16
I can’t help wondering how it would have come out had it not been for Wesley Fue’s garage door opener.
—Mike Tower, Chicago Tribune
“What happened to the dirt? That’s what I really don’t understand.”
Several inches of dirt had been removed, revealing a stone disk. The disk was about five feet in diameter and rose an inch or two off the surrounding gray floor. It was lime-colored and ribbed with a gridwork of black spokes.
“It looks as if we’ve discovered a high-tech vacuum cleaner,” Max said. He put the minicam down and inspected the grid from a respectful distance. There were too many unknowns here, and Max had no interest in getting rearranged the way the dirt had.
“This one,” April said, pointing toward the tree emblem. “All you have to do is touch the wall.”
“How about if we try it again?” he said.
“But something more distinguishable than dirt this time,” said April.
A few wooden chairs had been set inside the dome for the convenience of the workers. Max retrieved one and put it on the grid. Then he set up to record everything on video. He signaled when he was ready.
April pressed the flat of her hand against the wall in front of the tree.
It lit up.
“Okay,” she said.
But nothing happened. With a bleep, the light went out.
And there were no special effects.
Max looked at the six icons. They were tastefully done, but they did have the appearance of being functional rather than decorative. He noticed a recessed plate near the base of the wall. Another sensor?
“Go ahead,” she said. “Try it.”
He pushed it and felt something click. A panel door popped open. It was round, several inches across. Inside, he could see cables.
“Well,” he said, “we’ve got something. Our wall switches do tie in to a power source.”
“How about,” said April, “we try one of the other icons?”
He pointed the minicam at the chair and started it.
“Maybe,” she said, “we should make sure we’re not standing on another one of these grids.”
Max brushed away some of the earth with his heel. No sign of a gridwork. “I think we’re okay,” he said.
The smoke symbol was next. She pushed on the wall.
The icon stayed dark.
“I don’t think it’s working,” said Max.
“Apparently not.”
Almost casually, she tried the egg icon.
It blinked on. “We got a light,” she said.
Max backed up a few steps and started the minicam again.
April glanced at her watch.
The red lamp glowed in the viewfinder. The minicam got heavy, and Max shifted it higher on his shoulder.
He was beginning to suspect the phenomenon would not repeat when a tiny star began to glow in the middle of the viewing field.
“Twenty-three seconds,” she said.
The star expanded and grew brighter.
“My God,” said Max. “What is that?”
It enveloped the chair.
He watched it glitter and swirl until it hurt his eyes. Then it was gone.
So was the chair. They had a clean grid.
Edward (Uncle Ed) Crowley was in his third year as CEO of the Treadline Corporation, which had been a subsidiary of Chrysler but had gone independent three years before and was scoring a major success with its line of quality cars at reasonable prices (the company motto) and its emphasis on customer service.
Treadline was doing everything right. It had gone for a legitimate team concept, had got rid of its autocrats and replaced them with managers who understood how to motivate, had encouraged employees to make decisions, and had seen to it that everyone had a stake in success. Now, at last, things were coming together. The previous quarter had given Treadline its first net profit, and the curve was now decidedly up. He could see nothing ahead but prosperity.
His calendar lay open on his teak desk. German trade reps were due in fifteen minutes. That would spill over into lunch. Staff meeting at one, reflection at one-forty-five, wander down to the Planning Effectiveness Division at two-fifteen. Uncle Ed subscribed to the theory of management by walking around. He understood the importance of being seen. Conference with the legal director at three, and with Bradley and his technicians at four. Open door in effect from four-thirty. Anyone could pop by and say hello to the boss.
In fact, he got relatively few visitors. The line of command immediately below him, because they normally had easy access, were prohibited from taking advantage of his time. People further down the food chain were somewhat reluctant to drop in on the head man. But they did come by on occasion. And anyhow the open door was a valuable symbol, both to the rank and file and to his chiefs.
He had been going over the plans for restructuring Treadline’s long-term debt, in the hope of finding a way to finance needed R and D. But he was tired of looking at numbers, and his back was starting to hurt. He glanced at his watch and realized he’d been at it for an hour and a quarter. Too long.
Time to take a break and clear his mind. He got up, walked over to the window, and looked out at the Indianapolis skyline. The intercom beeped.
“Yes, Louise?”
“Mr. Hoskin on line one.”
Walt Hoskin was his vice president for financial operations, a fussy little man who had never learned to think outside the parameters. Which was why he would never rise higher than he was now. It was Hoskin’s plan that lay on his desk. And it was perfectly satisfactory within the general rules and principles of company policy and past practice. But the man did not know how to kill sacred cows. If Treadline was to take full advantage of recent market trends, they had to get out of the old buggy Hoskin was driving. He picked up the phone. “Yes, Walt?”
“Ed, have you seen the news this morning?” Hoskin’s voice was reedy and thin.
