Strangers

by Dean Koontz

  visited Elko earlier in the day. Tied to the hook was a hundred-foot length of hawser-laid nylon rope, five-sixteenths of an inch in diameter, the kind made for serious climbers and capable not only of holding one of them but of supporting all their weight at the same time.

  He tested the knot where the line tied to the hook, though he had tested it a dozen times before. He arranged the coil of rope at his feet, stepping on the loose end to prevent the entire length from being carried away when he pitched the grappling hook, but leaving most of it free to pay out. “Stand aside,” he said. Dangling the hook from his right hand on two feet of line, he began to swing it around and around, faster, faster, until the whoosh of it cutting the air was even louder than the storm wind. When he felt the velocity was right, he let go with his right hand, and the rope slipped loosely through his left hand, trailing after the grapple. The hook arced up and out into the storm. Though it had sufficient mass and momentum to be unbothered by the wind, it fell short of its target by about three feet.

  Jack reeled it back through the snow, churning the virgin mantle. He had to jerk on it a few times and then patiently finesse it when it got caught on something. He was not concerned about dragging it across the buried pressure-sensitive grid, for it was not nearly heavy enough to trigger that alarm. In a minute or two he had it in hand again. Without having been told what to do, Dom had knelt and coiled the rope once more as it came in. Now Jack was ready to try again.

  His second pitch landed just where he wanted it. The hook firmly snared the target branch.

  With the grapple securely planted, he took the other end of the rope to the nearest fence post. He slipped it through the chainlink about seven feet off the ground, wrapped it around the post, threaded it through the chainlink on the other side, and all the way around the post again. He pulled on it with all his strength, until the line between the post and the distant tree was taut. Then he enlisted Dom’s and Ginger’s help to keep it taut while he knotted it tightly to the post.

  As a result, they had a rope bridge that was seven feet off the ground where it began at the fence, angling up to a height of about nine feet at the tree. That slight incline, even over a mere thirty-five feet, would make the crossing more difficult, but it was as near to level as Jack could make it.

  He jumped high, grabbed the line with both hands, swung his body back and forth a few times to get momentum, then kicked up and threw his legs over the rope, crossing his ankles atop it. Like a playful koala bear clinging to the underside of a horizontal branch, he hung with his face turned skyward and his back parallel to the ground. By extending his arms behind him and pulling himself on the line and by alternately scrunching his legs up and extending them while keeping his ankles locked, he could inchworm along with no danger of touching the ground. He demonstrated the technique for Dom and Ginger. Before he reached the danger zone defined by the pressure-sensitive alarm grid, he let go first with his feet, then with his hands, and dropped to the ground.

  Dom tried getting onto the line. He attained a handgrip with his first jump. But he needed a full minute to swing his legs up and over, though he did it, then dropped back to the ground.

  Ginger, only five-two, had to be given a boost to get a proper handgrip. But to Jack’s surprise she required no assistance to kick up and wrap her legs over the line without delay.

  “You’re in pretty good shape,” Jack told her.

  “Yes, well,” she said, swinging back to the ground, “that’s because every Tuesday, on my day off, I eat buckets of vareniki, several pounds of graham cracker cake, and enough blintzes to sink a ship. Diet, Jack. That’s the key to fitness.”

  Shrugging his arms through the straps on one of the rucksacks and buckling it in place on his back, Jack said, “Okay, now, I’ll cross the rope bridge first with the two heaviest bags, which leaves one sack for each of you. Ginger, you’ll come second. Dom, you’ll bring up the rear. When you come across, the rope will sag more the closer you get to the center of the span, even as taut as we’ve made it, but don’t worry. It won’t droop far enough to put you in contact with the ground and set off the alarm. Keep your feet locked around the line, and for God’s sake don’t accidentally let go with both hands at the same time as you’re pulling yourself along. Try to make it all the way to the tree, just to be safe. But if your arms and legs give out, you can come down ten or twelve feet this side of the pine if you must, which’ll probably.be past the other end of the alarm grid.”

