Strangers (96 page)

Something had come down.

As that amazing news was revealed, the darkness in the truck was filled with an excited babble of voices. Reactions from Faye’s initial stunned disbelief to Sandy’s instant and enthusiastic acceptance.

Not only did Sandy accept, but she abruptly remembered large pieces of the forbidden night, as if Parker’s revelation had been a sledge that had struck a wrecking blow upon her memory block. “The jets came over, and the fourth one blew across the roof of the motel, so low it almost took the top off the building, and by that time we were all out of the diner, people were coming over from the motel, but the shaking was still going on. The ground vibrating just like in a quake. The air vibrating,
too.” Her tone of voice was a peculiar mix of delight and trepidation, both joyful and haunted. In the darkness everyone fell silent to hear what she had to say. “Then Dom…I didn’t know his name then, but it was Dom, all right…he turned away from the jets and looked up and back across the roof of the diner, and he shouted: ‘The moon! The moon!’ We all turned…and there was a moon, brighter than usual, creepy-bright, and for a moment it seemed to be falling on us. Oh, don’t you remember? Don’t you remember what it felt like to look up and see the moon falling on us?”

“Yes,” Ernie said softly, almost reverently. “I remember.”

“I remember,” Brendan said.

And Jorja had a glimmer of memory: the recollected image of a lambent moon, eerily bright, rushing toward them….

Sandy said, “Some people screamed, and some started to run, we were so scared, all of us. And the powerful shaking and roaring got louder, you could feel it in your bones, a sound like kettledrums and shotgun blasts all mixed up with the greatest wind you ever heard, though there was no wind. But there was the other sound, too, the queer whistling, warbling, fluty sort of sound under the thunder, getting louder by the second.…The moon got
very
bright all of a sudden. These beams came down from it, lit up the parking lot with a frosty sort of glow…and then
changed.
The moon turned red, blood-red! Then we all knew it wasn’t the moon, not the moon, but something else.”

Jorja saw, in memory, the lunar form turning from frost-white to scarlet. With that recollection, barriers implanted by the mind-control specialists began to crumble like sand castles under the assault of a high tide. She wondered how she could have looked so often at Marcie’s album of moons and not have been nudged toward understanding. Now understanding came in a flood, and she began to tremble with fear of the unknown and with an indescribable exultation.

“Then it came over the diner,” Sandy said, with such awe in her voice that she might have been seeing the starship descend right now, not in memory but in reality and for the first time. “It came in as low as the jet that had gone before it, but it wasn’t moving nearly as fast as the jet…slow…slow…hardly faster than the Goodyear blimp. Which seemed impossible because you could tell it was
heavy,
not like a blimp. Ever-so-heavy. Yet it drifted across us so slow, so beautiful and slow, and in that instant we all knew what it was, what it had to be, because it was nothing that had ever been made on this world….”

Jorja’s tremors grew as the memory returned with greater vividness. She recalled standing in the parking lot of the Tranquility Grille, with Marcie in her arms, looking up at the craft. It glided through the warm
July night above and would have looked almost serene except for the thunderous sounds and base vibrations that accompanied it. As Sandy had said—once the misapprehension of a falling moon was dispelled, they knew instantly what they were seeing. Yet the ship looked nothing like the flying saucers and rockets seen in a thousand movies and television shows. There was nothing dazzling about it—other than the very fact of its existence!—no coruscating bands of multicolored lights, no weirdly extruding spines and nodules, no inexplicable excrescences in its design, no unearthly sheen of unknown metal or peculiarly positioned viewports or blazing exhausts or strange wicked-looking armaments. The enveloping scarlet glow was apparently an energy field by which it remained aloft and propelled itself. Otherwise, it was quite plain: a cylinder of considerable size, though not even as large as, say, the fuselage of an old DC-3, perhaps only fifty feet long and twelve or fifteen feet in diameter; it was rounded at each end, rather like two well-worn tubes of lipstick welded together at their bases; through the shining energy field, a hull was visible, though it was singularly unimpressive, with few features and none of them dramatic, somewhat mottled as if by time and great tribulation. In memory, Jorja watched it descend again, across the diner, toward I-80, while the jet escorts wheeled and barrel-rolled and swooped and zoomed in the sky above and to the east and west. Now, as on that wondrous night, her breath caught, her heart pounded, her breast swelled with turbulently mixed emotions, and she felt as if she were standing before a door beyond which lay the meaning of life, a door to which she had suddenly been given the key.

