‘For a moment there I thought he was Korean, but then he seemed a bit different… Hawaii… should have known.’ Vale shrugged and rolled his eyes, grinning at Wilson and turned away, looking over the other boats, the pristine white walls of the marina, the shimmering haze above the horizon where the sky met the sea. ‘This is some boat,’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ Wilson said.
‘If you meant to impress me, you’ve succeeded.’ ‘Good,’ Wilson said. ‘We like to please. It’s all part of the service.’
The waiter returned with two drinks on a tray while Fallaci, who had been standing near the cabin, disappeared through the door. Wilson and Vale took their drinks, the waiter bowed and departed, then Vale leaned against the brass railing and stared around him with interest. The boat had a large crew, all dressed in white, all busy at their various tasks, working methodically, silently. There was something strange about them. Vale didn’t know what it was. They were all small and slim, dark-skinned, with narrow eyes, and Vale found himself refusing to accept that they came from Hawaii. He watched them with interest. They made him feel a bit unreal. They never glanced at one another, never spoke, and they kept their heads down. Vale shivered a little. He felt decidedly odd. He drank some rum and grinned at Wilson, still not knowing who he was, then the boat’s engine rumbled and the boat moved slowly out of the harbour.
‘Where are we going?’ Vale asked.
Wilson shrugged. ‘Nowhere special. We’ll just go out a short distance, maybe ten or fifteen miles, and then anchor. We’ll have lunch and then you can study all the documentation.’
The boat cruised out of the harbour, past white-painted buildings and other boats, the palmettos casting shadows on the people wandering lazily back and forth. The marina gradually fell behind them, revealing the immense sweep of the coastline, yellow beaches dominated by condominiums and baroque hotels. Eventually there was only the sea, green and blue, reflecting sunlight, waves rippling in pearly lines around the boat and streaming out in their wake.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it?’ Wilson said.
‘Yes, it is,’ Vale responded. ‘But I’ve always felt slightly weird out here. You can’t ignore all the stories.’
‘Of course… the Bermuda Triangle.’
‘You sound sceptical,’ Vale said.
‘Oh, I’m not completely sceptical. When so many boats and planes disappear, one can’t help being curious.’
‘Right,’ Vale said. ‘You simply can’t ignore the facts. Sinking boats you can accept. Crashing planes you accept. But other events have never been explained, and they make your flesh creep. What I mean is, I’m a scientist. I try not to believe in magic. But cases like that… I don’t know… We still don’t have the answers.’
‘What about UFOs?’ Wilson asked.
‘What about them, Mr McKinley? I won’t buy it that UFOs are the problem, here or anywhere else. I draw the line at flying saucers. The proof for UFOs is negligible. I’ll believe they exist when I see one… and I don’t think I’ll see one.’
‘Really?’ Wilson said, sipping his wine and smiling thinly, gazing over the railing at the sea, at the cloudy horizon. ‘I thought you might have seen one over the Cheyenne Mountain Complex.’
‘Why should I see one there?’
‘Oh, I don’t know…’ Wilson gazed at the clouds on the horizon, coming closer, expanding… ‘It’s just that I’d heard UFOs were frequently observed over scientific and military establishments. Given that, I thought they might have been seen over the Aerospace Defense Command.’
‘Balls,’ Vale said. ‘Anyway, the Cheyenne Mountain Complex has been built to survive a nuclear war – no matter how destructive – and as such can’t be seen from the air. In fact, that complex is a complete underground city, existing deep inside the mountain, resting on giant shock absorbers, webbed with miles of underground tunnels, and completely sealed off from the outer world. Believe me, McKinley, when you work in that place you’re not able to see anything in the sky – you don’t see a damned thing. Our job is to track spy satellites. Those are all we’ve ever tracked. Neither the radar nor the telescopes have ever picked up anything else. UFOs just don’t exist.’
Wilson smiled and sipped his wine, let the cool breeze fan his face, kept his gaze fixed on the sea, on the clouds near the horizon, that horizon which forever receded and led out to Bermuda. This boat would not reach Bermuda. It would drop anchor and then wait. The good professor, in an intoxicated dream, would find that facts have no credence.
