“What are you talking about? Last time I noticed, you were working for us. When did you quit? Did you pack it in when I wasn’t looking?”
“Listen, I was trying to keep the lab out of it.”
“Why? Why on earth would you want to do that?”
“Because we’re talking UFOs here, Bert. Maybe little green men. You want to be associated with little green men? I mean, Colson is supposed to be a hardnosed scientific institution.”
“Please stop changing the subject.”
“I’m not changing the subject.”
“Sure you are. This is about publicity. Tons of it. And all free. I didn’t hear much talk out there today about UFOs.”
“You will.”
“I don’t care.” It was a dangerous rumble. “April, you are on every channel. I assume that tomorrow you will be in every newspaper. You, April. Not Colson but Cannon.” He took a long breath. “You hear what I’m telling you?”
“But it’s bad publicity.”
“There is no such thing as bad publicity. When they line up again in the morning, as they assuredly will, please be good enough to mention your employer, who has been overpaying you for years. Do you think you can bring yourself to do that?”
She let the seconds run. She would have liked to defy the son of a bitch. But the truth was that he intimidated her. “Okay,” she said. “If that’s what you want.”
“Oh, yes. That’s what I want.” She could see him leaning back with his eyes closed and that resigned expression that flowed over his features when he confronted the world’s foolishness. “Yes, I would like that very much. By the way, you might mention that we’re especially good in environmental services. And listen, one other thing. I’ll be interested in hearing where you were and whose time you were on when this business first came to your attention.”
12
A little gleam of time between two eternities; no second chance to us forever more!
—Thomas Carlyle, Heroes and Hero Worship, V
Temperatures fell to minus twenty on the Fahrenheit scale the day after the press conference. The ground froze, people came down with frostbite, and Mac Eberly, a middle-aged farmer who’d brought half his family with him to the ridge, suffered chest pains. During the holidays the weather deteriorated further, and April reluctantly gave up and closed the operation for the season. She paid a generous bonus and announced they would restart the project when they could. In the spring, she added.
The following day a blizzard struck the area. And the wind-chill factor on New Year’s Eve touched a hundred below. The story quickly dropped out of the newspapers, shouldered aside by the run-up to the Super Bowl, a major banking scandal involving lurid tales of sex and drugs, and a celebrity murder trial.
April published her findings, and, in accordance with tradition, the new element was named cannonium in her honor. The NAACP awarded her its Spingarm Medal, and the National Academy of Sciences hosted a banquet in her honor. She was, of course, ecstatic. But nevertheless the long delay weighed on her spirits.
Max returned to Fargo, resumed his life, and proceeded to cash in on his newfound fame. People who were interested in buying, selling, or restoring antique warplanes were making Sundown their preferred dealer. Furthermore, Max found he was now in demand as a speaker. He’d never been comfortable speaking to groups of people, but offers were in the range of a thousand dollars for a half-hour. He took lessons in public speaking and learned that, with experience, he was able to relax and even became good enough to command interest and get a few laughs. He talked at Rotary Club affairs, business luncheons, university award presentations, and Knights of Columbus gatherings. When he found out April was getting an average of six thousand per appearance, he raised his price and was surprised that most groups were willing to meet it.
He spent a weekend with his father. The colonel was delighted. For the first time in Max’s memory, his father seemed proud of him and was anxious to introduce him to friends.
April, meantime, became a regular dinner companion. Somewhere during this period Max recognized a growing affection for her and made a conscious decision to maintain a strictly professional relationship. He told himself that the Johnson’s Ridge project was potentially too important to risk the complications that might come out of a romantic entanglement with the woman who had emerged as his partner in the venture. Or it might have been more complicated, a mix of race and Max’s reluctance to get involved and a fear that she might keep him at arm’s length. She had, after all, done nothing to encourage him. But when she introduced him to a police lieutenant she was dating and confided to Max that she really liked the guy, he was crushed.
Occasionally they took out the Lightning and flew over the escarpment. The blowing snow had filled in most of the excavation; only heaps of earth remained as evidence of the frenetic activity on the ridge. It was almost as if they had never been there. On one occasion, a cold, frozen day in late January, she asked him to land.
“Can’t,” he said.
“Why not? Ceil landed here.”
“I don’t know how deep the snow is. Ceil had an inch. We might have a foot. And there’s probably ice underneath.”
“Pity,” she said.
Unseasonably warm weather arrived in February. After several successive days in the fifties, April drove to Fort Moxie, picked up Tom Lasker, and toured the excavation with him. It was too early in the year to start again, and they both knew it. But she could not bear the prospect of waiting several more weeks. “Maybe we’ll get lucky,” she said. “When it gets cold, we can work around it.”
Lasker said he didn’t think it was a good idea. But April cleared it with Lisa Yarborough, and the spring drive got underway.
The weather held for eight days. The excavation teams returned and took full advantage of their opportunity. They dug the snow out of the trenches and dumped it into the canyon. They attacked the hard ground with a will and methodically uncovered a wide area of roof. They worked their way down the front of the structure, exposing a curved wall of the same emerald-green color and beveled-glass texture. To everyone’s disappointment, no doorway or entry was visible.
They had assumed that the front, the portion that looked out over the edge of the precipice, would provide an entrance. But its blank aspect was disappointing. There was considerably more work to be done, and because it was on the lip of the summit, the effort would be both slow and unsafe.
The roundhouse curved to within three feet of the void, from which it was separated by a shelf of earth and loose rock. This shelf covered the channel they’d seen on the radar printouts. The channel might provide a quick entrance but its proximity to the edge of the cliff rendered it dangerous. Before April would consent to excavating the channel, she wanted to dig out the rest of the structure. Surely somewhere else they would find a door.
They also erected several modular buildings to serve as storage and communications facilities.
The workers had got into the habit of bringing flashlights with them, which they periodically used to try to peer into the cannonium shell. Several swore they could see through, and a couple even claimed that something looked back. The result was that the ridge began to acquire a reputation that at first lent itself to jokes and later to an inclination by many to be gone by sunset.
On Washington’s birthday, the weather went back to normal. The Red River Valley froze over, and Max celebrated his own birthday on the twenty-third with April and the Laskers during a driving snowstorm. But the winds died during the night, and the morning dawned bright, clear, and cold. So cold, in fact, that they were forced by midafternoon to send everyone home.
By then they had almost freed the roundhouse from its tomb. Earth and rock still clung to it, but the structure was attractive in its simplicity. The wall was perfectly round and, like the bubble roof, it glistened after it had been washed.
Max was watching the first cars start down the access road when he heard shouting and laughter out of sight around the curve of the roundhouse.