Strangers

“A lot of peoplemost peoplewould feel the same,” Parker said.

"And even if the species we encounter is frighteningly different from us in physical appearance, that wouldn't shake me. When God told us He created us in His image, He didn't mean our physical appearance was like His. He meant our souls, minds, our capacity for reason and compassion, love, friendship: Those are the aspects of humanity that are in His image. Which is the message I'm taking to Brendan. I believe Brendan's crisis of faith was related to a memory of an encounter with a race vastly different from usand so shatteringly superior to usthat he subconsciously believed it put the lie to what the Church teaches us about mankind being in God's image. I want to tell him that it's not what they look like that matters or whether they're far more advanced than us. What indicates the divine hand in them is their capacity to love, to careand to use their Godgiven intelligence to triumph over the challenges of the universe that He gave them."

“Which they've had to do in order to come so far,” Parker said.

“Exactly!” Father Wycazik said. "I'm sure when the brainwashing loses its hold on Brendan, when he remembers what happened and has time to think about it, he'll come to the same conclusion. But just in case, I want to be there beside him, to help him, guide him."

“You love him very much,” Parker said.

For several seconds, Father Wycazik squinted into the tumultuous white world ahead, progressing more slowly and cautiously than when he'd been following the reflectors along a known road. At last he said, in a soft voice: "Sometimes I've regretted entering the priesthood. God help me, it's true. Because sometimes I think about the family I might have had: a wife whose life I could share, who'd share mine, and children to watch grow. . . . The family that might have beenthat's what I miss. Nothing else. The thing about Brendan is . . . well, he's the son I never had and never will. I love him more than I can say."

After a while, Parker sighed and said, "Personally, I think the CISG was full of crap. First contact wouldn't destroy us."

“I agree,” Stefan said. "Their fallacy lies in comparing this situation to our contact with primitive cultures. The difference is that we aren't primitive. This will be the contact between one very advanced culture and another superadvanced culture. The CISG believed if there ever was contact it'd have to be concealed, if at all possible, and that news of it would have to be broken to the public over ten or even twenty years. But that's wrong, dead wrong, Parker. We can handle the shock. Because we're ready for them to come. Oh, dear God, but we are so desperately and longingly ready for them!"

“So ready,” Parker agreed in a whisper.

For perhaps another minute they bumped and rocked along in silence, unable to speak, unable to put in words exactly what it felt like to know that mankind did not stand alone in creation.

Finally, Parker cleared his throat, checked the compass, and said, "You're right on course, Stefan. Ought to be less than a mile to Vista Valley Road. This man in Chicago that you mentioned a while ago ... Cal Sharkle. What was it he yelled to the cops this morning?"

"He insisted he'd seen aliens land and that they were hostile. He was afraid they were taking us over, that most of his neighbors had been possessed. He said the aliens tried to take control of him by strapping him in a bed and dripping themselves into his veins. Initially, I was afraid maybe he was right, that what had come down here in Nevada was a threat. But on the trip from Chicago, I had time to think about it. He was confusing his incarceration and brainwashing with the landing of the starship he'd seen. He thought it was aliens in pressurized space suits who'd kept him captive and stuck him full of needles. He witnessed the descent of a starship, and then these government men in decontamination suits came, and by the time they'd rammed all that stuff into his subconscious and weighted it down with a memory block, he was completely mixed up. No aliens apprehended him. It was his fellow men who mistreated him."

"You're saying government agents would've worn decontamination suits until it was clear whether or not the alien contact carried a risk of bacteriological contamination."

“Exactly,” Stefan said. "Some guests at the Tranquility must've approached the ship openly, so they had to be considered contaminated until evidence to the contrary was turned up. And we know some at the motel have distinctly remembered men inside decontamination suits: a few soldiers, brainwashing specialists. So poor Calvin was driven insane by a misconception arising from his inability to remember clearly."

“Must be less than half a mile to Vista Valley Road,” Parker said, studying the map in the light from the open glovecompartment door.

Snow drove relentlessly through the yellow cones of the headlights. Now and then, when the wind faltered or briefly changed the angle of its assault, shortlived forms of snow capered in arabesque dances, this way and that, but always dispersing and vanishing like ghostly performers the moment that the wind recovered its momentum and purpose.

