Majestic (19 page)

The being's skin was as white as chalk, his lips were thin and his nose was small. His eyes were sunken into his head, black pools. The most notable thing about him was that his head was large, almost grotesquely so.

Had I seen him on a streetcorner I would have assumed that he was a child with water on the brain.

But he was beautiful. Incredibly beautiful. His skin shone in the light, as delicate, as pure as the wings of a moth. Beside him I was big and ugly and coarse. My hand came up and I felt the wonder that a dog must feel close to the thin and glowing skin of his master.

He smelled of sulfur I thought at first, but then I noticed something else familiar about the odor.

In the terror of his death he had soiled himself. If you have never been in war that might surprise you. But I have seen situations where every man present has done it.

What was he? I cradled him and felt again that he was as light as a cloud. Had he been alive I wouldn't have been surprised to see him turn into a gas, or just disappear. I carried him through the strange central area, slipping across the curved black floor as I hurried toward the light of the familiar sky.

I pushed my way out through the shredded paper room and stepped into the welcoming familiarity of the desert.

The light made me squint, but as my eyes got used to it I was shocked to my depths by what I saw. There were people here, about a dozen of them, sitting around smoking and chatting about the disk. Hesseltine darted around among them like a nervous fly.

Cradling the body I turned away from the bland, staring faces. It seemed to me that I was protecting something sacred.

"Get them out of here!"

"They won't move! They're from the University of Pennsylvania, and - "

"We're out here in the middle of nowhere and we might as well be in a bus station." I glared at the obstinate, curious people. They seemed ugly, vicious, as if they were heartlessly intruding on my private grief. "Get out of here or I'll have you arrested!"

They stirred a little. "We're archaeologists," one of them said, "we'd like to know the age of this artifact."

The arrogance did it. "Can't you see you're not wanted here!" I was actually screaming. "This is a restricted zone! It's against the law for you to be here."

"Maybe we need a new law," one of them said.

"The hell we do, we need new people, if you're any example!" They were the enemy.

"I think our Congressmen are going to hear about this."

"Draw your gun, Hesseltine."

"Look, I - "

"Draw the goddamn weapon!"

"I haven't got a gun. Sorry. We didn't have armory orders."

I stared at the civilians. "You're moving out. Or I'm filing charges of spying with treasonous intent." This seemed to make them uneasy.

Long sun was shining on my burden, a perfect child in a silver suit, the most beautiful person I had ever seen.

If God's angels must meet death, then surely they looked like this.

The ground quaked and rolled. Then somebody was pulling at my shoulder. "Mr. Stone!"

I realized that I had fallen forward into Hesseltine's arms. The little being was between us. Hesseltine took him and laid him beneath the shadow of his craft.

Seeing this the civilians grew visibly uneasy. They began moving away in uncertain little clumps.

"My God, that thing is ugly."

I looked down at it, confused by Hesseltine's comment. My heart was full of tenderness, reproach rising in my voice. And then I saw it in the light of the setting sun.

How I could ever have viewed this thing as beautiful I did not know. It was worse than ugly, it was something from the depths of hell.

The skin was like wet, white paper. The eyes were black slits, the nose as sharp as a blade. Even in death the lips seemed to be twisted into a sneer.

I became aware that the thing had leaked fluid all over my bare arms. I wiped them, trying to get it off.

Quite abruptly, his face completely expressionless, Hesseltine leaned forward at the waist and vomited.

When he straightened up he commented only that he hadn't eaten all day.

For the first time I realized that it was late, and I had entered the disk early in the morning. "What time is it?"

"Six-twenty."

"How can that be?"

"Well, you were in there all day."

I was astonished, and then angry. "Why didn't you come in

and get me!"

His face hardened. He swallowed. There was a mirthless laugh. "I must have asked you to come out fifty times - "

"And I never answered and you - "

"You told me and told me to leave you alone! And frankly I didn't like your tone. I'm an officer and I expect the same minimal respect from civilians that I get from the enlisted men. And that stands even if you are some kind of goon from CIG."

