Strangers

Alvarado said, "You're not telling us you found a way through the Depository's security? But that's not possible!"

“Have you read the file on Jack?” Bennell asked his friend. "Yes? Well, just remember his Ranger training and what he's been doing for a living these past eight years or so."

Jack shook his head. "I can't take all the credit. Yeah, I got us through the perimeter, across the grounds, and past the first door, but it was Dom who actually got us inside."

“Dom?” Bennell said, turning in surprise to the writer. "But what do you know about security systems? Unless . . .

of course! This strange damn power of yours! Since that experience in Lomack's house and since the light you generated when Cronin first arrived at the Tranquility, you must've discovered the power wasn't external. You must know now that it's actually in you."

Ginger realized that Bennell's statement had revealed that their conversations at the Tranquility had, indeed, been monitored. But it also revealed that their discussions and strategy sessions in the diner, after Jack's arrival, had not been penetrated. Otherwise Bennell would have known about the experiment last night in which both Dom and Brendan had learned that their apparently mystical experiences were, in fact, events of their own creation.

“Yes,” Dom said. "We know the power's in usme and Brendan. But where does it come from Doctor Bennell?"

“You don't know?”

"I think it has something to do with what happened to us when we went in the ship, but I can't remember. Can't you tell me?"

“No,” Miles Bennell said. "Not really. It was known that three of you went into the vessel, but we didn't know that anything ... peculiar had happened to you in there. You'd come out just as the helicopters with DERO troops and scientific observers began to arrive on the site, and no one figured you'd been in there more than a couple minutes. When you were taken into custody, you didn't tell anyone that something important had happened while you'd been aboard. I believe you said you'd just looked around. And for ease of handling, you were all sedated immediately after being arrested and conveyed back to the Tranquility. So even if you'd changed your mind and decided to tell us what happened, you didn't have a chance." Excited, the lanky scientist absentmindedly began to comb his long fingers through his curly black beard as he talked. "When the decision was made to put a lid on the event, to brainwash every civilian who'd seen it, there wasn't time for a thorough debriefing of all the witnesses. In fact, you were never brought out of sedation; you were moved directly onto the drug program that was part of your memorywipe. That's one reason I was opposed to the coverup. I felt that by brainwashing you without giving us plenty of time to debrief . . . well, it was not only unfair and cruel to you but a really stupid waste of potential sources of data."

Ginger looked toward the open portal farther along the flank of the vessel, at the top of the portable stairs. "If we go back inside now, maybe the last of the memory block will crumble."

“That might help,” Bennell agreed.

Looking up at the starship again, Jack said, "How'd you know it was coming down out there along I-80?"

“Yeah,” Dom said. “And why'd they think it should be covered up?”

“And the creatures who came in it,” Jack said.

“God, yes,” Ginger said, “where are they? What's happened to them?”

Interrupting, General Alvarado said, "Like Niles said, you'll get the answers because you deserve them. But first, there's more urgent business.“ He turned to Dom. ”I suppose if you can levitate things and create light out of thin air, there's no problem getting through an electronic security system. And if you can get in, you ought to be able to use your power to keep other people out. You think you could? Keep both the blast doors and the smaller entrance from opening until we're ready to open them?"

Dom was clearly as baffled by these questions as Ginger was. He said, “Well, maybe. I don't know.”

Bennell looked at the general. "Bob, if you keep the colonel out, that'll be like lighting the fuse. He knows no one can control VIGILANT but him. If he can't get in . . . it'll look like voodoo to him. He'll be sure we're all infected."

“Infected?” Ginger said uneasily.

Alvarado said, "The colonel is convinced that weyou, me, Miles, all of ushave been somehow possessed by alien beings, taken over like a bunch of puppets, and that we're not human any more."

“That's insane,” Jack said.

But with greater uneasiness, Ginger said, "Of course, we know we haven't been. But is there reason to believe it could've happened?"

“Initially, yes, some small reason,” Miles Bennell said, "but it didn't happen. It's not true. And we understand now that it was never a possibility. Just typical blackminded human nature . . . putting the worst interpretation on everything. I'll explain later."