As they started up a steep slope, Parker said softly, "Something came down. . . . And if the government knew enough to close I-80 ahead of the event, they must've been tracking the craft a long time. But I still don't see how they could

know where it would come down. I mean, the crew of the ship might've changed its course at any time."

“Unless it was crashing,” Father Wycazik said. "Maybe it was picked up by satellite observation far out in space, monitored for days or weeks. If it approached on an undeviating course that would indicate it wasn't traveling under control, there'd have been time to calculate its point of impact."

“Oh, no. No. I don't want to think it crashed,” Parker said.

“Nor do I.”

“I want to think they got here alive . . . all that way.”

When the Jeep Cherokee was halfway up the slope, the tires spun on an especially icy patch of ground, then caught hold and propelled them forward again with a jolt.

Parker said, "I want to believe Dom and the others didn't just see a ship . . . but encountered whoever came in it. Imagine. Just imagine. . ."

Father Wycazik said, "Whatever happened to them that night in July was very strange indeed, a whole lot stranger than just seeing a ship from another world."

“You mean . . . because of Brendan's and Dom's powers?”

“Yes. Something more happened, more than just contact.”

They topped the crest of the hill and started down the other side. Even through shifting curtains of the storm, Stefan saw the headlights of four vehicles on Vista Valley Road below. All four were stopped and angled every which way, and their blazing beams crisscrossed like gleaming sabers in the snowbleeding darkness.

As he drove down toward the gathering, he quickly realized that he was heading into trouble.

“Machine guns!” Parker said.

Stefan saw that two of the men below were holding submachine guns on a group of seven peoplesix adults and one childwho were lined up against the side of a Cherokee that was different only in color from the one Parker had just bought. Eight or ten other men were standing around, a substantial force, obviously military because they were all dressed in the same Arcticissue uniforms. Stefan had no doubt that these were some of the same forces involved in the closure of I-80 both tonight and eighteen months ago.

They had turned toward him and were staring uphill, surprised at being interrupted.

He wanted to swing the Jeep around, gun the engine, and flee, but although he slowed down, he knew there was no point in running. They would come after him.

Abruptly, he recognized a familiar Irish face among those lined up against the Cherokee. "That's him, Parker! That's Brendan on the end of the lineup."

“The others must be from the motel,” Parker said, leaning forward to peer anxiously through the windshield. “But I don't see Dom.”

Now that he had spotted Brendan, Father Wycazik could not have turned back even if God had opened the mountains for him and provided a highway clear to Canada, as He had parted the Red Sea for Moses. On the other hand, Stefan was unarmed. And as a priest, he would have had little use for a gun even if he had possessed one. Having neither the means nor desire to attack, yet unable to run, he let the Cherokee roll slowly down the hill as he frantically wracked his mind for some course of action that would turn the tables on the soldiers below.

The same concern had gripped Parker, for he said, "What in the devil are we going to do?"

Their dilemma was resolved by the soldiers below. To Stefan's astonishment, one of the men with a machine gun opened fire on them.

Dom watched as Jack Twist directed the flashlight beam over the chainlink fence, then up to the barbedwire overhang that thrust out above their heads. They were at that long length of Thunder Hill's perimeter that ran through an open meadow, down toward the floor of the valley. Windblown snow had stuck to large sections of the thick, interlocking steel loops of the fence, but other areas were bare, and those uncrusted links were what Jack studied most closely.

“The fence itself isn't electrified,” Jack said above the shrieking wind. "There aren't conducting wires woven through it, and the current can't be carried by the links. No way. There'd be just too damn much resistance because they're too thick and because the ends of some of them don't make tight contact with each other."

Ginger said, “Then why the warning signs?”

“Partly to spook away amateurs,” Jack said. He put the beam of the flash on the overhang again. "However, there are conducting wires strung carefully through the center of that barbedwire roll, so you'd get fried if you went over the top. We'll cut through the bottom."

Ginger held the flashlight while Dom dug into one of the canvas rucksacks, found the acetylene torch, and passed it to Jack.

After he had slipped on a pair of tinted ski goggles, Jack lit the torch and began to cut an entrance through the chainlink barrier. The fierce hissing of the burning gas was audible even above the keening, moaning wind. The intense bluewhite acetylene flame cast an eerie light that struck a thousand jewelbright glints in the snow.

