by B. V. Larson
He waved his hand vaguely to the north. “This region here is called Yucca Flat. We set off most of the bombs here, about three-quarters of them. Baneberry lit up the northern sector, over that way. It yielded only about ten kilotons—not that big. But we screwed up. It sent a plume of dust up into the atmosphere, a column of dust ten thousand feet high. About a hundred of us got a heavy dose of radiation that day.”
He chuckled as if remembering happier days. He moved around Easy crater and headed deeper into the zone. I followed apprehensively. There was residual radiation out here, I knew. The old scientist didn’t seem worried about it, but I was.
“Tell me about the objects,” I said. “Were they made by the tests? When did you first discover them?”
“There have always been weird stories out here. I was one of the skeptics. I didn’t buy into the crap about aliens and collapsing matter until recently. I was one of the last people to become a convert. Now, the evidence concerning the objects and the invaders is impossible to deny.”
He proceeded to relate to me a series of encounters with artifacts and aliens. These events had shocked him as much as my own experiences had shocked me. Apparently, the objects had been around since the early tests. But frequent incursions by nonhumans from other worlds had started only recently.
“They stopped firing off nuclear weapons out here in 1992,” he said. “But the government is still out here. Mercury was populated up until a year ago. Area 51 is fully manned. Have you ever wondered about that? Have you wondered what we’ve been doing out here for these last few decades?”
“I think quite a number of people have been wondering about that.” I was also wondering what Trujillo was still doing out here. I’d relaxed a bit more as it became obvious he was probably some ancient hermit stuck in the past and not the emissary of some black-ops government organization.
“Rightfully so. We stopped lighting bombs, you see, but we didn’t stop experimenting. We continued working with new tricks of physics. Fission and fusion are big, loud events; people can detect those from space. But there are less flashy things you can do to an atom. Quiet, subtle tests that an installation can perform. These new tests were no less dangerous than the old ones—maybe, they were worse.”
“I’ve got a question and I imagine you are the man to ask,” I said. “Are there really alien captives out here in these facilities?”
He stopped and looked at me. “That’s classified.”
I shrugged. “I imagine most of what we’ve been talking about is classified. But I’m in the middle of it. I’ve met aliens. I was just wondering where they came from.”
“Well, they don’t fly here on a rocket, I can tell you that much! They come here the same way you’ve gone to visit them.”
“Through cracks in the universe?” I asked.
“You know about that, eh? So much for state secrets. This is probably all on TV now—I’ve been out of touch for a few years. Anyway, spacecraft are too difficult to build and too slow. It would take centuries to fly to another star system. It’s my belief all the aliens we’ve met have come through the fissures in the world. There have been more of them recently because we’ve created new flaws in our little slice of time and space. It’s a much easier path for everyone.”
I figured he was probably right. Stepping out through a rip was much simpler than reaching escape velocity and piloting a ship over light-years, not even knowing if there was a habitable world to explore at the end of the journey.
“I was told you might be able to help me with something,” I said, “something called the Beast.” McKesson hadn’t mentioned someone like Trujillo specifically, but what the heck! A little white lie might make Trujillo feel important.
“The Beast, eh? Cute name.”
“The creature in question is anything but cute,” I said.
“Something one of the crew let loose, am I right? Several of them like pets. Have you talked to Rostok, Haggstrom, or Gutter Jim?”
I’d never heard of anyone named Haggstrom but assumed he meant another member of the Community I’d yet to meet. I almost asked about that before deciding it was more important to learn what I could about the Beast.
“This creature dwells in another place, but raids the city at will,” I said. “As far as I can tell, it is able to create small rips between our world and its place of origin. At first, it came to devour a citizen about once a day. Now, the attacks are growing more frequent, bolder, and longer in duration.”
Trujillo glanced at me and whistled appreciatively. “Doesn’t sound like any of the Community pets I’ve heard of. I would say you have a new monster on your hands—one with a mind of its own. What’s it look like?”
I described the Beast as best I could, having seen only a fraction of it.
“Hmm,” he said. “Eyeball and tentacle? Nothing on the maw or other limbs?”
“I guess I must sound like a mouse describing the cat that prowls outside my hole, but it’s all I can give you.”
“Right, right, best not to imagine and embellish. Well, I can tell you I’ve never encountered such a creature, and I hope I never do. I can explain what the frequent small rips indicate, however. The creature probably comes from a small world—a pocket universe, we physicists call it.”
I frowned. “How do you know that?”
Trujillo ruffled a bit. “Where do you think these things were first encountered? Right out here, where we did the testing and shattered the stratum between the dimensions. I’m an eyewitness, one of the few that’s still breathing.”
Nobody who was still on the government payroll for a secret project would divulge such information so easily. More and more it was clear Trujillo was out here on his own.
“Okay. How small of a world are we talking about?”
He shrugged. “Hard to say. Much smaller than Earth. More like the size of an office building or a cave complex.”
I thought about that for a while as I walked along over sand, rubble, and loose earth. It occurred to me that walking on Mars or the moon must be a similar experience.
“One more thing,” I said. “How do I kill it?”