As a matter of fact, he hadn’t. Uncle Ed was a bachelor. On days when he worked late, as he had last evening, he often stayed overnight at the office. He hadn’t been near the TV either last evening or this morning. “No,” he said quietly. “Why? What’s going on?”
“We opened seventeen points down.” Hoskin delivered the news like a sinner announcing the Second Coming.
Uncle Ed prided himself on his ability to react coolly to crises and shocks. But this blindsided him. “Seventeen points?” he bellowed. “What the hell’s going on?” He knew of nothing, no bad news, no market speculations, that could produce this kind of effect.
“It’s that thing in North Dakota.”
“What thing in North Dakota?”
“The UFO.”
Uncle Ed had discounted the reports from Johnson’s Ridge as a mass delusion. “Walt,” he said, struggling to regain his composure. “Walt, what are we talking about?”
“There are reports that it’s about to become possible to make automobiles that will run damn near forever!”
Uncle Ed stared at his phone. “Nobody’s going to believe that, Walt.”
“Maybe not. But people might think other shareholders will. So they’re dumping their stock. There was a woman on ABC this morning saying that a car made of this stuff would last the lifetime of the owner. Provided he changed the oil and didn’t have any accidents.”
Hoskin was on the verge of hysteria. Uncle Ed eased into his chair.
“Are you there, Ed?” asked Hoskin. “Ed, you okay?”
The markets had opened mixed, unable to make up their minds for an hour or so. Then a wave of selling had set in. By late morning they were in free fall. The Nikkei Index lost 19 percent of its value in a single day, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 380 points.
They ran the sequence through the VCR.
The chair.
The light.
The empty grid.
They ran it a frame at a time, watching the incandescence build, watching it acquire a sparkle effect, watching it reach out almost protoplasmically for the chair. “Go slow,” said April.
The chair looked as if it was fading.
There were a couple of frames during which Max thought he could see through the legs and back. It looked like a double exposure.
They were in the control module. Around them, phones continued to ring. Helicopters came and left every few minutes. April had hired a bevy of graduate students to conduct the tours and coordinate visits by VIPs. Two of these students, wearing dark blue uniforms with a Roundhouse shoulder patch, were busy at their desks while simultaneously trying to follow April’s progress.
“We need to try this again,” said Max. “And use a filter.”
But they would apparently have to try a different icon: Like the tree, the egg seemed to have only one charge to fire and was no longer working.
She seemed not to be listening, but was instead staring into her coffee cup. At last she looked up. “What do you think it is, Max?”
“Maybe a garbage disposal.” The thought amused him. He looked back at the image on the monitor. Something caught his eye.
“What?” she said, following his gaze.
Behind the nearly transparent chair, against the wall, Max could make out two vertical lines.
“Those are not in the Roundhouse,” he said. He tried to visualize the space between the grid and the rear wall. There was nothing that might produce such lines. Nor anything on the wall itself.
“What are you thinking?” she asked.
Max’s imagination was running wild. “I wonder,” he said, “whether we haven’t sent an old chair into somebody’s vestibule.”
Randy Key was rendered even more desperate by the conviction that he was probably the only person on the planet who understood the truth about the ominous structure on Johnson’s Ridge. He had tried to warn his brother. Had tried to talk to his ex so she could at least hide their son. Had even tried to explain it to Father Kaczmarek. No one believed him. He knew it was a wild story, and he could think of no way to convince his family and friends of their danger. To convince anyone. So he had no choice but to take the situation into his own hands.
The thing they called the Roundhouse was in fact a signaling device left to sound the alarm that the human race was ready for harvest. Randy suspected it had been atop the ridge far longer, many times longer, than the ten thousand years the TV stations were talking about. He could not be sure, of course, but it didn’t matter anyhow. The only thing that did matter was that he understood the danger. And knew how to deal with it.
Randy worked for Monogram Construction. He was currently assigned to a road crew that was out restoring Route 23, in the Ogilvie area, north of Minneapolis. It pained him to think what it would all look like, these pleasant little white-fenced homes, and the lighted malls, and the vast road network, after the enemy had come.
It was, of course, too late now to stop the signal from being sent. It was on its way. All that remained to do, all that could be done, was to punctuate that signal in such a way that the creatures at the other end would understand there would be no free lunch on Earth. He would show them we knew about them and that they should be prepared for a long, hard fight if they came.
He would ride to the top of the ridge and gun the engine and crash into the son of a bitch. There were five hundred pounds of C4 in back of his Isuzu Rodeo, connected to a remote-control device that he’d purchased with a model car outfit. If everything went well, he would get out of the Isuzu quickly, warn any bystanders to take cover, and turn the Roundhouse into rubble. He hoped nobody inside would be killed, but he couldn’t help that. In the end, people would understand. It might take a while, but once they realized what he had done, he would be on television. And his ex would be sorry she hadn’t listened to him. But it would be too late then for her because he’d be damned if he was going to take the bitch back. Not even to get his boy.
