A lieutenant hurried over to Ogilvy, saluted, and began to speak to him in a low voice. Sanchez headed straight for a cement picnic table, where two other civilians had spread out topographic maps; the FBI had already gotten the state police to seal off all roads and highways leading to the lake, under the veiled pretense that a top-secret experimental jet had crashed here. Meredith Cynthia Luna walked on stiff legs to another concrete picnic table, where she sat and tucked her head between her knees.
That left Murphy alone, at least for the moment. Unnoticed by anyone, his hiking boots scuffing against the frozen sand, he sauntered past the soldiers, the sandbag emplacements, the trucks, and the FBI men until he reached the water’s edge. Now there was nothing between him and the tiny island; it lay about half a mile across the channel, clearly visible by its lonely stand of oak trees. Yet the crashed UFO was invisible; only the buoys gently bobbing in the water marked its whereabouts.
What allowed it to camouflage itself like that? An energy field of some sort? That was his first guess, considering what happened to the jet that had flown too close to it. The pilot of the second F-15 claimed that his missile exploded before it reached its target, yet he also said that the object nearly disappeared when it got close to the lake; he had been able to follow it only by the shadow it cast against the lake, and he didn’t see it clearly again until it skipped across the lake’s surface like a flat rock before running aground on the sandbar. So if it was a field, perhaps it wasn’t completely impenetrable. It might be able to ward off kinetic-energy sources, like an incoming missile, but was useless against inert matter like…
“Find anything interesting, Dr. Murphy?”
Startled by Ogilvy’s voice, Murphy turned around so quickly that he lost his balance. “Oh shit, don’t do that! You…”
“Sorry.” The colonel was faintly amused. “Didn’t realize you were so nervous.”
“I’m not.” Not really. Murphy let out his breath, nodded toward the sandbar. “Just trying to figure out what… um, what makes it go away like that.”
“From what I’ve been told, nobody knows.” Ogilvy pointed further down the beach; a pair of inflated rubber boats lay on the shore. “Six men paddled out there about a half-hour ago. They approached within thirty feet of the sandbar, but couldn’t make out anything except that shimmer we saw from the air.”
“Did they… ?”
“No. They were under orders to only recon the area and drop buoys. One man said that he felt his paddle hit something under the water, like a smooth surface, but they didn’t see anything when they looked down. It spooked them, so they skedaddled.”
A smooth, invisible surface just under the water. “How deep is it out there, Colonel?”
“Maximum depth is about fifty feet. Around the sandbar, only ten to fifteen where the dinghy was. Five or less at the waterline.”
Damn! They were right on top of the thing, and still couldn’t see it. “This used to be farm country before the dam was built,” Ogilvy was saying, “so that’s probably the top of a low hill. The yew-foh might have sunk completely if it hadn’t hit it.”
“Maybe that was it was trying to do.”
“Maybe. But why would it want to do that?”
“Well, it was being chased by a fighter, so…” Murphy shrugged. “I don’t know. Still trying to figure that part out. When I know more, I’ll tell you.”
Ogilvy nodded, but didn’t say anything for a few moments. “Yknow, Dr. Murphy,” he said quietly, “you seem to have your head screwed on tight. For an OPS guy, that is.”
“How’s that, Colonel?” he asked warily.
“Call me Baird…
“I’m Zack.”
“Zack.” They shook hands. “You’re a normal scientist, aren’t you?”
Normal scientist. Like there was another kind… “Astrophysicist, if that’s what you’re asking.”
“I can tell. You’re asking questions, not assuming anything. You’re not jumping to conclusions, then trying to make the facts fit the answers you’ve already figured out. Ms. Luna, on the other hand…”
He didn’t finish, but stepped aside to let Murphy see for himself. Meredith Cynthia Luna had recovered her poise; she had now taken a lotus position on the picnic table, palms spread upward on her knees, head tilted hack on her neck, eyes tightly closed. A handful of soldiers had paused to watch her, until an officer walked by and told them to get back to work.
“Asked her what she was doing,” Ogilvy murmured, “and she said she was trying to establish communion. Not communication… communion.” On top of everything else, she was a Strieber believer. Lord… “She’s not in my division. If she wants anything, give it to her. I don’t care, just keep her out of my way.”
“So you don’t think she’s…?”
“Got anything to contribute? Not really. But I can’t get rid of her either.”
“Sort of figured as much.” Ogilvy paused, then went on in a low voice. “Frankly, my people don’t have much respect for your people. Cashews and pistachios, we tend to call ’em. But you’ve got a good rep. Word up is that you’re probably the most reliable person at OPS. If you think you’ve got a lock on this situation…”
“I’m flattered, but I don’t.”
“This is new to all of us, but you’re the nearest thing we’ve got to an expert.” Ogilvy took a deep breath. “Look, Zack, we’re making it up as we go along. Agent Sanchez is working with the locals to keep a lid on this thing as long as we can. We’ve been lucky so far… hardly anyone saw this thing go down, and we’ve got the area bottled up. But that dog won’t hunt much longer.”
“How much longer?”
“Six, twelve hours. Twenty-four, tops. My people are ready to fly in more people and equipment, but we need to know what we’re dealing with first. Think you can do it, Dr. Murphy?”
Ogilvy posed this as a question, but it really wasn’t one. They both had higher authorities to whom they had to answer, and nobody upstairs was going to accept no for an answer.
“Yeah, I can do it,” Murphy said.
Time unknown
“I’m sorry, Tom.”
Franc gently folded Hoffman’s hands together on his chest, then pulled a blanket over the body. He spent another moment with the mission specialist, then carefully stood up and made his way upward along the precariously slanted deck to the hatch.
He had just left the passenger compartment when something thumped against Oberon s hull. Bracing himself against a bulkhead, he listened carefully, but didn’t hear anything until Metz’s voice rang out from the control room.
“Lu! Get in here! We’ve got a problem!”
Like they didn’t have enough already. Franc pitched himself down the dark passageway until he reached the ajar hatch to the control room, then dropped to his hands and knees and crawled into the compartment. Seated at his station, Metz was a shadow against the luminescent band of emergency lamps. Most of the screens glowed with status reports; one, however, displayed a camera view from outside the timeship.
“Oh, no,” Franc murmured. “Where did they come from?”
Just outside Oberon, three soldiers in a rubber boat. One cradled an archaic rifle in his arms; the second had an old-fashioned film camera aimed straight at them; the third gently guided the boat with a long plastic paddle. The first two were looking back at the oarsman, who gazed uncertainly into the water just beneath the boat.