The Forge of God (3 page)

"Did you touch it?" Minelli asked.

"Hell no."

Edward kneeled before it. There was a definite logic to the thing; a kind of head two feet long and shaped rather like a bishop's miter, or a flattened artillery shell, point down in the sand; a knobby pair of shoulder blades behind the fan-crest of the miter; short thin trunk and twisted legs in squat position behind that. Stubby six-digit feet or hands on the ends of the limbs.

Not a plant.

"Is it a corpse, maybe?" Minelli asked. "Wearing something, like a dog, you know, covered with clothes."

"No," Edward said. He couldn't take his eyes away from the thing. He reached out to touch it, then reconsidered and slowly withdrew his fingers.

Reslaw climbed down from the boulder. "Scared me so bad I jumped," he explained.

"Jesus Christ," Minelli said. "What do we do?"

The snout of the miter lifted from the sand and three glassy eyes the color of fine old sherry emerged. The shock was so great that none of the three moved. Edward finally took a step back, almost reluctantly. The eyes in the miter-head followed him, then sank away again, and the head nodded back into the sand. A sound issued from the thing, muffled and indistinct.

"I think we should go," Reslaw said.

"It's sick," Minelli said.

Edward looked for footprints, hidden strings, signs of a prank. He was already convinced this was no prank, but it was best to be sure before committing oneself to a ridiculous hypothesis.

Another muffled noise.

"It's saying something," Reslaw said.

"Or trying to," Edward added.

"It isn't really ugly, is it?" Minelli asked. "It's kind of pretty."

Edward hunkered down and approached the thing again, edging forward one booted foot at a time.

The thing lifted its head and said very clearly, "I am sorry, but there is bad news."

"What?" Edward jerked, his voice cracking.

"God almighty," Reslaw cried.

"I am sorry, but there is bad news."

"Are you sick?" Edward asked.

"There is bad news," it repeated.

"Can we help you?"

"Night. Bring night." The voice had the whispering quality of wind-blown leaves, not unpleasant by itself, but chilling in context. A waft of iodine smell made Edward recoil, lips curled back.

"It's morning," Edward said. "Won't be night for…"

"Shade," Minelli said, his face expressing intense concern. "It wants to be in shade."

"I'll get the tent," Reslaw said. He jumped down from the boulder and ran back to the camp. Minelli and Edward stared at each other, then at the thing canted over in the sand.

"We should get the hell out of here," Minelli said.

"We'll stay," Edward said.

"Right." Minelli's expression changed from concern to puzzled curiosity. He might have been staring at a museum specimen in a bottle. "This is really, wonderfully ridiculous."

"Bring night," the thing pleaded.

Shoshone seemed little more than a truck stop on the highway, a café and the rock shop, a post office and grocery store. Off the highway, however, a gravel road curved past a number of tree-shaded bungalows and a sprawling modern one-story house, then ran arrow-straight between venerable tamarisk trees and by a four-acre swamp to a hot-spring-fed pool and trailer court. The small town was home to some three hundred permanent residents, and at the peak of the tourist season—late September through early May—hosted an additional three hundred snowbirds and backpackers and the occasional team of geologists. Shoshone called itself the gateway to Death Valley, between Baker to the south and Furnace Creek to the north. To the east, across the Mojave, the Resting Spring, Nopah and Spring ranges, and the Nevada state line, was Las Vegas, the closest major city.

Reslaw, Minelli, and Edward brought the miter-headed creature into Shoshone after joining California state highway 127 some fifteen miles north of the town. It lay under moistened towels in the back of their Land Cruiser on the spread fabric of the tent, where once again it seemed dead.

"We should just go into Las Vegas," Minelli said. He shared a front seat with Reslaw. Edward drove.

"I don't think it would last," Edward said.

"How can we find help for it here?"

"Well, if it really
is
dead, there's a big meat locker in that grocery."

"It doesn't look any more dead than before it spoke," Reslaw said, glancing back over the seat at the still form. It had four limbs, two on each side, but whether it stood or walked on all four, none of them knew.

"We've touched it," Minelli said mournfully.

"Shut up," Edward said.

"That cinder cone's a spaceship, or a spaceship is buried underneath, obviously." Minelli blurted.

"Nothing's obvious," Reslaw said calmly.

