“Hey,” Minelli shrieked. “Supervisor! Supervisor! My face…My face. There’s something growing on it.”
Edward felt his pulse quicken. Nobody spoke.
“Oh, thank God,” Minelli said a few moments later, milking the situation for all it was worth. “Just a beard. Hey! I need my electric razor.”
“Mr. Minelli,” the supervisor said, “no more of that, please.”
“We should have warned you about him,” Reslaw said.
“I’m known to be something of an asshole,” Minelli explained. “Just in case you might be having second thoughts about keeping me here.”
AAP/NBS WorldNet, Woomera, South Australia, October?, 1996 (Octobers, USA): Despite Prime Minister Stanley Miller’s decision to “go public” with news of extraterrestrial visitors in South Australia, scientists at the site have heretofore released very little information. What is known is this: The object discovered by opal prospectors in the Great Victoria Desert is less than eighty miles from Ayers Rock, just over the border into South Australia. It lies some 210 miles due south of Alice Springs. Its appearance has been disguised to resemble the three great granite tors of the region, Ayers Rock and the Olgas, although it is apparently smaller than these well-known formations. The Department of Defense has surrounded the site with some 90 miles of razor wire in three concentric circles. Current investigations are being carried out by scientists from the Ministry of Science and the Australian Academy of Science. Help has been offered by officials at the Australian Space Research Center at Woomera and NASA’s Island Lagoon tracking facility, although scientific and military cooperation with other nations is by no means certain at present.
The dark gray Mercedes bus took Arthur Gordon and Harry Feinman from the small Air Force passenger jet through a heavily guarded gate into the Vandenberg Space Operations Center. Through the window, over a concrete hill about a mile north, Arthur could see the top half of a space shuttle and its mated rust-orange external tank and white booster rockets poised beside a massive steel gantry.
“I didn’t know you were prepared for this sort of thing, I mean, to bring specimens here,” Arthur said to the blue-uniformed officer sitting beside him, Colonel Morton Hall. Hall was about Arthur’s age, slightly shorter, husky and trim, with a narrow mustache and an air of quiet patience.
“We aren’t, speaking frankly,” Hall said.
Harry, seated in front of them next to a black-haired lieutenant named Sanborn, turned and peered around the neck rest. Each member of the civilian group was accompanied by an officer. “Then why is everything here?” Harry asked.
“Because we’re the closest, and we can improvise,” Hall said. “We have some isolation facilities here.”
“What are they used for, under normal circumstances?” Harry asked. He glanced at Arthur with an expression between roguishness and pique.
“I’m not at liberty to discuss that,” Hall said, smiling slightly.
“It’s what I thought,” Harry said to Arthur. “Yes, indeed.” He nodded and faced forward.
“What were you thinking, Mr. Feinman?” Colonel Hall asked, still smiling, albeit more tightly.
“We’re moving biological weapons research into space,” Harry said tersely. “Automated modules controlled from Earth. Bring them back here, and they’ll have to be isolated. Son of a bitch.”
Hall’s smile flickered but, to his credit, did not vanish completely. He had sprung his own trap. “I see,” he said.
“We all have the highest clearances and presidential authorization,” Arthur reminded him. “I doubt that there’s anything we can be kept from knowing, if we press hard enough.”
“I hope you appreciate our position here, Mr. Gordon, Mr. Feinman,” Hall said. “This whole thing was tossed into our laps just a week ago. We haven’t straightened out all of our security procedures, and it’ll be some time before we decide who needs to know what.”
“I would think this takes priority over practically everything,” Arthur said.
“We’re still not sure what we have here,” Colonel Hall admitted. “Perhaps you gentlemen can help us clear up our priorities.”
Arthur grimaced. “Now the ball’s in our court,” he said. “Touché, Colonel.”
“Better your court than mine,” Hall said. “This whole thing has been an administrative nightmare. We have four civilians and four of our own men in isolation. We have no warrants for arrest or any other formal papers, and there is no — well, you can imagine. We can only stretch national security so far.”
“And the LGM?” Harry asked, turning back again.
“He’s — it’s — our star attraction. You’ll see it first, then we’ll interview the men who found it.”
“’It,’” Arthur said. “We’ll have to find a less ominous name for that soon, certainly before ‘it’ becomes common knowledge.”
“We’ve been calling it the Guest, with a capital g,” Hall said. “It almost goes without saying, we’d like to avoid any leaks.”
“Not likely to avoid it for long, with the Australians having gone public,” Harry said.
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?