He cruised along the expressway, staring placidly out at the barren, snow-covered fields. A sense of repose had been creeping over him since he’d left Minnesota. He’d be at Fort Moxie by midafternoon. He had read there was no space in the Walhalla motels, but Fort Moxie was close enough. He hadn’t figured out how he would return to his motel after he’d destroyed his means of transportation. But that was okay. Once they saw the inner workings of the Roundhouse, they would be grateful, and someone would understand and give him a ride.
He’d used the workings of the model car to make the switch that would blow his bomb. He’d armed it but had put a wooden wedge between the electrical contacts to make sure they could not accidentally close.
Randy ran into two pieces of bad luck that afternoon. The first occurred as he passed Drayton on I—29. A red station wagon with Manitoba plates cut in front of him; Randy slammed on his brakes, slid sidewise, and bounced out onto the median. A tractor-trailer roared past, almost taking his front end off. But it missed him, and Randy, who ended up facing south, felt very fortunate. He shouldn’t have. His wedge had shifted, and it shifted again when he had to gun his engine to climb the narrow snow-covered embankment below which the pickup had come to rest. By the time he got back onto the freeway, it no longer served its purpose, and the contacts, although not actually touching, were close enough to permit a spark to cross. The bomb was, in effect, armed.
At the northernmost exit, just before entering Canada, he turned east onto Route 11 and followed it into Fort Moxie. Randy’s second piece of bad luck came when he approached the intersection at 20th Street. He was on the edge of town, and there wasn’t much out there, other than a lumberyard and the forlorn white building that housed the Tastee-Freez and Wesley Fue’s house. It happened that Wesley, who’d been fighting a cold for six weeks, had come home from his job at the bank, planning to make himself a good stiff drink and go to bed. It also happened that Wesley’s garage door opener was tuned to precisely the same frequency as the radio-controlled toy that Randy had converted into a firing switch.
The garage stood with its back to 20th Street. Wesley pulled into his driveway as Randy approached from the west. The driveway was partially blocked by his daughter’s sled. Wesley angled carefully around it, promising himself to speak with her when she got home from school, and reached up to activate his door opener, which was clamped to the top of the dash. He squeezed the remote just as its directional angle swept across Bannister Street. The radio beam caught Randy entering the intersection and closed the circuit on his bomb.
The intersection erupted in a sheet of flame. The explosion blew out the western end of the lumberyard, leveled the Tastee-Freez, knocked out all of Wesley’s windows, and demolished his garage. Wesley suffered two broken arms and a mass of cuts and burns, but he survived.
One of the few pieces of Randy’s vehicle that came through more or less intact was a vanity plate that read UFO.
Traffic was so heavy that Max decided to do something about it. In the morning he contacted Bill Davis at Blue Jay Air Transport outside Grand Forks and scheduled a helicopter pickup service. They established an operating schedule among Fort Moxie, Cavalier, Devil’s Lake, and Johnson’s Ridge.
Matthew R. Taylor had come to the White House by a circuitous route. His father had run a candy store in Baltimore, which had provided a meager existence for Matt and his six siblings. But the old man had provided his kids with one priceless gift: He’d encouraged them to read, and he didn’t bother too much about the content, subscribing to the theory that good books ultimately speak for themselves.
By the time he was nineteen, Taylor had devoured the Greek and Roman classics, Shakespeare, Dickens, Mark Twain, and a wide array of modern historians. He was also a decent outfielder in high school and at Western Maryland University. In 1965 he went to Vietnam. During his second patrol he took a bullet in the hip. Doctors told him he would not walk again, but he had stayed with a six-year-long program of therapy and now needed only a cane to get around the White House. Eventually, of course, the cane would become a symbol of the man and his courage.
He married his nurse and invested his money in a car wash, which failed, and in a fast-food outlet, which also failed.
Taylor was never very good at business, but he was scrupulously honest, and he was always willing to help people in the community who got in trouble. During the mid-seventies, when he was working as a clothing clerk at Sears Roebuck, he allowed himself to be persuaded to run for the county highway commission by people who thought they could control him.
He proved to be a surprisingly shrewd steward of the public money. Before he was done, several county officials and a couple of contractors were in jail, costs were down, and the road system had improved dramatically.
Taylor was elected to the House in 1986 and to the Senate eight years later. He chaired the ethics committee and introduced a series of reforms that brought him national prominence and the vice presidency. But within sixty days after his accession to office, a stroke incapacitated the chief executive, and Taylor became acting president under the Twenty-fifth Amendment. He was subsequently elected in his own right.
