Majestic (11 page)

"We can't know that," Walters said. "I don't think we can assume anything."

"This is just a pile of tinfoil and wallpaper. What I'd like to see is the rest of the thing."

"If this was a mortal wound." Gray had thought about it, and he had his doubts. If he'd been piloting the disk and it had sustained damage, the first thing he'd have done would have been to get it into outer space where there was no gravity. Then he could make repairs at his leisure, without fear of crashing.

"Well," Blanchard said, "if there's anything out in that desert, we can find it."

Jennings picked up one of the wooden I-beams. "What about the Russians?"

"A Russian blimp coming after the 509th," Gray said. "We considered that possibility."

"And?"

"It's a no-go, in my opinion. First, the material's just too strong. We don't have anything remotely like it, and I doubt that they do either. Second, none of the writing is in any known language. Third, that wood you're holding is too light and too hard to have come from earth. It isn't from an earth tree."

"You're certain about all this, Major? You've done your homework?"

Gray was quite certain. "Yes, sir."

"Where is the object it came from?" asked Jennings.

"We don't have knowledge of any other debris," Gray replied.

"You looked?"

"It's a big desert, Colonel."

"True enough," Blanchard said. He glanced at Jennings. "You think an air search is warranted, Payne?"

"Yes, sir."

"I agree."

Jennings started toward the door he had just entered. "I'll get it up right away. The 830th Search and Rescue Group. They're our highest-scoring search mission unit." Jennings left the hangar.

"Private," the colonel said to PFC Winters, "get this stuff into my office on the double."

"Yes, sir!" The PFC began gathering up the pieces.

Gray met the colonel's eyes. His expression of sardonic good humor was gone, replaced by a grave look.

Gray wondered if that was what Colonel Blanchard looked like when he was afraid.

Blanchard turned and headed back to the office block. As they passed Hope's office the publicist started toward the colonel with a piece of paper in his hand. Gray intercepted him. "Not now," he said. "We're sending up a search mission. The colonel thinks we might find the rest of the disk."

"Wow."

"Wait a while before you release anything. I'll call you." Hope nodded and took a step back.

"Don't leave me sitting on this, Don," Hope said. Gray thought he sounded rather desperate.

"Wait for my call." Now Hope looked forlorn. Gray smiled. "You aren't going to lose the story. It's just that, if we find the disk, it'll be really big."

"Big isn't the word. I'd get both papers and play on every radio station in town."

Gray clapped him on the shoulder and left the office. If he realized just how big this really was he'd probably freeze up. He followed Blanchard and the other officers into the 830th 's briefing room. Captain Gilman was ready to brief. Three helicopters and a Stinson reconnaissance plane equipped with cameras were being prepared to go to the Maricopa area. As the navigation officer began to speak, Gray glanced at his watch.

They'd had six minutes to prepare the mission, from the time they had been given the order. That was an impressive performance.

"The site is sixteen miles east-southeast of Maricopa," Gilman said. Hesseltine had already prebriefed. The officer pulled down a map of New Mexico - the same one that was in Gray's office, except the details of the White Sands Proving Ground and the high energy radar areas were simply marked "restricted airspace."

"Lieutenant Hesseltine, will you please pinpoint the location?" Captain Gilman stepped aside.

Hesseltine went up to the map. Together he and the navigation officer worked with the compass and protractor. "This is the approximate position of the Ungar house," Hesseltine said. "The wreckage is two miles west of that location. It fell in a fan pattern, indicating that the device was moving due west when the explosion took place."

"So we search west from the impact site," the navigation

"What's the appearance of the debris," one of the pilots asked.

"From the air what we saw will probably look like about a thousand square feet of torn-up tinfoil and paper.

You'll see glints. The stuff is shiny. We didn't pick much up. Maybe less than one percent. It's a pretty big debris field."

The pilots and observers filed out, some of them still adjusting their parachute straps. One of them stopped.

He turned around and addressed the squadron exec. "Sir," he said, "why weren't we told what we're looking for? What kind of device?"