He chuckled. “You don’t, probably. But there are several ways the attempt could be made. You could roll a very large explosive into its mouth instead of a victim, perhaps. Or a team could find a way into its lair and hunt it down. Very dangerous in either case. With the approach of using a bomb, it might just spit it back out and knock a city block flat. In the other case—the team probably wouldn’t survive. Even if they do kill it, they might kill themselves as well. Pocket-dwellers are part of their worlds. Destroying them might collapse everything.”
“So you’ve had practical experience with these things?”
He stopped and pointed to the west. “There’s a crater over there near the highway. It’s the only one that isn’t circular. That’s because it wasn’t created by a bomb, if you get my meaning. We opened a path down there to someplace else and had to collapse it in the end as a precaution. A lot of good people didn’t make it out.”
I peered into the night in the direction he indicated but couldn’t make out anything noteworthy. I tried to visualize this place, humming with scientists doing their secret experiments. It seemed bizarre, but then so did everything that went on out here.
“How did you guys keep it a secret for so long?”
“Well, in some ways, we didn’t. Haven’t you heard endless strange tales coming out of this part of the country? Weren’t they so crazy you dismissed them? That was what saved us, I think, and kept the light of truth from shining out here. People kept quiet for reasons of loyalty. National security and all. But when they didn’t keep their mouths shut, they told such amazing tales they were dismissed as crackpots and hoaxers.”
I thought about it, realizing that on my blog, my posted stories of real experiences had endured just such labels. To most people, I was a crank, a marginally disturbed person who insisted on believing in delusions. I could hardly b
lame the public. This stuff was simply too strange to be believed. When I’d read my own blog after losing my memory, even I’d been skeptical.
“Quentin—that is your name, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes, sir. Quentin Draith.”
He halted then and turned to peer at me. “Draith? You say your name is Draith?”
“Yes.”
“Ah, well, that changes everything.”
I frowned and opened my mouth to ask him if he’d known my parents, but I never got the chance. Without further warning, he attacked me.
Except, I didn’t know it was an attack at first. Trujillo didn’t swing his stick, throw a stone, or pull out a gun. Instead, he pulled out a bottle. It had some kind of internal light source, a faint glow that made the object more visible even in the dark night. The bottle was one of the old, small ones made with greenish glass in an hourglass shape. Softly rippled, it fit in his fist comfortably. As I watched he tilted it and aimed it at me. The mouth of the bottle was filled with a white light.
“Hey, what is that thing?” I demanded, backing up reflexively. I knew an artifact of power when I saw one. Soon after I’d met him, I’d had no doubt in my mind he possessed an object or two. No one could know as much about these things as he did without possessing them.
It was a weird kind of battle between us, stop-start, and with too much time to talk. I first realized what was going on when I felt a flash of heat cross my belly. The old bastard had burned me! I looked down in shock to see that my shirt was smoldering. It was the heat of my shirt that I felt, that was all. Whatever this weapon did, it could not burn me. It could still affect my clothing however.
I turned and ran, pulling my gun from my pocket. He lit up my back as I retreated.
“What’s this?” he demanded. “Are you wearing some kind of armor? You’re from the perimeter, aren’t you?
My jacket felt like it was on fire. Each time he directed the mouth of that bottle at me, it projected some kind of beam. I suspected my talisman was countering the effects, but not so completely that it protected my clothing.
I kept running, heading for the nearest crater. The beam played after me like a flashlight. I dove into the crater to avoid it. I rolled down into the dirt a dozen feet before I looked back.
At the rim of the crater above me, the sand turned to glass with a crackling sound. The air filled with an odd hot smell. I knew the old bastard was melting the top of the crater. I heard him grunting with effort as he pursued me.
Having no choice, I drew my pistol and aimed it at the top of the crater.
“Don’t make me shoot you,” I said. “I came only to ask questions. If I was with the government, I would have killed you right off rather than talking.”
“Nonsense,” Trujillo shouted. “You can’t believe bullets would affect me.”
“I know they do.”
“How so?”
“I passed the pillboxes on the way here. They wouldn’t be able to keep you inside the zone if you weren’t afraid of bullets.”
The old man was quiet for a moment. I took the chance to press my case.
“I would prefer that we talk in a civilized fashion,” I said. “I came here for information, not to assassinate you.”
“You’re just like the rest. You want information. All right. That’s the only reason I’m allowed to keep breathing. I’m a wild experiment, and you let me putter around out here, hoping to figure me out one day. Well, I’m not a man in a zoo. I live on my own terms, dammit.”
I frowned, finally beginning to put the last puzzle pieces in place. “Mercury looked abandoned. Are you the only one out here? The only one at the test site?”
I heard him shuffling around up there. Nervously, I held McKesson’s gun with both hands. If Trujillo showed his nose, I figured I would have to blow it off for him. We had been having a pleasant enough conversation, but I couldn’t chance being burned alive in my own clothing.
“How are you resisting my beams? These photons are aligned. This kind of radiation should go right through Kevlar.”
“I’ve got something more effective than that. I’ll tell you about it if you stop trying to burn me.”