‘I don’t believe it,’ Vale said.
‘What?’ Wilson asked.
‘Spy satellites being sold in the marketplace. That’s just fucking incredible.’
Wilson didn’t respond. He watched the land disappearing. The sea was calm and the sky was a silvery-blue sheet, with white clouds drifting under it. Professor Vale continued talking. He seemed unsteady on his feet. He sipped his drink and repeatedly blinked as he glanced vaguely around him. Wilson listened attentively. The professor was talking about pulse-power weapons. The boat stopped moving and the anchor was lowered and the professor kept talking. The crew took up their positions. Fallaci returned to the deck. The sea washed around the boat, rolled away to the horizon, and Wilson smiled when he saw a dark mass spreading out just below them. Professor Vale kept talking. He suddenly seemed very drunk. Jets of steam were rising from the sea and forming into a cloud. This cloud surrounded the boat.
‘We didn’t invent the pulse-power beam. The Russians didn’t invent it either. The British invented it eighteen years ago, but kept it under tight wraps. Now we’re expanding its potential. We’re running a race with the Russians. We’re utilizing it as a defensive weapon, for communications and reconnaissance, and we’re making quantum leaps in our technology, quietly forging ahead. These laser beams are amazing. Their possibilities are limitless. They can knock out spy satellites, zero in on flying rockets, and even show up the number plates of cars from two hundred miles up – they can pinpoint just about anything. Think of what that means, McKinley. The Cold War has been superseded. What we now have is a Balance of Terror in a post-nuclear age. People don’t know what’s happening.’
Wilson didn’t reply. The silence rang in Vale’s ears. He shook his head and saw the shifting of the clouds, a silvery haze all around him. He didn’t know what was happening. He felt very peculiar. Abruptly, sweeping away his drunken ebullience, he felt a fierce, senseless dread. What the hell was going on? He felt sick and disorientated. His throat went dry and his eyes went out of focus and the deck seemed to tilt. Vale dropped his glass. He watched it falling to the sea. It took a long time going down, turning over, reflecting sunlight, the light flashing off it in dazzling striations of incredible beauty. He didn’t see it strike the water. The hot air was beating at him. He looked sideways at McKinley – McKinley? – and saw icy blue eyes and gray hair. Not gray hair: silvery. Not silvery: a shimmering white. He was here, Professor Vale, I am here to make a deal with McKinley. Then fear. The inexplicable. The white hair and azure eyes. Professor Vale tore himself from this vision and glanced wildly about him. The boat was silent and still. The sea was boiling up around it… Roaring and boiling up around them all in immense walls of green steam. ‘Jesus Christ! What the hell…?’
Vale grabbed hold of the railing, the deck shuddering beneath his feet. The huge clouds of steam were rising from the sea and surrounding the boat. Vale couldn’t believe his eyes. The clouds of steam blocked out the sky. They had formed a perfect circle around the boat, half a mile in diameter. Now Vale wanted to scream. The deck shuddered again and groaned. Vale looked over the railing, down the side of the boat, and saw an immense, dark mass just below the surface, spreading out, slowly rising.
‘The Triangle! Oh, Jesus…!’
Vale slapped his forehead with one hand, terror sweeping away his senses, glanced around and saw McKinley, azure eyes and white hair, saw the crew, the Orientals, coming toward him, small and slim, moving silently.
He tried to run, but it was hopeless. Where could he run to? Paralyzed with fear, he gripped the railing, trying to take in the nightmare.
‘Oh, fuck! Oh my God!’
Suddenly, the sea roared. He stared at the distant clouds. Now much closer, they boiled up from from the waves to form a wall that blocked out the whole sky. Then the spiraling waves exploded, the spray sweeping around glinting steel. A perimeter of spikes surfaced, faraway, beneath the steam, all triangular, splitting the water like metal fins, thrusting up, growing larger.
Vale heard the sound of his own blubbering, saw the white ridge of his knuckles, his rational self stunned by disbelief and a throttling terror. All that and something else: an unreality that drained his senses. His head was spinning and he recalled the falling glass and realized he was drugged.
