“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I’ve got five hundred dollars that says I’m telling the truth.” He pulled the bills out of his pocket and tossed them onto the table. “You take ’em and let me drive you out there. If there’s nothing there, you keep the five hundred.”
“Sure,” I said. “And then you drive me out somewhere and it’s bye-bye Danny.”
“What for?” he snapped back. “It’s my five hundred in the first place and you don’t look like you’ve got anything worth rolling you for.”
That was true. Damn! An offer like that had to be bogus, it just had to be. However, I was starting to run short of cash and those bills on the table were very inviting. I accepted his offer by scooping them up, proof that even if Angel had not had too much to drink, I had.
We went back to Angel’s Jeep and drove off. Not too long after that, I fell asleep in the seat. I awoke to bright sunlight and a headache. My mouth felt like it usually did after a late-night party; there seemed to be a layer of slime over my teeth and a piece of carpet over my tongue. Angel was still piloting us down the highway.
“What time is it?” I asked with a groan.
“A little after noon.”
I had been out cold for eleven hours. “You’ve been driving the whole time?” Angel nodded. “Christ, where are we going?”
“South Dakota.”
“What’s in South Dakota?”
“I told you,” he said with a trace of irritation. “You think they’re going to put a spaceship in downtown Chicago?”
“I suppose not.” Neither of us spoke for an hour or so after that. Tough guy or not, Angel had to be tired and he totally ignored me and stared ahead at the road. That suited me fine. From my perspective, the situation didn’t look promising. I was stuck in a Jeep, going seventy-five miles an hour, with a crazed biker who thought he was taking me to a spaceship somewhere in South Dakota. The prudent thing to have done would have been to give him back the five hundred dollars and beg him to let me out. What stopped me? Not the five hundred dollars, I hadn’t been broke long enough to be that mercenary. Probably playing along in someone else’s acid dream seemed to be a better bargain than going back to deal with my own reality.
Eventually, I decided, in the sunlight and sober, that I was going along for the ride. I tried to coax Angel to tell me more about himself and his imaginary pirate friends. Angel didn’t claim to be any kind of extraterrestrial himself. On the contrary, he said he was a native-born American biker. He didn’t say how he became involved with these “pirates” or, in fact, anything about them.
He did tell me that he’d left the ship’s base after convincing his officers that he knew several men who would be good recruits, although he had actually planned to desert. He was not clear about why he changed his mind; maybe the brawl at the first bar had something to do with it. Regardless, he had decided to go back, and he figured he’d better have at least one recruit to show for his time. He was also in a big hurry because he didn’t remember precisely when the ship was supposed to leave.
It was an interesting fantasy.
I wondered if that last detail was Angel’s mental escape hatch. When we arrived at our destination and there was nothing there, would he be able to preserve his dreamworld by claiming we had missed the boat? Would he expect his five hundred dollars back? To be honest, I was more interested in the latter question. Maybe it really was the money that kept me in the Jeep.
Shortly after nightfall, Angel’s iron determination ran thin and he pulled over at a rest area.
“I hate to lose time,” he said, “but I have to sleep, at least for a while. Anyway, I might miss the turnoff in the dark.”
With Angel asleep in his reclined front seat, I could easily have stolen away, but I didn’t.
Angel awoke and started us off at dawn. Before too much longer, we had left civilized America behind and entered the Dakota badlands. The terrain there is spooky, a lot of bare rock for the most part. The twisty secondary road Angel took passed through a few tiny towns and then through a couple that appeared deserted. A few miles outside the second ghost town, he turned off onto a dirt road—a track, really. I could see why he had a four-wheel drive machine; nothing else would have survived. The track led into the bare hills, twisted through a ravine and then came back out onto a flat region. Once we reached that, Angel slowed down. He was obviously looking for something. I asked what.
“Track coming out. Either it rained since I left or it’s farther than I thought.”