I saw a puff of dust at the top of the crater. There, just for a moment, I saw his hat rise over the rim. I ducked and lifted my pistol, ready to fire. I didn’t want to do it, but I was tired of being burned.
But then he relented. “All right,” he said. “Let’s talk for a moment more. We can always kill one another later. I do think I can get you, you know. I’ve been working on the problem. I’ve been out here a long time, and I’ve had time to come up with many ways to kill a man. Hell, I could burn the ground at your feet and cook your flesh that way.”
Only somebody half-crazed would give his intended victim a little speech like that. But I also sensed he was probing for information concerning my powers. “Wouldn’t work,” I said, “but I thought we were going to talk first.”
“All right, all right. Answer me one question, then. Are you really Quentin Draith, the assassin? And if you are, why are you back here?”
The assassin?
“I don’t know much about my past. I do know I had a photo from Mercury. I came here to learn about the people in the picture.”
“I see.”
“Why did you decide to kill me when you learned my name?”
He hesitated, then heaved a great sigh. “You ever make a mistake? I think I made a mistake. In the past, I knew your parents. They were here with you when you were a kid—back before things went bad. They died out here, and the government handed you over to Meng. She was supposed to fix your mind or something.”
“She did that,” I said bitterly.
“She’s a witch, I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m too old for all this. I’m a Cold War warrior, if you kids even know what that is now. It all seems rather pointless these days, all the work we did out here cracking the atoms, the very building blocks of the universe.”
“Who is in charge of this facility now?”
“I suspect I am. I’m the director, the last one NTS ever had.”
“Where is everyone else?”
“For a long time, they dwindled in number. Then when we cracked the membranes between our world and the others, a few more were assigned here by the DOE. We had some bad experiments after that. Things went seriously wrong.”
“Are you talking about the accident that killed my parents?”
“It wasn’t exactly an accident. I can show you, but you must promise not to tell anyone else. I mean, you’ll probably die out here anyway, but in case you don’t, I don’t want anyone on the outside saying Trujillo was a traitor in the end.”
I thought about it for a second. “I can keep a secret.”
“If you’re anything like your folks, I know you can.”
I heard him shuffling off. Carefully, I climbed to the top of the crater. He was already fifty feet away and heading east. I crawled over the rim of the crater and followed him. I still had McKesson’s gun in my hand, but I had it down at my side.
I asked him a few more questions along the way, but he didn’t answer. He just kept telling me I’d understand when we got there. So we walked on in the dark, under the brilliant stars of the desert sky. Without any clouds or city lights, the stars were luminous and beautiful.
We walked up a small grouping of rocky hills. It wasn’t until we got to the other side that I saw anything new. We topped a rise and looked down into a vast area of white sand. It was the dried-out bones of a lakebed. We had to be very close to Area 51, I figured. In the middle of the dry lakebed was something I’d never expected to see on my good Earth.
There was a small city there, an alien city. It was lovely in a perfectly geometric way. Hundreds of cubes stood in a pile, as if stacked there by the hands of giants. There were lights here and there, illuminating the cubes.
I recognized the cubes and their configuration. It was a settlement built by the Gray Men.
> On the far side of a small cluster of rocky hills, I stood and stared down at the Gray Man installation. I knew each cube was perfect in proportion. The edges of every corner would be sharp to the touch, almost bladelike. I cursed under my breath.
“How many of them are here?” I asked. “How many of the Gray Men work with our government?”
“I don’t know. We’re at the limits of where I dare to walk. They allow me to wander these deserts, knowing I’ll burn anyone who comes here to capture me. But they’ve also told me they won’t allow me to leave.”
“You mean you can’t go down this hill to the cubes? Why not?”
“I’d catch a sniper’s bullet with my head before I went another thousand yards.”
I stood there at his side, eyeing the alien stack of cubes. Inside, I grew angry. If the government was working with the Gray Men, cooperating with them, then they’d sanctioned some of the things I’d endured at their hands. They’d allowed friends of mine to die. As I thought about some of the events I’d witnessed, I began to understand them more clearly. Why was the government so disinterested in aliens roaming the streets of Las Vegas? The answer was now clear: they were working with those same aliens, cooperating with them.
I’d read that the famous actor John Wayne, who’d played a cowboy in countless westerns, had vigorously argued on the government’s behalf. He had refused to believe his government would knowingly endanger American lives by conducting nuclear tests in this very desert. He’d been wrong, and he’d felt betrayed when he figured it out. Some said his own cancer death was due to shooting films out here during the days of surface tests and fallout.
“Well then, you’ve seen it,” Trujillo said. “That’s the answer: the government is working with these aliens. The problems in Vegas are just like the old fallout days—maybe in fifty years we’ll understand them better and outlaw all these government experiments. In any case, we can now leave this desert for good.”
“We?” He’d managed to surprise me.
“I’m asking you to take me out of here.” He gave me a sheepish grin; even he knew it took some nerve to go from trying to kill someone to asking for their help. “Make me invisible, and we’ll walk together. Maybe I’ll even burn some of those bastards in the pillboxes for laughs—no, no I won’t. I’m just talking. Take me with you, Draith. I’ve been stuck here a long, long time.”