Sandy said, “It came down in the barrens beyond I-80, at that place some of us knew was special, though we didn’t know why. The jets were buzzing it. Everyone at the motel and diner just had to get down there, couldn’t hold us back, my God, nothing could’ve held us back! So we piled in cars and trucks and took off—”

“Faye and I went in the motel van,” Ernie said out of the darkness in the troop transport, no longer breathing hard, his nyctophobia burned away in the heat of memory. “Dom and Ginger went with us. That pro gambler, too. Lomack. Zebediah Lomack from Reno. That’s why he wrote our names on the moon posters in his house, the ones Dom told us about. Some dim but urgent memory of riding with us in the van, down to the ship, must have almost busted through his memory block.”

“And Jorja,” Sandy said, “you and your husband and Marcie and a couple other people rode in the back of our pickup. Brendan, Jack, and others went in cars, strangers piling in with strangers, but in some way none of us were strangers anymore. When we got there we parked on the berm, and a couple other cars pulled up coming west from Elko, people
were running across the divider, cars driving in from the west just stopped right on the highway, and we all gathered on the shoulder of the road for a minute, looking out there at the ship. The glow around it had faded, though there was still a…a luminous quality to it, amber now instead of red. It set some clumps of sagebrush and bunch-grass on fire when it first touched down, but those burnt out almost entirely by the time we got there. It was funny…how we all gathered along the edge of the road, not shouting or talking or noisy in any way, you know, but quiet, all of us so quiet at first. Hesitating. Knowing we were standing on…a cliff, but that jumping off the cliff wasn’t going to be a fall, it was going to be like…like jumping off and
up.
I can’t explain that feeling too well, but you know. You know.”

Jorja knew. She felt it now, as she had then, the almost-too-wonderful-to-bear feeling that humankind had been living in a dark box and that the lid had just been torn off at last. The feeling that the night would never again seem as dark and foreboding or the future as frightening as it had been in the past.

“And as I stood there,” Sandy said, “looking out at that luminous ship, so beautiful, so impossible there on the plains, everything that had happened to me when I was a little girl, all the abuse and pain and terror…didn’t matter as much anymore. Just like that—” She snapped her fingers in the dark. “Just like
that
my father didn’t terrify me anymore.” Her voice cracked with emotion. “I mean, I hadn’t seen him since I was fourteen, more than a decade, but I still lived with the fear that someday he’d walk in again, you know, and he’d
take
me again, make me go with him. That was…that was silly…but I still lived with the fear, ’cause life was a nightmare for me, and in bad dreams those things happen. But as I stood there watching the ship, with everyone silent and the night so big, the jets overhead, I knew my father could never scare me again even if he did show up someday. Because he’s nothing, nothing, just a sick little man, a speck, one tiny grain of sand on the biggest beach you can ever imagine….”

Yes, Jorja thought, filled with the joy of Sandy’s discovery. Yes, that was what this ship from beyond meant—freedom from our worst and most inhibiting fears. Although the vessel’s occupants might bring no answers to the problems that beset humanity, their mere presence was in a way an answer in itself.

Her voice thickening even further with emotion, beginning to cry now, not with sadness but with happiness, Sandy said, “And looking at the ship out there, I felt all of a sudden as if I could put all the pain behind me forever…and as if I
was
somebody. All my life, see, I’d felt I was nothing, less than nothing, filthy and worthless, just a
thing
that had its
uses maybe, but nothing with…dignity. And then I realized we’re
all
just grains of sand on that beach, none of us so very much more important than any of the rest of us, but more than that…” She gave a small cry of frustration. “Oh, I wish I had words, I wish I had
words
and knew how to use them better.”

“You’re doing all right,” Faye said quietly. “By God, girl, you’re doing all right.”