He was starting to convince me. I found myself staring ahead, looking for tire marks that led away from the track.
“Aha! There we are!” Angel braked sharply, almost putting me through the windshield. I looked where his arm was pointing and there, indeed, were tire tracks. They headed away from the track at right angles, in the direction of a cliff wall that sprouted vertically from the plain.
“Angel, I hate to say it, but I don’t see anything over there.”
“Not yet, Danny. Not yet.” He swung the Jeep around to parallel the other tire markings.
We bounced along for another hour, seeing nothing different. I wondered if the tire marks would lead to a canyon carved into the cliff, but the rock wall ahead of us was solid. The tracks simply stopped at the base of the cliff.
I looked at Angel. He stared mutely at the rock in front of us.
“Maybe there’s another set of tracks?” I suggested.
“No. This is it,” he shook his head. “Just don’t rush me.”
He switched on the headlamps and gunned the Jeep directly at the cliff.
I yelled, “Shit!” and threw my arms up to shield my face. But there was no crash. The Jeep roared up to the cliff and into it. Angel brought the Jeep to a stop and grinned at me.
“Well, Danny, what do you think of that?”
I was stunned. The Jeep was sitting in what appeared to be a dark tunnel. Illuminated by our lights, the floor and semicircular roof looked like polished rock. Behind us, the rock ended in a pitch-black semicircle. Ahead, the tunnel curved to the left.
But, amazing as it was, a tunnel, however strange, does not a spaceship make. I told Angel so and he laughed.
“Just hang on,” he said.
It occurred to me then, that Angel must have stumbled on some abandoned government installation. As with most fantasies, there was a grain of truth behind this one.
Angel gunned the Jeep again. When we rounded the corner, I saw a semicircle of light not more than twenty yards ahead. Two figures stepped into the opening, blocking the road. There was no question that they were armed. Scratch abandoned installation, I thought; Angel must have come across something top secret. The figures at the end of the tunnel, when we reached them, looked human enough in shape. They wore coveralls of a leathery material, gloves and boots, and their faces were hidden behind visored helmets. Their weapons, and from the way they were held I assumed they were weapons, were something strange, however. At a distance, and in silhouette, I had taken them for rifles. Up close, I could see that they were not. They were a good foot longer than a normal rifle, and what would have been the barrel appeared to be a solid-blue cylinder. At least, I saw no opening in the business end. There were some odd protuberances on the stock and the whole piece seemed to have been melted together. There was nothing that looked like a trigger. Okay, the weapons certainly looked unearthly, even if their owners did not.
That was when Angel began speaking to the guards in something that was definitely not English. In response, one of the guards jumped onto the running board and Angel drove another quarter mile, which brought us out into a narrow canyon.
The ship sat in a hollow in the cliff wall. It was a stubby cigar shape that sprouted bat wings, all in jet black. A row of markings near the front end had to be writing, but it was in no alphabet that I recognized. Light glinted off a section of glass, set in a protuberance just behind the point where the wings attached. Otherwise, there was no evidence of any windows.
Small lumps and pieces of equipment broke the lines of the hull at regular intervals and hung from those wings. I couldn’t tell what they were, but the way they were positioned made me think of weapons. That ship made my skin crawl. Unless Washington was keeping even bigger secrets than usual, Danny Troy had just met the invaders from outer space.
Chapter 3
If I don’t remember a great deal of my first impression of the base, it’s probably because I was in a state of shock. The part of my brain that was functioning was tied up trying to provide an explanation of what I was seeing—any explanation other than that Angel’s psychosis had merged with reality. The one point that gave me hope, even after seeing the ship and hearing the language, was that for little green men these people looked human. When the guard flipped his visor up after jumping onto the Jeep, I saw a face that would have been at home on the streets of New York. The one other figure I saw outside looked equally human. When I mentioned it to Angel, he corrected me slightly.
“They’re the same as us, best I can tell,” he said, “but they call themselves Srihani. They call us Srihani, too.”