"I saw that in
It Came From Outer Space.
"

"Does that look like a big eye floating on a tentacle?" Edward asked. He had seen the movie, too. Its memory did not reassure him.

"Meat locker," Minelli responded, his hands trembling.

"There's a phone. We can call ambulances in Las Vegas, or a helicopter. Maybe we can call Edwards or Goldstone and get the authorities out here," Edward said, extending his actions.

"What'll we tell them?" Reslaw asked. "They won't believe the truth."

"I'm thinking," Edward said.

"Maybe we saw a jet plane go down," Reslaw suggested.

Edward squinted dubiously.

"It spoke English," Minelli commented, nodding.

None of them had mentioned that point in the hour and a half since they had hauled the creature away from the base of the cinder cone.

"Hell," Edward said, "it's been listening to us out there in space. Reruns of
I Love Lucy.
"

"Then why didn't it say 'Hey, Ricky!'?" Minelli asked, covering his fear with a manic grin.

Bad news. Like a mole that shouldn't be there.

Edward pulled the truck into the service station, its heavy-duty tires tripping the service bell. A deeply tanned teenage boy in jeans bleached to nondescript pale gray and a Def Leppard T-shirt walked out of the garage attached to one side of the grocery and approached the Land Cruiser. Edward warned him back with his hands. "We need to use a phone," he said.

"Pay phone right there," the boy drawled suspiciously.

"Anybody got quarters?" Edward asked. Nobody did. "We need to use the store phone. This is an emergency."

The boy saw the towel-shrouded shape through the Land Cruiser windows. "Somebody hurt?" he asked curiously.

"Stay back," Minelli warned.

"Shut up, Minelli," Reslaw whispered through gritted teeth.

"Yeah."

"Dead?" the boy asked, one cheek jumping with a nervous tic.

Edward shrugged and entered the grocery. There, a short and very wide woman clerk in a muumuu adamantly refused to let him use the phone. "Look," he explained. "I'll pay for it with my credit card, my phone card," he said.

"Shoa me the cahd," she said.

A tall, slender, attractive black-haired woman came in, dressed in unfaded jeans and a white silk blouse. "What's wrong, Esther?" she asked.

"Man's givin' us a royal payin," Esther said. "Woan use the pay phone ahtside, but sayes he's gaht a credit cahd."

"Jesus, thanks, you're right," Edward said, glancing between them. "I'll use my card on the pay phone."

"Is it an emergency?" the black-haired woman asked.

"Yeah," Edward said.

"Well, go ahead and use the store phone."

Esther glared at her resentfully. Edward sidled behind the counter, the clerk moving deftly out of his way, and punched a button for an open line. Then he paused.

"Hospital?" the black-haired woman asked.

Edward shook his head, then nodded. "I don't know," he said. "Maybe the Air Force."

"You've seen an airplane go down?" the woman asked.

"Yeah," Edward said, for the sake of simplicity.

The woman gave him an emergency hospital number and suggested he use directory assistance for the Air Force. But he did not dial the emergency number first. He dithered, glancing nervously around the store, wondering why he hadn't planned a clear course of action earlier.

Goldstone, or Edwards, or maybe even Fort Irwin?

He asked directory assistance for the number of the base commander at Edwards. As the phone rang, Edward hunted for an excuse. Reslaw was right: telling the truth would get them nowhere.

"General Frohlich's office, Lieutenant Blunt speaking."

"Lieutenant, my name is Edward Shaw." He tried to be as smooth and calm as a television reporter. "I and two of my friends—colleagues—have seen a jet go down about twenty miles north of Shoshone, which is where I'm calling from."

The lieutenant became very interested immediately, and asked for details.

"I don't know what kind of jet," Edward continued, unable to keep a slight quiver from his voice. "It didn't look like any I'm familiar with, except maybe… Well, one of us thinks it looked like a MiG we've seen in
AvWeek.
"

"A MiG?" The lieutenant's tone became more skeptical. Edward's culpable squint intensified. "Did you actually see the plane go down?"

"Yessir, and the wreckage. I don't read Russian… But I think there were Cyrillic markings."

"Are you positive about this? Please give me your name and proof of identity."

Edward gave the lieutenant his name and the numbers on his license plate, driver's license, and, for good measure, his MasterCard. "We think we know where the pilot is, but we didn't find him."

"The pilot is alive?"

"He was dangling on the end of a chute, Lieutenant. He seemed alive, but he went down in some rocks."

