Majestic (20 page)

I gave Sophie a Pall Mall when I first met her, and she threw herself back in her chair, making great clouds of smoke and laughing. "Do not smoke any more of these," she announced. "Cigarettes this good can be traded for lives."

The radio station went off the air at ten-thirty and the camp settled down. It was reassuring that there would be sentries on duty through the night. I could not have slept at all without that.

It seemed to me that I'd just closed my eyes when I suddenly found myself wide awake. It was extremely quiet. I sat up on the cot. The air in my tent was thick and stifling. I was thirsty. My head was pounding.

A child was standing in my doorway.

I practically leaped through the back of the tent.

Then he was gone. I took a couple of deep breaths. Hallucination? Walking corpse? I was prepared to believe anything.

I told myself that I must have been having a nightmare which had mixed with some real event, perhaps a sentry passing my tent.

I felt for my shoes, found them and carefully knocked them against the ground as Hesseltine had advised.

Scorpions were a constant problem in the desert. I put them on and stepped into the night, guiding myself with my flashlight. By the radium dial on my watch it was three-fifteen A.M. I was at once exhausted and unable to sleep.

I went to the field kitchen to try to find some water. There was a big canvas bag sweating on the side of the truck. I drank from the aluminum cup attached. The water was on the warm side and tasted strongly of the rubberized canvas of the bag. I almost gagged, thinking of the rubberized stink of the body bags that held the aliens.

The moon was now a yellow sickle on the eastern horizon. Despite its presence the desert sky was so clear that I could see the firmament in detail. The Milky Way stretched from horizon to horizon. Color was clearly distinguishable among the stars.

As I watched I began to notice a curious phenomenon. One by one the stars were winking out. Now what did that mean? As I looked I discerned a line almost halfway across the sky. Ahead of that line there were stars.

Behind it, none. And it was moving in our direction.

I assumed that it was a cloud. It had been a clear night. Where there had been a breeze earlier it was now still. I watched the cloud continuing to cover the stars. The night was also extraordinarily quiet, so quiet that I could hear the hiss of the match as a sentry lit a cigarette all the way on the other side of the compound.

In the brief glow of his match I saw a large owl standing right behind the man. I was quite surprised. I'd not been aware that owls got that big, nor that they walked on the ground. "Hey," I said softly in his direction.

"Look behind you."

He pulled out his flashlight and turned around. The bird's eyes shone. It didn't move or blink. Fascinated, I began walking closer. I'd forgotten all about the disk.

We kept it in our beams as we walked forward. One moment it would look like an owl and then next there would be the flash of something else. The sentry was beginning to breathe hard.

"It's an owl," I said. My voice sounded thick, as if the two of us were shut together in a closet.

"No, sir."

The creature made an abrupt move, causing the sentry to jerk back. His light tumbled away into the brush.

I gasped in a breath and forced myself to a state of control. I told the sentry to be calm.

The next instant there was an echoing shriek above us. I looked up into absolute blackness. There was nothing, not a star, not a glimmer of reflected light, not a cloud.

Then from high, high up there came pitiful cries.

"What the hell is that?"

There was no reply. I shined my light around.

No sentry. No owl.

The dark was clutching at me. I turned around, thinking to go back to the camp and get the others.

I heard something moving in front of me, as if the creature we'd had in our lights was coming closer. When I turned back I saw nothing.

Events began unfolding with the mysterious grace of tragedy. I heard the sentry babbling and whining - but he was close now.

He kept saying something - "Oh, no, oh, no" - over and over. As his voice died to whimpers I tried to call for help.

I felt a curious, soft, deep blow to my belly and wound up on my back on the ground. I was winded and my flashlight was gone.

When I tried to sit up I felt strong hands against my shoulders.

"Oh, God."

"Why do you call on your gods? We're the only ones here." The voice was swift and breathless and tough and far from human.

"We have the bodies," I said. "We can give you the bodies."

The reply was a snicker, then another sentence also delivered in that curiously breathless, mechanical tone:

"We're gonna take you for a ride."

