QUARENS ME, SEDISTI LASSOS
7
Hicks, bleary-eyed, clothing rumpled, sat on the straight-backed hotel desk chair and scanned the contents of the file he had marked “Hurrah.” “Hurrah” contained the choicest bits of information from twenty-two hours and perhaps three hundred dollars’ worth of accessing specialist bulletin boards around the world. He did not care about costs. He was still high.
Australia did indeed have an artifact in their Great Victoria Desert, something apparently disguised to resemble a huge chunk of red granite. The Australian government had kept the find secret for about thirty days, until leaks through investigating military and scientific agencies threatened to scoop them on the greatest story of all time. This much and more — speculation, rumors — had been repeated again and again on all the networks he had accessed. While the government had not released full details, they were expected to do so any day.
The Regulus bulletin board was used solely by radio astronomers belonging to the 21cm Club, of which he was an honorary member. After searching through the general and special interest messages, in a small area headlined “Irresponsible Murmurs,” Hicks had found a cryptic and unsigned note: “Ham fanatic, right? Say no more about identity. Picked up unscrambled transmission to AFI” — that, Hicks decided, must be Air Force One, the President’s plane — “concerning ‘our own bogey in the Furnace.’ The Man’s heading west to Vandenberg. Could this be…?”
Hicks frowned again, reading that. He knew several shuttle pilots currently flying out of Vandenberg. Dare he call them up and ask if anything untoward had been happening? Dare he mention “our own bogey in the Furnace”?
A knock interrupted his reverie. He was heading for the door when it opened and a young Asian woman in lime-green blouse and slacks backed in. “Housekeeping,” she announced, seeing him. “Okay?”
Hicks looked over his room abstractedly, relieved that he had chosen to wear a robe. He often worked in the buff, paunch, gray chest hairs, and all — the habit of a bachelor of long standing. “Please, not yet.”
“Soon?” she asked, smiling.
“Soon. An hour.”
She shut the door behind her. Hicks paced back and forth from curtained window to bathroom door, chin in hand, face as clear and guileless as an infant’s. “I cannot think straight,” he muttered. Turning on the television and selecting a twenty-four-hour news station, he sat on the corner of the bed.
For a moment, he thought he had tuned to a movie channel by mistake. Three shiny silver objects, shaped like long-necked gourds, hovered above arid sandy ground. Nearby squatted a large van topped by an array of electronic sensing equipment. The van gave the objects scale; each was as tall as a man. Hicks reached over to turn up the volume, joining a male announcer in midsentence:
“—from four days ago, shows the three mechanical remote devices which the Australian government claims emerged from a disguised spacecraft. The government says these devices have communicated with their scientists.”
The video of the silvery gourds and van was replaced by a typical press conference scene, with a slender, thirtyish man in a brown suit standing behind a clear plastic podium, reading a prepared statement: “We have communicated with these objects, and we can now affirm that they are not living creatures, but robots, representing the builders of the spacecraft — it is now confirmed to be a spacecraft — buried within the rock. While the actual communications are still being analyzed and will not be released immediately, the substance of the information supplied was positive, that is, not threatening or alarming in any fashion.”
“Jesus bloody Christ,” Hicks said.
The image of the hovering gourds returned. “They’re flying,” Hicks said. “What’s holding them up? Come on, you bastards. Do your job and say what the bloody hell’s going on.”
“Commentary from world leaders, including the Pope, after these messages—”
Hicks flung his arms out and swore, kicked the cabinet holding the television, and punched the set off. He could spend another three hundred dollars chasing rumors across all the networks and bulletin boards in the world, or—
Or he could stop being a novelist wallah and start being a journalist again by finding the news behind the news. Certainly not in Australia. The Great Victoria Desert, by now, had representatives of the media three-deep, trying to interview every grain of sand.
A faint memory of some obligation suddenly flared into consciousness. He had had an appointment this morning. “Damn.” That single word, said almost happily, adequately expressed his slight irritation at having forgotten the local television interview. He should have been at the studio five hours ago. It hardly seemed to matter. He was on to something.
The “Furnace”…Where in hell would that be? Somewhere near Vandenberg, apparently. He had visited Vandenberg seven times in his career, twice covering important combined civilian-military shuttle launches to polar orbit. Hicks pulled out his pocket compact disk player from a suitcase and hooked it into the computer. He indexed the World Atlas sector on his reference disk and searched through the F’s in the gazetteer. “Furnace, furnace, furnace—”
He quickly found several Furnaces, the first in Argyll County, Scotland. There was also Furnace, Kentucky, and Furnace L (“What is L, lake?”) in County Mayo, Ireland. Furnace, Massachusetts…And Furnace Creek, California. He entered the map number and coordinates. In less than two seconds, he had a detailed color map of an area a hundred kilometers square. A flashing icon in the lower left-hand corner indicated a comparative satellite photograph was available. His eye searched the map until an arrow appeared, flashing next to a tiny dot.
“Furnace Creek,” he said, smiling. “On the edge of Death Valley proper, not far from Nevada actually…” But not very close to Vandenberg — across the state from it, in fact. He switched disks and keyed in a request for Automobile Club of Southern California information. The computer found a year-old listing. “1995L Brief: Furnace Creek Inn. 67 units. Golf, riding. Long-established, picturesque location overlooking Death Valley. Three stars.”
Hicks thought for a moment, very much aware that the facts were not coming together perfectly. Operating solely on instinct, he picked up the phone, punched a button for an outside line, and requested the area code for Furnace Creek. It was the same as San Diego’s although it was hundreds of miles north-northeast. Shaking his head, he called information and asked for the number of Furnace Creek Inn. A mechanical voice informed him, and he jotted it down, whistling.
The phone rang three times. A sleepy-voiced, young-sounding girl answered. Hicks checked his watch again, for the fourth time in ten minutes. For the first time, he actually paid attention to the dials. One-fifteen p.m. He hadn’t slept all night. “Reservations, please.”
“That’s me,” the girl said;
“I’d like to book a room for tomorrow.”
“I’m sorry, sir, we can’t do that. We’re completely full.”
“Can I make a reservation for your dining room, then?”
“The inn is closed for the next few days, sir.”
“Big traveling party?” Hicks asked, his smile broadening. “Special reservations?”