet. There were little rays coming out of each end), a pentagram, a wagon filled with rocks, a shape (Harlan took it to be a shape from a map—the outline of a country or a state, perhaps), the head of a man (Harlan’s guess was that the man was the President). Above the President’s head there was a small, six-fingered hand.

For the exact solution to the puzzle, readers were encouraged to send money. There was apparently a book. There was an address to which the donations were to be sent—a post office box in Inglewood, California.

Harlan was never sure in such cases if he should be angered or saddened by the fact that people would indeed send money, that the Leonard Maxwells of the world could, in fact, command their fleets of bulletproof limos. He thought about this for a moment and then began looking through the box at his side to see if perhaps Sarge Hummer had sent any money himself. It was what he was doing when it became apparent to him that he was no longer alone in the lot. The sense of being watched descended upon him like an unwelcome draft. When he looked up he saw that there were in fact three men standing not twenty feet from the porch upon which he sat.

It was impossible for him to say just how or when they had arrived. His first impulse was toward fear, his second, toward anger at having become so engrossed in Maxwell’s ration of horseshit that he had missed something important.

He took the men to be men of the town. They had the look of the desert about them. They wore boots and khaki trousers. One wore a trucker’s hat. One looked like an Indian. One, a huge, sloppy-looking man with a graying crewcut, held a shotgun in the crook of his arm.

It was the man with the gun who spoke. “Maybe you would like to tell us just what the fuck you’re doing here,” the man said.

H
arlan was wrong about the men. They weren’t from the town. The man with the gun claimed to be from the sheriff’s department in Ridgecrest but he offered no ID, nothing except the double-barreled gun. The gun was enough. Harlan told the men what he was up to. It was an abridged version, but essentially the truth. He thought for a moment about telling them something else but then passed on it. He had come this far. Maybe he would learn something from them.

He was wrong about that, too. When he was finished talking, the man with the gun looked at the Indian and grinned. “These are popular people,” he said.

“You’re looking for them too?” Harlan asked.

The Indian looked at Harlan, looked him up and down and then, apparently having satisfied himself about something, looked toward the hills at the north end of town.

“These people are criminals,” the man with the gun said. “It’s a matter for the law.” He looked straight at Harlan. “Your best bet would be to take a hike. That way.” For Harlan’s benefit he pointed with the gun in the direction of Los Angeles.

“Back with all the other creeps and weirdos,” the third man said. It was the first time he had spoken. He was a tall, skinny man with such angular, bony shoulders, it looked to Harlan as if a clothes hanger had managed somehow to remain stuck in his shirt.

“That’s right,” the man with the gun said. “You people kill me. You come out here trying to tell folks what to do and you dump shit on the place.” It occurred to Harlan that the man with the gun was rather weird-looking too. The guy looked like he had been put together with tires. His head looked a bit too small and the crew-cut had the look of something that had been put in place with a hammer. Pink flesh shone in the sunlight between the well-oiled shafts of silver hair. But Harlan didn’t argue with the man. They had dumped shit here. Tine shit was what Harlan was trying to clean up. “I won’t argue with you,” Harlan said. “I was hoping to help set it right.”

The Indian, who had been looking toward the town, laughed. The Indian’s legs were much too short for his torso—which was thick and heavily muscled. He wore dun-colored boots with red tips on them. A thin golden earring sparkled in the lobe of one ear.

The man with the gun said nothing. He raised his eyebrows and pointed toward L.A. with his gun.

Harlan crossed the dirt and got into his car. The man with the gun followed him. When Harlan had closed the door the man placed the barrel of the gun into the open window so that it was pointed at Harlan’s face. Harlan had begun to lean forward, toward the ignition, when he noticed he was still holding the pamphlet. The first idea which came to him was that the man was going to accuse him of stealing something.

“You wouldn’t,” the man asked him, “happen to know anything about a red car with two niggers and an Indian in it?”

Harlan slipped the folded pamphlet into the ashtray so that it was held by a corner, flat against the dash. “Not a thing,” he said.

