The Forge of God

by Greg Bear

  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.

  18

  Lieutenant Colonel Albert Rogers took the radio message in hand and climbed out of the rear door of the communications trailer, down the corrugated metal steps to the crunchy white sand. He didn't really want to think about the implications of his orders; thinking on such an esoteric level would do him no good whatsoever. The Guest was dead; Arthur Gordon had ordered his team to investigate the interior of the Furnace. Rogers would not allow anyone but himself to do it.

  He had been planning for such a mission. He had drawn incomplete diagrams of the bogey's interior in a small notebook, little more than suppositions based on length, height, width, and the angle and length of the tube running through solid rock. Climbing the tube would present no problem—even where it angled straight up, he could take it like a rock climber in a chimney, back against one side, legs jackknifed and feet pressed against the other, inching his way up. He would carry a miniature digital video recorder, smaller than the palm of his hand, and a helmet-mounted finger-sized video camera. A Hasselblad for high-resolution pictures and a smaller, lighter automatic film-packed 35mm Leica completed his equipment. He doubted the investigation would take more than a day. There was, of course, the possibility that the bogey was honeycombed with interior spaces. Somehow, he doubted that.

  As a sergeant and corporal brought the supplies he requested from the stores trailer, he drew up his itinerary and discussed emergency measures with his second-in-command, Major Peter Keller. Rogers then donned the chest pack and heavy climbing boots, coiled three lengths of rope neatly and hung them from his belt, and walked around the south side of the bogey.

  He checked his watch and set its timer. It was six A.M. The desert was still wrapped in gray dawn, high cirrus stretching from horizon to horizon in a thin layer. The desert smelled of clean cold air, a hint of dry creosote bush.

  "Give me a lift," Rogers instructed Keller. The major meshed the fingers of both hands to make a stirrup and Rogers stepped into the stirrup with his left foot. With a heave-ho, Keller lifted him into the tunnel. Rogers lay on his back in the angled shaft for a moment, staring at the first bend, about forty feet into the-rock. "Okay," he said, punching the button on his watch for the timer to start. "I'm off."

  They had decided against unwinding a telephone wire and communicating directly with him as he climbed. The video recorder was equipped with a small lapel mike, into which he would make oral observations; the video camera would make an adequate record of what he saw from moment to moment. If time and opportunity presented, he would take pictures with the other cameras.

  "Good luck, sir," Keller called as he began his low-angle ascent up the tunnel.

  "The hell with that," Rogers grunted under his breath. The first thirty feet were easy, a wriggling crawl. At the bend, he paused to shine a light up into the darkness. The tunnel angled straight up after the first thirty feet of incline. He noted this aloud for the record, then looked down over his stomach and legs at the cameo of Keller's face. Keller made an okay sign with circled thumb and index finger. Rogers blinked his light twice.

  "I'm going into the belly of an alien spaceship," he told himself silently, grimacing fiercely to limber his tense jaw and face muscles. "I'm crawling up into an unknown. That's it. Don't be afraid." And he wasn't—a kind of energetic calm, almost a high, came over him.

  He thought of his wife and four-year-old daughter living in Barstow, and a variety of scenarios stacked up behind their faces. Heroic dead father and lifetime benefits. Actually, he wasn't clear on the benefits. He should be. He vowed to check that out immediately when he got back. Much better thought: heroic live father and retirement at twenty years and going into some business, defense contract consultant maybe, though he had never thought of that before. First man inside an alien spaceship. Real estate was more likely. Not in Barstow, however. San Diego, maybe, though being ex-Navy or ex-Marine would be more help there.

  He began to climb, rubber-soled boots grabbing the rock and hands bracing against the opposite wall. A foot at a time. No damaging the spacecraft; not even a scratch. He heaved himself up with a grunt, again locking his boots and hands against the rock. Smooth surface, nothing like lava. Featureless and gray, amorphous. Astronauts had been trained in geology when they landed on the moon. No need to train an Army colonel. Besides, this wasn't a natural place; what good would geology do?

  At least it wasn't slippery.

  He had climbed fifteen feet when he paused and shined his light forward. Another bend above him, beyond which they had not probed with the pole-mounted cameras. Truly unknown. Rogers conjured up the few science fiction movies he had seen. He had never been a big fan of science fiction movies. Most of his buddies had enjoyed Aliens when they watched it on a VCR just out of boot camp. He tried to forget about that one.

  The Guest was dead. What if that made the others angry? What if they knew, somehow, and were waiting for him?