They were not at a position where they risked being seen from the main entrance of the Depository, which lay over the brow of a hill that sloped up from the other side of the fence. However, Dom was sure the weird acetylene light reached high enough into the night to be spotted from the other side of that rise. If seen, it would draw guards this way. But if Jack was right, if the Depository's security was largely electronic, there would not be guards prowling the grounds tonight; and in this weather, surveillance by video cameras was pretty much ruled out, too, for their lenses would be icedover or packed with snow.

Of course, though they wanted to get inside the Depository and have a quick look around, it Would not be a tragedy if they were apprehended here. After all, being taken into custody was part of Jack's plan for focusing attention on Thunder Hill.

Dom, Ginger, and Jack were not armed. All the weapons had been for the others, in the Cherokee, because their escape was essential. If they were stopped, all was lost. Dom hoped they wouldn't need their guns, and that they were already safely in Elko.

As Jack cut a crawlthrough opening in the fence, the eldritch light of the acetylene torch increasingly captivated Dom and, suddenly, made a connection with the past, hurtling him back once more in memory:

The third jet roared over the roof of the diner, so low that he threw himself flat on the parking lot, certain the airplane was crashing on top of him, but it swooped past, leaving shattered air and a blast of engine heat in its wake; he started to get up, and a fourth jet boomed over the roof of the motel, a huge halfglimpsed shadowy shape, its running lights carving white and red wounds through the night as it thundered south and angled east, out across the barrens beyond I-80, where the thirdjet had gone, and now the first two craft, which hadpassed over at a greater altitude, were far out there, swinging back, one to the east and one to the west;, yet still the earth shook and the night was filled with a great rumble like an ongoing and neverending explosion, and he thought there must be more jets coming, even though the queer electronic oscillation that had throbbed under the roar was now getting louder and shriller and stranger and was unlike anything jets would produce; he shoved up onto his feet and turned, and there was Ginger Weiss and Jorja and Marcie, and there was Jack running over from the motel, and Ernie and Faye coming out from the office, and others, all the others, Ned and Sandy; the rumble was now like the crash of Niagara Falls combined with the basethrob pounding of a thousand timpani; the ululant electronic whistle made him feel as if the top of his head was going to be sliced off by a bandsaw; there was frostsilver light of a peculiar kind; he looked up, away from the jets that had gone past, over the roof of the diner, looked up toward the light,- he pointed and said, “The moon! The moon!” Others looked where he pointed; he was filled with a sudden terror, and he cried, “The moon! The moon!” and staggered back several steps in surprise and fear; someone screamed.. . .

“The moon!” he gasped.

He was down in the snow, driven to his knees by the shock of the memoryflash, and Ginger was kneeling in front of him, holding him by the shoulders. “Dom? Dom, are you okay?”

“Remembered,” he said numbly as the wind rushed between their faces and tore their smoking breath out of their mouths. "Something . . . the moon . . . but I didn't quite get enough."

Beyond them, having cut a crawlthrough in the chainlink fence, Jack switched off the acetylene torch. The darkness folded around them again like the wings of a great bat.

“Come on,” Jack said, turning to Dom and Ginger. "Let's go in. Quickly now."

“Can you make it?” Ginger asked Dom.

“Yeah,” he said, though there was an icy cramping in his guts and a tightness in his chest. “But all of a sudden ... I'm scared.”

“We're all scared,” she said.

"I don't mean scared of getting caught. No. It's something else. Something I almost remembered just then. And I'm . . .

shaking like a leaf, for God's sake."

Brendan gasped in disbelief when Colonel Falkirk ordered one of his men to open fire on the Jeep that was approaching Vista Valley Road from the hillside above. The madman didn't know who was in the vehicle. The soldier given the order also thought it was out of line, for he did not immediately raise his weapon. But Falkirk took a menacing step toward him and shouted: "I told you to open fire, Corporal! This is an urgent national security matter. Whoever's in that vehicle is no friend of yours, mine, or our country. You think any innocent civilians would be driving overland, sneaking around the roadblock, in a goddamn blizzard like this? Fire! Waste them!"