I remember next a wild jumble of dark images: cactuses, shrubs, running animals, then grass and sheep and suddenly rushing up a mountainside and flying off into midair. I was kicking and grabbing at things, totally disoriented.

And then I was high in the sky. As I passed over the summit of a mountain I saw the twinkling lights of a city arrayed before me. It was beauty so extreme that I wanted to somehow link myself to it, to melt into it.

When I was a boy I used to lie on the roof of our house watching the sunset, and sometimes when it was orange and red beyond the hills, I would wish that I could somehow let the beauty fill every molecule of my being.

I was free in the empty sky, slipping like a night bird through the air. Before me were those living diamond lights. There was something so wonderfully perfect about it, so very right that it seemed like a part of heaven.

Beyond the vision but emerging from it there was a sense of what I can best describe as something a religious person might call purity.

I went down close to the silent streets, passing the Plains Theatre with its darkened marquee for Cheyenne, looking into the window of a shop called Mode O'Day. Even the mannequins in their frocks seemed incredibly beautiful.

And then the street ends and there are great hangars around me and lights buzzing with June bugs and moths and the huge planes of the 509th with their atomic babies in their bellies and I am rolling, floating, swimming in the air.

I saw a soldier walking along the tarmac with a rifle slung on his shoulder. Closer and closer I drifted, until I was just above him. I grabbed the hat off his head.

He looked up but I was pulled into the sky before he could see me. Then he searched the empty tarmac around him. "Well, shit," came his echoing shout.

I had that hat clasped in my hand and no intention of letting go. It was damned important and I knew it. If this fantastic thing was really happening the hat would be proof. I watched the world race and swoop past. There was a measure of control, and I found that I could to a degree influence my height and direction by twisting and turning.

I was feeling grand and alone in the sky when I turned onto my back and found myself face to face with a wall of dull gray metal. It looked like the same substance as the disk.

The thing must have been there all along. But how could it have been so silent, so stealthy? The base had obviously failed to detect its presence and it was huge, far larger than the little ship that had crashed.

A question flashed through my mind: Why hadn't they simply picked up their machine? They must have the means to do practically anything.

The metal was no more than two feet away from me. I stretched out my hand but it moved away, remaining an inch or so out of reach.

I heard a buzzing in my head. It got rapidly so loud that it hurt. Involuntarily I clapped my hands to my temples but the sound was inside. I couldn't protect myself from it. It began to shriek like a desperately straining motor.

I dropped about fifteen feet. Then the buzzing got low and I felt as if I was swimming in butter. There was a smell like burning rubber.

Was this magnificent device breaking down the moment I thought it invincible?

I fell another thirty feet, a truly sickening lurch. I tried to turn over, to see how close I was to the ground. No luck. Couldn't do it. The burning rubber smell was strong now. A dusting of what appeared to be warm ash was drifting down onto me from above. The buzzing changed to a noise like continuously shattering glass, a crashing that went on and on and on.

Again I fell, this time it seemed for miles. My muscles knotted against the feeling that the land was going to slam into my back any second. I kicked and screamed and grabbed air. So much for self-control.

Then I stopped falling. It was so abrupt it hurt. I drifted a little in one direction and then another. Throwing myself from side to side I tried to turn over, somehow to get my bearings. More of the ash sifted down.

I seemed to stabilize. Better. Now I was regaining a measure of stability, even moving forward. They must have fixed it, thank the good Lord

It was like the bottom dropped out of the world. Again I raced downward, the wind screaming in my ears.

Above me I saw all the stars of the sky.

The disk was gone! They'd left me here in midair and I was dying.

Crying, my throat aching with grief and dread, beyond panic, I fell to my final end.

Then I realized that I wasn't moving anymore. It took a long moment to understand that the absolute lack of motion meant that I had landed.

I felt around beside me. Dirt. Weeds. I was on the ground! I sat up. Incredible. Out in the middle of the desert.

When I stood up I found that I was pretty weak at the knee, but otherwise I seemed well enough.

