Hall nodded, facing up to practicalities. “We still don’t know whether they have what we have.”
“What we have, the Russians probably already know about,” Harry said.
“Don’t be cynical, Harry,” Arthur admonished.
“Sorry.” Harry grinned boyishly at the officer beside him, Lieutenant Sanborn, and then at Hall. “But am I wrong?”
“I hope you are, sir,” Sanborn said.
On a concrete apron a mile and a half from the shuttle runway stood an implacable concrete building with inward-sloping walls, covering about two acres of ground. The tops of the walls rose three stories above the surrounding plain of concrete and asphalt. “Looks like a bunker,” Harry said as the bus approached a ramp inclining below ground level. “Built to withstand nuclear strike?”
“That’s not really a priority here, sir,” Lieutenant Sanborn said. “It would be next to impossible to harden the launch sites and runway.”
“This is the Experiment Receiving Lab,” Colonel Hall explained. “ERL for short. ERL holds our civilian guests and the specimen.”
In a broad garage below ground level, the bus parked beside a rubber-buffered concrete loading dock. The front passenger door opened with a hiss and their escorts led Harry and Arthur out of the bus, across the dock, and into a long, pastel green hallway lined with sky-blue blank-faced doors. Each door was described by numbers and cryptic acronyms on an engraved plastic plaque mounted in a small steel holder. Somewhere, air conditioners hummed quietly. The air smelled faintly of antiseptic and new electronics.
The hall opened into a reception area equipped with two long brown vinyl-upholstered couches and several plastic chairs spaced around a table covered with magazines — scientific journals, Time and Newsweek, and a lone National Geographic. A young alert-looking major sat behind a desk equipped with a computer terminal and a card identification box. One by one, the major cleared all four of them and then punched a code into the keypad lock of a broad double door behind his desk. The door opened with a sucking hiss.
“The inner sanctum,” Hall said.
“Where is it?” Harry asked.
“About forty feet from where we are right now,” Hall said.
“And the civilians?”
“About the same distance, on the other side.”
They entered a half-circular room equipped with more plastic chairs, a small wash-up area and lab table, and three shuttered windows mounted in the long curved wall. Harry stood by the bare lab table and rubbed his hand along the shiny black plastic top, examining his fingers briefly for dust — the gesture a professor might make in a classroom. Arthur’s mouth twitched in a brief smile. Harry caught the twitch and lifted his eyebrows: So?
“Our Guest is behind the middle window,” Hall said. He spoke into an intercom mounted to the left of the middle window. “Our inspectors are here. Is Colonel Phan ready?”
“I am ready,” a soft, almost feminine voice replied over a speaker.
“Then let’s get started.”
The shutters, mounted on their side of the window, clacked and began to rise. The first layer of glass behind was curtained in black. “This is not a one-way mirror or anything fancy,” Hall said. “We’re not concealing our appearance from the Guest.”
“Interesting,” Harry said.
“The Guest has requested a particular environment, and we’ve done our best to meet its requirements,” Lieutenant Sanborn said. “It is most comfortable in conditions of semidarkness, at a temperature of about fifteen degrees Celsius. It seems to enjoy a dry atmosphere with approximately the same mix of gases found in our own air. We believe it exited its normal environment at about six o’clock on the morning of the twenty-ninth of September to explore…well, frankly, we don’t know why it left, but it was caught by daylight and apparently succumbed to the glare and heat by about nine-thirty.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” Harry said. “Why would it leave its…environment…without protection? Why not make all the necessary precautions and plan the first excursion carefully?”
“We don’t know,” Colonel Hall said. “We have not interrogated the Guest or caused it any undue strain. We supply it with whatever it requests.”
“It makes its requests in English?” Arthur asked.
“Yes, in quite passable English.”
Arthur shook his head in disbelief. “Has anyone called Duncan Lunan?”
“We haven’t ‘called’ anybody but people with an immediate need to know,” Hall said. “Who is Duncan Lunan?”
“A Scottish astronomer,” Arthur explained. “He made a fair mess of a controversy about twenty-three years ago when he claimed to have evidence of an alien space probe orbiting near the Earth. A probe he thought might be from Epsilon Bootis. His evidence consisted of patterns of anomalous returned radio signals that seemed to have been bounced from an object in space. Like a great many pioneers, he had to face disappointment and recant, after a fashion.”
“No, sir,” Hall said, again with his enigmatic smile. “We haven’t spoken to Mr. Lunan.”
“Pity. I can think of a hundred scientists who should be here,” Arthur said.
“Eventually, perhaps,” Hall allowed. “Not right now.”
“No. Of course not. Well?” Arthur gestured at the dark window.
“Colonel Phan will give us a direct view in a few minutes.”
“Who is Colonel Phan?” Harry asked.
“He’s an expert in space medicine from Colorado Springs,” Hall said. “We couldn’t find anyone better qualified on such short notice, although I doubt we could find a better man for the job even if we searched all year.”
“You didn’t ask us,” Harry said. Arthur nudged him gently in the arm.
The lights in the viewing room dimmed. “I hope someone’s making videotapes of our Guest,” Harry whispered pointedly to Arthur as they pulled their seats close to the window.
“We have a digital recorder and three high-resolution cameras working around the clock,” Lieutenant Sanborn explained.
“All right,” Harry said.
Harry was obviously nervous. For his own part, Arthur felt both alert and vaguely anesthetized. He could not quite accept that an age-old question had been answered affirmatively, and that they were about to see the answer.
The black curtain drew aside. Beyond another thick pane of glass framed in stainless steel, they saw a small, dimly lighted, almost empty square room, watery green in color. In the middle of the room was a low platform draped with what appeared to be blankets. A plastic beaker of clear water sat in one corner. In the right-hand corner nearest their window was a meter-tall transparent cylinder, open at the top. Arthur took all this in before focusing on what lay under the blankets on the low table.
The Guest moved, raised a forward limb — clearly a kind of arm, with a three-fingered hand, each finger divided in two above the middle joint — and then sat up slowly, the blanket falling free of its wedge-shaped head. The long “nose” of its head pointed at them and the golden brown eyes emerged from the blunt end, withdrew, emerged. Arthur, mouth dry, tried to see the being as a whole, but for the moment could only concentrate on whether the eyes were lidded, or actually withdrew within “pools” of pale gray-green flesh.
“Can we speak to it?” Harry asked Hall over his shoulder.
“There’s two-way communication with the room.”
Harry sat in a seat near the window. “Hello. Can you hear us?”
“Yes,” the Guest said. Its voice was sibilant and weak but clearly understandable. It lowered itself to the floor and stood uncertainly beside the low table. Its lower limbs — legs — were jointed in reverse, yet not like a dog’s or horse’s hind legs, where the “knee” is the analog of a human wrist. The Guest’s articulation was quite original, each joint actually reversed, with the limb’s lower half dropping smoothly, gracefully, to split into three thick extensions, the tip of each extension splayed into two broad “toes.” The legs made up much of its height, its rhinoceros-hide “trunk” occupying only about half a meter of its full meter and a half. The end of the long head, thrust forward on a thick, short neck, dropped a few centimeters below the juncture of legs and trunk. The arms rose from each side of the trunk like the folded manipulators of a mantis.