He tried to focus on McKinley, wondered who he really was, saw his icy blue eyes and white hair, the wall of clouds beyond him. The boat was trapped inside those clouds. The green steam swirled and drifted. The triangular grids rose from the sea, growing larger, spitting water, a great circle of gleaming steel teeth that surrounded the boat. Vale couldn’t believe what he was seeing. The only reality was his fear. The deck shuddered beneath his feet, the boat rocking and rumbling, and he glanced down and saw an enormous mass rising to the surface.
‘Grip the railing!
Hold tight !’
Someone was shouting at him. He licked his lips and saw McKinley. The azure eyes were uncommonly bright and intense, hypnotizing him, chilling him. Be he did as he was told. He saw the wall of steel around him. He felt the presence of the massed crew behind him, but he didn’t dare look at them.
The monster’s steel jaws were closing. Vale’s eyes were drawn to the boiling sea. The dark mass was still rising and spreading out, and then it struck the boat’s hull. Vale felt it and heard it: the deck shuddered and shrieked. There was a harsh, metallic rumbling, water rushing and hissing, then the boat suddenly rocked from side to side, settled down, finally steadied.
Vale looked on, mesmerized. The whole boat was slowly rising. The sea poured away between the rising walls, and an enormous steel deck broke the surface. This steel deck was smooth and solid, a quarter mile in diameter, and the walls that had looked like huge fins went right around its perimeter. The sea poured out through those walls, the enormous deck pushed the boat up, and the triangular fins of the perimeters started moving toward one another, rising high and curving in above the boat like interlocking, giant fingers.
Vale gazed up in awe. The steel walls curved high above him. They were roaring and hissing, water rushing down their sides, and they moved in toward one another to block out the steaming green clouds. Vale stood there, paralyzed. The deck was steady beneath his feet. The triangular walls came together high above to form an immense, empty hangar.
The walls locked together, reverberating. A bright light filled the gloom. Vale looked across that great floor of steel and saw nothing but curved walls. Then the floor began to rumble. Vale almost gagged with fear. The floor began to sink, like some enormous elevator, and the walls soared all around him, an immense globe of steel, until the light became a blazing white haze that turned the dream into reality. Sweeping vistas of steel and glass. A maze of ladders and catwalks. Silhouettes moving through the white haze, the air vibrating and humming. Vale saw it and felt awe and choking horror. Something cold touched his neck and then scorched it and he dropped into Hell.
Chapter Seven
Richard was standing before the large windows of the front room of the apartment, a glass of cheap red wine in his shaking right hand, his eyes bloodshot and blinking, slightly glazed with constant fear, looking over an adventure playground, the grimy rooftops of Finsbury Park, the gray sky that seemed to smother the distant maze of the City of London. The sky obsessed him, mesmerized him, filled him with dread and fascination, glided through his dreams and colored his waking hours with the promise of more horrors. It was six in the evening, darkness advanced across the skyline, and Richard raised his glass of wine to his lips to drink deeply, compulsively.
All white. Everything. He closed his eyes and relived the nightmare. His hand shook as he had another sip of wine and then opened his eyes again. He saw the labyrinth of the city, the distant dome of St. Paul’s, and above it, the darkening, cloud-filled sky that took him back to the start of it.
Richard shivered violently, finished his drink and turned away, then he left the room and entered the kitchen and poured some more wine. He had a sip and then glanced around him, at empty bottles and unwashed dishes, crumpled newspapers on the table, on the floor, the signs of total neglect. He had been here for five days and had only gone out for the papers. He couldn’t eat, he couldn’t sleep, he rarely washed, and the wine helped to make the long days pass.
He left the kitchen, stood briefly in the hallway, drank more wine and stared at each of the rooms in turn, at the comforting brightness. Every light in the apartment was turned on. They had been on since he arrived here. He didn’t dare turn them off lest the nightmares returned and jerked him out his restless sleep, screaming dementedly, his thoughts haunted by phantoms.
All white. Everything. He couldn’t believe what had happened. He could believe even less that he had awakened three days later, alone, on the hills of Dartmoor, thirty miles from Bodmin Moor, the drunken woman and her car no longer there, the missing days a mystery. Richard shuddered again at the very thought of it, put the glass to his lips, drank deeply, and went back to the lounge, wishing that Jenny would come.