  “We’ll make it all the way,” Ginger said confidently. “It’s only thirty or thirty-five feet.”

  “In just ten feet,” Jack said, fastening the second rucksack to his chest, “you’ll feel as if your arms are coming out of their sockets. In fifteen feet, you’ll feel as if they have come out of their sockets.”

  Something about Brendan Cronin’s reaction to his rector’s death had jolted Leland Falkirk. When the young priest demanded to be given time and privacy to deliver the last rights to Stefan Wycazik, there had been a fierce fire of indignation in his eyes and such hot grief in his voice that his humanity could not be in doubt.

  Leland’s fear of alien possession was voracious, eating him alive. He had seen—and others had discovered—strange things inside that starship, enough to justify his fear if not his total paranoia. But even he found it difficult to believe that Cronin’s anguish was the clever play-acting of an inhuman intelligence in disguise.

  Yet Cronin, with his bizarre powers, was one of two prime suspects, one of the two witnesses most likely to have been taken over, the other being Dominick Corvaisis. Where did the healing and telekinesis come from if not from an alien puppet-master living within the man’s body?

  Leland was confused.

  With powdery snow pluming up around his feet, he walked away from the kneeling priest, then stopped and shook his head and tried to clear his thoughts. He saw the other six witnesses by Jack Twist’s Cherokee, still under guard. He saw his soldiers caught between the need to do their duty as they were told and a confusion worse than Leland’s own. He saw the stranger who had been with Wycazik—now up and moving around, miraculously whole. That healing seemed wonderful, an event calling for celebration, not fear; a blessing, not a curse. But Leland knew what lay inside Thunder Hill. That dark knowledge put things in a different perspective. The healing was a ruse, clever misdirection to make him think the benefits of cooperation with the enemy were too great to justify resistance. They were offering an end to pain. And perhaps an end to all death other than that too sudden to be avoided. But Leland knew the very essence of life was pain. It was dangerous to believe escape from suffering was possible. Dangerous, because such hopes were routinely destroyed. And the pain following in the wake of shattered hopes was far worse than it would have been if you had just faced it and endured it in the first place. Leland believed that pain—physical, mental, emotional—was the core of the human condition, that survival and sanity depended upon embracing pain rather than resisting it or dreaming of escape. You had to thrive on pain to avoid being defeated by it, and anyone who came along with an offer of transcendence must be greeted with disbelief, contempt, and deep distrust.

  Leland was no longer confused.

  The big Army truck—Jorja supposed it was a troop transport—had hard metal benches along both sides and also against the forward wall that separated the driver’s compartment from the rear. Dangling leather loops, riveted to the walls at regular intervals, provided those on the benches with something to hang on to when the ride got rough or steep. Father Wycazik’s corpse had been laid on the forward bench and secured with lines that tied under the seat and then to the wall straps, forming a rope basket to restrain the body’s movement. Everyone else—Jorja, Marcie, Brendan, Ernie, Faye, Sandy, Ned, and Parker—sat on the side benches. Usually, the rear doors were held shut only by the interior latch, allowing soldiers to get out quickly in case of an accident or other emergency. But this time Colonel Falkirk himself slid the bolt into place on the
outside. The sound of it made Jorja think of prison cells and dungeons, and filled her with despair. A fluorescent light was set in the ceiling, but Falkirk did not order it lit; they were forced to ride in darkness.

  Although Ernie Block had endured the night remarkably well thus far, everyone had expected him to come apart when he was locked in the pitch-black bay of the truck. But he sat beside Faye, holding her hand, and coped. He had periodic bouts of anxiety marked only by spells of hyperventilation, which he quickly overcame. “I’m beginning to remember the jets Dom spoke of,” Ernie said soon after they got in the truck, before it started to move. “There were at least four, swooping low, two very low ... and then something else happened I can’t recall ... but after that, I remember getting in the motel van and driving like hell down toward 1-80 ... out toward the special place along the highway that means so much to Sandy, too. That’s all so far. But the more I remember ... the less afraid I am of the dark.”

