Majestic

by Whitley Strieber

  They swept off the blacktop onto a dirt road. The Jeep dropped way back to avoid their dust cloud.

  They drove at a steady forty-five miles an hour, for three hot and dismal hours. When they stopped the shadows were long and the katydids were already singing.

  They were in Maricopa, a town that consisted of ten houses strung along the roadside, a store, a bar and a gas station.

  Everybody got down from the vehicles. Walters stretched his back, took off his sunglasses and began cleaning them with his handkerchief. His PFC driver whapped at his own uniform, bringing up clouds of dust.

  "I'll bet that bar is full of cold beer," Hesseltine said. Nobody acknowledged him, but I have no doubt that PFC

  Winter's eyes rolled.

  "I'll go in and confirm these instructions," Gray announced. Walters went with him.

  "You want a beer, Private?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "Our commanding officer will fail to realize this."

  "Yes, sir."

  "End of story, Private."

  "Yes, sir."

  Gray and Walters came hurrying back like men about to miss a train. "The road is about half a mile back toward Roswell," Gray said. "Then another thirty miles to the man's house. It's just a track."

  It was far worse than that. Hesseltine waited for the Chevy to break an axle.

  Amazingly, it didn't happen. This may have been because of the number of gates they had to open and close was so great that they never managed to get past twenty before they had to slow down again.

  "The cattleguard hasn't been invented yet in New Mexico."

  "Apparently not, Lieutenant."

  "This is gate number sixteen."

  "I haven't been counting."

  Soon they arrived at a miserable hovel that was distinguished only by a tiny flower garden in the front yard.

  The garden had sunflowers in it, and a few fat little cactuses with yellow flowers on them. Two kids, shy and afraid, cowered by the side of the house.

  "Look out," Hesseltine muttered to Gray. "They might be commie dwarfs disguised as scared kids."

  To Hesseltine's surprise, Gray stomped his foot against the floorboard of the car. He glared a moment at his junior officer.

  "Close your window, Lieutenant," he snapped as he wound up his own. "Breaches of security are always a serious business, especially in a sensitive area like Roswell. For all we know, those kids are Commies and ready to report our least move to their cell leader. The fact that we're here on this ranch could be common knowledge in Moscow inside of an hour!"

  Hesseltine was so taken aback by this outburst that he guffawed before he could stop himself. Gray glared at him. "You've got to take this seriously, Hesseltine."

  "I'm sorry, sir. It's just that I've blown a date, and—"

  "I understand perfectly. But we have to do this. And do it right."

  "I agree, sir."

  The porch had an old couch on it that was covered with a piece of canvas. The couch was sprung and there were places where animals had torn at the stuffing.

  Gray was not a large man, but he felt huge in this little adobe-brick house. He knocked, the sound echoing flatly in the dark room beyond the rusty screen door.

  Soon a shadow appeared moving forward from the back of the house, a woman gliding swiftly and crookedly along. She appeared behind the door, hesitant, her face clouding at the sight of the uniforms. She had a cigarette between her lips, which she took into her fingers. "Can I help you?" she asked, her voice soft.

  Gray felt pity for her until he saw the flashing strength in her eyes. As he had many times before, he thought now that he did not understand these tough New Mexico people. "I'm Major Gray of the Roswell Army Air Force. This is Lieutenant Hesseltine and Mr. Walters." He did not introduce PFC Winters. The soldier, in any case, was lingering out by the Jeep.

  "Come on in," Ellie replied, opening the door. The two children, who had been standing on the steps, now crowded past to be with their mother. "Go back outside, now," she said, "you let these men be. They're important Army men and they don't need kids to bother them." She herded them toward the back of the house. "They've never seen Army men so close," she added. As she spoke she smiled, and Gray was surprised without understanding why at how her smile made him feel.

  For all his self-assurance Gray was an uneasy and open-hearted child of America. Her poverty spoke to him of his childhood seeing Okies on the road and hoboes in the back alley behind the white bungalow where he ate meals of collard and steak and cornbread. He had bounced along in the backseat of a clean little Essex, and heard his father say things like, "God has blessed us among the cursed millions, and we must never forget to thank Him."

