Koontz, Dean R. - Strangers

by Strangers(Lit)

  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 frostwhite 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

  saidonce 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 singularly

  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 I-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 I-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. Jus
t 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

  usall 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

  painthat 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. Moving 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 I-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.<
br />
  "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 close as any people had ever been since the dawn of time.

  At last Parker said, "What happened, Brendan? What happened to the

  three of you when you went inside?"

  Using the rope bridge, they crossed the pressure-sensitive alarm grid.

  Pausing several times to employ other clever devices in Jack's bag of

  tricks, they passed through the finely woven web of electronic security

  that guarded the grounds of Thunder Hill, coming at last to the main

  entrance.

  Ginger looked up at the immense blast doors. The blowing snow had stuck

  and frozen to the burnished steel in cryptic patterns that looked as if

  they ought to have some meaning.

  A two-lane blacktop led away from the doors. Heating coils were

  evidently embedded in it, for not a speck of snow lay on the pavement,

  and steam rose from its surface. The road curved down and west across

  the meadow, into the forest, where the lights of the main gate glowed

  softly in the distance. She could not see the guardhouse past which they

  had crept in the pickup, but she knew it was out there.

  If visitors were admitted during the next few minutes, or if the guards

  changed shifts and returned to the Depository, the jig was up. She and