  The colonel put no guards in with them. He seemed to think it would be dangerous for even two or three heavily armed soldiers to ride in their company.

  Before herding them into the truck, the colonel had seemed on the brink of ordering their execution, right there along Vista Valley Road. Jorja’s stomach had knotted painfully with fear. Finally Falkirk calmed down, though Jorja was not convinced he would let them live once they arrived wherever they were going.

  He had demanded to know where Ginger, Dom, and Jack had gone. At first, no one would respond, which infuriated him. He placed his hand on Marcie’s head and quietly told them what pain he would put the child through if they continued to be difficult. Ernie had spoken at once, cursing Falkirk as a disgrace to his uniform—and reluctantly revealing that Ginger, Dom, and Jack had gone west from the Tranquility, heading for Battle Mountain, Winnemucca, and ultimately Reno. “We were afraid all the routes to Elko would be watched,” Ernie said. “We didn’t want to put all our eggs in one basket.” It was a lie, of course. For a moment Jorja wanted to scream at Ernie not to jeopardize her daughter’s life with transparent lies, but she realized Falkirk had no way of knowing for sure that it was a phony story. The colonel was suspicious. But Ernie provided more details of the route Jack was supposedly following, and at last Falkirk sent four of his men to check it out.

  Now, as the truck rumbled and jolted through the windy night toward a destination Falkirk had not shared with them, Jorja hung on to a strap with one hand and held Marcie with her free arm. The girl made things easier by clinging fiercely to Jorja. Her semicatatonic limpness had given way to a strong need for affection and contact, though she was still by no means connected with reality. But her sudden need to hug and be hugged seemed, to Jorja, a hopeful sign that she would find her way back from the dark domain into which she had retreated.

  Jorja would not have believed that anything could distract her entirely from her intense concern about her daughter. But a couple of minutes after the truck started to move, Parker Faine began to tell them why he and Father Wycazik had been making that risky cross-country trek through the snowswept night. The news he related was so momentous that it pushed everything else from Jorja’s mind and held her, rapt. He told them about Calvin Sharkle, about how Brendan had passed on his power to Emmy Halbourg and Winton Tolk. “And now ... perhaps ... to me,” Parker said with such wonder in his voice that it was communicated instantly to Jorja and caused gooseflesh to break out all over her. Parker spoke of the CISG. And he told them what they must have seen on that long-lost summer night in July: Something had come down. Something had come down from the sky, and the world would never be the same again.

  Something had come down.

  As that amazing news was revealed, the darkness in the truck was filled with an excited babble of voices. Reactions from Faye’s initial stunned disbelief to Sandy’s instant and enthusiastic acceptance.

  Not only did Sandy accept, but she abruptly remembered large pieces of the forbidden night, as if Parker’s revelation had been a sledge that had struck a wrecking blow upon her memory block. “The jets came over, and the fourth one blew across the roof of the motel, so low it almost took the top off the building, and by that time we were all out of the diner, people were coming over from the motel, but the shaking was still going on. The ground vibrating just like in a quake. The air vibrating too.” Her tone of voice was a peculiar mix of delight and trepidation, both joyful and haunted. In the darkness everyone fell silent to hear what she had to say. “Then Dom ... I didn’t know his name then, but it was Dom, all right ... he turned away from the jets and looked up and back across the roof of the diner, and he shouted: ‘The moon! The moon!’ We all turned ... and there was a moon, brighter than usual, creepy-bright, and for a moment it seemed to be falling on us. Oh, don’t you remember? Don’t you remember what it felt like to look up and see the moon falling on us?”

  “Yes,” Ernie said softly, almost reverently. “I remember.”

  “I remember,” Brendan said.

