"And unofficially?"
"Unofficially, we have no idea. They may have simply slipped into the earth some distance. Or they may continue falling until they emerge from the earth's crust at some point on the other side of the globe." Smith consulted his computer briefly. "Which would appear to be Kazakhstan."
"Then what will happen to them?"
"I have no idea. And it is not something I care to dwell on," said Harold W. Smith, closing the file and pressing the concealed stud under his desk edge that sent his CURE terminal slipping into the concealment of his desktop receptacle.
Epilogue
With the coming of winter, the Kazakh hill men of Kazakhstan came down from the gray folds of the Tian Shan Mountains to dwell with their herds in the valley.
Bulbul, leader of his people, led them off the mountains, as he had every winter for twenty-two years. Come the spring, he would lead them back up. It was the way of the Kazakh hill men of Kazakhstan.
After they had pitched their felt tents and set the bullocks to grazing, they cut the head off a sheep and played the last game of buzkashi until the spring.
It was a rough, sweaty game. The men on their horses would swoop down on the carcass, and fight with one another for the privilege of carrying it from a circle drawn at one end of the great winter valley to a pole at the other, and back.
It was a tradition as old as the mountains.
Bulbul, as always, was the first to reach the dead animal. Leaning over his pounding pony, his weathered hands snatched up the thing by its wooly white coat just ahead of the others.
Laughing and calling, they thundered after him. They seldom caught him. But this year, Pishaq bumped his horse against Bulbul's own and grabbed a sheep leg.
Tugging and struggling, they rode hard, the sheep carcass straining between them. The man who had it firmly in hand when he reached the end of the valley would be declared the winner.
In past years, for twenty-two winters, the winner had been Bulbul. This year, he felt, for the first time, the strength of a new champion in opposition to his own. It made his blood run hotter, but somehow his spirit grew sad. He did not yet wish to become old.
They never reached the end of the sheltering valley, still green with grazing grass.
Directly before their pounding hoofs, something came up from the earth.
It looked like a man. A strange, dead man.
Bulbul gave a warning shout, and immediately all horses were reined in.
Through the dust they watched as the dead man floated up from the grass, as if he were a ghost arising from some long-forgotten grave.
Their narrow eyes tensed, in the wonder of it.
"A ghost!" Bulbul hissed.
"Look at its eyes! They are dead!"
It was true.
The eyes of the ghost were open and staring, but its pupils were like pinpoints. Dead.
As they watched, it floated up toward the sky.
A rider shouted.
"Another ghost!"
It was so. This ghost wore a blue uniform, like a soldier. His eyes, like the other's, were round in a way they had never seen.
A third ghost, too, soon emerged from their ancestral grasslands.
They watched in stolid silence, these men of the mountains, rough of face and hard of eye.
They had seen strange things in their lives. But none stranger than this. Yet such were they, that they did not retreat or betray cowardice. Only the horses were skittish.