"Where are you calling from?"

"Shoshone. The… I don't know the name of the store."

"Charles Morgan Company Market," the black-haired woman said.

Edward repeated the name. "The town's grocery store."

"Can you lead us to where you saw the aircraft?" the lieutenant asked.

"Yessir."

"And you realize the penalty for giving false information about an emergency of this sort?"

"Yessir, I do."

Both women regarded him with wide eyes.

"A MiG?" the slim, black-haired woman asked after he hung up. She sounded incredulous.

"Listen," Edward said. "I lied to them. But I'm not going to lie to you. We might need your meat locker."

Esther looked as if she might faint. "What's happenin' heah?" she asked. "Stella? What's this awl abauht?" Her drawl had thickened and her face was sweaty and pasty.

"Just you," Edward said to Stella.

She examined him shrewdly and pointed to his belt and rock hammer, still slung in its leather holder. "You're a rock hound?"

"A geologist," he said.

"Where?"

"University of Texas," he said.

"Do you know Harvey Bridge from…"

"U.C. Davis. Sure."

"He comes here in the winter…" She seemed markedly less skeptical. "Esther, go get the sheriff. He's at the café talking to Ed."

"I don't think we should let everybody in on this," Edward suggested.
Bad feeling.

"Not even the sheriff?"

He glanced at the ceiling. "I don't know…"

"Okay, then, Esther, just go home. If you don't hear from me in a half an hour, go get the sheriff and give him this man's description." She nodded at Edward.

"You'll be okay heah?" Esther asked, short thick fingers rapping delicately on the counter.

"I'll be fine. Go home."

The store had only one customer, a young kid looking at the paperback and magazine rack. With both Stella and Edward staring at him, he soon moved out through the door, shrugging his shoulders and rubbing his neck.

"Now, what's going on?" Stella asked.

Edward instructed Minelli to drive the Land Cruiser around to the back of the store. He motioned for Stella to follow him through the rear door. "We'll need a cool dark place," he told her as they waited.

"I'd like to know what's happening," she repeated, her jaw firm, head inclined slightly to one side. The way she stood, feet planted solidly on the linoleum and hands on her hips, told Edward as plain as words she would stand for no more evasion.

"There's a new cinder cone out there," he said. Minelli parked the vehicle near the door. Talking rapidly to keep his story from crashing into splinters, Edward opened the Land Cruiser's back gate, pulling aside the tent and moist towels. "I mean, not fresh… Just new. Not on any charts. It shouldn't be there. We found this next to it."

The miter-head lifted slightly, and the three sherry-colored eyes emerged to stare at the three of them. Reslaw stood by the store's far corner, keeping a lookout for gawkers.

To her credit, Stella did not scream or even grow pale. She actually leaned in closer. "It's not a fake," she said, as quickly convinced as he had been.

"No, ma'am."

"Poor thing… What is it?"

Edward suggested she stand back. They unloaded it and carried it through the delivery door into the refrigerated meat locker.

PERSPECTIVE

East Coast News Network interview with Terence Jacobi, lead singer for the Hardwires, September 30, 1996:

ECNN: Mr. Jacobi, your group's music has consistently preached—so to speak—the coming of the Apocalypse, from a rather radical Christian perspective. With two songs in the Top 40 and three records totaling ten million sales, you've obviously hit a nerve with the younger generation. How do you explain your musics popularity?

Jacobi (
Laughing, then snorting and blowing his nose
): Everybody knows, between the ages of fourteen and twenty-two, you've got only two best friends: your left hand and Christ. The whole world's out to get you. Maybe if the world went away, if God wiped the slate clean, we could get on with just being ourselves. God's a righteous God. He will send his angels to Earth to warn us. We believe that, and it shows in our music.

October 3

Harry Feinman stood near the back of the boat untangling line from the spindle of his reel. Arthur let the boat drift with the slow-moving water. He dropped anchor a dozen yards south of the big leaning pine that marked the deep, watery hollow where, it was rumored, fishermen had pulled in so many big ones the past few years. Marty played with the minnows in the bait bucket and opened the cardboard containers full of dirt and worms. The sun was a dazzle outlined by thin high clouds; the air smelled of the river, a fresh, pungent greenness, and of coolness, of the early fall. In the calm backwater of the hollow, orange and brown leaves had collected in a flat, undulating clump.