The Border

by Robert McCammon

  Beale walked a distance of about seventy yards and stopped. He faced only the flat plain, the foothills and the dark splashed with the flashes and flares of the war above them. Ethan saw him reach into his suit jacket and bring out a small black device not unlike the communication unit. He pressed a series of buttons on it.

  And waited.

  Nothing happened.

  A blazing blue streak of energy speared down into the foothills about two miles away and tossed earth into the air. The ground trembled beneath their feet.

  Beale pressed the buttons again. Still nothing happened. Ethan had to rest his right hand against Dave’s shoulder for support, and on his other side he was supported by Olivia’s arm.

  The President looked to Derryman. His face rippled with the nervous tic and his voice had weakened. “Vance…I know I’m in the right place. Maybe I’ve forgotten the sequence?”

  “Let’s try fresh batteries,” Derryman said, and he brought from his own pocket four small Duracells he’d taken from a package in the storeroom.

  “I should’ve thought of that.”

  “My job is to think for you when your mind is full.” Derryman was illuminated by the bursts of deadly flame in the sky as he took the device and popped it open. He removed the old batteries and inserted the new. “Here, try it now.”

  Beale repeated the procedure, a pattern of six numbers, a star, and six numbers once more.

  For a moment, again nothing happened. Ethan was the first to feel the thrum of machinery moving in the earth.

  A section of the plain was angling downward to make a ramp wide enough for a military truck. Small blue guidelights flickered on in the concrete walls. Drifts of dust were pulled into what sounded like air intakes, but it appeared that the rectangle of earth concealing the ramp was a fabrication of some kind of weather-resistant material. Fake sand and pebbles were part of the camouflage. A soft blue glow grew stronger in the opening. The ramp stopped at a fifteen-degree angle and the rumble of machinery ceased.

  “Watch your step going down,” Beale advised. “The surface was meant for tires, not shoes. Ethan, grab hold of someone, I don’t want you falling.”

  “Yes sir,” Ethan said, because after all Beale was the President of the United States. He again found support between Dave and Olivia, with Jefferson behind him to catch if either one of them stumbled. The rubbery artificial surface gripped shoe soles better than Beale had suggested. On his way down the ramp, Ethan looked up at the battle. The clouds pulsed with fire. A huge explosion sent pieces of Cypher ship whirling to Earth beyond a range of distant mountains. A few seconds after that, the triangular shape of a Gorgon craft swept over the plain about five hundred feet up. It was nearly sliced in two, fluids pouring from the hexagonal passages. Something shimmering and shaped like a child’s top spun rapidly across the sky, shooting red energy spheres in all directions before it too exploded, or rather imploded because there was no sound in its destruction.

  Ethan could feel them gathering, could sense the harmonics in the hundreds of warships that were answering the call of Gorgons and Cyphers. The clouds boiled like dirty yellow water in a pot. Energy bolts whipped down like jagged lightning and cracked upon the mountains. Red spheres that had missed their targets or been deflected in some way streaked on toward the horizons. Ethan thought of the last stand at Panther Ridge, and wondered if the alien forces had decided their last stand against each other would be in the sky here, thousands of feet above Area 51.

  The group reached the bottom, which was a small parking garage and loading docks for trucks. Everything was illuminated in the soft blue glow. The President used his control device again and the ramp began to close. Just before the opening was sealed, Ethan and the others saw the massive underside of a Cypher ship, like a shiny black roach, pass only a hundred feet or so overhead. It was pocked with smoking holes, each one large enough to fly the Kestrel into. It moved on, its propulsion silent but an eerie high-pitched electronic chatter coming from dying systems.

