Starman (7 page)

The town was big enough to warrant the stoplight, but if there was a cop around he was conspicuous by his absence. She didn’t slow down again until they had passed the last house and were back among the trees. Repeated glances into the rearview mirror revealed only empty road behind them. There was no sign of hoped-for flashing red lights, no sound of a closing siren.

And still he continued to ignore her. Did he know what she’d been trying to do back there and had he simply decided not to pay any attention, or was he so foreign, so ignorant of local customs that he didn’t know the difference between a yellow light and a red one? She wasn’t sure which to believe.

Maybe she ought to give in and listen to some news. The clock on the dash said it was almost six. If her abductor was some kind of dangerous foreign agent or escaped madman or something, maybe there’d be something on the news about him. The continued not-knowing was worse than anything the broadcaster might say. She found herself wishing he was nothing more than a Russian spy on the run, or some scientist who’d gone over the edge and maybe shot a couple of his colleagues.

That much at least she could make sense of.

The music segued into a station signature tune, then to the sound of a rooster crowing, and finally a voice. Still no reaction from her passenger.

“Up and at ’em, folks,” said the cheery voice of the DJ. “This is station WDUL, Duluth, Minnesota, bringing you the six
A.M.
news. World news, commodity index and farm prices following the weather. But first, what’s been happening in our neck o’ the woods.

“No folks, those of you who saw that flash in the sky last night, you weren’t imagining things. It wasn’t the end of the world, neither, and it wasn’t a burning airliner. No sir.”

Jenny found her eyes edging away from the road and back over toward her silent companion. Words continued to pour from the speaker. She was looking at him differently now, and her expression began to alter as the DJ’s voice rambled on.

“Nope,” he continued in his folksy, bucolic fashion, “according to the AP wire, one of the biggest meteors to strike our little old planet Earth in the past eighty years hit last night right here in our own backyard, near Ashland and not far from Chequamegon Bay, right over the border. So for you folks who called in to say that you saw a flying saucer land over there, this ought to take care of . . .”

Jenny didn’t want to hear any more. She reached out and turned the radio off. The road bent sharply to the left. Between her need to shut off the flow of reportage and simultaneously keep an eye on her passenger she nearly drove off the pavement. The car’s wild gyrations didn’t faze him in the least. Why should they, she thought? She stifled the laughter that was building inside her because she recognized it as the incipient hysteria it was.

Foreign? Oh, that was funny, that was! He was a foreigner all right. It didn’t explain what he was doing with Scott’s face and body, but it explained a helluva lot of other things. Like his silence, and that unnaturally direct stare, and his ignorance of things as commonplace as red lights and windshield wipers. It explained what she’d seen in the living room and on her front porch last night. It explained just about everything—except what they were doing together driving a souped-up ’77 Mustang south toward Arizona.

She looked from the radio to him and back again, hoping he—it, whatever—at least had enough sense to make the connection. “That was about you, wasn’t it? That flash, that meteor, that was you coming down. You really are some kind of Martian or something, aren’t you?”

Silence and indifference.

“What do you want here?” The questions came pouring out of her. “What are you doing? What do you want with me? Where did you learn to speak English?” A car was coming toward them. She ignored it. “Come on, damn you. Say something! I know you can talk a little bit, anyway. Where’d you learn English?”

Now he did look at her, but when he opened his mouth it was a different voice from the one that had spoken to her before which emerged. Not that it was unfamiliar, and the words were understandable. It wasn’t Russian or Chinese, and it wasn’t the old man’s voice.

It was Mick Jagger’s, or a remarkable facsimile. “I can’t get no, satisfaction,” the man sang to her. He was as straight-faced as if he were serenading a high-school sweetheart.

“That does it,” she muttered grimly. She closed her eyes, hit the brakes with both feet, and threw the wheel hard left, sending the Mustang skidding crazily toward the approaching vehicle. Caught off guard, her passenger went tumbling into the dashboard.

