17

Arthur unfolded a newspaper as the Learjet taxied across the runway. On a far apron, B-l bombers lined up, their sleek tan, gray, and green shapes obscured by a layer of early morning sea haze. It took a few seconds for him to focus on the headlines. His thoughts were still on Harry Feinman, and on the autopsy.

The Guest had no discrete internal organ structure. Stuffed within the thoracic cage was shell-pink tissue continuous except for occasional cavities, more like a brain than anything else. The head consisted of the Lexan-like articulated bone material, arranged in large solid masses, with no discernible central nervous system. Small nodes the size of BBs interrupted the continuity of the bone; they appeared to be made of some sort of metal, perhaps silver.

Harry would soon be undergoing his own probing and examination in Los Angeles.

The plane completed its taxi and began to accelerate down the runway, small jets screaming thinly beyond the insulated walls.

Arthur focused on the newspaper. The front page headline read,

The same unscrambled transmission that had brought Trevor Hicks to Furnace Creek had led other reporters, just hours later, to reach similar conclusions. Hicks had struck a mother lode. The others had had to make do with testimony from inhabitants of Shoshone and one phone call to Furnace Creek Inn that had gotten through to the apartment of a maid who spoke only Spanish. Bernice Morgan had not been interviewed. Perhaps Crockerman persuaded her, Arthur thought, tracking the story several times to see if he had missed any telling details.

General Paul Fulton, Commander in Chief of West Coast Shuttle Operations, was on the flight with Arthur. He came forward as soon as they were in the air and had finished their climb to 28,000 feet.

“Ah, the good old free press,” he commented, taking the neighboring seat. “Pardon me, Mr. Gordon. We haven’t had time to just sit and talk.”

“You’re going back to testify?”

“Before some key congressmen, before the Space Activities Committee senators — God only knows what Proxmire is going to make of this. How he got on that committee in the first place is beyond me. The man’s politically immortal.”

Arthur nodded. He felt as if his brain were mush. He had hoped to sleep through the entire flight, but Fulton seemed to have something on his mind.

“A lot of us are worried about Crockerman’s choice of Trevor Hicks. He’s a science fiction writer—”

“Only recently,” Arthur said. “He’s quite a decent science writer, actually.”

“Yes, and we actually don’t fault the choice of Hicks, but we wonder about the President’s need to go beyond the…primary group. His staff and advisors and Cabinet. The assigned experts.”

“He wanted a second opinion. He mentioned that a couple of times.”

Fulton shrugged. “The Guest shook him.”

“The Guest shook me, too,” Arthur said.

Fulton dropped the subject abruptly. “There will be two of our Australian counterparts in Washington when we arrive. Flown in fresh from Melbourne. They were spare parts down there, I suspect. The really important man — Quentin Bent — is staying behind. Do you know him?”

“No,” Arthur said. “There’s something of a gap between the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, science-wise, in all but astronomy. Bent’s not an astronomer. He’s a sociologist, I believe.”

Fulton looked dubious. “Your colleague, Dr. Feinman… Is he going to be able to keep up?”

“I think so.” Arthur recognized that he was taking a disliking to General Fulton, and wondered how reasonable that was. The man was only trying to gather information.

“What does he have?”

“Chronic leukemia.”

“Terminal?”

“His doctors think it’s treatable.”

Fulton nodded. “I wonder if that’s not a good diagnosis for the Earth.”

Arthur didn’t catch his meaning.

“Cancer,” Fulton volunteered. “Cosmic cancer.”

Arthur nodded reflectively and looked out the window, wondering when he would find time to call Francine, talk to Marty, touch base with the real world.

Lieutenant Colonel Albert Rogers took the radio message in hand and climbed out of the rear door of the communications trailer, down the corrugated metal steps to the crunchy white sand. He didn’t really want to think about the implications of his orders; thinking on such an esoteric level would do him no good whatsoever. The Guest was dead; Arthur Gordon had ordered his team to investigate the interior of the Furnace. Rogers would not allow anyone but himself to do it.

He had been planning for such a mission. He had drawn incomplete diagrams of the bogey’s interior in a small notebook, little more than suppositions based on length, height, width, and the angle and length of the tube running through solid rock. Climbing the tube would present no problem — even where it angled straight up, he could take it like a rock climber in a chimney, back against one side, legs/jackknifed and feet pressed against the other, inching his way up. He would carry a miniature digital video recorder, smaller than the palm of his hand, and a helmet-mounted finger-sized video camera. A Hasselblad for high-resolution pictures and a smaller, lighter automatic film-packed 35mm Leica completed his equipment. He doubted the investigation would take more than a day. There was, of course, the possibility that the bogey was honeycombed with interior spaces. Some-how, he doubted that.

As a sergeant and corporal brought the supplies he requested from the stores trailer, he drew up his itinerary and discussed emergency measures with his second-in-command, Major Peter Keller. Rogers then donned the chest pack and heavy climbing boots, coiled three lengths of rope neatly and hung them from his belt, and walked around the south side of the bogey.

He checked his watch and set its timer. It was six a.m. The desert was still wrapped in gray dawn, high cirrus stretching from horizon to horizon in a thin layer. The desert smelled of clean cold air, a hint of dry creosote bush.

“Give me a lift,” Rogers instructed Keller. The major meshed the fingers of both hands to make a stirrup and Rogers stepped into the stirrup with his left foot. With a heave-ho, Keller lifted him into the tunnel. Rogers lay on his back in the angled shaft for a moment, staring at the first bend, about forty feet into the rock. “Okay,” he said, punching the button on his watch for the timer to start. “I’m off.”

They had decided against unwinding a telephone wire and communicating directly with him as he climbed. The video recorder was equipped with a small lapel mike, into which he would make oral observations; the video camera would make an adequate record of what he saw from moment to moment. If time and opportunity presented, he would take pictures with the other cameras.

“Good luck, sir,” Keller called as. he began his low-angle ascent up the tunnel.

“The hell with that,” Rogers grunted under his breath. The first thirty feet were easy, a wriggling crawl. At the bend, he paused to shine a light up into the darkness. The tunnel angled straight up after the first thirty feet of incline. He noted this aloud for the record, then looked down over his stomach and legs at the cameo of Keller’s face. Keller made an okay sign with circled thumb and index finger. Rogers blinked his light twice.

“I’m going into the belly of an alien spaceship,” he told himself silently, grimacing fiercely to limber his tense jaw and face muscles. “I’m crawling up into an unknown. That’s it. Don’t be afraid.” And he wasn’t — a kind of energetic calm, almost a high, came over him.