Blanchard answered. "Anything out in that goddamn desert that looks like its made of metal."

"Yes, sir! Does that include windmills and tin roofs, sir?"

"Get going!"

The search party headed for the flight line. Gray followed them. As intelligence officer, he felt that he had to participate in this part of the mission as well. If a disk was located, it would be his job to examine it. He got issued a chute and climbed into one of the helicopters. They were uncomfortable, noisy and slow, but they were truly amazing machines, the very latest in aircraft.

He knew about the incredible speed of the new jets that were under development, and was duly impressed, but these astonishing little craft would always seem like miracles to him.

The pilot introduced himself. "I'm Lieutenant Kephart," he said. He reached across and shook Gray's hand.

Gray nodded. "Let's go," he said.

The pilot flipped a switch and the helicopter's engine wheezed to life. A moment later they rose into the air, the nose pointing downward as the rotors grabbed for speed and lift. It was a strange way to take off, watching the apron spread out below you instead of fall away behind like in a normal plane.

It was now fifteen-thirty hours. It would take an hour to reach the crash site. The slowness and short range of the helicopters meant that there would be no more than another hour of search time before they would have to return to base. Gray watched the hot, empty New Mexico countryside pass by beneath them. Every so often they would see a house so dusty it looked like it was part of the land, a lump of mud and wood.

The three copters were at an altitude of fifteen hundred feet, and caused a good deal of notice below. People came out of their houses and waved, and observers waved back. Pilots concentrated on flying their cantankerous ships. To keep one of them in the air required continuous concentration. Gray didn't even want to think about their crash rate, which was horribly high.

They flew along Highway 370 to Picacho or Sunset, Gray wasn't sure which, then turned north, keeping the red dirt road to Maricopa and the looming peak of El Capitan to their left.

It was not long before they were in the crash area. One of the other observers, more trained in visual search techniques than Gray, was the first to spot the wreckage. From the air the fan shape of it was clear. The explosion had scattered debris widely, and bits and pieces had continued to fall from the craft as it moved west. "Take us in an absolutely straight line from where the debris field forms that point," Gray said. The pilot radioed this instruction to the others, and the three helicopters formed a line abreast with a thousand yards of separation.

The navigator aboard the Stinson reported the exact location of the debris field to Roswell.

The helicopters dropped to a few hundred feet and proceeded in formation. Above them, at a thousand, the Stinson took detailed pictures of the route of flight, even though nothing was being spotted. Wartime experience had taught the AAF that objects missed by airborne observers could often be found by experts examining photographs.

They flew for thirty minutes without seeing anything. The land was absolutely flat, but it was rising and there were hills ahead, and a mesa to the north. Searching hills was going to be a lot harder.

They'd come about sixty miles from the debris field. The farther they went the less likely they were to find something, in Gray's estimation. The absence of a crash site this far out meant that the craft must still have been under power. The pilot could have maneuvered, maybe even returned his ship to the safety of outer space.

Searching the empty land, Gray's mind turned toward that magical notion, outer space. What did it mean?

And what worlds hid in its folds of darkness? Could the craft have come from Mars or Venus? Who was to know? Gray had a feeling, though, that it was from farther away, from another star. There were no trees on Mars, and wood and paper had been involved in the construction of this craft. Of course, Venus was covered by cloud. Was it a teeming jungle underneath? Nobody knew. But Gray doubted it. He had observed that the most vital civilizations arose in temperate areas. At best Venus was something like equatorial Africa, a gigantic hellhole seething with mosquitoes the size of rump steaks and snakes big enough to swallow a mule.

"This is one-two-one. I observe a glint of metal two o'clock approximately one thousand yards out," a voice said in the earphones.

"Change course zero-three-zero, drop to two hundred," came the reply from the Stinson.

A moment later the second copter spotted it. "We have gleaming metal eight hundred yards out dead ahead,"

the observer stated.

Gray didn't see a thing. The earphones were alive now, as observers and pilots coordinated their observations.

