Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers

by Strangers(Lit)

  hope that the event aroused.

  "We went inside," Ginger said wonderingly.

  'Yes," Jack said. "You, Dom, and Brendan."

  "But," Ginger said, "I can't ... can't quite remember what happened to

  us in there."

  "Me neither," Dom said. "That part hasn't come back to me yet. I

  recall everything up to the minute we went through the hatch, into that

  golden light . . . then nothing."

  For a moment they were oblivious of their perilous surroundings.

  Ginger's lovely, delicate face was bone-white. Partly, it was the

  bloodless look of fear. But not fear alone.

  Dom now understood, as Ginger did, why they had responded to each other

  so powerfully the instant that she had gotten off the plane at the Elko

  County Airport on Sunday. That summer night, they went into the ship

  together and shared something that had forever bonded them.

  "The ship's here, inside Thunder Hill," she said. "It must be."

  Dom agreed. "That's why the government took the land away from those

  ranchers. They enlarged the grounds of the Depository to make it more

  difficult for anyone to spot the truck that brought the ship in."

  Jack said, "It would've been a hell of a big load."

  "Like those huge trucks they haul the space shuttle on," Dom said.

  Jack said, "Yeah, but why would they hide what happened?"

  "I don't know," Dom said. He tapped the button that would summon the

  elevator. "But maybe we can find out."

  The elevator arrived with a quiet hum, and they rode down to the second

  level. Judging from the length of the ride, the top two floors of the

  installation were separated by several stories of solid rock.

  The doors opened at last, and they stepped into an immense circular

  cavern three hundred feet in diameter. From far above, the scaffolded

  lights shed wintry beams on an odd collection of sheet-metal buildings

  that hugged the walls most of the way around the chamber. Warmer light

  shone at small windows in two of those structures; otherwise, they were

  dark and appeared untenanted. Dom thought it looked a little like a

  film crew on location, a bunch of dressing-room trailers. Four large

  caverns branched from the main chamber, one of which was closed off by

  huge wooden doors that were curiously primitive for an otherwise highly

  modern facility. In the three adjacent open caverns, lights glowed, and

  Dom saw stored equipment-Jeeps, troop carriers, trucks, helicopters, and

  even jet aircraft-in addition to other trailer-like buildings with more

  lights at the windows than those in the main chamber. Thunder Hill was

  an enormous arsenal and a selfsustaining subterranean city, which Dom

  had known, but he had not guessed at the immensity of it.

  More mystifying than the Depository's many wonders was its air of

  abandonment. The second level was as deserted and silent as the first.

  No guards, no busy personnel, no voices or sounds of labor. True, the

  caverns were slightly cool; and at this time of the evening, most of the

  staff would probably keep to the heated living quarters. But a few

  should have been in sight. And if most were off duty, there should have

  been music, T-V, voluble poker-game conversations, and other muted

  recreational sounds waiting from the farther reaches of the facility.

  In a whisper so thin it was little more than a subvocalization, Ginger

  said, "Are they all dead?"

  "I told you," Jack said in an equally quiet voice, "something's wrong.

  .. ."

  Dom felt drawn toward the huge wooden doors-almost three stories high,

  at least sixty feet wide-that sealed the entrance to the fourth cavern,

  so he allowed his feelings to guide him. Followed by Ginger and Jack,

  he walked as quietly as he could toward a smaller, man-sized door set in

  the bottom of one of those giant wooden portals. It was ajar, and a

  wedge of light, brighter than that in the main cavern, fell out onto the

  stone floor. He put one hand upon the door to pull it open, then

  stopped when he heard low voices inside. He listened until he

  ascertained there were only two of them, both men. They were speaking

  too softly for him to follow their conversation. Dom considered turning

  back, but he had a hunch that if he had an opportunity to look into any

  one room before being apprehended, he could do no better than this one.

  He pulled open the small door in the huge door and walked through.

  The ship was there.

  Ginger stood with one hand on her breast, as if to restrain her heart

  from hammering loose.

  The cavern beyond the wooden doors was enormous, fully two hundred feet

  long and varying between eighty and a hundred-twenty feet in width, with

  a high domed ceiling. The rock floor had been chiseled, planed, and

  abraded to form a level surface from wall to wall; all the deep holes

  and crevices had been filled with concrete. Judging from scattered oil

  and grease stains, and from recessed ringbolts in the floor, the chamber

  had once been used for storing or servicing vehicles. To the right of

  the entrance, along the wall, were more trailerlike buildings with small

  windows and metal dbors, a dozen stretching almost to the end of the

  chamber. Though probably used as offices or living quarters at one

  time, they'd been converted to research facilities. Hand-lettered signs

  were fixed to some doors: CHEM LAB, CHEM LIBRARY, PATHOLOGY, BIO LAB,

  BIO LIBRARY, PHYSICS I, PHYSICS 2, ANTHROPOLOGY, and others too far away

  to read. In addition, work tables and large machines-a conventional

  X-ray unit, a large sound spectrograph of exactly the kind in use at

  Boston Memorial Hospital, and many other pieces of equipment Ginger did

  not recognize-stood in rows or clusters in the open area immediately in

  front of the metal buildings, as if someone were conducting a sidewalk

  sale of high-tech laboratory equipment. The amount of research to be

  done had outstripped the available quarters, which was no surprise,

  considering the object of the inquiry.

