"He doesn't look too healthy," commented one of the men who had been first to see Ford approaching.
"Probably the contact with Earth's polluted atmosphere," Beta said, looking down on Roote's stricken body. "Damn Squiltas." Scratching his belly, he glanced up at Ford. "What can we do to help?"
Ford smiled, excited and relieved to finally be among people who truly understood what Roote was.
He took a deep breath. "We need to gather up all the car batteries we can get," Ford exhaled urgently.
Chapter 20
Dr. Harold W. Smith had always thought that when he reached a certain age there would be nothing left that would surprise him. On this day, he learned that he could not have been more wrong.
The director of CURE fought the urge to let his mouth drop open in shock as he scanned reams of material on the World Wide Web devoted entirely to alien conspiracy theories.
Smith knew there always had and would be lunatics out there. But he was amazed to find an entire subculture devoted to the ludicrous notion that the United States government was deliberately covering up the fact of regular alien visits to the planet Earth.
Forget that Earth was a relatively obscure planet in a relatively isolated part of the Milky Way. Never mind that the odds of anyone ever stumbling upon Earth in the vast expanse of the cosmos were beyond astronomical. Overlook the obvious notion that it would be easier to hold a nuclear explosion in a hatbox than to contain a secret on the level being posited by the UFO devotees. None of these considerations warranted concern for those whose eyes were turned hopelessly starward.
To the rational, analytical, staunchly terrestrial mind of Harold W. Smith, the whole discussion was utterly incredible. He wondered if it would seem less unbelievable if he had not been so tired. He doubted it.
Smith had been working for hours without sleep. Police in Los Angeles had rounded up Arthur Ford's roommate. The man had known nothing beyond the fact that his friend was somewhere in New Mexico.
So far, the usual checks had been fruitless. There were no credit-card transactions, no airline tickets, not even a simple traffic violation. It was as if Arthur Ford had vanished off the face of the planet.
The irony of that thought occurred to Smith the moment it passed through his weary brain.
No, Ford was still on Earth. Somewhere. But where?
It was possible that he and Roote had run out of gas and were dying in the desert right now. Perhaps they had even crossed the border into Mexico. It was a big, big world. And in order to track his quarry, Harold Smith needed something, anything to go on. So far, he had nothing.
"Blast." Smith muttered the rare curse under his breath as he dropped back in his seat.
"Nothing yet?"
Remo's voice startled him. Chiun had awakened from his untroubled night's sleep hours ago. He and Remo had gone for a walk around Fort Joy. Smith had been so involved in his work that he hadn't heard them return.
The CURE director sighed. "I would have an easier time locating a single grain of sand in the desert," he complained. Removing his glasses, he rubbed his weary eyes.
"I have great faith in your oracles, Emperor," the Master of Sinanju offered. Hands clasped behind his back, he was looking at them through the wall of the huge tank. The Plexiglas distorted his wizened form.
"Thank you, Master Chiun," Smith said. "But I do not think you appreciate the difficulty of this search. There is a network of individuals out there who I am now certain would be more than willing to aid Elizu Roote. They would be as convinced as the young man we met at the airport that they were dealing with an alien being."
"You haven't even found Ford yet?" Remo asked. He was leaning against the side of the tank. Smith shook his head.
"He has vanished."
"Any friends in the area?" Remo asked. "Maybe there's some other nut nearby who might help him out."
Smith turned to a pad beside his laptop. In a dull monotone, he began reading from the hasty notes he had collected from the Internet.
"Alien Guards, Alien Sentries, Alien Watchers, Binary Ring Party, Brotherhood of the Stars, Brothers of Aliens, Brothers of Man, Camp Alpha, Camp Beta, Camp Earth, Camp Gamma, Camp Omega-not to be confused with Omega Camp, Omega Brotherhood or a dozen other sites around the area."
Disgusted, he tossed the notepad back to the table.
"We could check them all out," Remo offered.