  One afternoon his father sat beneath the blooming wisteria in the backyard with tears streaming down his face. After that things had slowly gotten harder and harder. The Essex went, the refrigerator became an ice box again, the radio broke and was not repaired, and the leaves of autumn rolled down the street.

  But there were also pennants won and comic books read and Baby Ruths eaten, and the sonorous majesty of Latin Club declamation contests. "In partem gloriae venio," and all the rest of it, Virgil and Cicero and the compressed fury of Seneca's plays.

  The Grays had been a raft of neat, diminished pride in the shabby Midwestern ocean. These people were even worse off, and that scared him and made him hate them a little, and also feel tender toward them. Two generations ago most of the New Mexico settlers had set off westward from the ruins of Virginia, leaving their silk collars and magnolia evenings forever behind. They had slipped from grace and tumbled down into poverty's labyrinth of musty, rugless rooms and chipped white bowls on the dinner table.

  "My husband's out back. I'll get him to come up." She left the living room, and in a moment her voice came again, low and hard and shockingly loud, "The Air Force is here!"

  Hesseltine fidgeted with a bit of frayed cloth on the arm of the easy chair in which he was sitting. Gray stood nervously contemplating the large picture of Christ on the cross that hung over the mantel of the ancient, blackened fireplace. On the mantel there was also a picture of a lean, young man and a girl beside him.

  "Would you like coffee," the woman said in her murmuring, prayerful way. Gray imagined the family before its picture of Jesus, praying against their frayed lives and the dry, hot desert where they made their living. He could not have been more wrong, of course. The Jesus was there for the colors, which Ellie thought matched the chair. And it was good for the kids.

  Although all three men had declined coffee, the woman was making it anyway when her husband came banging into the house. He loomed through to the living room like a great caricature of Abraham Lincoln, stooping under the door and crossing directly to Cray. Walters and Hesseltine jumped to their feet.

  "How in the world did you beat us," Gray asked.

  "There's a road in that passes north of Arabela. Cuts off fifty miles."

  "Oh."

  "I thought I told you about it."

  "We'd better get out to the crash."

  "We can't."

  "Can't?"

  "It'll be dark before we get there. No use goin' until mornin'."

  Gray could see by the looks on Hesseltine's and Walters's faces that they were just as appalled as he was.

  "We got you each a plate of beans," the rancher said affably. "And coffee."

  Gray managed to smile. Walters was impassive. Hesseltine looked like he was thinking about going AWOL.

  Winters had come to the door and stood there hesitantly. "Bring in that half of bourbon," Walters growled.

  The PFC produced a well-sucked half-pint of Old Granddad, which Walters handed to each man in turn.

  Gray drank a swallow to be sociable. Hesseltine, he noticed, knocked back a couple of long pulls.

  "That hit the spot," the lieutenant said. "Pardon me for drowning my sorrows. As of fifteen minutes from now I'm standing up the best-looking WAAF captain in Roswell."

 
; "You better hope she doesn't put you on report."

  "I like your sense of humor, Major Gray."

  "Thank you, Lieutenant."

  The rancher's wife called them into the kitchen, where they hulked around the table. When Gray saw how sparse the meals were, he knew that the woman had stretched four helpings of beans to eight. Even so, each plate had a little scrap of fat back on it along with the beans, and the coffee smelled rich and good.

  They sat down to the crowded table. "This is some of that stuff," the rancher said. He put a couple of small pieces of tinfoil on the table.

  Gray felt a flush of anger: he recognized it as foil from a burst weather balloon. He picked up the scrap of material. "Did you see the plane?"

  "Lights. Heard the explosion. Then the next night y'all's blimp came over with the searchlights, but it missed the wreckage."

  Gray frowned. "Blimp?"

  "Sure. That big gray blimp."

  Walters looked at Gray, took the foil from him. He held the stuff in his hand, staring down at it. Abruptly he crushed the foil to a tiny ball, then put it on the table.

  To Gray's amazement, it sprang back to its original shape.