The driver of the van locked up his own brakes, sending the bigger vehicle into a wild skid as he fought to miss the oncoming Mustang. The end result was that both of them ended up sliding sideways toward each other. There was a metallic
bang
as doors contacted, slid apart, and caught again on rear fenders. The van’s left taillight exploded in a shower of red plastic. Metal crumpled. The Mustang skewed around in a full three-sixty before coming to a stop on the shoulder.

The van was owned by a young and presently extremely upset man named Heinmuller. As soon as he managed to get both his breath and his bus under control he locked the parking brake. Then he reached under the front seat and brought out a big lug wrench. Piling out of the van, he paused to check his custom paint job. His blood pressure rose steadily as he noted the gouges in the lacquer, the marks on one mag wheel, and the missing curb indicator. That much he could have lived with, but the twisted rear fender and busted taillight were something else again. It wasn’t just the broken red plastic cover, either. The metal had been punched in and wires were showing. Between that and the fender he had a major project on his hands.

One thing for sure: he wasn’t going to pay for it.

He turned and shouted angrily toward the Mustang, which still rested where it had skidded to a halt on the shoulder behind him.

“You crazy sons of bitches! What’s the matter with you? Look what you did to my van. You want to play chicken on the highway, why don’t you find somebody else to pick on?” He gestured at the damaged fender. “You see this? Who’s gonna pay for this?” When no response was forthcoming from his assailant, he picked up a rock lying by the side of the road and threw it at the other car. “Come on, own up to it, and you damn well better have insurance!”

The explorer blinked, shook his head. He’d been stunned by the collision with the dash. Now he turned to see Jenny trying to scramble out the door. The gun had tumbled to the floor and lay somewhere out of sight beneath the seat. There was no time to go hunting for it. He grabbed at her, still unbalanced by the concussion he’d suffered.

Heinmuller had started toward the Mustang, holding the big lug wrench tightly in his right hand. If they wouldn’t come to him, he’d sure as hell go to them. He could understand the reason for their continued silence, but if they thought he was going to shine it on they had another thing coming. He was prepared for just about anything: a fight, confrontation with somebody strung out on dope, a bunch of frightened, drunken teenagers.

The one thing he wasn’t prepared for was to see the door of the Mustang burst open and an attractive young woman come staggering out. She saw him and instead of offering an apology or trying to run away, she took a step toward him and started screaming at the top of her lungs.

An attack he could have coped with. An injury from within the car he could have coped with. The one thing he wasn’t ready to deal with was a wild cry for help. He stopped in his tracks.

A man followed her out of the car and locked his arms around her. They started scrambling around, kind of wrestling and yet not quite fighting. Heinmuller stared at them and they both stared back.

“Help me, please!” the woman was shouting.

“I send greetings!” the guy yelled, with equal intensity. He smiled even as he continued to tussle with the woman who, Heinmuller noted absently, wasn’t bad looking at all.

The near collision and the damage to his precious van temporarily shoved to the back of his thoughts by this new situation, he stood watching them while trying to decide what to do next.

“What the hell’s going on here?” he finally asked them. “What’s with you two?” The last thing he wanted to do was insert himself into the middle of some serious domestic quarrel.

“I’m being kidnapped!” the woman insisted.

“Greetings!” said her companion again.

Heinmuller frowned. They were fighting, that was for sure, but not as husband and wife. But the guy neither looked nor acted like a kidnapper. Something mighty cockeyed was happening here and he wasn’t sure he wanted any part of it.

But if she was telling the truth . . .

He raised the lug wrench and started toward them, keeping his eyes fixed on the man. He was still wary of both of them. This might be some kind of scam, a show designed to lull his suspicions so they could steal his van. But the more he watched the woman struggle the less he thought that was the case.

“Let her go, pal, or I’ll give you greetings,” he finally said.

As he drew near, the man reached into a pocket of his windbreaker. Heinmuller dropped to a cautionary crouch, but the guy didn’t have a gun. It was only some kind of ball bearing or something. As soon as he saw that his would-be opponent wasn’t armed he resumed his advance. The man held the hand holding the gray sphere out toward him.

“All right, buddy, you asked for it. I told you to let go of her.” Heinmuller decided to hit the guy on the arm. That ought to make him loosen his grasp.