  And Jorja had a glimmer of memory: the recollected image of a lambent moon, eerily bright, rushing toward them....

  Sandy said, “Some people screamed, and some started to run, we were so scared, all of us. And the powerful shaking and roaring got louder, you could feel it in your bones, a sound like kettledrums and shotgun blasts all mixed up with the greatest wind you ever heard, though there was no wind. But there was the other sound, too, the queer whistling, warbling, fluty sort of sound under the thunder, getting louder by the second.... The moon got very bright all of a sudden. These beams came down from it, lit up the parking lot with a frosty sort of glow ... and then changed. The moon turned red, blood-red! Then we all knew it wasn’t the moon, not the moon, but something else.”

  Jorja saw, in memory, the lunar form turning from frost-white to scarlet. With that recollection, barriers implanted by the mind-control specialists began to crumble like sand castles under the assault of a high tide. She wondered how she could have looked so often at Marcie’s album of moons and not have been nudged toward understanding. Now understanding came in a flood, and she began to tremble with fear of the unknown and with an indescribable exultation.

  “Then it came over the diner,” Sandy said, with such awe in her voice that she might have been seeing the starship descend right now, not in memory but in reality and for the first time. “It came in as low as the jet that had gone before it, but it wasn’t moving nearly as fast as the jet ... slow ... slow ... hardly faster than the Goodyear blimp. Which seemed impossible because you could tell it was heavy, not like a blimp. Ever-so-heavy. Yet it drifted across us so slow, so beautiful and slow, and in that instant we all knew what it was, what it had to be, because it was nothing that had ever been made on this world....”

  Jorja’s tremors grew as the memory returned with greater vividness. She recalled standing in the parking lot of the Tranquility Grille, with Marcie in her arms, looking up at the craft. It glided through the warm July night above and would have looked almost serene except for the thunderous sounds and base vibrations that accompanied it. As Sandy had said—once the misapprehension of a falling moon was dispelled, they knew instantly what they were seeing. Yet the ship looked nothing like the flying saucers and rockets seen in a thousand movies and television shows. There was nothing dazzling about it—other than the very fact of its existence!—no coruscating bands of multicolored lights, no weirdly extruding spines and nodules, no inexplicable excrescences in its design, no unearthly sheen of unknown metal or peculiarly positioned viewports or blazing exhausts or strange wicked-looking armaments. The enveloping scarlet glow was apparently an energy field by which it remained aloft and propelled itself. Otherwise, it was quite plain: a cylinder of considerable size, though not even as large as, say, the fuselage of an old DC-3, perhaps only fifty feet long and twelve or fifteen feet in diameter; it was rounded at each end, rather like two well-worn tubes of lipstick welded together at their bases; through the shining energy field, a hull was visible, though it was si
ngularly unimpressive, with few features and none of them dramatic, somewhat mottled as if by time and great tribulation. In memory, Jorja watched it descend again, across the diner, toward 1-80, while the jet escorts wheeled and barrel-rolled and swooped and zoomed in the sky above and to the east and west. Now, as on that wondrous night, her breath caught, her heart pounded, her breast swelled with turbulently mixed emotions, and she felt as if she were standing before a door beyond which lay the meaning of life, a door to which she had suddenly been given the key.

  Sandy said, “It came down in the barrens beyond 1-80, at that place some of us knew was special, though we didn’t know why. The jets were buzzing it. Everyone at the motel and diner just had to get down there, couldn’t hold us back, my God, nothing could’ve held us back! So we piled in cars and trucks and took off—”

  “Faye and I went in the motel van,” Ernie said out of the darkness in the troop transport, no longer breathing hard, his nyctophobia burned away in the heat of memory. “Dom and Ginger went with us. That pro gambler, too. Lomack. Zebediah Lomack from Reno. That’s why he wrote our names on the moon posters in his house, the ones Dom told us about. Some dim but urgent memory of riding with us in the van, down to the ship, must have almost busted through his memory block.”