"It would take years," Smith said, shaking his head. "There are hundreds of groups camped out from the Rio Grande to Roswell. Some have permanent settlements, some come back at a specific time each year. Others are nomadic, moving from one place to another rapidly. Their paranoia does not allow them to stay in one place very long. If Ford has gone to any of these, it would be nearly impossible to find him."
"If this creature is as you both claim, it will surface again," Chiun said with certainty.
"And the only way we'll know is when someone shows up on the nightly news smoking like a bucket of extra crispy," Remo said.
Chiun shrugged. "It will be a trail to follow."
"No way we're waiting," Remo insisted. "I'm not letting that hutbar toast anyone else."
"Remo, we have no choice," Smith said, forcing a reasonable tone in his tired voice.
A small electronic beep suddenly emanated from his computer. Smith turned back around, checking the thin band on which only a few lines of text could appear at one time.
The four Folcroft mainframes had continued to troll the Net since Smith's return to the Shock Troops lab. A satellite connection transmitted any relevant data to the CURE director's briefcase laptop.
As he read the information his computers had gathered, Smith felt the weariness melt away.
"I have something," he said, his lemony voice tense.
Stepping rapidly across the room, Remo and Chiun gathered around the computer.
"What is it?" Remo asked.
"Arthur Ford has used his Discover card."
"Where?" Remo pressed anxiously. "And don't say Neptune."
Smith was typing rapidly at the small keyboard, accessing the pertinent information.
"The Wal-Mart in Truth or Consequences." Remo scrunched up his face. "Wasn't that an old game show?" he asked.
"The city was renamed after the success of the program," Smith explained as he worked.
"There's a brain trust I'd steer clear of," Remo said dryly. "What was their fall-back option, 'Let's Make a Deal Falls'? Probably Assholeville'd be more appropriate, huh, Little Father?"
"Silence, chatterbox," Chiun insisted. He was watching intently as Smith typed at his computer.
"I have located several other individuals whose credit-card uses roughly match the purchase time of Arthur Ford. I have traced them all back to a single location. They are all residents of a place called Camp Earth."
Remo seemed surprised. "That's pretty slick, Smitty," he said, impressed. "How'd you do that?"
"Ford bought an unusually large quantity of a single item, as did the others. There was a clear correlation between all of the purchases." He didn't seem pleased by his discovery. "They have effectively cleaned out the entire area of this one item."
"What is it?" Remo asked.
Smith looked up at him. When he spoke, his voice was tight. "Automobile batteries."
ARTHUR FORD DIDN'T RAVE a clue what he was doing.
The ufologist had borrowed a set of jumper cables from one of the Camp Earth inhabitants. Carefully he clamped a clawed end to one of the many batteries sitting on the dirt floor of the corrugated tin shack.
"How much juice does he take?" Beta RAM asked. He was crouching in the doorway, hands braced on his knees.
The leader of the Salvion movement glanced around at the huge number of car batteries arranged around the supine form of Elizu Roote. "I'm not sure," Arthur admitted. "I saw him drained once before, but never this bad." Crawling on his knees, he gently lifted Roote's head with one hand. Squeezing open another of the jumper cable claws, he found
the metal patch on the Army private's spine. Carefully he clamped the hook onto the nub.
Beta RAM and Arthur Ford actually heard the hum from the battery. It was a rapid powering-down noise.
Once Ford removed the clamp from the battery, Beta used a tester to confirm their suspicions. Both were right. The battery had been drained of all its juice.
There was no reaction from Roote. He continued to lie there, eyes closed, breathing shallow. Not so much as a solitary muscle spasm disturbed his slender frame.
"His power must be really low," Ford commented.
Leaving the far end of the cables hooked to Roote's neck, he moved over to the next battery, latching on to another terminal with one of the free claws.
The results were the same as before. A loud hum, followed by a total lack of any reaction from Elizu Roote.
"This is going to take forever," Beta RAM complained.
Arthur wasn't paying attention. Sliding on his knees through the dirt, he had already moved over to the next battery. He hooked into Roote's system once more.