The man’s fingers contracted, breaking the gray sphere he held. There was an explosive crackle. It sounded like a power transformer blowing up. A bright ball of light formed around the man’s fist.

“Hey—ouch!” Heinmuller flung the wrench away as though it had bit him. Suddenly it was glowing a bright, cherry red. Behind him a forty-foot pine exploded like a torch. Both tree and wrench had been in a straight line with the man’s fist, but Heinmuller didn’t make the connection. His gaze traveled from his hand to the roaring blaze behind him to the now white-hot lug wrench. As he stared at it the steel dissolved into tiny metal balls of evaporating metal which sizzled and vanished into the air like spit on a hot stove. Seconds later there was only steaming earth where the wrench had been lying.

Heinmuller gaped at the spot for another moment, to convince himself that he hadn’t imagined it, then turned and ran like hell for his van. Jenny slumped as the badly frightened young man burned rubber as he disappeared down the highway.

Her captor helped her back onto her feet. His gentle touch even while fighting to keep her under control was just one more addition to the mass of contradictions that he was composed of. She didn’t scream anymore. There was no one around to hear her now, besides which she was more awed than frightened. When she turned to stare at him it was clear he wasn’t even upset by her attempt to escape. His expression was unchanged.

“What did you do? How did you do that?” She pointed toward the ground where the wrench had—the only description she could think of that fit was “vanished.”

He said nothing, directed her gently but firmly back into the car. This time he climbed in front of her and was waiting with the gun tucked back in the waistband of his chinos when she slid in behind the wheel. He gestured down the road. As far as he was concerned they might have stopped for a quick look at the scenery.

“Okay, okay,” she said tiredly. “I know. Arizona-maybe.”

“Yes, Arizona-maybe,” he repeated. He paused a moment before adding, “Define ‘okay.’ ”

“Okay means all right, you win. We’ll do it your way.”

He turned away from her and resumed his Buddhalike stare out the front window. As he did so the false smile she’d put on her face faded and she muttered under her breath, “In a pig’s eye we will.” She shifted into drive and the Mustang pulled back out onto the pavement.

The huge Sikorsky workhorse hovered over the center of the impact crater. Several thick cables hung from its belly into the hole. Workers on the ground attached the dangling lines to the steel cage that had been built around the blackened object in the crater’s center.

Mark Shermin watched until he was sure both cables and cage would do their job without snapping. Then he turned and jogged back to his own waiting helicopter.

Once inside he turned back to the crater. The Sikorsky’s two big engines revved up. The meteor, or whatever it was, went up easily on the skycrane’s winch. He followed their progress until both chopper and cargo had disappeared over the trees. Then he turned to the waiting radioman and nodded.

Lemon punched in a numerical sequence on the keyboard in front of him, waited until a series of lights winked to life atop the readout board. He spoke into the mike.

“Communications Central, this is Project Visitor, Chequamegon Sighting. I have Mister Shermin here for you.” A pause, then he glanced back at his waiting charge. “Your director’s on the line.”

Shermin recognized George Fox’s voice instantly. The director was talking to someone in the same room with him. “Are we on scramble? Okay.” Then, more loudly, “All right, Shermin, what is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know? You’re not paid not to know, Shermin. I can not know myself. I’ve got a whole building full of bozos working for me back in Washington who don’t know. So don’t let me hear it from you.”

“What I mean, sir, is that I’ve an idea what it is but I’d rather not speculate until I’ve had a chance to examine it fully. We just lifted it out of here. It’s on its way back to the base and I’m getting ready to follow it in.

“I’ll tell you this much. If it
is
a meteor, it’s the funniest one I’ve ever seen. It’s not iron or nickel or any kind of stony matter, though again, I don’t want to commit myself firmly until we’ve had proper analyses run on it. I’m not even sure the composition is metallic. For one thing it’s got some kind of funny glaze all over it. Most of it burned off on reentry, but there’s still enough left to analyze. Some kind of weird ceramic or something. Like I said, it’s awfully early for speculation. I want to run a piece of it through a lab. Spectrograph, specific gravity, the usual stuff.