Very suddenly a wave of nausea overwhelmed me. I staggered, but it subsided without developing into anything.

I took stock of myself. Physically undamaged. Badly shaken, though. Alone in the middle of nowhere. The stars above me, the empty land around - I could be hundreds of miles from the camp.

There was little point in walking. In this darkness it might even be dangerous. I thought I might at least try to get my bearings, though, and began trying to locate Polaris. First-I searched the sky before me. Then I turned carefully around, making certain that I was in exactly the opposite position.

I found myself staring at the camp, which was ten yards away.

For a moment I thought it might be a mirage. Then I walked forward. No, it was quite real.

One of our sentries challenged me.

"Wilfred Stone."

"Oh. Couldn't sleep?"

I walked into the gleam of his flashlight. I fought back my panic, my wild disorientation. "Actually, I was thirsty, but I got a little sidetracked." My voice shuddered toward a calm I did not feel.

"I wouldn't leave the perimeter again. We've got a guy lost already."

"Really?" It was as if cold fingers were compressing my heart.

"A PFC name of Flaherty. Sentry on the last watch. Nobody can find him."

I remembered him screaming in the sky. But I - hadn't that all been a nightmare? I'd been getting some water, then I realized I was carrying an overseas cap. I held it up, looking stupidly at it. The sentry looked at it too.

"You find that in the desert?"

What could I say? "In the desert." The lie was essential, and not just to protect my reputation. It defended my sanity.

He took the cap, looked at the name in the band. "It's his all right," he said. He trotted off toward Hesseltine's tent, which was lit and active, no doubt because of the missing man.

I walked into the center of the group of tents and vehicles. The disk still glowed in the lantern light.

I at last understood that I wasn't looking at an accidental crash.

This disk hadn't crashed at all. It had been put here, and the bodies along with it.

It was bait. And we had taken it, and were wriggling on the line.

In some murky place our struggles must be ringing a bell. Somebody had heard the sound and grasped the line and set the hook.

And now they were going to reel us in.

TRANSCRIPT: INTERROGATION OF ROBERT UNGAR LOCATION: ROSWELL ARMY AIR FORCE BASE, HRKJ INTERROGATOR: JOSEPH P. ROSE, SPECIAL OFFICER,

CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE GROUP

1ST INTERROGATION SESSION

JPR: Let's get names clear. You are Robert Ungar?

RU : Bob.

JPR: I should call you Bob?

RU : I've been Bob so long I ain't gonna hear you, you say Robert.

JPR: Bob. Age forty-seven?

RU : Yes, that is my age. Sir, why have I been brought here?

JPR: Informally. A few questions.

RU : This is a room with barred windows. I would like to know if there are charges against me.

JPR: Well?

RU : Because I am going home if there ain't. I can go home. That's the law.

JPR: You are in a special federal compound.

RU : I am returning home.

JPR: Yes, that's right. And so please before you go answer me a couple of questions.

RU : No! Hell, no!

JPR: For your country, sir.

RU : Oh, Lord.

JPR: Did these alien beings say anything to you?

RU : I - I - they - who?

JPR: What did you see?

RU : There was a big blast in the sky the night of the second. There had been a hell of a thunderstorm out in the desert. Strange. We looked at it. The lightning was striking the same places over and over again. I was worried my sheep was gonna bunch against a fence. I went out there first thing in the mornin' and my daughter and son and I picked up a lot of junk. We thought it was a crashed plane so we told the sheriff -

JPR: Right away?

RU : Naw. A few days, maybe - when I got to town. Ain't got the telephone out there.

JPR: Did you see any of these alien beings?

RU : What the hell are you asking me? I saw some wreckage that a military officer told me was from a spaceship. I didn't see none of these beings you talk about.

JPR: But you stated to the papers that you had seen this crashed disk. But in fact you saw no such thing.

RU : I saw what I said! Now look, are you trying to twist my words, or something? I didn't see no alien beings, sir. I saw what I said I saw.