“I’m getting lost again, sir. What ploy?”
“Ignoring experts.” The President leaned forward, extending his hands across the table, fists clenched, his eyes moist. Crockerman’s expression was a rictus of pain. “I asked the Guest one thing, and received one important answer, from all of our questions…I asked it, ‘Do you believe in God,’ and it replied, ‘I believe in punishment.’” He leaned back, looking at his fists and relaxing them, rubbing the palms, where fingernails had dug deep. “That must be significant. Perhaps the Guest is from another world, another place where transgressors have been dealt with severely. That thing out there in the ‘Furnace,’ Death Valley of all places…We have been told it will render the Earth down into slag. Total destruction. We have been told we cannot destroy it. I believe in fact we cannot.”
Hicks was about to say something, but Crockerman continued, his voice low.
“God, a superior intelligence, sculpts us all, finds us wanting, and sends our material back into the forge to be reshaped. That thing out there. The Furnace. That’s the forge of God. That’s what we’re up against. Might be up against.”
“And the Australian artifact, the robots, the messages?”
“I don’t know,” Crockerman said. “It would clearly sound insane to claim the Australians were dealing with an adversary…But perhaps.”
“Adversary…a kind of Satan?”
“Something opposed to the Creator. A force that hopes we will be allowed to continue our transgressions, to put all creation out of balance.”
“I think there are better explanations, Mr. President,” Hicks said quietly.
“Then please,” Crockerman pleaded, “tell me what they are.”
“I am not qualified,” Hicks said. “I know almost nothing about what’s happened. Only what you’ve told me.”
“Then how can you be critical of my theory?”
The way Crockerman spoke, like a child though using grown-up words, chilled Hicks to the bone. A friend had once spoken to Hicks in a similar tone in London in 1959; she had died by her own hand a month later.
“It is not realistic,” he said.
“Is anything about this situation realistic?” Crockerman asked. Neither had done much more than push the food around on his plate.
Hicks took a bite. The omelet was cold. He ate it anyway, and Crockerman began to eat his. Neither spoke again until the plates were empty, as if engaged in a contest of silence. The waitress took the plates away and poured more coffee into Hicks’s cup.
“I apologize,” the President said, wiping his lips with the napkin and folding it on the table. “I’ve been rude with you. That’s unforgivable.”
Hicks mumbled something about the strain they were all under, and how it was understandable.
“You give me a kind of perspective, however,” Crockerman said. “I can see, just watching your reaction, how others would react. This is a very difficult time, in more ways than one. I’ve had to interrupt my campaign schedule. The election is less than a month away. Timing is very important. I see I need to trim the rough edges from my phrases…”
“Sir, it is not phrasing. It is perspective,” Hicks said, his voice rising. “If you pursue these theories of cosmic recrimination, I can hardly imagine the damage you might cause.”
“Yes. I see that.”
Do you? Hicks asked himself. And then, examining Crockerman’s suspicious, half-lidded expression, Yes, perhaps you do…but that won’t stop you.
17
Arthur unfolded a newspaper as the Learjet taxied across the runway. On a far apron, B-l bombers lined up, their sleek tan, gray, and green shapes obscured by a layer of early morning sea haze. It took a few seconds for him to focus on the headlines. His thoughts were still on Harry Feinman, and on the autopsy.
The Guest had no discrete internal organ structure. Stuffed within the thoracic cage was shell-pink tissue continuous except for occasional cavities, more like a brain than anything else. The head consisted of the Lexan-like articulated bone material, arranged in large solid masses, with no discernible central nervous system. Small nodes the size of BBs interrupted the continuity of the bone; they appeared to be made of some sort of metal, perhaps silver.
Harry would soon be undergoing his own probing and examination in Los Angeles.
The plane completed its taxi and began to accelerate down the runway, small jets screaming thinly beyond the insulated walls.
Arthur focused on the newspaper. The front page headline read,
PRESIDENT ON SECRET DEATH VALLEY VISIT
Details Unclear:
May Be Related to Australian Aliens
The same unscrambled transmission that had brought Trevor Hicks to Furnace Creek had led other reporters, just hours later, to reach similar conclusions. Hicks had struck a mother lode. The others had had to make do with testimony from inhabitants of Shoshone and one phone call to Furnace Creek Inn that had gotten through to the apartment of a maid who spoke only Spanish. Bernice Morgan had not been interviewed. Perhaps Crockerman persuaded her, Arthur thought, tracking the story several times to see if he had missed any telling details.
General Paul Fulton, Commander in Chief of West Coast Shuttle Operations, was on the flight with Arthur. He came forward as soon as they were in the air and had finished their climb to 28,000 feet.
“Ah, the good old free press,” he commented, taking the neighboring seat. “Pardon me, Mr. Gordon. We haven’t had time to just sit and talk.”
“You’re going back to testify?”
“Before some key congressmen, before the Space Activities Committee senators — God only knows what Proxmire is going to make of this. How he got on that committee in the first place is beyond me. The man’s politically immortal.”
Arthur nodded. He felt as if his brain were mush. He had hoped to sleep through the entire flight, but Fulton seemed to have something on his mind.
“A lot of us are worried about Crockerman’s choice of Trevor Hicks. He’s a science fiction writer—”
“Only recently,” Arthur said. “He’s quite a decent science writer, actually.”
“Yes, and we actually don’t fault the choice of Hicks, but we wonder about the President’s need to go beyond the…primary group. His staff and advisors and Cabinet. The assigned experts.”
“He wanted a second opinion. He mentioned that a couple of times.”
Fulton shrugged. “The Guest shook him.”
“The Guest shook me, too,” Arthur said.
Fulton dropped the subject abruptly. “There will be two of our Australian counterparts in Washington when we arrive. Flown in fresh from Melbourne. They were spare parts down there, I suspect. The really important man — Quentin Bent — is staying behind. Do you know him?”
“No,” Arthur said. “There’s something of a gap between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, science-wise, in all but astronomy. Bent’s not an astronomer. He’s a sociologist, I believe.”
Fulton looked dubious. “Your colleague, Dr. Feinman… Is he going to be able to keep up?”
“I think so.” Arthur recognized that he was taking a disliking to General Fulton, and wondered how reasonable that was. The man was only trying to gather information.
“What does he have?”
“Chronic leukemia.”
“Terminal?”
“His doctors think it’s treatable.”
Fulton nodded. “I wonder if that’s not a good diagnosis for the Earth.”
Arthur didn’t catch his meaning.
“Cancer,” Fulton volunteered. “Cosmic cancer.”
Arthur nodded reflectively and looked out the window, wondering when he would find time to call Francine, talk to Marty, touch base with the real world.