Majestic (8 page)

Gray met Walters's eyes. The CIC man's face was literally drained of color. "Let's go out to the Jeep," he said evenly. "Get those maps."

Outside, it was immediately obvious that Walters wasn't looking for any maps. "What the hell is going on here," he asked.

"I don't know."

"What is that stuff?"

"Frank, I've never seen anything like it before in my life."

"And a blimp!"

"Experimental aircraft, maybe."

"Something you wouldn't know about?"

Gray didn't like to think that experimental aircraft would be tested in the squadron area without his knowledge, but it was possible. "Could be," he answered.

"I don't like it. There isn't a hangar in New Mexico that can hold a blimp."

"Texas, then. Blimps can fly long range."

"Real long range. Like from Russia. If you ask me, this could be some kind of new goldbeater's skin.

Incredibly tough. Suitable for a long-range spy blimp, or even a bomber."

Both men knew what a bomber could do to the 509th if it struck while there were atomic devices on the flight line.

"Hiroshima'd look like a picnic," Gray said. He tried to imagine the scope of the disaster, but his mind rejected it.

"Two blimps. One of them blows up in a thunderstorm. The other one comes searching for the remains."

"They have a hell of a big radar signature." "They can also fly low and slow, Don."

"Low and slow all the way from Russia. Damn, that's scary."

They went back inside to find that the rancher and his family were already going to bed.

As he passed the couple's bedroom door, Gray glimpsed an old iron bed with yellow sheets and a dresser with a half-empty bottle of Trushay hand cream on top. He felt a pang of loneliness; Jennine used Trushay.

He wished that he'd called her before he came out here. Suddenly he was facing Russians in the night, and he was uneasy.

"I think we'd better hang watches," he said when the four soldiers were alone together in the living room.

"I agree," Walters said.

"What're we worried about, coyotes?" Hesseltine sounded disgusted.

Gray explained to him. "Russians. This stuff is most probably some kind of goldbeater's skin, used to cover a blimp. The rancher saw another blimp last night. Long-range Russian blimps after the 509th."

That stopped even Hesseltine. The PFC's eyes were wide.

"I'm armed," Walters said. He produced a police special from under his jacket. "The man on watch carries it in his belt."

"Is it a regulation weapon?" Gray asked. "I didn't think civilians could carry weapons on base."

"Consider me a cop. That's what counterintelligence is, kid. Police work."

Gray didn't know Walters all that well, but he'd always had a lot of respect for the man. His background as a police detective combined with his toughness and brains made him one of the best counterintelligence men that Gray had ever met. With communist fifth columnists, fellow travelers and spies said to be everywhere, good men were needed to protect the 509th.

He lay on his back with a couch cushion for a pillow. First PFC Winters went on watch, then Hesseltine.

Gray had decided that the postmidnight hours were the most dangerous, and assigned them to himself and Walters. There would be four two-hour watches from nine P.M., then reveille along with the rancher, who ordinarily got up at five.

He must have slept a little, because Hesseltine's place was empty and the PFC was snoring peacefully when he opened his eyes again. Walters had been sawing Z's from the second they'd snuffed the oil lamp. Gray lit a cigarette.

He could easily imagine Russians sneaking around out here. He thought of the goldbeater's skin. How the hell had they done it? He'd never seen anything even remotely like it. Incredibly tough. Incredibly light.

Suddenly Hesseltine was whispering in his ear. "Your turn, boss."

Gray looked at his radium-dial watch. "You've got it, Mr. Hesseltine." He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray he'd brought down to the floor. "Any sign of anything?"

"It's been quiet, except for the porcupines, badgers, ferrets, owls, coons and coyotes. Not to mention the things that

scream."

There was nothing screaming now. As a matter of fact it was absolutely quiet, absolutely dark and about as lonely a place as Gray had ever been in. The Milky Way came right down to both horizons. Even a tiny constellation like Lyra stood out clearly. The only way you could tell where the land started was that there were no stars there.

