Everyone else had seen too. The peacekeeper looked at Dave and smiled tightly. “I guess I’m back where Ethan began,” he said, and he wiped his hand on the leg of his jeans. Dave had to shift his gaze to the floor.
The elevator slowed and stopped. The doors slid open. Ahead of them was a long corridor that looked to be made of stainless steel and was rounded like a vein through a body. Corporal Suarez left the elevator first, then Derryman and Winslett. Beale followed them and then the others with Jefferson last.
The President led them forward. The corridor branched to both left and right. He took the group to the left and continued forty more yards to a solid slab of a door also made of stainless steel. Another keypad and a monitor screen were mounted in the wall. Beale went through the process of keying in the numbers once more and the crisp female voice said, “Good evening again, Mr. President. Please verify.” The screen came on, the outline of the hand appeared and the verification was made. There came the sound of two locks disengaging.
The door appeared heavy, but obviously it was not, because Beale was able to pull it open with its rubber-coated handle using a minimum of effort. The door seemed to float open. Tube lights at the ceiling were already on. Cool air began to be circulated, but Olivia thought even before crossing the threshold—which had an electric eye implanted in it—that she smelled the dry, medicinal odor of a hospital.
They entered, and when the door closed behind them, the two locks engaged.
The first chamber was a glassed-in space with three rows of theater seats much like the President’s television studio, but here the seats faced two large flatscreens. A door led into a larger room, sixty feet long if an inch. Pale green tiles covered the walls and the floor was made of gray tiles. The overhead light fixtures were round, like flying saucers. A digital clock on the wall was still running and reported the time as 20:38 in white numerals. Another stainless steel door stood at the far end of the room, with a square red warning light of some kind above it. The surgery, Ethan thought, picking it up from the mind of Foggy Winslett. And more from the general, a flare of fear: Don’t want to go in there hell no, no way. Too many bad memories of the bodies…
“Here,” said President Beale, “are the artifacts.”
He was standing before the glass double doors of a smaller room off to the right. Jefferson figured it to be about the size of a nice walk-in cigar humidor. Within the room, under the glow of the light tubes, were lucite shelves on which eight different items rested. Below the items were little identifying letters and numbers printed on clear stick-on labels: FL12255 under what appeared to be an ordinary piece of dark-colored iron, IA240873 beneath a metallic sphere not much larger than a baseball, AR060579 beneath a featureless black cube, and so on.
“Those came from crashed spaceships?” Jefferson asked, his sense of wonder now in overdrive. “Jesus!”
“A couple of them,” Beale said, “were shot down by missiles. The responsibility of other presidents. One collided with a private jet at night in a thunderstorm, over Indiana. The identifiers signify what state these were found in, the day, the month, and the year they were recovered. There have been seven others that self-destructed after awhile, but again that was before my time. All the records, the ships, and the bodies are kept somewhere else.” Beale turned to look at Ethan. “We’ve gone over these things with the best possible minds available, which is not easy considering the security involved. We don’t think any of these are weapons, but do you think differently?”
“I need to get closer,” the peacekeeper said.
Beale opened one of the doors for him, and he hobbled through on his own power. “Come in if you want to,” he told Dave, Olivia, and Jefferson. “You’ve come this far…take a few more steps.”
They went in. Beale followed and shut the door behind him, and neither Derryman nor Winslett showed any inclination to want to enter. Ethan scanned the objects.
He didn’t know exactly what each one was, but he sensed no warlike energy. “Can I touch anything?”
“If you can’t, who could? Pick up that piece of FL12255. But before you do, think of an earthly material…a texture, the skin of something…whatever. Go ahead.”
Ethan visualized water as he remembered it rising from the bottom of the swimming pool at Panther Ridge. When he put his hand on the piece of iron, it became a puddle of iron-colored liquid. When he withdrew his hand, it crawled itself back into its original shape. Dust, he thought, and putting his hand on the object it became a powdery iron-colored substance. As soon as the touch was broken, it turned back into what it had been…which the peacekeeper realized was a transmutable material tuned to the thoughts of whoever had physical contact with it.
“My Lord,” Olivia said softly.
Ethan picked up the metallic sphere. It looked as if it were jointed together in about a dozen places. It was heavy, but not too much for one hand.
“Balance it on the tip of a finger,” Beale said.
It seemed too heavy for that, but Ethan tried using his index finger. When it should have fallen, it did not; it balanced there and was perfectly weightless. In another few seconds, the ball lifted off his finger three inches and hung there. Then it started rotating. The joints began to open and close with rapid succession, but soundlessly, and suddenly there was a sixth entity in the room.
It stood slim and tall, a little over seven feet, in appearance a male humanoid albino with pale eyes and shoulder-length white hair. Jewels sparkled along the edges of both ears, which were again very much similar to those of humans but curled just slightly inward. The being wore a long white gown decorated with dozens of shining gold figures that made Olivia think of ancient Aztec pictographs she’d seen with Vincent in the National Museum of History in Mexico City. The being smiled beatifically, offered his long-fingered hands in an obvious attitude of friendship and began to speak in a quiet voice that was like no language the Earth-dwellers had ever heard; it was full of pops and clicks and what sounded like stuttering. When he was finished, in about half a minute, the entity bowed his head and faded out. The sphere stopped its rotation and settled back onto the tip of Ethan’s finger, where it remained until Beale took it and returned it to its proper place.
“We’ve tried to decipher the message,” the President said. “We think it’s something to do with medicine. There’s a sound in there that means the same as in a language known as ‘Comecrudan’, but that was extinct by the mid-1880s.”
“You’re exactly right,” Ethan said.
“What?”
“It’s about medicine. I know that language, and I know that civilization. He was offering your world the cure for cancer.”
Beale didn’t speak, and neither did anyone else from planet Earth.
“He was telling you,” Ethan went on, “that the cure for cancer is depicted in the symbols on his gown. Is this from one of the ships that was shot down?”