“We’re at loose ends,” Reslaw said. “I am, anyway.”

They passed General Fulton and Colonel Phan as the watch supervisor escorted them into a small auditorium near the base public information office. An Air Force lawyer talked to them about their immediate future and offered legal assistance, including the agenting of book and movie offers, without fee. “I think I’m pretty good, and so does the Air Force,” he said. “Nothing mandatory, of course. If you don’t like me, the service will pay for any lawyer you choose, within reason.”

The press conference, though an ordeal, was mercifully brief — only half an hour. They sat alone at a long table while approximately three hundred reporters competed to ask questions, one at a time, through remote microphones. For Edward, the questions blurred into one another: How did you find the alien? Were you actually looking for spaceships and aliens? Are you going to sue the Air Force or the United States government? (“I don’t know,” Edward replied.) What do you think of the Australian spaceship? Of the President’s address to the nation? (“If we are being invaded,” Minelli said, “I think his message sucks.”) Bernice Morgan, Stella’s mother, sat in a roped-off section. She wore a belted print dress and carried a broad white sun hat. Her face was calm. Beside her sat the Morgan family lawyer, older and much more grizzled than the military counsel, in a dark blue suit, clutching a briefcase.

By three, they were back hi the auditorium. Stella stood beside her mother while their lawyer discussed the circumstances of their release. He then offered to represent all four of the detainees, as he referred to them.

A staff sergeant handed Edward a bag containing the keys to his Jeep, and they were all given their packets of personal effects. “I can drive you all right out of here,” Edward said. “If we can avoid the reporters…”

“That’s going to be difficult. If you’d like an escort…” the military counsel offered.

“No thanks. We’ll manage.”

Reslaw and Minelli went with Edward. Stella accompanied her mother to the lawyer’s limousine. “Where are we going?” she asked Edward.

“I’ll take up your offer if it’s still open,” Edward said. Minelli and Reslaw agreed.

“Open to all.”

The Jeep and the limousine pulled away from Vandenberg’s main eastern gate, away from the crush of reporters. A few valiant camera trucks and press cars followed them, but Edward managed to shake them off by taking a devious route through Lompoc.

The climb up the shaft was not difficult; Rogers had indicated it was a much more impressive journey mentally than physically. Yet Arthur was not entirely certain why he was making the trip. What could the hollow interior tell him, that he hadn’t already seen in Rogers’s photographs and video?

Still, he had to do it. His inner confusion had to be resolved. He half hoped for some intuitive breakthrough. And perhaps something would have changed — a change that might indicate where the truth actually lay.

Arthur clambered around the second bend and crawled on all fours along the last stretch of tunnel. In a few minutes, he emerged into the broad cylindrical antechamber, switching on the video camera mounted over his ear.

His lamps played off the complex faceting of the opposite side of the main chamber. Walking to the lip of the antechamber, circling the beam of his torch over the faceted cathedral vastness, he tried to make out the red light Rogers had photographed. He couldn’t see it. Taking a deep breath — as he imagined Rogers had done before — he turned off all his lights and settled into a squat a couple of meters from the edge.

Circular. Designed for weightless conditions? How could all this crystalline structure survive planetfall? What in hell is the function? After five minutes, he still couldn’t make out a red light in the vastness. “One change, at least,” he noted aloud for the recorder.

He switched on the torch again and scrutinized the faceting intently, moving his eyes a few degrees, then again, trying to discern some pattern or evident function. It was beautiful, which implied a pattern, but beyond that…

Could all the facets be used to focus some sort of radiation drive? If so, then was the throat of the drive where he was now standing, in the (presently) closed antechamber? Would the tunnel into the mound then represent a kind of relief valve, left open to evacuate the contents of the chamber after landing? There were no traces of hot exhaust blast outside. Perhaps all that had been obscured after the landing, during the time the craft was camouflaged.

If he stood on tiptoes, he still could not hold the torch high enough to put it in the focal center of the antechamber cylinder, which was about two meters above the greatest stretch of his arms. A simple stepladder…and he could see if the facets reflected the beam directly back at him.

Even from where he stood, that didn’t seem likely.

What would Marty think, knowing his daddy was even now standing inside an alien spacecraft? What would Francine think?

If it is a spacecraft. Everybody seems to assume that. Perhaps the spacecraft left machines to construct this, and it was never in space at all. If so, why?

The cool dark quiet was profound, almost comforting. Reminds me of an anechoic chamber. Maybe the facets are dampers of some sort. He whistled sharply. The whistle returned, muted but clear. His voice, however, did not return. He shut off the microphone and shouted several times to make that point. The first two shouts were wordless, mere yells, apelike, and somehow he felt better after them. The third shout came out of him so rapidly he had no time to think.

”What the hell are you doing here? What are you doing to us, goddammit?”

Embarrassed, his face hot, Arthur approached the lip again and pointed his torch at the facets directly below. He thought of the Guest’s triple sherry-colored eyes, protruding from the surrounding dusty gray-green flesh. What a nightmare. All of it. Day by day we learn and it means nothing, has no pattern. We are befuddled being befuddled. Deliberate.

He tried to subdue his unreasoning rage. Surely there were ways to bring a nuclear weapon into this chamber. Backpack nukes hadn’t been manufactured for twenty years, and had never been field-tested. What else was in the arsenal that could be hauled into the chamber by one or at most two men?

Lieutenant Colonel Rogers knew. He had thought of just such a contingency before Arthur had broached the subject. His reaction — immediate, brusque — made that clear. If two were thinking of it, then others were, as well. How could they circumvent Crockerman’s authority over all nuclear weapons?

What good would it do?

“I’d like to ask you a few more questions,” he said, leaving the mike off. “Just between one human individual and whatever, whoever you are. Are we no more to you than a nest of ants? You go to the trouble to create an artificial being…”He was convinced of that, though the proof was not absolute. “You feed us two stories, maybe more. What are you telling the Russians in Mongolia? Are you telling them the universe is run on socialist principles? We thought, years past…we thought the arrival of something like you would change us all. You’ve taken advantage of that. You seem to know us better than we know ourselves. Or are we just so simple you can predict our behavior? If you’re superior, then why are you torturing us? How many civilizations have you destroyed?”

He did not expect an answer. The circular gray-faceted cathedral interior gloomed around him, silent and implacable, unreal despite his intense scrutiny.

“You’re going to eat the Earth, and spit it out, and move on,” he continued, his voice trembling. His rage was almost overwhelming; he wanted to smash things. With some haste, he retreated to the tunnel, to reach the outside before his decorum vanished completely and he wept in frustration.