Ginger was about to demand an immediate explanation, but General Alvarado said, "Please, hold the questions. We don't have much time. Right now, we believe Falkirk is returning here, having taken your friends into custody-"

“No,” Dom said, “they got away before we did. They're gone.”

“Never underestimate the colonel,” Alvarado said. "But see, the thing isif Dom could use his power to shut down the entrances and keep Falkirk out, maybe we'd have the time to find a way to blow this whole story wide open. Because if he gets in here . . . I'm afraid there's going to be bloodshed one way or another."

Movement at the front of the chamber caught Ginger's attention, and she gasped in dismay when she saw Jorja, Marcie, Brendan, and then all the others coming in through the small door in the big door.

“Too late,” Miles Bennell said. “Too late.”

At the entrance to Thunder Hill Depository, the seven witnesses and Parker Faine were taken out of the transport and grouped in the snow in front of the smaller steel door. Lieutenant Horner's machine gun discouraged flight and resistance.

Leland ordered the other DERO men back to Shenkfield, where they were to bury Stefan Wycazik in an unmarked grave and await further orders. But no orders would be forthcoming from Leland, for he would not be alive to give them. It was not necessary to sacrifice the entire company, for just he and one other man could control the prisoners and destroy the entire Depository, and it was Lieutenant Horner's bad luck to be secondincommand and have that responsibility fall upon his shoulders.

In the entrance tunnel, Leland was alarmed to see that the video cameras were not working. But then he realized that the new emergency program under which VIGILANT was operating did not require visual ID for admittance, for it would respond only to one key: the prints of the palm and all the fingers on Leland's left hand. When he put his palm to the glass panel beside the inner door, VIGILANT admitted him at once.

He and Horner took the eight prisoners down to the second level and across The Hub to the cavern where Alvarado and Bennell waited. As Leland stood back and watched them file through the mansized door in the huge wooden wall, he looked beyond them and saw the other witnessesCorvaisis, Weiss, and Twistand although he did not know how they had gotten here, he was exhilarated by the realization that, contrary to expectations, he had the whole group exactly where he wanted them.

He left Horner to follow the prisoners, while he hurried back to the elevators. He could never trust poor Tom again,

not now that the lieutenant had been alone with people who might be contaminated.

Carrying his submachine gun at the ready, Leland took a smaller elevator down to the third level. He intended to kill anyone who moved toward him. And if they rushed him in great numbers, he would turn the gun on himself. He wouldn't let- himself be changed. Through childhood and adolescence, his parents had striven to change him into one of them: a shouterandwailerinchurches, a selfflagellator, a Godterrorized speaker of tongues. He had resisted the changes his parents would have wrought in him, and he would not be changed now. They had been after him all his life, in one guise or another, and they would not get him after he had come this far with his identity and dignity intact.

The bottom level of Thunder Hill Depository was given over entirely to the storage of supplies, munitions, and explosives. Staff members all lived on the second level and most worked there as well. However, at any hour of the day, a few workers and a guard were usually on duty on the third and lowest floor. When Leland stepped out of the elevator, into the central cavern off which other chambers openedan arrangement much like that on the second floorhe was pleased to see the basement was deserted tonight. General Alvarado had obeyed Leland's orders and had sent all of his people to their quarters.

Alvarado probably thought that, by cooperating, he could convince Leland that he and all his people were unquestionably human. But Leland was not naive enough to be taken in by such a ruse. His own parents had been capable of behaving like normal human beings, toooh, yes, smiles and plenty of sweettalk, oaths of love and affectionand )*ust when you started to think they actually cared about you and wanted the best for you, they'd suddenly reveal ' themselves for what they really were. They would get out the leather strap or the PingPong paddle in which the old man had drilled holes, and the beatings would be administered in the name of God. Leland Falkirk couldn't be easily deceived by a masquerade of humanity, for at an early age he had learned to look forin fact, to expectan inhuman presence below the skin of normality.

Crossing the main cavern to the massive steel blast door that sealed off the munitions room, Leland looked nervously left and right and up into the darkness between the lights. One of his punishments, as a child, had been long imprisonments in a windowless coal cellar.