  The instant the ramp closed up, brighter white tubes of light illuminated at the ceiling. They were the same light tubes Ethan had seen at the White Mansion installation. Alien technology, as Derryman had explained, powered the S-4 center as well. Down here there was no sound of the war above but rather only the polite hissing of an air-filtration system scrubbing away any dust that might have drifted in. Lights had come on in a glassed-in guard’s station, empty of a guard. Two traffic barriers painted yellow with black diagonal stripes stood on either side of the guard’s station, but they were easily walked around. Beale led the way deeper into the complex with Corporal Suarez right at his side and Derryman and Winslett only a couple of paces behind. Twice Beale stopped to allow Ethan, helped along by Olivia and Dave, to catch up.

  They came to an elevator with stainless steel doors. Beside it was an illuminated keypad and above it a flat black screen like a computer monitor. Beale keyed in a string of numbers. The attempt did nothing, the monitor remained blank. “Damn,” the President said, “I can’t remember all this shit.” He tried again, visibly concentrating, pausing after each number.

  The monitor screen brightened. An outline of a hand appeared, with palm upward, fingers slightly spread and thumb to the left.

  “Good evening, Mr. President,” said a cool and efficient female voice from a speaker slit along the bottom of the monitor. “Please verify.”

  Beale placed his palm, fingers and thumb directly against the outline. The monitor blinked very quickly, like a picture being taken, and went dark again. “Thank you, sir,” said the voice.

  The elevator doors opened. It was a large car, more than enough to hold a dozen people comfortably with space to spare. The numbers on the control panel went from One down to Five. When everyone was aboard, Beale pressed the Five button, the elevator doors closed, and they descended with a speed that made the stomach flip.

  “You doing all right?” Dave asked Ethan.

  Ethan nodded, but he was not. The body had been injured more severely than when he’d entered it. Though there’d been internal damage in that blast concussion there had been no fractured bones. The dark-haired woman with the boy—his mother, but that had to be concealed from him because it was better to let his mind work with questions rather than to be overcome with answers—had pulled him close. She and the four others had taken the full impact of a Cypher strike that had missed its Gorgon target. If the concussion of that blast in the strip mall had not ended the boy’s life, this surely would have done it. His left arm was dead and cold now from the shoulder down, but his broken ribs on that side were hurting him, and pain flared through the muscles along his spine. He felt the pressure of liquid in the lungs, a sensation that they were laboring. He had to cough into his free hand, and then he regarded the ugly red scrawl of blood cupped there.

  Everyone else had seen too. The peacekeeper looked at Dave and smiled tightly. “I guess I’m back where Ethan began,” he said, and he wiped his hand on the leg of his jeans. Dave had to shift his gaze to the floor.

  The elevator slowed and stopped. The doors slid open. Ahead of them was a long corridor that looked to be made of stainless steel and was rounded like a vein through a body. Corporal Suarez left the elevator first, then Derryman and Winslett. Beale followed them and then the others with Jefferson last.

  The President led them forward. The corridor branched to both left and right. He took the group to the left and continued forty more yards to a solid slab of a door also made of stainless steel. Another keypad and a monitor screen were mounted in the wall. Beale went through the process of keying in the numbers once more and the crisp female voice said, “Good evening again, Mr. President. Please verify.” The screen came on, the outline of the hand appeared and the verification was made. There came the sound of two locks disengaging.

  The door appeared heavy, but obviously it was not, because Beale was able to pull it open with its rubber-coated handle using a minimum of effort. The door seemed to f
loat open. Tube lights at the ceiling were already on. Cool air began to be circulated, but Olivia thought even before crossing the threshold—which had an electric eye implanted in it—that she smelled the dry, medicinal odor of a hospital.

  They entered, and when the door closed behind them, the two locks engaged.

  The first chamber was a glassed-in space with three rows of theater seats much like the President’s television studio, but here the seats faced two large flatscreens. A door led into a larger room, sixty feet long if an inch. Pale green tiles covered the walls and the floor was made of gray tiles. The overhead light fixtures were round, like flying saucers. A digital clock on the wall was still running and reported the time as 20:38 in white numerals. Another stainless steel door stood at the far end of the room, with a square red warning light of some kind above it. The surgery, Ethan thought, picking it up from the mind of Foggy Winslett. And more from the general, a flare of fear: Don’t want to go in there hell no, no way. Too many bad memories of the bodies…

  “Here,” said President Beale, “are the artifacts.”