  He was still calm, still slightly high, eyes wide, pupils dilated in the dark, face moist with exertion. Up, up, and then over the lip of the bend. He rested in the nearly level tunnel beyond the bend, shining his light into impenetrable darkness. Pulling out his notebook, he worked quickly to figure angles and distances. He was about fifteen or twenty feet from the outer surface. Shining his light on a notebook page with the chart of the interior, he drew in the level tunnel. His path resembled a dogleg tire iron, thirty feet into the mound at an upward angle, then straight up twenty feet or so, and now horizontally into the interi
or.

  Silence. No sounds of machinery, no voices, no air moving. Just his own breathing. When he had rested a few minutes, he crawled, flashlight strapped to one wrist sweeping the tunnel with every motion.

  Ninety feet ahead, the tunnel opened into a larger space. He did not hesitate. Eager to be out of the confinement, Rogers scrambled forward and grabbed the lip of the tunnel with both hands, pulling his head out. He played the light across the enclosed volume.

  "I'm in a cylindrical chamber," he said aloud, "about thirty feet long and twenty across. I'm probably in the middle of the mound"—he referred to his sketch— "below the peak maybe sixty or eighty feet. The walls are shiny, like enamel or plastic or glass. Dark gray, with a bluish tint. The tunnel opens near the rear of the cylinder, and at the front"—he consulted his chart—"pointing northwest, there is another space, even larger. No sign of quarters or inhabitants. No activity."

  He stood up in the cylinder, testing the surface with his boots. There was still enough traction to walk easily. "I'm going forward."

  Rogers walked to the edge of the cylinder, keeping his light shined ahead. Then he opened his chest pack and pulled out two superbright torches. Holding them away from his eyes, he flicked the switches on both.

  Mouth wide open, Rogers surveyed a cavern at least a hundred feet long and eighty feet high. The cylindrical chamber was squarely in the center of one end, placing him about twenty feet above the bottom. "It's full of shiny facets, like a gem," he said. "More like glass, not mirrors but shiny. Not just facets, either, but structures— beams, supports, braces. It's like a cathedral inside here, but made of blue-gray glass." He took several dozen pictures with the Hasselblad, then lowered the camera arid just stared, trying to impress the memory and make sense out of what he was seeing.

  From the end of the cylinder to the ornate gleaming surface below was a drop of at least thirty feet. No rappelling down; there was nothing to tie the rope onto, and he would not even try to hammer a piton into place.

  "I can't go any farther," he said. "There's nothing moving. No place I'd call living quarters. No machinery visible, even. And no lights. I'm going to turn off the torches and see if anything glows afterward." He plunged himself into complete darkness. For a moment, his throat constricted and he coughed, the sound breaking into a chatter of echoes.

  "I don't see anything," he said after a few minutes of darkness. "I'm going to turn the torches on to take more pictures." He reached for the switches and then paused, squinting. Directly ahead, burning dimly and steadily, was a tiny red light, no more than a star in the vastness. "Wait. I don't know if the video can pick that up. It's very weak. Just a single red light, like a pinprick."

  He watched the gleam for several more minutes. All motions it made were easily explained by optical illusion; it changed neither in position nor brightness. "I don't think the ship is dead. It's just waiting." Then he shook his head. "But maybe I'm jumping to conclusions, just because of one little red light." Turning on his wrist flashlight, he mounted a telephoto lens on the Hasselblad and set the camera to a long exposure, then rested it on the lip of the cylinder, facing the red light. With a remote button, he opened the camera lens. When the exposure was complete, he reset for even longer and shot another. Then he turned on the torches and sat down to fill his memory with as much detail as he could. "It's still silent," he said.

  After fifteen minutes, he got to his feet and instinctively brushed off his pants. "All right. I'm going back."

  To his enormous relief, nothing interfered with his return journey.

  19

  October 10

  Edward Shaw learned of the Guest's death two days later, when they all received a visit from Colonel Phan. After a ten-minute warning, in which time Edward quickly dressed, the curtains were drawn and all four of them faced the small, muscular brown man in his pin-neat blue uniform, standing in the central laboratory.

  "How long have we got, Doc?" Minelli asked. He had been getting more and more flippant, less predictable, as the days passed. He talked often of the President and how they would soon be "outta this dump." His speech more and more resembled a comic imitation of James Cagney. Minelli had never reacted well to overbearing authority. Edward had heard of a time, years before Minelli came to Austin, when he had been jailed on a minor dope charge, and had bloodied his face against a jailhouse door. Edward worried about him.