•     •     •

Harlan was an hour out of the junction before he came to a gas station. The station was located in a place called Four Corners. It was an ugly Little spot. There was a gas station and a crummy-looking restaurant on each corner. There were some concessions set up along the highway, which sold the kinds of things you would expect from a Mexican border town. Cheap articles of gold and silver, together with a garish display of crockery, decorative mirrors, and Indian rugs hung about in a lifeless fashion beneath a mean-tempered sun.

There were roads going in four directions out of Four Corners. One could go east toward Vegas, west toward Bakersfield, south toward San Bernardino and Los Angeles, or north, toward nothing at all. Harlan stood in the shade of the metal roof which sheltered the pumps and looked toward a train yard off to the west. What he was thinking about was that picture of Ceton Verity and the desert landscape before which he had stood.

“Let me ask you something,” Harlan said. He was addressing himself to the man who had come around to collect money for the gas. “Have you ever heard of something called the Electro-Magnetron?”

The man laughed. He was a thin man with dark hair and when he laughed a gold tooth lit up in the sun. “Sure,” he said, “I’ve heard of it. What do you want to know about it?”

“Do you know where it is?”

The man took his cap off and ran a hand back over his hair. “Oh, not exactly,” he said, “it’s up around Table Mountain and Trona and all that shit somewhere.”

“Table Mountain?”

“That way,” the man said. He pointed north. “Take you maybe another three hours to the turnoff. I don’t know about after that.”

“You know what else is up there?”

“What else? Well, there’s a lot of stuff. I mean it’s a lot of nothing. There’s some old mining towns. There’s Trona. You can get to Death Valley that way, if you want to see that. They tell me there’s some people up there in a couple of those towns now. Hippies or some damn thing. Got themselves one of those communes I guess.

I don’t get up that way much myself.” The man put Harlan’s money into the front pocket of his shirt.

Harlan looked north. The horizon in that direction appeared to be built up in bands of blues and grays. The bands undulated beneath the sun. “Three hours you say?”

The attendant had begun to turn away. Harlan’s car was already pointed north. The man waved his arm. “Just keep going like you’re going,” he said. “You’ll see the signs.”

Harlan sat for a moment in the car after the man had gone back inside. He looked into the bands of whitened colors. There were a number of things on his mind. There was what the man with the gun had told him. There was also the prospect of driving back to Los Angeles. When he thought of L.A. he envisioned the scene in which he would begin to explain how he had come to arrive in the rental car from Las Vegas. He envisioned this so clearly that he abandoned it almost at once. He abandoned it for a number of reasons. He abandoned it for what the station attendant had said about hippies and communes. Obadiah and the girl he had gone off with were about the right age for that sort of thing. And there was something about finding the pamphlet in the magazine as he had, as if the two things had something to do with each other. And finally there was what the man with the gun had asked him. The guy had not said the black men were looking for something in the museum, but this was the impression with which Harlan had been left. Perhaps it was the impression with which he had wanted to be left, feeding as it did a particular theory of his. And when he thought of the theory he thought of the little puzzle contained in the pamphlet. Perhaps, he thought, he should begin a puzzle of his own, and he began to think of the things he could put in it: Leonard Maxwell, Ceton Verity, Sarge Hummer, Sarge Hummer’s girl, two black men and an Indian in a red car. Maxwell’s puzzle supposedly added up to something. Harlan didn’t know if his did or not. And yet he was within three hours of a possible answer. The idea was difficult to leave alone. He looked at his watch. He considered the time of day, the choices which ringed him, visibly in Four Corners, like the points of a compass. In the end he went with the puzzle. He went for three hours and fifteen minutes. He went believing there would be enough daylight left for a look around and he was right about half of it. There was light, enough so that even before leaving the highway for the turnoff the station attendant had told him about, he could see that something was wrong.

W
hat Harlan saw first, rising above the tops of the creosote bushes which lined the highway, were the roofs of the cars. The roofs were green—the color of State cars. After making the turnoff, he could see that the cars had been parked in such a way as to block any further progress in the direction Harlan was headed.

He drove slowly for the last few yards and then coasted to a stop as two Rangers walked toward him. The men wore tan uniforms with Smokey the Bear hats and gold-rimmed aviator shades. One of the men leaned forward, taking a look around Harlan’s car as he spoke, “Afraid this road is closed,” the man said. “You have business in Table Mountain?”