  He was standing before the glass double doors of a smaller room off to the right. Jefferson figured it to be about the size of a nice walk-in cigar humidor. Within the room, under the glow of the light tubes, were lucite shelves on which eight different items rested. Below the items were little identifying letters and numbers printed on clear stick-on labels: FL12255 under what appeared to be an ordinary piece of dark-colored iron, IA240873 beneath a metallic sphere not much larger than a baseball, AR060579 beneath a featureless black cube, and so on.

  “Those came from crashed spaceships?” Jefferson asked, his sense of wonder now in overdrive. “Jesus!”

  “A couple of them,” Beale said, “were shot down by missiles. The responsibility of other presidents. One collided with a private jet at night in a thunderstorm, over Indiana. The identifiers signify what state these were found in, the day, the month, and the year they were recovered. There have been seven others that self-destructed after awhile, but again that was before my time. All the records, the ships, and the bodies are kept somewhere else.” Beale turned to look at Ethan. “We’ve gone over these things with the best possible minds available, which is not easy considering the security involved. We don’t think any of these are weapons, but do you think differently?”

  “I need to get closer,” the peacekeeper said.

  Beale opened one of the doors for him, and he hobbled through on his own power. “Come in if you want to,” he told Dave, Olivia, and Jefferson. “You’ve come this far…take a few more steps.”

  They went in. Beale followed and shut the door behind him, and neither Derryman nor Winslett showed any inclination to want to enter. Ethan scanned the objects.

  He didn’t know exactly what each one was, but he sensed no warlike energy. “Can I touch anything?”

  “If you can’t, who could? Pick up that piece of FL12255. But before you do, think of an earthly material…a texture, the skin of something…whatever. Go ahead.”

  Ethan visualized water as he remembered it rising from the bottom of the swimming pool at Panther Ridge. When he put his hand on the piece of iron, it became a puddle of iron-colored liquid. When he withdrew his hand, it crawled itself back into its original shape. Dust, he thought, and putting his hand on the object it became a powdery iron-colored substance. As soon as the touch was broken, it turned back into what it had been…which the peacekeeper realized was a transmutable material tuned to the thoughts of whoever had physical contact with it.

  “My Lord,” Olivia said softly.

  Ethan picked up the metallic sphere. It looked as if it were jointed together in about a dozen places. It was heavy, but not too much for one hand.

  “Balance it on the tip of a finger,” Beale said.

  It seemed too heavy for that, but Ethan tried using his index finger. When it should have fallen, it did not; it balanced there and was perfectly weightless. In another few seconds, the ball lifted off his finger three inches and hung there. Then it started rotating. The joints began to open and close with rapid succession, but soundlessly, and suddenly there was a sixth entity in the room.

  It stood slim and tall, a little over seven feet, in appearance a male humanoid albino with pale eyes and shoulder-length white hair. Jewels sparkled along the edges of both ears, which were again very much similar to those of humans but curled just slightly inward. The being wore a long white gown decorated with dozens of shining gold figures that made Olivia think of ancient Aztec pictographs she’d seen with Vincent in the National Museum of History in Mexico City. The being smiled beatifically, offered his long-fingered hands in an obvious attitude of friendship and began to speak in a quiet voice that was like no language the Earth-dwellers had ever heard; it was full of pops and clicks and what sounded like stuttering. When he was finished, in about half a minute, the entity bowed his head and faded out. The sphere stopped its rotation and settled back onto the tip of Ethan’s finger, where it remained until Beale took it and returned it to its proper place.