A rose by any other name, I thought.
My mind wasn’t focusing too well just then, but I remember wondering how all of this had been concealed. Granted, the entire base appeared to have been skillfully dug in, but there were dirt tracks indicating traffic along the canyon floor, and there were entrances into the opposite cliff wall. The air force, I had read, had satellites that could read license plates from orbit. Sooner or later, it would seem, they would notice that something was going on in the Dakota badlands. Either that, or someone would fly over the little canyon and wonder about roads in a blocked off canyon, miles from anywhere. Even if no one was ever curious enough to investigate, how did they bring that ship up and down without lighting up every radar screen from Vandenberg to Washington? The answer to the first question, Angel told me, was a variation on the device that had fooled me into thinking the tunnel entrance was solid rock. The virtual imager was worthless against the scanning devices the Srihani had, but it was adequate to hide the base from Earth technology, as long as there were no large artifacts out on the canyon floor. Other devices kept the ship off NORAD’s screens when it took off and landed. If they landed late at night, the risk of a visual sighting would be negligible.
Angel drove the Jeep up to one of the entrances. Seen up close, it was an archway chopped into the side of the cliff, with a metal door set at the rear of the opening, where it was hidden from above. Angel got out of the Jeep there, in response to a comment from the guard, and motioned for me to do the same. He walked up to the door and put his hand on a small metal plate that was set into the rock next to the door. Quietly, the door slid open and Angel walked in. I followed him. (What else was I going to do?) Judging from the width of the track set into the stone, it would have taken an antitank missile to breach that door.
The space inside must have been made in the same way as the tunnel, a polished semicircular arch with no decoration at all. Here there was light, from a row of glowing strips that ran along the highest point of the arch. There were a pair of benches set into the wall. Angel sat down on one; I took the other.
“Well, Danny, what do you think now?” he asked.
“I think I had one drink too many in Cleveland. Is it possible to still be drunk two days after your last drink?”
“Not that I’ve ever heard.” He smiled thinly.
“All right,” I said, “I believe in your base. What happens now?”
“We wait. Just a little bit, I hope, until they let Carvalho know I’ve brought someone back with me. Carvalho is the captain, so he bosses this operation.”
“That’s the guy who set all this up?” I asked. “You know, I follow what you said about how they can hide it, but I’m amazed that anybody could set a spaceship down and dig a base into the wall of a canyon, even in South Dakota, without somebody noticing.”
Angel gave me a wink. “No, Carvalho didn’t build this,” he said, “although he’s not fond of admitting that. I don’t think even the Imperials could build a base here today without its being noticed; construction activity’s hard to hide. The real story is that it was built a lot of years ago by a freebooter who heisted a load of mining equipment and got the idea that it would be nice to have a hidey-hole completely outside the empire. I don’t know just when, but even seventy years ago it would’ve been easy to do without anyone noticing. How Carvalho found out about it, and what happened to the original outfit, I don’t know either. We use it now as a safe storage depot, you know, for repairs and supplies.”
“Angel,” I said, “you’re talking about Imperials and an empire. What empire?”
“What empire?” This time he roared with laughter. “What empire? The goddamn Galactic Empire. What’s the matter, don’t you read comic books?”
I was going to laugh too, until it hit me: Angel meant what he said. He was laughing at me.
“I told you this was a pirate outfit,” he said. “Well, you can’t have pirates unless there’s something to pirate. Right?”
I conceded the point.
“Okay. The Srihani built this great fuckin’ empire out there in space, but right now, they can’t run it for shit. You’d think that if they’re smart enough to build starships, and let me tell you some of the stuff they’ve got is unfuckingbelievable, then they would be smart enough to run a government. Wrong! They’re as fucked up as we are, maybe worse, so we do just fine.”