"I didn't say a word to you. And I was only in there ten minutes at most."

He turned away. I watched him moving in the pale light, looked toward the civilians now bunched in nervous little knots, at the enlisted men leaning up against the truck that had arrived during the day.

"Hesseltine." I drew him a short distance into the desert, out of the others' hearing. "Let's try to talk coherently about this."

"Sure. Coherently. I'll make a note of that."

"Listen, we're out here alone with this thing, and I think we ought to at least try to be on the same side.

You're Air Force and I'm not and that makes me suspect. I realize that and I accept it. But you've got to work with me because I'm who the President sent down here."

"I can't be faulted for my performance, if that's what you're driving at."

How was I going to reach him? "You've performed excellently. You're a top man in a crack outfit and it shows."

"Well, good."

"Look, I don't know what the hell happened here today. It felt like I was in there ten minutes scouting around and bringing out that body. End of story."

"You didn't talk to me?"

"Not to my knowledge."

He lit a cigarette, took a long puff and faced into the sunset. "You were in there for approximately nine hours and we spoke every fifteen or twenty minutes. You refused water and food and threatened me with arrest if I entered the disk."

The young man stood with his feet apart, wearing his lightweight summer uniform, his cigarette between his fingers and an expression of hatred on his face. During his day at the door of the disk, he had come to dislike me intensely.

"It's obvious that there's a lot more going on here than we can as yet even begin to understand. We need to proceed with ultimate caution."

"I just don't want to hear any more threats from you."

"Lieutenant, just scratch them from the record. I don't remember them. As far as I'm concerned they won't happen again."

He had stopped listening to me and was watching the desert. I followed his eyes. There was a light out there, winking on and off, moving slowly closer. It seemed to drift first to the left and then the right, then disappear for a few moments, only to pop up closer.

Hesseltine seemed transfixed.

"Hesseltine?"

"Yeah."

"Shouldn't we take some steps?"

"Oh, yeah." He trotted over to the site. "Okay, guys, get ready for chow. We'll be doing guard duty two by two all night so they'll have sent a couple of vats of Java. Chow's from the officer's mess if you can handle food that good."

The light was boring down on us, glaring malevolently through the evening.

Fear literally rolled over me, transforming me in an instant from a competent if slightly uneasy CIG officer into a terrified little boy.

One moment I was standing there and the next I was racing through the underbrush. I had no clear thoughts.

I just wanted to get away from that light. I was drowning in the ocean of desert.

The light was boring into my back, I could feel it. Terrible, as if it was cutting right through to my soul. It was huge behind me now, and I could hear it snarling and grinding and roaring as it came down upon us like a runaway train from the beyond. And then it rumbled past me, an ordinary ten-ton army truck. I tried to change my wild flight into more of a trot, but everybody had seen me capering in the headlights. The men looked at me as I strode into the light of their gasoline lanterns. I tried to manage a dignified appearance.

My obvious vulnerability must have been reassuring to Hesseltine, because he seemed less inclined to hostility. "We figured you'd seen a snake," he said. "No. I thought - "

"That they were coming to get back their own? Not yet. It was only the supply wagon. Since we're obviously staying the night."

"Good thinking," I muttered.

The arrival of another truck meant that we could finally strip the area of unwanted civilians. Hesseltine's men had efficiently gotten identification from all of them. I put the sheet of names and addresses in my briefcase.

As soon as the food and field kitchen were unloaded the civilians, docile from an afternoon's barrage of threats, were put aboard the trucks for the trip back to their base camp near Lincoln.

I intend now to confess everything that happened on that hot July evening. A Wednesday night my yellow diary tells me. It says, "Stars. A late moon. Toward morning clouds racing from the south. Didn't drop below seventy-five."

That is all it says, just those few words to describe the night on which my soul was wrapped with chains.

