13
The sky over Death Valley was a leaden gray and the air still carried the chill of morning. The presidential helicopter landed at the temporary base set up by the Army three miles from the false cinder cone. Two four-wheel-drive trucks met the party and drove them slowly over the paved roads and unpaved Jeep trails, and then off the trails, lurching and growling around creosote bushes and mesquite and over salt grass, sand, chunks of lava, and desert-varnished rocks. The false cinder cone loomed a hundred yards beyond their stopping point, the edge of a bone-white desert wash that had been filled with water just ten days before. The perimeter of the mound was cordoned off by Army troops supervised by Lieutenant Colonel Albert Rogers from Army Intelligence. Rogers, short, wiry, swarthy-skinned, and gentle-eyed, met the presidential party of eight, including Gordon and Feinman, at the cordon perimeter.
“We’ve had no activity,” he reported. “We have our surveillance truck on the other side now, and a survey team on the top. There’s been no radiation of any sort beyond the kind of signature we expect from sun-heated rock. We’ve inserted sensors on poles up into the hole the three geologists found, but we haven’t sent anybody past the bend. Give us the order, and we will.”
“I appreciate your eagerness, Colonel,” Otto Lehrman said. “I appreciate your caution and discipline more.”
The President approached the cinder cone’s tall black north face, accompanied by two Secret Service agents. The Marine officer who carried the “football” — presidential wartime codes and emergency communications system in a briefcase — stayed by the truck.
Rotterjack dropped back a few paces to snap a series of pictures with a Hasselblad. Crockerman ignored him. The President seemed to ignore everybody and everything but the rock. Arthur worried about the expression on his face; tense yet slightly dreamy. A man informed of a death in the immediate family, Arthur thought.
“This is where the alien was found,” Colonel Rogers explained, pointing to a sandy depression in the shadow of a lava overhang. Crockerman walked around a big lava boulder and knelt beside the depression. He reached out to touch the sand, still marked by the Guest’s movements, but Arthur restrained him. “We’re still nervous about biologicals,” he explained.
“The four civilians,” Crockerman said, not completing his thought. “I met Stella Morgan’s granddaddy thirty years ago in Washington,” he mused. “A real country gentleman. Tough as nails, smart as a whip. I’d like to meet Bernice Morgan. Maybe I could reassure her…Can we arrange something for tomorrow?”
“We go to Furnace Creek Resort, after this, and tomorrow you’re meeting with General Young and Admiral Xavier.” Rotterjack looked over the President’s schedule. “That’s going to fill most of the morning. We’re to have you back at Vandenberg and aboard the Bird at two p.m.”
“Make a slot for Bernice Morgan,” Crockerman ordered. “No more arguments.”
“Yes, sir,” Rotterjack said, pulling out his mechanical pencil.
“They should be here with me, those three geologists,” the President said. He got to his feet and walked away from the overhang, brushing his hands on his pants. The Secret Service agents watched him closely, faces impassive. Crockerman turned to Harry, still clutching his black notebook, and then nodded at the cinder cone. “You know what my conference with Young and Xavier is all about.”
“Yes, Mr. President,” Harry said, matching Crocker-man’s steady gaze.
“They’re going to ask me if we should nuke this whole area.”
“I’m sure that’s going to be mentioned, Mr. President.”
“What do you think?”
Harry considered for a moment, eyebrows meeting. “The entire situation is an enigma to me, sir. Things don’t fit together.”
“Mr. Gordon, can we effectively retaliate against this?” He indicated the cinder cone.
“The Guest says we cannot. I tend to accept that statement for the time being, sir.”
“We keep calling him the Guest, with a capital G,” Crockerman said, coming to a halt about twenty yards from the formation, then turning to face south, examining the western curve. “How did that come about?”
“Hollywood’s absorbed just about every other name,” McClennan observed.
“Carl has been an avid watcher of television,” Crockerman explained candidly to Arthur,” before his duties made that impossible. He says it lets him keep in touch with the public pulse.”
“The name obviously evolved as a way to avoid other, more highly colored words,” McClennan said.
“The Guest told me he believes in God.”
Arthur chose not to correct the President.
“From what I understand,” Crockerman continued, his face drawn, eyes almost frantic above a forced calm, “the Guest’s world was found wanting, and eliminated.” He seemed to be searching the faces of Arthur and those nearest to him for sympathy or support. Arthur was too stunned to say anything. “If that’s the case, then the agency of our own destruction awaits us inside this mountain.”
“We must have more cooperation from Australia,” McClennan said, clenching one fist and shaking it in front of him.
“They’re telling quite a different story down there, aren’t they?” The President began walking back to the trucks. “I think I’ve seen enough. My eyes can’t squeeze truth out of rocks and sand.”
“Making tighter arrangements with Australia,” Rotterjack observed, “means telling them what we have here, and we’re not sure we can risk that yet.”
“There’s a possibility we’re not the only ones who have ‘bogeys,’” Harry said, giving the last word an almost comic emphasis.
Crockerman stopped and turned to face Harry. “Do you have any evidence for that?”
“None, sir. But we’ve asked for the NSA and some of our team to check it out.”
“How?”
“By comparing recent satellite photographs with past records.”
“More than two bogeys,” Crockerman said. “That would be something, wouldn’t it?”
14
Trevor Hicks slowed the rented white Chevrolet as he approached the small town of Shoshone — little more than a junction, according to the map. He saw a cinder-block U.S. post office flanked by tall tamarisk trees and beyond it, a stark sprawling white building housing a gas station and grocery store. On the opposite side of the highway was a coffee shop and attached to it, a spare building with neon beer advertisements in its two small square windows. A small sign spelled out “Crow Bar” in flickering light bulbs — a local tavern or pub, obviously. Hicks had always been partial to local pubs. This one, however, did not seem to be open.
He pulled into the post office’s gravel parking lot, hoping to ask someone if the coffee shop was worth a visit. He didn’t trust local American eateries any more than he liked most American beer, and he did not think the appearance of the coffee shop — or cafe, as it styled itself on an inconspicuous sign — was very encouraging.
It was almost five o’clock and the desert was already chilly. Twilight was an hour or so away and a mournful wind blew through the tamarisk trees beside the post office. His morning and afternoon had been frustrating — a rental car breakdown fifty miles outside Las Vegas, a ride in the tow truck, arranging for another car, and as a lagniappe, a heated conversation with his publisher’s publicist when he thought to call and explain his missed interview…Delay after delay. He stood near the car for a moment, wondering what sort of idiot he was, then chose the glass door on his right. As it happened, that led him into the local equivalent of a branch library — two tall shelves of books in a corner, with a child-sized reading table squatting before them. A counter stood opposite the shelves, and beyond it the furniture and apparatus — so a small plaque read — of the Charles Morgan Company. The door on the left led into a separate alcove that was the post office proper. The air of the office was institutional but friendly.