“Shake the fucking President’s hand,” Minelli roared. “Ah, Christ, let me out.”
Fulton walked with the watch supervisor down the connecting corridor between the cells, his face ashen. “This whole thing…has become the worst screwup…of my entire career,” he said, eyes half closed.
Within half an hour, the four stood in sunshine outside the smooth concrete walls of the Experimental Receiving Laboratory, blinking. Edward made a point of keeping close to Stella. She seemed frail, excessively quiet, her face drawn and haunted like that of a starved child.
“You going to make it?” Edward asked.
“I want to go home. I’m clean, but I want to take a shower at home. Does that make sense?”
“Perfect sense,” Edward said. “Wash off all the prison cooties.”
She smiled broadly, then opened her arms wide and held them out to the sky, making an ecstatic feline wriggle. “God. The sun.”
Minelli covered his eyes with one hand against the sun, stretching the other hand out palm-up to catch the rays. “Beautiful,” he said.
“What do you want to do, Edward?” Stella asked.
“Take a hike,” Edward said without hesitating. “Get back out to the desert.”
“If any of you wants to spend some time in Shoshone…” Stella paused. “It might be silly, you probably want to get as far away from here as possible, but you can stay at our house. I realize you must have other things to do.”
“We’re at loose ends,” Reslaw said. “I am, anyway.”
They passed General Fulton and Colonel Phan as the watch supervisor escorted them into a small auditorium near the base public information office. An Air Force lawyer talked to them about their immediate future and offered legal assistance, including the agenting of book and movie offers, without fee. “I think I’m pretty good, and so does the Air Force,” he said. “Nothing mandatory, of course. If you don’t like me, the service will pay for any lawyer you choose, within reason.”
The press conference, though an ordeal, was mercifully brief — only half an hour. They sat alone at a long table while approximately three hundred reporters competed to ask questions, one at a time, through remote microphones. For Edward, the questions blurred into one another: How did you find the alien? Were you actually looking for spaceships and aliens? Are you going to sue the Air Force or the United States government? (“I don’t know,” Edward replied.) What do you think of the Australian spaceship? Of the President’s address to the nation? (“If we are being invaded,” Minelli said, “I think his message sucks.”) Bernice Morgan, Stella’s mother, sat in a roped-off section. She wore a belted print dress and carried a broad white sun hat. Her face was calm. Beside her sat the Morgan family lawyer, older and much more grizzled than the military counsel, in a dark blue suit, clutching a briefcase.
By three, they were back hi the auditorium. Stella stood beside her mother while their lawyer discussed the circumstances of their release. He then offered to represent all four of the detainees, as he referred to them.
A staff sergeant handed Edward a bag containing the keys to his Jeep, and they were all given their packets of personal effects. “I can drive you all right out of here,” Edward said. “If we can avoid the reporters…”
“That’s going to be difficult. If you’d like an escort…” the military counsel offered.
“No thanks. We’ll manage.”
Reslaw and Minelli went with Edward. Stella accompanied her mother to the lawyer’s limousine. “Where are we going?” she asked Edward.
“I’ll take up your offer if it’s still open,” Edward said. Minelli and Reslaw agreed.
“Open to all.”
The Jeep and the limousine pulled away from Vandenberg’s main eastern gate, away from the crush of reporters. A few valiant camera trucks and press cars followed them, but Edward managed to shake them off by taking a devious route through Lompoc.
The climb up the shaft was not difficult; Rogers had indicated it was a much more impressive journey mentally than physically. Yet Arthur was not entirely certain why he was making the trip. What could the hollow interior tell him, that he hadn’t already seen in Rogers’s photographs and video?
Still, he had to do it. His inner confusion had to be resolved. He half hoped for some intuitive breakthrough. And perhaps something would have changed — a change that might indicate where the truth actually lay.
Arthur clambered around the second bend and crawled on all fours along the last stretch of tunnel. In a few minutes, he emerged into the broad cylindrical antechamber, switching on the video camera mounted over his ear.
His lamps played off the complex faceting of the opposite side of the main chamber. Walking to the lip of the antechamber, circling the beam of his torch over the faceted cathedral vastness, he tried to make out the red light Rogers had photographed. He couldn’t see it. Taking a deep breath — as he imagined Rogers had done before — he turned off all his lights and settled into a squat a couple of meters from the edge.
Circular. Designed for weightless conditions? How could all this crystalline structure survive planetfall? What in hell is the function? After five minutes, he still couldn’t make out a red light in the vastness. “One change, at least,” he noted aloud for the recorder.
He switched on the torch again and scrutinized the faceting intently, moving his eyes a few degrees, then again, trying to discern some pattern or evident function. It was beautiful, which implied a pattern, but beyond that…
Could all the facets be used to focus some sort of radiation drive? If so, then was the throat of the drive where he was now standing, in the (presently) closed antechamber? Would the tunnel into the mound then represent a kind of relief valve, left open to evacuate the contents of the chamber after landing? There were no traces of hot exhaust blast outside. Perhaps all that had been obscured after the landing, during the time the craft was camouflaged.
If he stood on tiptoes, he still could not hold the torch high enough to put it in the focal center of the antechamber cylinder, which was about two meters above the greatest stretch of his arms. A simple stepladder…and he could see if the facets reflected the beam directly back at him.
Even from where he stood, that didn’t seem likely.
What would Marty think, knowing his daddy was even now standing inside an alien spacecraft? What would Francine think?
If it is a spacecraft. Everybody seems to assume that. Perhaps the spacecraft left machines to construct this, and it was never in space at all. If so, why?
The cool dark quiet was profound, almost comforting. Reminds me of an anechoic chamber. Maybe the facets are dampers of some sort. He whistled sharply. The whistle returned, muted but clear. His voice, however, did not return. He shut off the microphone and shouted several times to make that point. The first two shouts were wordless, mere yells, apelike, and somehow he felt better after them. The third shout came out of him so rapidly he had no time to think.
”What the hell are you doing here? What are you doing to us, goddammit?”
Embarrassed, his face hot, Arthur approached the lip again and pointed his torch at the facets directly below. He thought of the Guest’s triple sherry-colored eyes, protruding from the surrounding dusty gray-green flesh. What a nightmare. All of it. Day by day we learn and it means nothing, has no pattern. We are befuddled being befuddled. Deliberate.