"Any way I can reach him?"
She laughed. "If you find out, please tell me. I don't even know where it is."
"You mean you've never even seen it?" Clark pumped his voice full of incredulity.
"Well, he did show me the general direction once when we were driving over to White Sands, so at least I know my husband's not in Alaska."
"Service wives have it rough."
"You're not in the service?" Mrs. Henderson's voice became guarded.
"Oh, sure," Clark lied. "That's how I know how it is. Or, rather, my wife does. They keep me traveling all the time on the hardware gadgets."
"Oh." She sounded relieved. "Well, tell me where you're stopping, and if he does get home, I'll have him call you."
"Sorry." He lied again. "I've got to fly to L.A. this afternoon. Just tell him Ray called. And thanks anyway, Mrs. Henderson."
On his way out the door, Clark hesitated, stepped back toward the bathroom, then turned quickly and went out again, banging the door hard. He walked rapidly down to the office, putting a smile back on his face by the time he reached the desk. He handed his room key to the clerk and asked him to arrange a car rental for him.
"Caddy?" asked the clerk. Clark hadn't realized a shave could do that much for a man's appearance.
"No, Chevy or Ford's okay."
While he waited, Clark leaned on the desk and talked with the thin young man who ran the office.
"What road do I take to go to White Sands?" he asked.
"You're on it. Route 54. Take a left out front and then keep straight on out. It's about sixty miles."
"Say, how do I get to that new Army base out that way? I got a friend in the Signal Corps there."
"Search me." The young man shrugged his shoulders. "I heard of some base out that way some place, but from what I hear, it's supposed to be secret."
"What's between here and White Sands?"
The youth grinned quickly. "Desert."
Several miles northeast of El Paso, driving at an unaccustomed 40 miles per hour, Clark had to agree with the description. To his right, the gray-brown land stretched flat to the far horizon, burnished almost white by the unrelenting sun which now rode well up in the sky. Occasional small boulders, clumps of tumbleweed and scattered barrel cactus offered the only relief from the expanse. On Clark's left rose the Franklin Mountains, gray and barren too except for the greasewood clinging to the lower slopes. More than forty million years ago, an ancient agony beneath the earth's surface had thrown up fire and lava to mold a mighty mountain range. Hundreds of centuries of wind and sun had eroded the peaks, inch by inch, until the limestone hills stood like old men, gaunt, withered, timeless.
Despite the heat, the dryness of the air left Clark feeling better than he thought he had a right to feel. He wiped his brow, but found no perspiration on it; evaporation had turned him into a self-cooling machine. Just over the New Mexico state line, he swung into a service station. From the look of the empty road ahead, it would be the last for many miles.
A man, from his stance of casual authority the proprietor, stood in the doorway. He wore a grease-spotted undershirt and his face was seamed and leathery.
"Coke in there?" Clark asked. The man nodded toward a big red box. Clark dropped in his dime and waited for the bottle to thump out of the recesses of the vending machine. "Have one?"
The man shook his head, but smiled faintly in thanks.
"How far is it to White Sands?" Clark asked.
"About fifty."
"You sure got a hot country here," said Clark, "and I got to make three PX's out that way today."
"Salesman?"
"Yep. Detergents. But this is a new route for me." This evoked no comment. Clark went on: "How many miles to that Army base, you know, the one they just finished up six, seven weeks ago?"
"Figured you wanted information," said the man in the undershirt, scratching his jaw. "By them tags, you rented the car in El Paso, so you didn't need no gas."
Clark laughed. "Okay, but I did offer to spend another dime. Listen, I'll make a deal with you. I'm breaking in on this territory and I want to sell that new base."
"What kind of deal?"
Clark laid a $20 bill on the glass counter by the cash register. The man made no move to pick it up.
"How do I know you're not some kind of spy?" he asked.
Clark pulled out his wallet again and sorted through his stack of cards, looking for his old Army reserve identification card. He thumbed quickly over several credit cards that listed him as a senator and held out the reserve ID card, with his picture and prints of his right and left index fingers on it.
"Georgia, huh? Whereabouts?"
"Macon, but I'm working out of Dallas now," Clark said. "Listen, all I want is a starter. Tell me where the road to that base turns off and the twenty's yours. And from now on, when I come back, I'll buy my gas here."
The man rang the cash register and carefully placed the twenty under a clamp in the bill compartment.
"Honest, friend," he said, "I don't know much about it. All I know is they built some kinda base over yonder." He pointed vaguely to the northwest. "They got a pretty big airfield there, and lots of buildings, from what I hear, but I ain't never seen nobody from the place. Least, nobody who'd admit it. If I was you, I'd watch my speedometer and when I'd gone about thirty miles, no, make it twenty-seven, twenty-eight, I'd look for a blacktop road off to the left, heading up to a little rise."
"Thanks a lot," said Clark. He drained the last of the soft drink.
"If you get in there to sell any soap, they ought to give you the gold watch, friend," said the station proprietor. "I don't think you will."
As Clark drove off, he watched in the rear-view mirror and saw the man squint at the rear of his car, then wet the stub of a pencil and mark the back of his hand. He's either working for somebody up the line, Clark mused, or he's a very cautious citizen.
Clark pressed the gas pedal down until the car was rolling along at 75 miles an hour. He watched the speedometer; when it showed he had traveled about 25 miles from the gas station, he slowed down. Several cars whizzed by him, the drivers glancing back in irritation. Clark kept his eyes to the left. The mountains reached higher now, though they ran farther from the highway, and the land rolled slightly in the foreground.
He slowed, then stopped. A black asphalt strip, obviously a fairly new road, ran off the highway at a right angle. It was unmarked.
Clark turned left onto it and drove slowly along. The pavement was thick. He saw the track of heavy-duty tires printed in faint dust marks on the blacktop. The road ran upward on a gentle grade. The desert stretched away unbroken save for a hill-or rather a domelike swelling of land-several miles off to his right.
Suddenly the road dipped over the rise. About a mile ahead he could see a high wire fence. A wire-mesh gate, closed, blocked the road there and a small hut stood inside. He saw a large sign, but couldn't read it from that distance. He had slowed to less than 20 miles an hour.
"Okay, bud, that's far enough!"
Clark, turning his head toward the source of the shout, saw a soldier coming at him from behind a large rock. He wore khaki shorts and short-sleeved shirt, field shoes and sun helmet, and for an instant Clark recalled the pictures of Montgomery's British desert troops in World War II. But this man carried a modern submachine gun-pointed right at him- and his collar insignia were U.S. government issue.
Clark saw another guard coming from the other side of the road a few yards farther along. He stopped the car.
"Move over, bud." The first soldier opened the door and shoved Clark to the middle of the seat. He tossed his weapon on the back seat. The other GI squeezed against Clark from the right side and also dropped his weapon in back, but he took a pistol from a holster and held it in his right hand. Both men looked like regulars to Clark. They were about thirty years old, he guessed. Their appearance left nothing to guesswork: they were hard.