  The ship from another world lay to the left of the entrance. It looked

  exactly as Ginger had recollected minutes ago, when the forbidden memory

  had at last pushed through the block and returned to her: a cylinder

  between fifty and sixty feet long, fifteen feet in diameter, rounded at

  both ends. It had been set upon a series of five-foot-high steel

  trestles to keep it off the floor, rather like a submarine in dry dock

  for repairs. The only thing different from its appearance on the night

  of July 6 was the absence of the eerie glow that had changed from

  moon-white to scarlet to amber. It possessed no visible propulsion

  system, no rockets. The hull was nearly as featureless as she recalled:

  here, a ten-foot-long row of shallow depressions in the metal, each big

  enough for her to insert her fist, but without evident purpose; there,

  four protruding hemispheres like halves of cantaloupes, also without

  apparent function; here and there, half a dozen circular elevations,

  some as large as the lid of a trash can, some no bigger than the mouth

  of a mayonnaise jar, none higher than three inches, all quite

  mysterious.
Otherwise, but for the marks of wear and age, the long

  curving hull was smooth over ninety-eight percent of its surface. Yet

  its unspectacular design did not prevent it from being by far the most

  spectacular thing Ginger had ever seen. She was simultaneously

  terrified and joyous, overcome with a dread of the unknown yet exultant.

  Two men were sitting at a table at the foot of portable stairs that led

  up to an open hatch in the flank of the elevated spacecraft. The most

  imposing was a lanky man in his forties, with curly black hair and

  beard, wearing dark trousers, dark shirt, and white lab coat. The other

  was in an Army uniform with the jacket unbuttoned, a somewhat portly man

  ten years older than his bearded companion. Now, seeing their three

  visitors, they fell silent, rose from their chairs, but did not shout

  for guards or rush to trip an alarm switch. The two merely watched Dom,

  Jack, and Ginger with interest, gauging their first reactions to the

  trestled craft that loomed over them.

  They were expecting us, Ginger thought.

  That realization should have concerned her, but it did not. She had no

  interest in anything but the ship.

  With Dom close by her right side and Jack on her left, she moved with

  them in silence to the nearest end of the cylindrical vessel. Although

  her heart had begun beating hard and fast the moment she had entered the

  chamber and seen the ship, its previous pounding was mild compared to

  its current furious hammering. They stopped within an arm's length of

  the hull and studied it with an attitude of wonder bordering on

  veneration.

  Random swirling patterns of fine-grain abrasion swept across the entire

  curving bulk of it, as if it had persevered through clouds of cosmic

  dust or particles of a type and origin as yet unknown to man. Random

  nicks and small dents were scattered across the surface, clearly not

  part of the design but inflicted by elements far more hostile than the

  winds and storms that battered the ships of earth's seas and skies. The

  hull was mottled gray-black-amber-brown as if bathed in a hundred

  different acids and scorched in a thousand fires.

  Aside from its intrinsic and powerful alienness, the strongest

  impression Ginger got from the ship was a sense of great age. For all

  she knew, it could have been built only a few years ago and could have

  journeyed to Elko County at fasterthan-light speeds, arriving on the

  night of July 6, just a few months or a year after being launched. But

  she did not think that was the case. She could not ascertain the source

  of her conviction-call it intuition-but she was certain that she was

  standing in the shadow of an ancient vessel. And when she reached out

  and touched the cool metal, letting her fingertips move lightly over its

  scarred and finely abraded surface, she felt even more strongly that she

  was in the presence of a venerable relic.

  They had come such a long way. Such a very long way.

  Following her lead, Dom and Jack had touched the hull, too. Dom took a

  deep quaverous breath. His, "Ahhhhhhh," was more eloquent than any

  words could have been.

  "Oh, how I wish my father could have lived for this," Ginger said,

  remembering dear Jacob the dreamer, Jacob the lufunentsch, who had

  always loved tales of other worlds and distant times.

  Jack said, "I wish Jenny'd lived longer ... just a little

  longer.........