"We're going to need more batteries," Ford commented as he worked.
"You've got a couple hundred already," Beta RAM said. "We'd have to go all the way to Las Cruces for more."
"We need more," Ford insisted. "He's sucking down juice like there's no tomorrow."
Beta RAM sighed. "If he's working for the Squiltas, there might not be a tomorrow," he muttered. Shaking his head, he added, "I'll see what I can do."
The leader of Camp Earth ducked back out the door of the small shack, leaving Arthur Ford to his work of reviving a man more dangerous than any of the creatures of Beta RAM's fertile imagination.
BY THE TIME Remo and Chiun arrived at the Truth or Consequences House Warehouse store, it was a little after three in the afternoon.
"Why are we here?" the Master of Sinanju asked as they walked through the huge airconditioned building. Shoppers filled the aisles.
"Camp Earth is one of the few alien-chasing wacko groups without its own Web site," Remo explained. "Smith doesn't know exactly where it is."
"And he believes someone here knows?" Chiun asked. He appeared to be extremely doubtful that any of the people they were passing could know anything. The men all looked as if they had just stepped in from the bowling alley next door, and the women seemed to be practicing for the Olympic gum-snapping-and-halter-top-wearing competition.
"Maybe," Remo said. "Someone from there bought a ton of batteries here and at other stores in town. It's possible the locals know where they were bringing them."
"Knowledge is no doubt scarcer than hen's teeth in this toilet-seat emporium," the Master of Sinanju sniffed. Tucking his hands inside the sleeves of his silver kimono, he trailed Remo reluctantly up the aisle.
They found the manager of the automotive department at the rear of the building. The man expressed sympathy for their situation, but explained with a sad smile that he had no more automobile batteries in stock.
"Gee, I'm really sorry," he said, "but a couple guys came in this morning and cleaned me out."
"I heard," Remo said. "We were hoping you knew who they were. Maybe where we could find them."
The man shook his head in apology. "Sorry," he said. "Didn't really know them. If you really need a battery that bad, I've got another batch coming in on Tuesday."
Remo shook his head. "Thanks. We'll check somewhere else."
As they turned to go, the manager called to them.
"Good luck," he said with an apologetic shrug. "The whole town's cleaned out. In fact, I just heard from our sister store down in Las Cruces. Someone already put all their supply on reserve. Maybe if you hurry you can sneak in and get one before they pick them up."
Remo spun back around. "How long ago did you talk to them?" he demanded.
The man's face clouded. "Five minutes," he said. "Customer made a cell call to make sure the store held on to all the batteries. Told the manager down there to check with me when he asked if they were on the level." He shook his head. "Why's there such a big run on batteries?"
The manager found that the last words he had spoken were to himself.
The two men he had been speaking to were suddenly nowhere near him. When he craned his neck over the crowd of shoppers, he was just able to spy them as they raced around the corner of the long aisle at the distant front of the store. A moment later he could barely distinguish the bright silver flash of the old Asian's kimono in the parking lot as the pair raced past the long windows beyond the line of cash registers.
"Have fun driving to Las Cruces without a battery," the manager muttered, annoyed at their rudeness.
Glancing down, he returned to work.
Chapter 21
The old rusted Dodge truck that Beta RAM drove down into Las Cruces was so battered it almost looked as if someone had stuck four bald tires on one of the Camp Earth shanties and pushed it down the hill.
The sun was sinking lower in his rearview mirror as the Prophet of Salvion steered the rattling pile of metal down the sticky black streets.
Beta was not a happy Camp Earth camper.
For several years now his followers in the Salvion movement had been willing to do anything and everything he asked of them. Even though they were all dancing on the precipice of Armageddon, in a strange way it had truly been a golden age for Beta RAM. In just a few short hours, Arthur Ford had changed all that.
The people were no longer talking about Salvion and the Squiltas threat, they were discussing creatures called the Power Players of Andromeda.