  “And Jorja,” Sandy said, “you and your husband and Marcie and a couple other people rode in the back of our pickup. Brendan, Jack, and others went in cars, strangers piling in with strangers, but in some way none of us were strangers any more. When we got there we parked on the berm, and a couple other cars pulled up coming west from Elko, people were running across the divider, cars driving in from the west just stopped right on the highway, and we all gathered on the shoulder of the road for a minute, looking out there at the ship. The glow around it had faded, though there was still a ... a luminous quality to it, amber now instead of red. It set some clumps of sagebrush and bunch-grass on fire when it first touched down, but those burnt out almost entirely by the time we got there. It was funny ... how we all gathered along the edge of the road, not shouting or talking or noisy in any way, you know, but quiet, all of us so quiet at first. Hesitating. Knowing we were standing on ... a cliff, but that jumping off the cliff wasn’t going to be a fall, it was going to be like ... like jumping off and up. I can’t explain that feeling too well, but you know. You know.”

  Jorja knew. She felt it now, as she had then, the almost-too-wonderful-to-bear feeling that humankind had been living in a dark box and that the lid had just been torn off at last. The feeling that the night would never again seem as dark and foreboding or the future as frightening as it had been in the past.

  “And as I stood there,” Sandy said, “looking out at that luminous ship, so beautiful, so impossible there on the plains, everything that had happened to me when I was a little girl, all the abuse and pain and terror ... didn’t matter as much any more. Just like that—” She snapped her fingers in the dark. “Just like that my father didn’t terrify me any more.” Her voice cracked with emotion. “I mean, I hadn’t seen him since I was fourteen, more than a decade, but I still lived with the fear that some day he’d walk in again, you know, and he’d take me again, make me go with him. That was ... that was silly ... but I still lived with the fear, ’cause life was a nightmare for me, and in bad dreams those things happen. But as I stood there watching the ship, with everyone silent and the night so big, the jets overhead, I knew my father could never scare me again even if he did show up some day. Because he’s nothing, nothing, just a sick little man, a speck, one tiny grain of sand on the biggest beach you can ever imagine....”

  Yes, Jorja thought, filled with the joy of Sandy’s discovery. Yes, that was what this ship from beyond meant—freedom from our worst and most inhibiting fears. Although the vessel’s occupants might bring no answers to the problems that beset humanity, their mere presence was in a way an answer in itself.

  Her voice thickening even further with emotion, beginning to cry now, not with sadness but with happiness, Sandy said, “And looking at the ship out there, I felt all of a sudden as if I could put all the pain behind me forever ... and as if I was somebody. All my life, see, I’d felt I was nothing, less than nothing, filthy and worthless, just a thing that had its uses maybe, but nothing with ... dignity. And then I realized we’re all just grains of sand on that beach, none of us so very much more important than any of the rest of us, but more than that ...” She gave a small cry of frustration. “Oh, I wish I had words, I wish I had words and knew how to use them better.”

  “You’re doing all right,” Faye said quietly. “By God, girl, you’re doing all right.”

  And Sandy said, “But even though we’re just grains of sand, we’re also ... also part of a race that might some day go up there, out there into all that darkness, out where the creatures in that ship came from, so even as grains of sand we have a place and purpose. Do you see? We just got to be kind to one another and keep going. And one day all of us—all the billions of us who were and are—we’ll be out there with those who’ll come after us ... out there on top of all the darkness, and anything we ever endured will have been worth it, somehow, because it’ll have been a part of our getting there. All of that hit me in a flash while we stood there along the interstate. And suddenly that night, right there, I started crying and laughing both....”