  Ginger suddenly realized that Jack did not mean the same thing she

  meant, that he was not saying he wished his Jenny had lived to see this

  vessel. He was wishing she had lived through these events because, as a

  result of this extraterrestrial contact, Brendan and Dom had acquired

  the power to heal her. If she had not succumbed on Christmas Day, they

  might have been able to go back to her-assuming they got out of Thunder

  Hill alive-and might have knit up her damaged brain, bringing her out of

  her coma, returning her to the arms of her devoted husband. That

  jolting moment of comprehension made Ginger aware that she had hardly

  begun to grasp the implications of this incredible event.

  The portly man in the military uniform and the bearded man in the lab

  coat had walked over from the table near the ship's portal. The

  civilian put his hand to the hull, which Ginger and Dom and Jack were

  still exploring. He said, "An alloy of some kind. Harder than any

  steel produced on this world. Harder than diamond, yet extremely light

  and with surprising flexibility. You're Dom Corvaisis."

  "Yes," Dom said, offering his hand to the stranger, a courtesy that

  would have surprised Ginger if she had not also sensed that this

  mild-spoken scientist and the military man with him were not their

  enemies.

  "I'm Miles Bennell, director of the team studying this . . . wonderful

  event. And this is General Alvarado, commanding officer of Thunder

  Hill. I can't tell you how deeply I regret what's been done to you.

  This shouldn't be a secret possessed by a few. It belongs to the world.

  And if I had my way, the world would hear about it tomorrow."

  Bennell shook Jack's and Ginger's hands, too.

  Ginger said, "We have questions......

  "And you deserve answers," Bennell said. "I'll tell you everything

  we've been able to learn. But we might as well wait until everyone's

  assembled. Where are the others?"

  "What others?" Dom asked.

  And Ginger said, "You mean from the motel? They're not with us."

  Bennell blinked in surprise. "You mean most of them managed to slip

  through Colonel Falkirk's hands?"

  "Falkirk?" Jack said. "Do you think he brought us here?"

  Bennell said, "If not Falkirk-who?"

  "We came in ourselves," Dom said.

  Ginger saw the shock of that news register with both Bennell and General

  Alvarado. They looked at each other in surprise, and then a light of

  hope lit both their faces.

  Alvarado said, "You're not telling us you found a way through the

  Depository's security? But that's not possible!"

  "Have you read the file on Jack?" Bennell asked his friend. "Yes? Well,

  just remember his Ranger training and what he's been doing for a living

  these past eight years or so."

  Jack shook his head. "I can't take all the credit. Yeah, I got us

  through the perimeter, across the grounds, and past the first door, but

  it was Dom who actually got us inside."

  "Dom?" Bennell said, turning in surprise to the writer. "But what do you

  know about security systems? Unless . . .

  of course! This strange damn power of yours! Since that experience in

  Lomack's house and since the light you generated when Cronin first

  arrived at the Tranquility, you must've discovered the power wasn't

  external. You must know now that it's actually in you."

  Ginger realized that Bennell's statement had revealed that their

  conversations at the Tranquility had, indeed, been monitored. But it

  also revealed that their discussions and strategy sessions in the diner,

  after Jack's arrival, had not been penetrated. Otherwise Bennell would

  have known about the experiment last night in which bo
th Dom and Brendan

  had learned that their apparently mystical experiences were, in fact,

  events of their own creation.

  "Yes," Dom said. "We know the power's in us-me and Brendan. But where

  does it come from Doctor Bennell?"

  "You don't know?"

  "I think it has something to do with what happened to us when we went in

  the ship, but I can't remember. Can't you tell me?"

  "No," Miles Bennell said. "Not really. It was known that three of you

  went into the vessel, but we didn't know that anything ... peculiar had

  happened to you in there. You'd come out just as the helicopters with

  DERO troops and scientific observers began to arrive on the site, and no

  one figured you'd been in there more than a couple minutes. When you

  were taken into custody, you didn't tell anyone that something important

  had happened while you'd been aboard. I believe you said you'd just

  looked around. And for ease of handling, you were all sedated

  immediately after being arrested and conveyed back to the Tranquility.

  So even if you'd changed your mind and decided to tell us what happened,

  you didn't have a chance." Excited, the lanky scientist absentmindedly

  began to comb his long fingers through his curly black beard as he

  talked. "When the decision was made to put a lid on the event, to

  brainwash every civilian who'd seen it, there wasn't time for a thorough

  debriefing of all the witnesses. In fact, you were never brought out of

  sedation; you were moved directly onto the drug program that was part of

  your memory-wipe. That's one reason I was opposed to the cover-up. I

  felt that by brainwashing you without giving us plenty of time to