  "You can't burn it or tear it," the rancher said as he spooned up the last of his beans. "I don't wonder, you couldn't put a bullet through it, either."

  Gray met Walters's eyes. The CIC man's face was literally drained of color. "Let's go out to the Jeep," he said evenly. "Get those maps."

  Outside, it was immediately obvious that Walters wasn't looking for any maps. "What the hell is going on here," he asked.

  "I don't know."

  "What is that stuff?"

  "Frank, I've never seen anything like it before in my life."

  "And a blimp!"

  "Experimental aircraft, maybe."

  "Something you wouldn't know about?"

  Gray didn't like to think that experimental aircraft would be tested in the squadron area without his knowledge, but it was possible. "Could be," he answered.

  "I don't like it. There isn't a hangar in New Mexico that can hold a blimp."

  "Texas, then. Blimps can fly long range."

  "Real long range. Like from Russia. If you ask me, this could be some kind of new goldbeater's skin.

  Incredibly tough. Suitable for a long-range spy blimp, or even a bomber."

  Both men knew what a bomber could do to the 509th if it struck while there were atomic devices on the flight line.

  "Hiroshima'd look like a picnic," Gray said. He tried to imagine the scope of the disaster, but his mind rejected it.

  "Two blimps. One of them blows up in a thunderstorm. The other one comes searching for the remains."

  "They have a hell of a big radar signature." "They can also fly low and slow, Don."

  "Low and slow all the way from Russia. Damn, that's scary."

  They went back inside to find that the rancher and his family were already going to bed.

  As he passed the couple's bedroom door, Gray glimpsed an old iron bed with yellow sheets and a dresser with a half-empty bottle of Trushay hand cream on top. He felt a pang of loneliness; Jennine used Trushay.

  He wished that he'd called her before he came out here. Suddenly he was facing Russians in the night, and he was uneasy.

  "I think we'd better hang watches," he said when the four soldiers were alone together in the living room.

  "I agree," Walters said.

  "What're we worried about, coyotes?" Hesseltine sounded disgusted.

  Gray explained to him. "Russians. This stuff is most probably some kind of goldbeater's skin, used to cover a blimp. The rancher saw another blimp last night. Long-range Russian blimps after the 509th."

  That stopped even Hesseltine. The PFC's eyes were wide.

  "I'm armed," Walters said. He produced a police special from under his jacket. "The man on watch carries it in his belt."

  "Is it a regulation weapon?" Gray asked. "I didn't think civilians could carry weapons on base."

  "Consider me a cop. That's what counterintelligence is, kid. Police work."

  Gray didn't know Walters all that well, but he'd always had a lot of respect for the man. His background as a police detective combined with his toughness and brains made him one of the best counterintelligence men that Gray had ever met. With communist fifth columnists, fellow travelers and spies said to be everywhere, good men were needed to protect the 509th.

  He lay on his back with a couch cushion for a pillow. First PFC Winters went on watch, then Hesseltine.

  Gray had decided that the postmidnight hours were the most dangerous, and assigned them to himself and Walters. There would be four two-hour watches from nine P.M., then reveille along with the rancher, who ordinarily got up at five.

  He must have slept a little, because Hesseltine's place was empty and the PFC was snoring peacefully when he opened his eyes again. Walters had been sawing Z's from the second they'd snuffed the oil lamp. Gray lit a cigarette.

  He could easily imagine Russians sneaking around out here. He thought of the goldbeater's skin. How the hell had they done it? He'd never seen anything even remotely like it. Incredibly tough. Incredibly light.

  Suddenly Hesseltine was whispering in his ear. "Your turn, boss."

  Gray looked at his radium-dial watch. "You've got it, Mr. Hesseltine." He stubbed out his cigarette in the ashtray he'd brought down to the floor. "Any sign of anything?"

  "It's been quiet, except for the porcupines, badgers, ferrets, owls, coons and coyotes. Not to mention the things that

  scream."