I probably stared at him for a minute. Then, I said, “So, if they’ve got all this ‘unfuckingbelievable’ stuff, why don’t they just take over Earth?” (That’s what would happen in a movie.)
Angel shrugged. “Nothing here they really want. Anyway, there’s just the one ship. They could mess us up pretty bad, but I don’t know about take over, and it would draw attention. The idea is to have a safe base.”
“I don’t suppose these guys speak English?” I asked.
Angel said, “I’m the only American. A couple of the officers learned a little English so they can buy supplies in the towns around here. You should see how these guys counterfeit tens and twentys.” That made me wonder about the five hundred he had given me, and I almost missed what he said next.
“Don’t worry about the language, Danny. When you get to the main ship, there’s a machine that’ll teach you. Easy as pie.”
“Main ship?”
“Christ yeah!” That gave Angel an opportunity for another laugh. “You thought that dinky boat out there was our ship?” I nodded. “Danny-boy, that’s just one of the landing boats. We’d never bring down the big ship—that would be impossible to hide. The boat brings up supplies and we can bring down parts that are better fixed in the shop here. It gives us some R & R outside too, even if this place is short of pussy.”
I was mulling over that tidbit (about the ship, not the pussy) when the guard reappeared and I lost my chance to pump Angel for more information. The guard led us around two turns of identical corridor, until we came to a door set into a wall. The door opened to the guard’s hand on the touch plate and we found ourselves in a brightly lit room. It looked like a short section of corridor that had been left unfinished at one end and then separated from the other corridor by a wall and a door. The sole furnishing was a peculiar table. It was shaped like an M or a W, depending on your orientation. We stood facing the ends of the legs. Seated at the table were three of the spacemen, one at the end of either leg and one in the middle. None of the three were wearing any weapons that I could see, nor were they wearing the leathery outer covering of the guards. I decided to take that as a good sign. Angel muttered something about not needing a “full dress set up,” but fell silent before he said enough to help me understand the situation.
The conversation began when the one sitting in the middle addressed Angel. I had hoped that Angel would translate for me as they spoke, but I was disappointed in that. Apparently, the spaceman had no interest in either talking to
me, or hearing anything I might have to say. As the conversation went along, Angel did less and less of the talking. Eventually, he seemed to be responding only briefly to questions. The longer it took, the more desperate I became to know what was being said. Unable to understand the words, I tried to read the Srihani’s face and became even more frustrated. He had pale skin and gray eyes on otherwise African features, which I found distracting, but what made it impossible was that his facial expressions didn’t seem to match the tones of his voice.
If I couldn’t read the Srihani, I could read Angel, and what I saw there wasn’t promising. Angel stood ill at ease, his face growing more sullen with each exchange. Watching him, and looking at the array of spacemen in front of us, I found myself thinking that this was a kangaroo court. Perhaps, I thought in my misery, Angel had actually disobeyed orders by bringing me there. I began to wonder what horrible means spacemen might use to dispose of unwanted guests. Even the thought of facing Judge Doroty began to seem good as the tirade went on. I was actually beginning to think good thoughts about Texas justice when the Srihani stopped abruptly.
Angel hesitated a moment before he turned to me, as though he was not quite certain that the silence would last. Finally, he said, “I told him who you are, and so forth. Basically, he says it’s cool.”
“Angel, it sounded to me like there was one hell of a lot more than that said.”
Angel just shrugged. “Most of that stuff is just between Gerangi and me. Nothing to do with you.”
“Gerangi?” I asked. “I thought the captain was named Carvalho.”
“He is, but he’s on the ship,” Angel told me. “Gerangi is the exec.”
“Oh.” I nodded sagely, as though it actually made a difference to me who was sitting there. “Angel, just tell me straight once more, this is not some weird government thing, is it?”
“No.”
I’m told you can recognize a crazy by the gleam in his eyes. Angel’s eyes looked okay to me.
My Life: An Ex-Quarterback's Adventures in the Galactic Empire Page 3