And Sandy said, “But even though we’re just grains of sand, we’re also…also part of a race that might someday go up there, out there into all that darkness, out where the creatures in that ship came from, so even as grains of sand we have a place and purpose. Do you see? We just got to be kind to one another and keep going. And one day all of us—all the billions of us who were and are—we’ll be out there with those who’ll come after us…out there
on top of all the darkness,
and anything we ever endured will have been worth it, somehow, because it’ll have been a part of our getting there. All of that hit me in a flash while we stood there along the interstate. And suddenly that night, right there, I started crying and laughing both….”

“I remember!” Ned said from his part of the darkness. “Oh, God, now I remember, I do, it’s all coming back. We were standing there on the side of the road, and you grabbed hold of me and hugged me. It was the first time you ever told me you loved me, the first time, though I’d known you did. You hugged me, you told me you loved me, it was crazy, right there with a
spaceship
come down! And you know what? For a few minutes, you holding me and telling me you loved me…the spaceship didn’t matter. All that mattered was you telling me, telling me after so long.” His voice filled with emotion, too, and Jorja sensed that he was putting his arms around Sandy, in the gloom on the other side of the truck. “And they took that away from me,” he said. “They came with their damn drugs and their mind control, and they took away from me the first time you told me you loved me. But I got it back now, Sandy, and they’re never taking it away from me again. Never again.”

Faye said plaintively, “I still can’t remember anything. I want to remember, too. I want to be a
part
of it.”

Everyone was silent as the transport rumbled through the night.

Jorja knew the others must be pondering some of the same thoughts that were rushing through her mind. The mere existence of another—and superior—intelligence put human strife in a different context. Mankind’s endless, violent struggles to dominate and enslave, to impress one philosophy or another upon the entire race at any cost in blood and pain—that seemed so hopelessly petty and fruitless now. All narrow, power-centered philosophies would surely collapse. Religions that preached the oneness
of all men would probably thrive, but those that encouraged violent conversion would not. In some way impossible to explain but easy to
feel,
just as Sandy had felt it, Jorja was aware that extraterrestrial contact had the potential to make one nation of all mankind, one vast family; for the first time in history, every individual could have the respect that only a good, loving family—no king, no government—could bestow.

Something had come down from the sky.

And all humankind could be lifted up.

“Moon,” Marcie murmured against Jorja’s neck. “Moon, moon.”

Jorja wanted to say: Everything’ll be fine, honey; we’ll help you remember now that we know what it is you’ve forgotten, and when you do recall it, you’ll realize it’s nothing to be scared about; you’ll realize it’s wonderful, honey, and you’ll laugh. But she did not say any of that, for she did not know what Falkirk intended to do with them. As long as they were in the colonel’s custody, she did not hold out much prospect for a happy ending.

Brendan Cronin said, “I remember more. I remember descending the embankment from the interstate. Moving out toward the ship. It lay like shimmering amber quartz. I walked slowly toward it with the jets swooping overhead, other people coming with me…including you, Faye…and you, Ernie…and Dom and Ginger. But only Dom and Ginger came all the way to the ship with me, and when we got there we found a door…a round portal…open….”

Jorja remembered standing on the shoulder of I-80, afraid to go closer to the ship and blaming her reluctance on the need to keep Marcie safe. Wanting to call out a warning and at the same time wanting to urge them on, she had watched Brendan, Dom, and Ginger approach the golden craft. The three had begun to move out of sight along the side of the ship, and everyone still on the shoulder of the highway had rushed eastward a hundred feet or so to keep them in view. Jorja had seen the portal, too, a round circle of blazing light on the side of the glimmering hull.

“The three of us gathered in front of the door.” Brendan spoke softly, yet his voice carried above the rumble of the truck. “Dom and Ginger and me. We thought…something would come out. But nothing did. Instead, there was a quality about the light inside…the wonderful golden light I’ve seen in my dreams…a comforting and compelling warmth that
drew
us somehow. We were scared, dear God, we were scared! But we heard helicopters coming, and we sensed government people would take over the second they arrived on the scene, take over and push us back, and we were determined to be part of it. And that
light!
So…”