  "You are all healthy, with no signs of contamination or illness," Phan said. "I plan no more tests for you. You have heard from your duty officer, I believe, that the Guest is dead. I have finished the first level of autopsy, and found no microbiologicals anywhere within its system. It appears to have been a completely sterile creature. This is good news for you."

  "No bugs, m'lady," Minelli said. Edward winced.

  "I have recommended that you be released," Phan said, staring levelly at each in turn. "Though I do not know when they will do so. As the President said, there are security concerns."

  Edward saw Stella Morgan through her window and smiled at her. She did not return the smile; perhaps the fight was wrong and she did not see him; perhaps she was feeling as depressed as Reslaw, who seldom said anything now.

  The combination of free interaction through the intercom and separate confinement seemed to undermine the camaraderie Edward thought was typical of prison camp inmates. They were not being abused. They had nothing really solid to fight against. Their confinement, until now at least, had not been senseless. Consequently, they were not "drawing together" as Edward thought they might. Then again, he had never before been held in long-term detention. Maybe his expectations were simply naive.

  "We are preparing papers that you will sign, promising not to speak of these last few days—"

  "I won't sign anything like that," Minelli said. "There aren't any best-sellers if I sign that. No agents, no Hollywood."

  "Please," Phan said patiently.

  "What about Australia?" Edward asked. "Are you talking with them?"

  "Conferences begin today in Washington," Phan said.

  "Why the wait? Why didn't everybody start talking weeks ago?"

  Phan did not answer. "Personally, I hope all is made public soon," he said.

  Edward tried to control a building anger. "Why can't we get together? Take us out of here and put us in a BOQ or something."

  "Barbecue?" Minelli snorted.

  "Bachelor officer's quarters," Edward explained, his lower lip trembling. He was beginning to cry. He checked that response immediately, putting on an air of indignant rationality. "Really. This is hell. We feel like we're in jail."

  "Worse. We can't make zip guns or knives," Minelli said. "Bottom of the world, Ma!"

  Phan regarded Minelli with an expression between irritation and concern. "That is all I have to tell you now. Please do not worry. I am sure you will be compensated. In the meantime, we have new infodisks."

  "Goody," Minelli said. As Phan turned away, he shouted, "Wait! I'm not feeling well. Really. Something's wrong."

  "What is it?" Phan asked, gesturing to a watch supervisor behind him.

  "In my head. Tell them, Reslaw."

  "Minelli's been disturbed recently," Reslaw said slowly. "I'm not doing too well, myself. He doesn't sound good. He's different."

  "I'm different," Minelli concurred. Then he began to weep. "Goddammit, just put us back out where the rocks are. Let us go in our truck. I'll sign anything. Really. Please."

  Phan glanced at them all, then turned and left abruptly. The curtains hummed back into place. Edward's drawer opened and he removed a newspaper and the new packet of infodisks. Hungrily, he read yesterday morning's headline.

  "Christ," he muttered. "They know about the President. Stella!" He punched her number on the intercom. "Stella, they know the President came out here!"

  "I'm reading," she said.

  "Do you think your mother got through?"

  "I don't know, really."

  "We can hope," Edward said.

&
nbsp; Minelli was still weeping.

  20

  Hicks lay back against a pillow in the Lincoln Bedroom, a foot-high stack of reports on the round draped night-stand beside him, a small glass-globed lamp glowing softly above the reports. The late Empire-period pendulum clock on the marble mantelpiece ticked softly, steadily. The large, high-ceilinged room looked haunted, in a cozy sort of way; haunted by history, by association. This had been Abraham Lincoln's Cabinet room originally; here he had signed the Emancipation Proclamation.

  He shook his head. "I'm crazy," he said. "I'm not here. I'm imagining all of it." For a moment, he hoped desperately that was true; that he was dreaming in the hotel room at the Inter-Continental, and that he would soon be promoting his novel for six minutes or less on another radio show, before another young announcer . . .

  On the other hand, what was so undesirable about being in the White House in Washington, D.C., personally chosen by the President of the United States to advise him on the biggest event in human history? "The man doesn't listen," he murmured.

  Hicks picked up the topmost report on the stack, a thick sheaf of photocopied papers on the Death Valley site, the Guest, and all that was known about the Great Victoria Desert site.

  The Guest's interim autopsy report was third in the stack. Using a talent acquired across years of research, he skimmed the first two papers quickly, stopping only for essential details. The reports, not unexpectedly, were "safe"—hedged through and through with ambiguous language, craftily defused theories, prompt second-guessing. Only the autopsy report showed promise of being substantive.