Leland pressed his left hand to the glass panel beside the door, which rolled open. Banks of lights flickered on automatically down the length of a room piled twenty feet high with anchored crates and drums and racks that contained live ammunition, mortar shells, grenades, mines, and other instruments of destruction.

At the end of the long chamber was a twentyfootsquare vault that also required a palm ID to be opened. The weapons within were of such deadly magnitude that only eight people out of the hundreds in Thunder Hill were authorized to enter, and no one of them alone could open the vault. The system required three of the eight to apply their palms to the glass panel, one after another, within one minute, before access would be granted. But this also was overseen by VIGILANT, and the computer's new program, designed by Leland, made him the sole keeper of the Depository's tactical nuclear arsenal. He put his palm to the cool glass, and fifteen seconds later the manylayered, steel MacGruder vault door swung slowly open with a hum of electric motors.

To the right of the vault door, twenty backpack nukes hung on wall pegs, missing only their primary detonators and their binary packages of explosive material. The detonators were stored in drawers along the back wall. To the left of the door, in leadlined cabinets, the binary packages lay waiting for Armageddon.

DERO training included familiarization with a variety of nuclear devices that terrorists might conceivably plant in American cities, so Leland knew how to assemble, arm, and disarm The Bomb in virtually all of its design permutations. He got the components from the cabinets, took two backpackbomb frames down from the wall pegs, and put together both weapons in only eight minutes, glancing nervously at the door as he worked. He breathed easier only when he had set the timers on both detonators for fifteen minutes and had started the clocks.

He slung his submachine gun over his shoulder, slipped each arm into the straps of a backpack nuke. Each device weighed sixtynine pounds. He heaved both off the floor and lurched out of the vault, bent like a hunchback and grunting under that apocalyptic weight.

Another man might have had to stop two or three times during the journey back through the immense munitions room. Any other man might have been forced to pause, put the bombs down, catch his breath, and stretch his muscles before going on. But not Leland Falkirk. That dead weight wrenched his back and pulled at his shoulders and made his arms ache, but he grew happier as the pain intensified.

In the main cavern into which the elevators opened, he put one of the backpack nukes on the center of the floor. He looked around at the solid rock walls and up at the granite ceiling with a feeling of satisfaction. If there were any faults at all in the rock strataand surely there werethe place would cave in, bringing everything above down with it. But even if the mighty stone chambers could contain and withstand the blast, no one who tried to take refuge on this level would survive. Not even an alien lifeform of great adaptability could reconstitute itself after being vapotized in a nuclear heat and reduced to random atoms.

Nuclear pain.

He would not be able to survive it, but he would prove that he had the nerve to contemplate and endure it. Only a fraction of a second of blinding agony. Not bad, actually. In fact, not as bad as vigorous and drawnout beatings with a leather strap or with a PingPong paddle that had been drilled full of holes to increase the sting.

Still holding the second nuke by its straps, Leland smiled down at the changing numbers on the first bomb's digitaldisplay clock, which was already counting toward Ragnarok. The nicest thing about backpack nukes was that, once armed, they could not be disarmed. He did not have to worry that someone could undo his work.

He entered the elevator and rode up to the second level.

Carrying Marcie, Jorja crossed directly to Jack Twist and stood beside him, looking up at the ship cradled on trestles. Although the collapse of her memory block and the inrushing recollections had more or less prepared her for this sight, she was overcome with an awe as powerful as that which had seized her in the troop transport, when the astounding truth had first been revealed. She reached out to touch the mottled hull, and a shiverpart fear, part wonder, part delightcoursed through her when her fingertips made contact with the scorched and abraded metal.

Whether following her mother's lead or acting on an impulse of her own, Marcie reached forward, too. When her small tentative hand pressed against the hull, she said, “The moon. The moon.”

“Yes,” Jorja said immediately. "Yes, honey. This is what you saw come down. Remember? It wasn't the moon falling. It was this, glowing white like the moon, then red, then amber."

“Moon,” the child said softly, sliding her tiny hand back and forth across the flank of the vessel, as if she were trying to clean off the mottled film of age and tribulation and, thereby, also clean off the clouded surface of her own memory. “Moon fell down.”