Some were chains of love. And some were chains of death.

Chapter Fifteen

The Chronicle of Wilfred Stone

The trucks pulled out at seven-thirty, and I made a note to address the issue of FBI coverage on the civilian witnesses in my next contact with Hillenkoetter. The civilians took all the color and chatter with them when they left. The atmosphere of the camp became charged with order. Airmen talked quietly together, busying themselves with tent erection and food preparation. Soon the smell of spaghetti and meatballs filled the camp.

Once the sun set an impenetrable darkness seemed to rise up out of the land itself. But for the interior of a cave, I had never been in a place so dark. The moon was past its last quarter and not due up until after midnight, so there was nothing but starlight and the gas lanterns of the camp.

The evening star was Mercury, and I found that I could make it out quite easily on the western horizon until nearly nine o'clock. It's light was a pure, heartbreaking green. When it finally followed the sun it carried with it our last link to the day.

The disk reflected the yellow-white light of the lanterns, all except the tear in its side, which was absolutely black.

The meal was served off the back of the field kitchen by the cooks. It would have been nice to have some beer, but only ice tea and Cokes were offered. I set myself up in front of my tent and dug into my rations.

Hesseltine followed me. He pulled his camp stool over and sat down.

"Look, I'm sorry about earlier. It was a rough day."

"Forget it. Instantly. You were out there for nine hours waiting for me, for God's sake. You had every right to be angry."

We ate in silence, two men in a wavering pool of light. "We're in radio contact every half hour," he said.

I watched an enormous moth lurch into view. It was so big I thought at first that it was a bat. It seemed like something from a time of giants.

The smell of the alien bodies drifted through the camp. I lit a cigarette, defending myself. "When'll they be bagged up?"

"They are, unfortunately. But they need cold storage. Even rubberized canvas can only hold in so much stink." Hesseltine gazed at the disk. "You sure you don't know what happened in there?"

"I haven't got the faintest idea."

"You're sure you weren't knocked out? But then how the hell did you keep answering me. I mean, we talked."

"I can account for ten minutes, maybe fifteen."

Something howled out on the desert. As it died away it was answered by the low, uneasy laughter of the men. "Coyote," Hesseltine shouted.

One of the noncoms wailed the animal a reply.

"The men'd be more comfortable out here if there was more of a moon," Hesseltine said.

"All we have to do is wait it out until morning, then we'll get transport instructions from Los Alamos."

"Probably gonna be a long time to morning."

The cooks had brought a portable radio, and they set it up in the middle of the camp. At nine-fifteen a program called Musical Showcase was broadcast from KGFL in Roswell.

The men sat around smoking and talking softly while Texas Joe Turner's voice echoed into the desert night: Love, oh, careless love,

You see what careless love has done to me. . . .

As one grows older even the hardest parts of the past acquire beauty. Days I tried to forget now return to me transformed, Algiers balanced in evening light, the rains of winter sweeping old Marseilles, that black camp night with the disk and the bodies.

The last of evening slipped into the sky and Hesseltine went to his own tent. I hadn't brought my bags, not so much as a razor, so there was little I could do but lie back on my cot. When I'd set out this morning, I had no idea that I wasn't going to come back tonight.

I was still suffering from the lack of depth in our planning. What I had to do was to concentrate on my immediate objective, which was not to let the bodies and the disk out of my sight until they were safely inside a facility controlled by the Central Intelligence Group. I could only trust that Sally was preparing that facility and sending me the transport I needed to reach it with the disk.

I coughed, realizing that my mouth was dry and filthy with soot from the chain-smoking I'd been doing since I got out of the craft. In those days I don't think there were filter cigarettes. If there were, they certainly didn't work the same way they do now. I recall cigarettes that could really give you a hit. It was wonderful to smoke in complete innocence, unaware of the dangers and oblivious to the discomfort of the few nonsmokers. I don't think that we could have made it through World War Two without cigarettes. Smoking was practically the only relief.