The country loved Matt Taylor as they had no other president since FDR. He was perceived by many as a new Harry Truman. He possessed several of Truman’s finest characteristics: an unbending will when he believed he was right, uncompromising integrity, and a willingness to say what he meant in plain English. This latter tendency sometimes got him in trouble, as when he offhandedly remarked within the hearing of journalists that it might be prudent, during the visit of a certain Middle Eastern potentate, to hide the White House silver.
Taylor explained his solid ratings by saying that the American people understood that he did what he thought was right, and to hell with the polls. “They like that,” he would say. “And when they reach a point where they don’t trust my judgment anymore, why, they’ll turn me out. And good riddance to the old son of a bitch.”
The president’s political alarms over the North Dakota business had been sounding all winter. His advisors had told him not to worry. It was just a crop circle flap, the sort of thing to stay away from, to deflect at press conferences. A chief executive who starts talking about flying saucers is dead. No matter what happens, he is dead. That was what they said. So he had kept away from it, and now it was blowing up. The stock market today had dropped 380 points.
“They’re already calling it Black Wednesday,” said Jim Samson, his treasury secretary. Samson was now trying to pretend he’d been warning the President all along to take action.
It was a turbulent time. There were six wars of strategic interest to the United States being fought with varying degrees of energy, and another fifteen or so hotspots. Famine was gaining, population growth everywhere was shifting into overdrive, and the UN had all but given up the dream of a new world order. The American transition from an industrialized economy to an information economy was still creating major dislocations. Corruption in high places remained a constant problem, and the splintering of the body politic into fringe groups that would not talk to each other continued. On the credit side, however, the balance of trade looked good; the long battle to reduce runaway deficits was finally showing positive results; racism, sexism, and their attendant evils seemed to be losing ground; drug use was way down; and medical advances were providing people with longer and healthier lives. Perhaps most important for a politician, the media were friendly.
The truth was that Matt Taylor could not take credit for the latter trends any more than he could be blamed for the former. But he knew that whatever else happened, he had to have a strong economy. If he lost that, the dislocations accompanying the evolution through which the western world was now passing were going to get a lot worse. He could not allow that. He was not going to stand by and watch hordes of homeless and unemployed reappear on the American scene. No matter what it took.
“A blip,” Tony Peters said. “These things happen.”
Peters was chairman of the president’s Fiscal Policy Council. He was also an old ally, with good political instincts. Of the people who had come up with him from Baltimore to the White House, no one enjoyed a greater degree of Taylor’s confidence.
“Tony,” the president said, “it’s only a blip if there’s nothing to it. What happens if they really have a metal up there that won’t break down or wear out?”
“I agree,” said Samson. “We need to find out what the facts are here.”
Peters frowned. “As I understand it, Mr. President, it’s not a metal.”
“Whatever.” Taylor pushed back in his chair and folded his arms. “They can make sails out of it. And they can make buildings. The issue is, what happens to the manufacturing industries if they suddenly get materials to work with that don’t break down periodically?” He shook his head. “Suppose people buy only one or two cars over a lifetime. What does that mean to GM?” He took off his glasses and flung them on the desk. “My God,” he said, “I don’t believe I’m saying this. All these years we’ve been looking for a way to beat the Japanese at this game. Now we have it, and it would be a catastrophe.”
Taylor was short and stocky. He wore nondescript ties and well-pressed suits that were inevitably last year’s fashion.
“Mr. President,” said Peters, “it’s all tabloid stuff. No one is going to be able to mass-produce supermaterials.”
“How do you know? Have we looked into it?”
“Yes. Everybody I’ve talked to says it can’t happen.”
“But we have samples.”
“We saw a lot of lightning before we learned how to put it into a wall switch. What we need to do is get everybody’s mind off this thing. Pick one of the wars, or the Pakistani revolution, and start sounding alarms.”
There was this about Tony Peters: He was the only person Taylor had ever known who seemed to understand what drove economies, and who could make that insight clear to others. He also knew the Congress, the power brokers, and the deal makers. He was an invaluable aide to an activist president. But Taylor knew his chairman’s limits. To Peters, experience was everything. One learned from it and applied its lessons succinctly, and one could never go far wrong. But what happened when you ran into a problem that transcended anything you’d seen before? What good was experience then?
“I want you,” said Taylor, “to talk to some of the people who’ve been out there. Top people, right? Find out what’s really going on. What the risks are. Not what your experts say can’t happen.”
Peters stared back. “You’re not serious,” he said. “We shouldn’t get anywhere close to this thing, Mr. President. We start asking questions, and it’ll get around.”
“Try to be discreet, Tony. But goddammit, the markets are in the toilet. Find somebody who understands these things and get me some answers. Definitive ones. I want to know if that thing is for real. And if it is, what’s it going to do to the economy.” He felt tired. “I don’t want any more guesswork.”