Strangers (98 page)

“What now?” Dom asked shakily. Clearly, he had been surprised by his ability to focus his power so soon after the near-catastrophe in the diner last night.

“Something’s wrong,” Jack said. “I don’t know what. But no guard…something’s wrong.” He skinned back the hood of his ski suit and pulled the zipper down a few inches, and the others did the same. Jack said softly, “This is just the cargo-receiving area. Trucks come in and unload. The main part of the installation must be below us. So…I don’t like this emptiness…but I guess we go down.”

“If we’ve got to go, then let’s stop
shmoozing
and get a move on,” Ginger said, heading toward the far end of the tunnel.

She heard the inner door swish as Jack closed it.

They went farther into Thunder Hill.

2
Fear

They made hardly more noise than three mice easing past a dozing cat, yet their footsteps echoed in the rock-walled vault. Not loudly. The echoes did not sound like footsteps but rather like the whispers and murmurs of conspirators hidden within the shadowed niches on all sides.

Dom’s uneasiness grew.

They crept past a couple of enormous elevators. Each of them was seventy feet wide and nearly as deep, open platforms that were raised and lowered by synchronized hydraulic shafts at each corner, more than big enough to move fighter aircraft in and out of the bowels of the mountain. They passed smaller cargo lifts, too, and finally came to a pair of standard-size elevators.

Before Jack could press the call button for the lift, Dom was hit by another flash of memory. As before, it was sufficiently vivid to displace current reality. This time, he recalled the crucial event of July 6: the white-to-scarlet metamorphosis of the moon, which suddenly proved not to be the moon at all but a head-on view of the rounded bow of a descending ship. It was a plain cylinder with few features, none remarkable, almost
homely
in a way, yet he sensed immediately that its journey, ending here, had not begun anywhere on this world.

When the initial power of the memory faded enough to allow reality to impinge upon him once more, Dom found himself leaning against the closed doors of the lift with both hands, his head hanging down between his arms. He felt a hand on his shoulder, turned, and saw Ginger. Jack was standing behind her.

She said, “What’s wrong?”

“I remembered…more.”

“What?” Jack asked.

Dom told them.

He didn’t need to convince them that contact with an extraterrestrial craft had been made that summer night. The moment he reminded them of what they’d seen, their own memory blocks crumbled as quickly as his. In their faces, he saw the singularly unique blend of awe, terror, joy, and 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 self-sustaining 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, TV, voluble poker-game conversations, and other muted recreational sounds wafting 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 trailer-like buildings with small windows and metal doors, 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 1, 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 faster-than-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
luftmentsch,
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. And if I had my way, the world would hear about it tomorrow.”