  “I remember!” Ned said from his part of the darkness. “Oh, God, now I remember, I do, it’s all coming back. We were standing there on the side of the road, and you grabbed hold of me and hugged me. It was the first time you ever told me you loved me, the first time, though I’d known you did. You hugged me, you told me you loved me, it was crazy, right there with a spaceship come down! And you know what? For a few minutes, you holding me and telling me you loved me ... the spaceship didn’t matter. All that mattered was you telling me, telling me after so long.” His voice filled with emotion, too, and Jorja sensed that he was putting his arms around Sandy, in the gloom on the other side of the truck. “And they took that away from me,” he said. “They came with their damn drugs and their mind control, and they took away from me the first time you told me you loved me. But I got it back now, Sandy, and they’re never taking it away from me again. Never again.”

  Faye said plaintively, “I still can’t remember anything. I want to remember, too. I want to be a part of it.”

  Everyone was silent as the transport rumbled through the night.

  Jorja knew the others must be pondering some of the same thoughts that were rushing through her mind. The mere existence of another—and superior—intelligence put human strife in a different context. Mankind’s endless, violent struggles to dominate and enslave, to impress one philosophy or another upon the entire race at any cost in blood and pain—that seemed so hopelessly petty and fruitless now. All narrow, power-centered philosophies would surely collapse. Religions that preached the oneness of all men would probably thrive, but those that encouraged violent conversion would not. In some way impossible to explain but easy to feel, just as Sandy had felt it, Jorja was aware that extraterrestrial contact had the potential to make one nation of all mankind, one vast family; for the first time in history, every individual could have the respect that only a good, loving family—no king, no government—could bestow.

  Something had come down from the sky.

  And all humankind could be lifted up.

  “Moon,” Marcie murmured against Jorja’s neck. “Moon, moon.”

  Jorja wanted to say: Everything’ll be fine, honey; we’ll help you remember now that we know what it is you’ve forgotten, and when you do recall it, you’ll realize it’s nothing to be scared about; you’ll realize it’s wonderful, honey, and you’ll laugh. But she did not say any of that, for she did not know what Falkirk intended to do with them. As long as they were in the colonel’s custody, she did not hold out much prospect for a happy ending.

  Brendan Cronin said, “I remember more. I remember descending the embankment from the interstate. Movin
g out toward the ship. It lay like shimmering amber quartz. I walked slowly toward it with the jets swooping overhead, other people coming with me ... including you, Faye ... and you, Ernie ... and Dom and Ginger. But only Dom and Ginger came all the way to the ship with me, and when we got there we found a door ... a round portal ... open....”

  Jorja remembered standing on the shoulder of 1-80, afraid to go closer to the ship and blaming her reluctance on the need to keep Marcie safe. Wanting to call out a warning and at the same time wanting to urge them on, she had watched Brendan, Dom, and Ginger approach the golden craft. The three had begun to move out of sight along the side of the ship, and everyone still on the shoulder of the highway had rushed eastward a hundred feet or so to keep them in view. Jorja had seen the portal, too, a round circle of blazing light on the side of the glimmering hull.

  “The three of us gathered in front of the door.” Brendan spoke softly, yet his voice carried above the rumble of the truck. “Dom and Ginger and me. We thought ... something would come out. But nothing did. Instead, there was a quality about the light inside ... the wonderful golden light I’ve seen in my dreams ... a comforting and compelling warmth that drew us somehow. We were scared, dear God, we were scared! But we heard helicopters coming, and we sensed government people would take over the second they arrived on the scene, take over and push us back, and we were determined to be part of it. And that light! So ...”

  “So you went inside,” Jorja said.

  “Yes,” Brendan said.

  “I remember,” Sandy said. “Yes. You went inside. All three of you went inside.”

  The immensity of the memory was overwhelming. The moment when the first representatives of the human race had set foot for the first time into a place built neither by nature nor by human hands. The moment that forever divided history into Before and After. Remembering, their memory blocks having entirely crumbled, no one could speak for a while.

  The truck rumbled toward its unguessable destination.

  The darkness within the vehicle seemed vast. Yet the eight of them were as