Gray wished he had another cigarette, but you didn't carry lights on watch. He stood in front of the house beside the bulk of his staff car. It would have been nice to see if he could pick up some dance music, but he supposed that all the radio stations would be shut down by now.

One-fifteen. As his eyes slowly adjusted to the dark he took a walk around the house. He moved up toward the barn, which was small and ramshackle. There was a horse snorting inside, and he could hear sheep bleating somewhere off in the distance. There were rustles and shuffling sounds and occasional low growls in the brush.

Once he was startled to see what he thought might have been a glow on the horizon, but it disappeared and he didn't see it again.

An hour passed.

Then he heard a noise unlike any he had heard before. It cut through him like a white-hot blade.

Walters and the rancher and Hesseltine came pouring out the kitchen door. PFC Winters stood behind them.

"What the hell was it," Walters breathed.

"Damned if I know," Gray said. The scream was still echoing in his head. "What about it, Mr. Ungar?"

The rancher was standing very still, staring into the black night. "I heard it right after the crash. I lived here all my life, and I never heard anything like it before."

Gray's fingers closed around the piece of foil in his pocket. In his mind there had formed a question, but he did not yet know how to put it into words.

"Goddamn," Hesseltine said softly.

The rancher backed up against his screen door.

From inside the house a child keened, and Mrs. Ungar offered comfort in a shaking voice.

Ungar whispered, "The other night when I heard it, I thought nothing could sound like that but the devil."

"It's real," Walters said. "We all heard it."

They were silent, then, and so was the night.

Chapter Five

In part I have written this in an attempt to understand why Will Stone and the others did what they did. Why did they choose to decide that these others were dangerous?

One of the things that I originally understood the least was the mind of Will Stone and by extension all the other Will Stones that choke the bureaucracies of the world.

I can read his diaries, listen to him talk, read assessments of him, sit across from him and watch him slowly choking on his cancer, and never actually see him. The moment I leave him, it is as if he has never existed.

The curse of living with too many secrets is that a man's own meaning also becomes a secret. He loses himself in the machinery of his knowledge.

I keep thinking that, if only I understood exactly what was so strangely unformed about the man I would also know why he failed so dismally to grasp the sublime aim of the others. Somehow he translated their offer of help into a deadly challenge.

I suppose it was an offer of help. Surely it must have been. What would happen to us, I wonder, if we were attacked by an army whose weapons were so subtle that we could not understand even that we were at war?

I am fascinated by the contrast between Stone and Bob Ungar. The one is alive and yet more indistinct than a shadow. The other - long dead - is vivid with meaning and sense and even grace.

I can imagine the morning that he took the military party to the crash site. Major Gray's report reveals nothing of the emotions, of the sinew and color of the experience. But I can imagine.

Dawn at the Ungar ranch would be marked by quiet kitchen bustle and the smell of strong coffee. Judging from the uneasiness he reports feeling, Don Gray would have been sleeping fitfully.

Perhaps the clink of dishes made him open his eyes. It was still pitch dark, but the entire Ungar family was already at breakfast. Walters was with them, slopping down coffee and chewing on a big piece of bread.

Gray woke up the others, tucked in his shirt and went to the table. The meal consisted of coffee and bread spread with a thin coating of grape jelly. He thought of steak and eggs at the officer's club. Roswell AAF was a good life. Challenging to be an intelligence officer in a place where it really mattered. A good outfit.

Excellent facilities.

Coffee and bread. Not even a glass of water to wash it down, let alone milk or juice. They couldn't have drunk the water even if it had been offered. These people used cisterns. The Air Force warned you to drink only from approved water supplies as soon as you set foot on base. And stay away from animals that might have fleas: New Mexico had fifty to a hundred cases of bubonic plague a year. Not to mention astronomical polio statistics and a substantial amount of TB in the Mexican population.

Don was just as glad that the coffee was well boiled.

Ungar wiped his mouth against the back of his hand. "Let's get on out there. I've got a lotta other stuff to do today."

He pulled his ancient Jeep up to the house. His daughter and son got in with him. The four soldiers rode in Walters's much newer Jeep. Gray and Hesseltine sat in the back, deciding that it was best to leave the staff car behind.