  There was nothing screaming now. As a matter of fact it was absolutely quiet, absolutely dark and about as lonely a place as Gray had ever been in. The Milky Way came right down to both horizons. Even a tiny constellation like Lyra stood out clearly. The only way you could tell where the land started was that there were no stars there.

  Gray wished he had another cigarette, but you didn't carry lights on watch. He stood in front of the house beside the bulk of his staff car. It would have been nice to see if he could pick up some dance music, but he supposed that all the radio stations would be shut down by now.

  One-fifteen. As his eyes slowly adjusted to the dark he took a walk around the house. He moved up toward the barn, which was small and ramshackle. There was a horse snorting inside, and he could hear sheep bleating somewhere off in the distance. There were rustles and shuffling sounds and occasional low growls in the brush.

  Once he was startled to see what he thought might have been a glow on the horizon, but it disappeared and he didn't see it again.

  An hour passed.

  Then he heard a noise unlike any he had heard before. It cut through him like a white-hot blade.

  Walters and the rancher and Hesseltine came pouring out the kitchen door. PFC Winters stood behind them.

  "What the hell was it," Walters breathed.

  "Damned if I know," Gray said. The scream was still echoing in his head. "What about it, Mr. Ungar?"

  The rancher was standing very still, staring into the black night. "I heard it right after the crash. I lived here all my life, and I never heard anything like it before."

  Gray's fingers closed around the piece of foil in his pocket. In his mind there had formed a question, but he did not yet know how to put it into words.

  "Goddamn," Hesseltine said softly.

  The rancher backed up against his screen door.

  From inside the house a child keened, and Mrs. Ungar offered comfort in a shaking voice.

  Ungar whispered, "The other night when I heard it, I thought nothing could sound like that but the devil."

  "It's real," Walters said. "We all heard it."

  They were silent, then, and so was the night.

  Chapter Five

  In part I have written this in an attempt to understand why Will Stone and the others did what they did. Why did they choose to decide that these others were dangerous?

  One of the things that I originally understood t
he least was the mind of Will Stone and by extension all the other Will Stones that choke the bureaucracies of the world.

  I can read his diaries, listen to him talk, read assessments of him, sit across from him and watch him slowly choking on his cancer, and never actually see him. The moment I leave him, it is as if he has never existed.

  The curse of living with too many secrets is that a man's own meaning also becomes a secret. He loses himself in the machinery of his knowledge.

  I keep thinking that, if only I understood exactly what was so strangely unformed about the man I would also know why he failed so dismally to grasp the sublime aim of the others. Somehow he translated their offer of help into a deadly challenge.

  I suppose it was an offer of help. Surely it must have been. What would happen to us, I wonder, if we were attacked by an army whose weapons were so subtle that we could not understand even that we were at war?

  I am fascinated by the contrast between Stone and Bob Ungar. The one is alive and yet more indistinct than a shadow. The other—long dead—is vivid with meaning and sense and even grace.

  I can imagine the morning that he took the military party to the crash site. Major Gray's report reveals nothing of the emotions, of the sinew and color of the experience. But I can imagine.

  Dawn at the Ungar ranch would be marked by quiet kitchen bustle and the smell of strong coffee. Judging from the uneasiness he reports feeling, Don Gray would have been sleeping fitfully.

  Perhaps the clink of dishes made him open his eyes. It was still pitch dark, but the entire Ungar family was already at breakfast. Walters was with them, slopping down coffee and chewing on a big piece of bread.

  Gray woke up the others, tucked in his shirt and went to the table. The meal consisted of coffee and bread spread with a thin coating of grape jelly. He thought of steak and eggs at the officer's club. Roswell AAF was a good life. Challenging to be an intelligence officer in a place where it really mattered. A good outfit.

  Excellent facilities.

  Coffee and bread. Not even a glass of water to wash it down, let alone milk or juice. They couldn't have drunk the water even if it had been offered. These people used cisterns. The Air Force warned you to drink only from approved water supplies as soon as you set foot on base. And stay away from animals that might have fleas: New Mexico had fifty to a hundred cases of bubonic plague a year. Not to mention astronomical polio statistics and a substantial amount of TB in the Mexican population.