  “We’ve tried to decipher the message,” the President said. “We think it’s something to do with medicine. There’s a sound in there that means the same as in a language known as ‘Comecrudan’, but that was extinct by the mid-1880s.”

  “You’re exactly right,” Ethan said.

  “What?”

  “It’s about medicine. I know that language, and I know that civilization. He was offering your world the cure for cancer.”

  Beale didn’t speak, and neither did anyone else from planet Earth.

  “He was telling you,” Ethan went on, “that the cure for cancer is depicted in the symbols on his gown. Is this from one of the ships that was shot down?”

  “It happened a long time ago,” the President said.

  “I see,” Ethan replied. His hand went to his left side to try to ease some of the pain there of fractured ribs and raw nerves.

  He took stock of the other objects: a small humanoid-looking figurine fashioned from a metal that shimmered with many colors, a square of what appeared to be ordinary window glass but was only a few millimeters in thickness, a coil of delicately fine silver-colored wire, and the rest of them.

  “There are no weapons here,” the peacekeeper said. “These are gifts.”

  “Gifts,” the President repeated, hollowly.

  “Brought to you—foolishly—by civilizations wanting to make contact. You weren’t ready for that. You were far from ready, and they learned that lesson.”

  “No weapons?” Jefferson sounded distraught. “None? Ethan, there’s nothing here?”

  Ethan didn’t answer.

  “What is that?” he asked President Beale. He lifted his hand to point at the small black cube. Arizona, the sixth day of May, 1979.

  “A mystery,” the President said.

  Ethan picked it up. It was light, and again it could be easily managed with one hand, and could sit right in the palm. The sides were smooth and featureless, the dimensions perfect.

  “No substance that we know of on Earth,” Beale said, “can drill into it or leave a mark on it. X-rays can’t see into it. No medical or military device we have can look inside that thing. So it just sits there doing nothing. The scientists figured that if it was going to blow up the world it would have already, but they were so afraid of it they kept it in a lead-lined vault for over twenty years.”

  “Maybe you’re supposed to paint white dots on it and hang it from your rearview mirror,” said Dave, who was beginning to realize that there was truly nothing here, that the Cyphers and Gorgons were having one hell of a battle over their heads, and there was probably no way to get back to the White Mansion, which itself was as safe as an open wound.

  Ethan pondered the object. Neither could he penetrate what was inside it, but…

  “This is a gift too,” he said. “It has to be. The question is…what was it created to give?”

  “We’ll never know,” said Beale
.

  “It looks like fear,” Ethan decided.

  “What?” This time it was Jefferson who posed the question.

  “Like fear. A small black cube of fear.” That statement caused the seed of an idea to grow roots. “Tell me…any one of you…what do the people of your planet collectively fear?”

  “Alien invasion,” Dave said. “Or for two alien tribes to be fighting over us.”

  “More than that,” Ethan urged. “Some fear that’s been a real possibility for a long time, much longer than their war.”

  “Total destruction,” Olivia offered.

  “How?” Ethan kept examining the cube as he waited for an answer.

  “Nuclear bombs,” Jefferson said. “Or…I don’t know…The End, I guess. Like what killed the dinosaurs.”

  “The strike of a huge asteroid,” the President added. “Even now…I mean, before all this…we know they’re out there. Some have passed pretty close, but we’ve kept it secret. We thought that if one of those hit us again, it could be the end of all life.”

  “And you were defenseless against those,” said Ethan, who already knew the answer.

  “We had emergency plans, but we would’ve only gotten one chance, and if we failed, it would be all over.”

  Ethan felt he needed to cough up blood again. How long could he keep this body going? He didn’t know.

  Fear…an asteroid strike…the end of all life…one chance and if we failed it would be all over.

  Something resonated within him. He could not see into the cube, could not discern its alien workings or its purpose, but like the idea of the White Mansion, he could not put out of his consciousness the progression of fear…an asteroid strike…the end of all life…one chance and if we failed it would be all over…