He had phoned her an hour ago, the first call since his return, and had noticed the confusion in her voice, the hint of anger beneath it. In truth he couldn’t blame her; more precisely, he didn’t care; now driven by the singular, desperate need to talk it out of his system.
All white. Everything. His last memory was of the whiteness. He recalled the flying disks, the enormous mother ship, the silhouettes moving to and fro in the dazzling light – then nothing: oblivion. A nauseous awakening on Dartmoor; stumbling down the hill and hitching a lift and being told by the driver that it was Sunday. He hadn’t understood that at all – his last recollection was of Thursday – and sitting there in the truck beside the farmer he had thought he was going mad.
Now he stood by the window, drinking wine, shaking in spasms, rubbing his unshaven chin and looking out as the city’s lights blinked on. The lights were floating in darkness, a silvery web, a sparkling mosaic, and they merged with the lights in his head and took shape as the nightmare…
His feverish thoughts had filled the nights, making him pace from room to room through the apartment, trying to shake off his demons. The fear was always present, all around him, deep inside him, a living thing that breathed against his neck and made him drink even more. Exhausted, terrified, he dreaded sleep, yet had to sleep, sitting upright in a chair, groping blindly for the bottle, muttering vague and incoherent protestations as the silence tormented him.
Richard couldn’t understand it, couldn’t touch it or see it. What it was, what it meant or might mean was something concealed from him. So he drank and relived it. He wondered constantly about the woman. He saw that enormous flashing mass, the flying disks, the jolting car; and he sobbed as the white light flared up and sent him into oblivion.
It had started five days ago. He had paced the apartment all that time. The world outside, both by day and by night, now seemed alien and threatening. Richard thought about reality. He wondered what reality was. He was pondering this riddle, losing himself in labyrinths, when the shrill ringing of the doorbell cut through him and made his nerves twitch.
‘Jesus Christ!’ he whispered. Turning away from the window, he stepped forward, then stopped, had another sip of wine and licked his lips and let his nerves settle down. It was all too much for him: at eighteen he felt like fifty. He glanced around the cluttered room, at the squalor of his hibernation, and he felt the shame reaching up to stroke him and make his cheeks burn. Then he licked hi
s lips again, shook his head and stepped forward, leaving the room and going along the straight hall, the lights stinging his eyes.
The front door had stained-glass windows, pretty mosaics of lead and wire, and he saw her silhouette at the other side, an indistinct, smokey form. He froze there, frightened again, the fear followed by further shame, wondering if it really was her, wondering why he should doubt it. Then he shook his head from side to side, cursing softly, trying to grin, but the grin died pathetically on his lips when the bell rang a second time.
‘Jenny?’ ‘Yes! What’s the matter? Let me in! Why in God’s name are you whispering like that? What on earth’s going on in there?’
Richard unlocked the door, fumbling clumsily, nervously, then stepped back and pulled the door open and studied her carefully. Jenny didn’t step inside, simply stared at him, shocked, her right hand reaching up to her forehead, brushing her auburn hair from brown eyes.
‘What on earth…?’
‘Come in.’
‘What?’
‘I said come in.’
‘What on earth have you been doing to yourself?’
‘Don’t just stand there. Come in!’
She stared at him, brow furrowed, a forefinger to her lips, then she shrugged and stepped reluctantly inside, her shoulder brushing against him. This brief contact was electrifying, jolting through him as a shock
– not sexual; more a sudden awareness of being outside himself. He closed the door and turned around, saw chocolate-colored eyes, a moonshaped face, her auburn hair a tangled web of curls, her long legs in blue denims. She returned his gaze, studying him, then shrugged and moved away, wandering lazily along the hallway, glancing into all the rooms, sighing despairingly when she saw the awful mess: the empty, discarded bottles.
‘Very nice,’ she said mockingly.
Turning back, she stared at him, a quiet appraisal, clearly critical, then she shrugged and entered the living room and he dutifully followed her. Stopping again in the middle of the room, she surveyed the untidy mess on all sides, then she sighed and sank into an armchair, her legs languidly outstretched. She was clearly disgusted.
GENESIS (Projekt Saucer) Page 11