It took some arm-twisting to find out that they were talking about the race from which the companion of Ford's had apparently come.
Ford had described the creature's amazing abilities to the people of Camp Earth. How he could channel and launch electricity with his fingers. How he killed only when he was threatened. How he was being stalked by government agents.
Slowly those at Camp Earth were beginning to believe their ultimate salvation, as well as the hope of all mankind, lay in the hands of this E.T.-come-lately.
Beta RAM knew what would come next. His followers would denounce Salvion. They would disregard the Squiltas threat. They would toss out Beta himself as part of the old orthodoxy.
The prophet of Salvion would be without his beloved followers. Perhaps when the celestial ark finally did come, he would be forced to bring along pigs after all, assuming the more attractive females in the movement went with Arthur Ford.
It was all utterly ghastly. On a cosmic scale. These things weighed heavily on the mind of Beta as he drove his rickety red truck into the big parking lot of the House Warehouse store in Las Cruces.
After parking the truck near the front of the lot, he walked toward the store.
Car batteries were pretty heavy, he thought as he approached the large building. He had helped move a few of the many that had been brought back to Camp Earth earlier that day and had had a difficult time lugging them.
Hmm...
Maybe he could drop a battery on Roote's head and blame it on the Squiltas. If Arthur Ford objected, Beta could give him the battery treatment, too.
As the electronic entrance door slid open before him, Beta reminded himself that the government secreted cameras in the motion sensors in order to keep videotaped records of every American citizen. Beta RAM covered his face with both hands and ducked his head away from the black sensor box as re stepped into the air-conditioned store.
THEY HAD BURNED UP the highway between Truth or Consequences and Las Cruces, twice avoiding the flashing lights of state police cruisers by sheer reckless driving.
Within the city limits, Remo did his best to stay within the posted speed limits.
As they drove down one traffic-filled street, the Master of Sinanju glanced at his pupil.
"Your driving on the highway was more reckless than usual," he commented.
As Remo steered the rented car he had borrowed from Smith through the thick traffic, he shot a look at Chiun
.
"I wouldn't talk if I were you," Remo said. "I've been strapped in when you were behind the wheel. It's like being in a turbo-charged bumper car."
"Allow me to refresh your memory, O Forgetful Caster of Aspersions. I am thinking of a certain truck you tipped over on me in Germany," the Master of Sinanju said dryly.
"Water under the bridge," Remo said. "And besides, I apologized for that about a billion times."
"And forgiving soul that I am, I considered accepting some of them," Chiun replied. "Even though you nearly killed me, we were transporting my gold-thus your carelessness in haste was almost excusable. However, there is no treasure in this vehicle other than me. Therefore there is no need to risk my precious life."
"Have you been paying attention the last couple of days?" Remo asked. "That guy tried to fry my cullions. I want to settle his hash. It's as simple as that."
"If by simple you mean simple-minded, I agree," Chiun said.
"Are these insults strictly for pleasure, or is there a point behind all this?"
Chiun nodded somberly. "You are behaving rashly. You are rushing into a conflict without any concern for the possible outcome."
Remo was genuinely surprised. "You think I can't beat this asswipe?" he asked.
"If he were an ordinary foe, I would say yes, my son. Without hesitation. But neither you nor Smith believe this man to be ordinary."
"He isn't," Remo insisted.
"This have I conceded," Chiun agreed. "So why do you hasten to meet him again? Give yourself time to heal. Knowledge is our ally when confronted with the unknown. While you grow strong, Smith will learn more of this creature. When the time comes we will face it together, you and I."
"Nope. Roote is a killer, Little Father. He was a maniac before they stitched all that hardware into him. Thanks to Chesterfield, he's a hell of a lot more dangerous. He has to be stopped now. Case closed."
Remo hunkered down behind the steering wheel, his face pulled into hard lines.
"You are still not one hundred percent," Chiun pointed out after a moment's silence.
"I'm fit as a fiddle," Remo said dismissively. "You are strong, Remo, but you are not invincible."
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