They bounced over the desolate land for about half an hour. Gray could see a mountain ahead, but it never seemed to get any closer. The land undulated in great, shallow waves. Spanish daggers and chorro cactus dragged along the sides of the Jeep. Tough clumps of dry grass waved in the morning breeze. Out where the land was flat tumbleweeds bounded along.

They came to the top of a rise and he saw the crash site. His practiced eye told him at once that something had blown up us it was traveling in a westerly direction. Debris had funned out from a point about a hundred yards below the base of a hill. The wreckage covered an area about a quarter of a mile long. They stopped the Jeeps. "No large debris," Hesseltine said immediately.

"What was it?" Walters asked.

Gray spoke. "The lack of large debris does suggest a balloon or some such thing."

The rancher walked into the mess. "I want y'all to take a look at something." He pointed at the ground.

"Those things."

Gray saw some small balsa beams, some shaped like the letter I and others like a T. He picked one up. It was marked by violet hieroglyphics.

"Cyrillic?" Hesseltine asked.

"No," Walters said as he examined it.

"Jap?"

Gray looked at the writing. It was vaguely reminiscent of Egyptian, but there were no familiar animal shapes.

"I've never seen anything like it before."

The little girl held up a piece of what seemed to Gray to be parchment. There were rows of little squiggles on it. They were pink and purple, and Gray couldn't make anything out of them at all.

"Maybe they're numbers," Hesseltine said. "The way they're in columns like that."

The little girl held another piece of the parchment up to the sun, the disk of which had just cleared the horizon. "You can see yellow flowers inside. Its real pretty."

The torn pieces of parchment were abundant, and all four soldiers picked them up and held them to the sun.

"Cornflowers," Gray said.

Walters grunted. "Primroses. Cornflowers are blue."

"You can't burn it, bend it, tear it or nothin'," the rancher said. "Just like the tinfoil."

PFC Winters spoke. "What I think you all have here," he said in his drawl, "is the pieces of one of them flying disks like folks've been seeing."

Nobody replied. Suddenly Walters grabbed a large piece of foil and begun struggling furiously with it. He pulled it, ripped at it, stood on it and tried to stretch it. Nothing.

Finally he took out his pistol. "Okay, folks, we'll see just how strong this stuff really is." He laid the three-foot-square piece of material out on the ground and fired into it.

There was a blast from the gun, and the foil swarmed into the ground behind the bullet. "That tore it," the PFC

said. He and Walters pulled it out of the ground.

The flattened bullet was lying in the middle of the foil, which was completely unmarred.

"You sure that's not Cyrillic on that paper," Walters asked again.

The bullet just lay there, flattened. The foil shone in the sun. Gray took out his Old Golds and with shaking hands pulled the foil from around the few cigarettes that remained in the pack. He took a piece of the strange metal in one hand and the cigarette wrapping in the other.

The metal was thinner by a considerable margin. He was a methodical man, and not quick to make decisions. He carefully returned the cigarette wrapping to the pack and put his cigarettes in his pocket. He then picked up a piece of the parchment and attempted to burn it with his lighter. It would not burn.

"Nothin' burns," the rancher said. "And the wood doesn't break."

Walters grabbed a piece of the wood. It bent like rubber. No matter how he twisted it around he could not make it snap. Finally he threw it to the ground. "What the hell is it?"

Gray looked at the PFC. "I think you're absolutely right, soldier. I think what we have here is the remains of an exploded flying disk."

"Oh, Lord," Walters said. "What are they doing here? What are they up to?"

"Maybe just looking around," Hesseltine replied.

"By dark of night? In secret? I hardly think that's all they're doing." Walters looked grim. He had taken his pistol from his shoulder holster and stuck it in his belt.

"We don't know what they're doing," Gray said. There was annoyance in his voice. He didn't like loose speculation. They weren't equipped even to think about things like intent. "What we need to do is gather up as much of this stuff as we can, and get it back to the field pronto." "We ought to recce the whole site,"