"We see an object," said the Stinson. "It is a metal disk. Repeat, a metal disk."

Gray peered ahead, feeling helpless.

Then he saw it, just ahead of the copter, seemingly so close that he could touch it. The disk was on the ground at the end of a swath of broken soil. It was the color of burnished aluminum. How these men had managed to spot gleams of sunlight off its dull surface he could not imagine.

They went down to approximately fifty feet, each helicopter in turn circling the craft so that the observer could get a close look. Then they cleared out and the Stinson made a series of low-level photographic passes.

Don Gray said nothing, but he literally ached to get out there and have a closer look at that thing. He'd deliberated asking the pilot to let him go down the rescue rope and remain with the device overnight, but he found that he was quite uneasy about being out here in the dark. More important, it seemed too radical a departure from procedure, and he'd already done enough rule-stretching for one day.

They flew back to base, arriving just after eighteen hundred. Blanchard and Jennings were waiting on the apron with Hesseltine and Walters. As Gray dismounted the copter, he saw the observer trotting off to the photo unit with his film for processing.

"What was it like," Blanchard asked Gray. "A featureless disk. It had torn up a lot of dirt on impact."

Blanchard ordered everybody into Operations for debriefing. Each observer reported what he had seen. Gray was surprised to learn that they had observed pieces of wreckage in the broken soil behind the craft. He'd seen nothing.

Then the photo unit reported. Lieutenant Baker himself came in with the portfolio of pictures. He took his time setting up ten crucial shots on the map board, while everybody in the room squirmed. He had to be allowed his moment of drama; the photo unit had prepared the pictures in record time.

Since he'd gotten back Don Gray had smoked up the rest of his Old Golds and was working on Hesseltine's Luckies. His mouth tasted dry and his head was still roaring with the noise of the chopper.

When Baker started to talk, however, all feelings of fatigue left the major.

"We have here a disk approximately thirty feet in diameter, of unknown thickness, content and construction.

There are a hundred and sixty-five observed fragments in the impact area, most of them located in the soil that the object traversed as it slid into the hillside. There is also this." He pointed to a blurry enlargement.

Total silence.

"Is it a body?" Colonel Blanchard asked. His voice was gentle.

"An apparent cadaver approximately three feet long, in a distended posture, showing some signs of predator action. If you observe carefully, you will see that the cadaver appears to have a deformed head, unless the skull has somehow exploded."

"Are we looking at an alien, Lieutenant?" Jennings snapped.

"I wouldn't know. We are looking at a small cadaver that has a deformed head, and reveals signs of having been damaged by predators, like coyotes. That's all I can say."

Blanchard was so excited that he had gotten to his feet. "I want a full recovery party on that crash site as soon after dawn as practicable," he said.

"Yes, sir," said his exec.

"This is the goddamnedest thing I've ever encountered in my career, gentlemen. I want every man to realize how important this is. This is an alien spacecraft, for God's sake. We cannot even build such a craft at this time. This is going to be of the greatest interest to Washington."

"Sir, what do we do on site?"

"Obtain all visible debris and the craft itself if possible, and bring the material back to this base." He looked at Jennings. "Let's have a powwow, buddy. Gray, tag along." He turned and left the operations room.

Gray allowed his two superior officers to get a little ahead of him. He paused at Lieutenant Hope's office and got a rather desperate smile. "The piece is written, sir."

"Here's a change. You can say that the disk was recovered intact and brought to this base for transfer to higher headquarters." He thought a moment. "No, say it was loaned higher headquarters. Got that - loaned."

"I have just one question, Don. When can I circulate this baby?"

Blanchard was about to call Eighth Air Force. "Do it," Gray said.

"Yes, sir."

When Gray entered the colonel's office he was leaning far back in his chair. A cigar was clenched between his teeth. Jennings was standing at the window, staring out at the flight line. Walters was there, slumped against the wall. Hesseltine sat more or less stiffly, nervous to be with so much brass in the absence of his own boss.