The dark gray Mercedes bus took Arthur Gordon and Harry Feinman from the small Air Force passenger jet through a heavily guarded gate into the Vandenberg Space Operations Center. Through the window, over a concrete hill about a mile north, Arthur could see the top half of a space shuttle and its mated rust-orange external tank and white booster rockets poised beside a massive steel gantry.

“I didn’t know you were prepared for this sort of thing, I mean, to bring specimens here,” Arthur said to the blue-uniformed officer sitting beside him, Colonel Morton Hall. Hall was about Arthur’s age, slightly shorter, husky and trim, with a narrow mustache and an air of quiet patience.

“We aren’t, speaking frankly,” Hall said.

Harry, seated in front of them next to a black-haired lieutenant named Sanborn, turned and peered around the neck rest. Each member of the civilian group was accompanied by an officer. “Then why is everything here?” Harry asked.

“Because we’re the closest, and we can improvise,” Hall said. “We have some isolation facilities here.”

“What are they used for, under normal circumstances?” Harry asked. He glanced at Arthur with an expression between roguishness and pique.

“I’m not at liberty to discuss that,” Hall said, smiling slightly.

“It’s what I thought,” Harry said to Arthur. “Yes, indeed.” He nodded and faced forward.

“What were you thinking, Mr. Feinman?” Colonel Hall asked, still smiling, albeit more tightly.

“We’re moving biological weapons research into space,” Harry said tersely. “Automated modules controlled from Earth. Bring them back here, and they’ll have to be isolated. Son of a bitch.”

Hall’s smile flickered but, to his credit, did not vanish completely. He had sprung his own trap. “I see,” he said.

“We all have the highest clearances and presidential authorization,” Arthur reminded him. “I doubt that there’s anything we can be kept from knowing, if we press hard enough.”

“I hope you appreciate our position here, Mr. Gordon, Mr. Feinman,” Hall said. “This whole thing was tossed into our laps just a week ago. We haven’t straightened out all of our security procedures, and it’ll be some time before we decide who needs to know what.”

“I would think this takes priority over practically everything,” Arthur said.

“We’re still not sure what we have here,” Colonel Hall admitted. “Perhaps you gentlemen can help us clear up our priorities.”

Arthur grimaced. “Now the ball’s in our court,” he said. “Touché, Colonel.”

“Better your court than mine,” Hall said. “This whole thing has been an administrative nightmare. We have four civilians and four of our own men in isolation. We have no warrants for arrest or any other formal papers, and there is no — well, you can imagine. We can only stretch national security so far.”

“And the LGM?” Harry asked, turning back again.

“He’s — it’s — our star attraction. You’ll see it first, then we’ll interview the men who found it.”

“’It,’” Arthur said. “We’ll have to find a less ominous name for that soon, certainly before ‘it’ becomes common knowledge.”

“We’ve been calling it the Guest, with a capital g,” Hall said. “It almost goes without saying, we’d like to avoid any leaks.”

“Not likely to avoid it for long, with the Australians having gone public,” Harry said.

Hall nodded, facing up to practicalities. “We still don’t know whether they have what we have.”

“What we have, the Russians probably already know about,” Harry said.

“Don’t be cynical, Harry,” Arthur admonished.

“Sorry.” Harry grinned boyishly at the officer beside him, Lieutenant Sanborn, and then at Hall. “But am I wrong?”

“I hope you are, sir,” Sanborn said.

On a concrete apron a mile and a half from the shuttle runway stood an implacable concrete building with inward-sloping walls, covering about two acres of ground. The tops of the walls rose three stories above the surrounding plain of concrete and asphalt. “Looks like a bunker,” Harry said as the bus approached a ramp inclining below ground level. “Built to withstand nuclear strike?”

“That’s not really a priority here, sir,” Lieutenant Sanborn said. “It would be next to impossible to harden the launch sites and runway.”

“This is the Experiment Receiving Lab,” Colonel Hall explained. “ERL for short. ERL holds our civilian guests and the specimen.”

In a broad garage below ground level, the bus parked beside a rubber-buffered concrete loading dock. The front passenger door opened with a hiss and their escorts led Harry and Arthur out of the bus, across the dock, and into a long, pastel green hallway lined with sky-blue blank-faced doors. Each door was described by numbers and cryptic acronyms on an engraved plastic plaque mounted in a small steel holder. Somewhere, air conditioners hummed quietly. The air smelled faintly of antiseptic and new electronics.

The hall opened into a reception area equipped with two long brown vinyl-upholstered couches and several plastic chairs spaced around a table covered with magazines — scientific journals, Time and Newsweek, and a lone National Geographic. A young alert-looking major sat behind a desk equipped with a computer terminal and a card identification box. One by one, the major cleared all four of them and then punched a code into the keypad lock of a broad double door behind his desk. The door opened with a sucking hiss.

“The inner sanctum,” Hall said.

“Where is it?” Harry asked.

“About forty feet from where we are right now,” Hall said.

“And the civilians?”

“About the same distance, on the other side.”

They entered a half-circular room equipped with more plastic chairs, a small wash-up area and lab table, and three shuttered windows mounted in the long curved wall. Harry stood by the bare lab table and rubbed his hand along the shiny black plastic top, examining his fingers briefly for dust — the gesture a professor might make in a classroom. Arthur’s mouth twitched in a brief smile. Harry caught the twitch and lifted his eyebrows: So?

“Our Guest is behind the middle window,” Hall said. He spoke into an intercom mounted to the left of the middle window. “Our inspectors are here. Is Colonel Phan ready?”

“I am ready,” a soft, almost feminine voice replied over a speaker.

“Then let’s get started.”

The shutters, mounted on their side of the window, clacked and began to rise. The first layer of glass behind was curtained in black. “This is not a one-way mirror or anything fancy,” Hall said. “We’re not concealing our appearance from the Guest.”

“Interesting,” Harry said.

“The Guest has requested a particular environment, and we’ve done our best to meet its requirements,” Lieutenant Sanborn said. “It is most comfortable in conditions of semidarkness, at a temperature of about fifteen degrees Celsius. It seems to enjoy a dry atmosphere with approximately the same mix of gases found in our own air. We believe it exited its normal environment at about six o’clock on the morning of the twenty-ninth of September to explore…well, frankly, we don’t know why it left, but it was caught by daylight and apparently succumbed to the glare and heat by about nine-thirty.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” Harry said. “Why would it leave its…environment…without protection? Why not make all the necessary precautions and plan the first excursion carefully?”

“We don’t know,” Colonel Hall said. “We have not interrogated the Guest or caused it any undue strain. We supply it with whatever it requests.”

“It makes its requests in English?” Arthur asked.

“Yes, in quite passable English.”

Arthur shook his head in disbelief. “Has anyone called Duncan Lunan?”

“We haven’t ‘called’ anybody but people with an immediate need to know,” Hall said. “Who is Duncan Lunan?”