“Frank?” He recognized Edie Thoraldson’s voice. “Something’s happened at Kor’s place. We’re sending the unit.”
That was the Quick Response Team, which Frank had once directed. “What?” he asked. “What happened?”
“I’m not exactly sure,” she said. “Apparently somebody got buried. I’ve got the police coming in from Cavalier. I thought maybe it wouldn’t be a bad idea if you took a look.”
“Okay,” he said, puzzled.
Peg looked at him, worried. “What is it?” she asked.
“Don’t know. Edie says somebody got buried. What the hell does that mean?” He had his coat on already. “Keep the door locked,” he said.
Kor’s house was only six blocks away. He paused in his driveway for a stream of cars carrying volunteer firemen. Then he backed out into the street and turned left. Two minutes later he parked behind a gathering crowd a half-block away from Kor’s house. He was just behind the Quick Response Team. The neighborhood was thick with box elders, and it was hard to see what was happening. But he could hear a lot of crowd noise.
The fire engine rolled in. The crowd split and flowed away from the emergency vehicles. And Frank finally got clear of the trees.
Where Kor’s house, lately the Backcountry Church, had been, there was now a two-story-high snow cylinder. The snow was swirled at the top like soft ice cream.
27
He asked for a sign.
—Mike Tower, Chicago Tribune (commenting on Old-Time Bill and the freak storm at the Backcountry Church)
Harry Mills liked to say he was pure corn country, bred true. He had spent thirty years in the Congress of the United States, eight as chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, before becoming Matt Taylor’s vice president. Harry told people he had no political ambitions other than to serve his nation well. He would be seventy-seven before he could hope for a run at the top job.
He had therefore decided to retire at the end of Taylor’s first term, while he was still young enough to enjoy the leisure. He would write his memoirs; travel the country to spend time with his grandchildren, who were scattered from Spokane to Key West; and get back to playing serious bridge, a pursuit he’d abandoned a quarter-century ago.
The reality was that Harry probably had become too old. He had lost his passion for politics, his taste for power. He no longer enjoyed influencing policy, or rubbing shoulders with the decision makers, or even making the Sunday round of talk shows. Tonight he was at a reception for the Jordanian king, and he devoutly would have preferred to be home with Marian, shoes kicked off, watching a good movie.
As was usually the case at these outings, he was being stalked by half a dozen predators who wanted to use him to push their agendas. One was the NASA director, Rick Keough, who caught up with him near the hors d’oeuvres.
Harry didn’t like Keough very much. The director was a former astronaut, so he was popular with the general public. But he was given to grandstanding, and he was less interested in the organization than he was in his own career.
Keough was nursing a rum and Coke and trying to look like a man bearing up under misfortune and bureaucratic stupidity. They exchanged pleasantries, and he came to the point. “Mr. Vice President, we have a problem. This thing on Johnson’s Ridge. My people are starting to wonder whether they have a future.”
Keough had headed the effort to return to an aggressive manned program when that idea was popular, and during recent years had argued just as effectively for economy, science, and safety. He was short, barely five-six, narrow of both shoulder and intellect. There was an elusiveness in his character, a tendency to become distracted or change the subject without warning. Talking to Keough, one of the capital’s pundits had once remarked in print, was like trying to carry on a conversation with a man hiding behind a tree.
“How do you mean?” asked Harry.
“Are you serious? What’s the point of boosters and shuttles when you can walk?” He finished off his drink. “What is the President going to do about that thing?”
Harry was tired of hearing about the Roundhouse. He was not a man easily rattled, and he was convinced that, given time, it would all blow over. When it did, life would go on. “Relax, Rick,” he said. “There will always be a mission for NASA.”
“Well, maybe somebody better tell that to my people, because they are looking around. Mr. Vice President, they are going to start bailing out. These are dedicated people. And they can’t be replaced. Once they get the feeling that what they do doesn’t matter anymore, they’re gone. The organization will die.”
And your job with it. “I’ll talk to the President,” Harry said. “I’m sure he’ll be willing to issue a statement of purpose.”
“I think he’ll have to do better than that. You want my suggestion?”
Harry fingered his glass, waiting.
“Condemn the area. Send in a flight of F—111’s and take the top off the escarpment. You can apologize later, and nobody will complain. Nobody.”
DRIVER IN FATAL CRASH CLAIMS ATTACK BY “VISITOR”
Grand Forks, ND, Apr. 2 (UPI)—
A driver charged with vehicular homicide in Saturday’s seven-car crash on I—29 has claimed that “something” took the wheel out of his hand and drove the car across the median into oncoming traffic. John Culver, twenty-nine, of Fargo, insisted yesterday that he had no way to bring his 1997 Honda under control. Police have said Culver was legally drunk when he crashed head-on into a station wagon, beginning a chain of collisions that killed three.
The press conferences on Johnson’s Ridge were held daily at one o’clock. Pool reporters, wearing pressure suits, had visited the galaxy terminus, which seemed to be located on an off-world platform. No one knew for certain, because no exit from the chamber could be found. But if it was indeed off-world, then it followed that artificial gravity was now within reach. An expedition was being planned.
Today, however, no one was interested in anything other than the Visitor.
Flanked by Adam Sky, April began by issuing a short statement that admitted a remote possibility that something might have come through the port. “We don’t think so,” she said. “We are reasonably sure that the only thing that happened was a brief malfunction. The malfunction opened a channel between Johnson’s Ridge and one of the terminus worlds.”
“The Maze?” asked Peter Arnett of CNN.
“Yes,” she said.
“April,” he pursued, “when are you going to open it up for us? The Maze?”
“As soon as we can be sure it’s not inhabited, Peter.” (Wrong word: She should have said “not occupied.” Sounded less ominous.) “But I’d like to reiterate that we spent more than two hours over there. We saw no sign of life. And we were in no way molested, attacked, or threatened by anyone. After we returned, the system reactivated on its own. No one appeared, and there was no evidence to suggest it was anything but a malfunction. And I hope this puts the rumors to rest.”
“You saw nothing at all?” asked Le Parisien.
“That’s correct.”
“But that’s what you’d expect to see, isn’t it,” asked the London Times, “if the creature was invisible?”
“How can I respond to that?” asked April. “We didn’t see anything. More than that I can’t say. If the Times wants to speculate, go ahead.”
“How do you account for Deekin’s statements?” asked a reporter from Pravda. “Deekin swears something came across.”
April allowed herself to look distressed. “You’ll have to ask Dr. Deekin about that.”
Reporters, like everyone else, love a good story. And April knew they were torn between their natural skepticism and an unexpressed hope that there was something to the rumor. Everyone understood that this was the sort of thing that sold newspapers. A lot of newspapers.
She had, of course, been less than candid. The guard who had seen the wrong icon light up had been George Freewater. George also believed something had come across. But they had learned the danger of going public with everything they knew.