CHAPTER THIRTEEN:
Lineas de Muerta
Vickery walked quickly east on 8th Street, past carnicerias and narrow check-cashing and eyebrow-threading businesses, and shops whose Asian signs and tinted windows gave him no clue about what goods or services might be dispensed in them. He had left Plowman, Santiago and Castine in the truck, with the ignition key, in a nearby parking lot with two exits and no gates. Castine had wanted to come along with him, but he had reminded her that Galvan didn’t like her, and—to her objection that Galvan didn’t like him either—pointed out that at least he was paying the woman a hundred dollars a month in recompense for the various damages and destructions the two of them had inflicted on her vehicles and her pride, over the years.
Galvan’s yard was only half a block ahead of him; the chain-link fence, masked with green netting, was obliquely visible, and the gate was of course pulled open at this hour. Vickery hurried to it and stepped up the broad driveway.
He made himself walk at a more leisurely pace between the two rows of cars, toward the long maintenance bay and the silver Airstream trailer that sat off to the left. On the other side of the lot was the two-story building, its windows painted over white, in which Galvan had her office.
As he neared the open bay doors, squinting into the dimness and wondering if any of the several mechanics visible had worked here long enough to remember him, a voice from his left called, “You get right the fuck out of here.”
Vickery looked toward the trailer. A bald man in a T-shirt now stood in the doorway, squinting in the sunlight and glowering at him.
“Hi, Tom,” Vickery said. “She’ll see me.” He waved toward the office building. “Is she in there?”
“I’ll call her. Wait where you are till she tells the guys to beat the shit out of you.”
Vickery nodded, and decided not to compound his imminent offense by presuming to pour himself a cup of coffee at the cart by the maintenance bays; he had left his .45 with Castine for the same reason. He took a deep breath of the chilly morning air, spicy with the smells of solvents and chorizo, and tried to relax his shoulder muscles as he exhaled.
He remembered being one of Galvan’s drivers, back in 2016 and 2017, taking fares to airports and churches and consulates in Galvan’s supernaturally shielded cars, and he reflected that it had not been all that different from when he had been a Secret Service agent standing post along one secured boulevard or another, in one city or country or another, as motorcades drove past. Assuring secure transportation.
And he had worked in Galvan’s fleet of taco trucks too, parking alongside malls and high schools and construction sites to sell tacos and enchiladas to the faces that crowded up to the little service window.
It seemed there had never been a particular place where he worked; or even, considering his plan to move his trailer again, where he lived.
“Vickery,” came the woman’s well-remembered voice from behind him. He turned toward the building and saw Anita Galvan striding toward him, her face creased in a wide smile. “A guy’s going to give me fifteen thousand dollars for telling him where you are. Contrata.”
Having expected this development, Vickery held his arms out to the sides so that the mechanics she had just summoned would have no trouble frisking him.
He believed the word contrata was Spanish for hire, and he had never understood why she used it as a signal to her employees that whoever she was facing was to be immediately and forcibly detained. He knew without looking around that at least one of the mechanics would now be standing off to the side and holding a gun pointed at him, and he didn’t jump when hands from behind began patting him down thoroughly.
“You don’t need to call the guy,” Vickery said. “He’ll be here before long anyway. He’s tracking me by my blood, the bloody cloth that guy Harlowe had, in 2018—remember?” At any rate he may very well be, Vickery thought. He went on before she could speak, “That’s why I need to borrow one of your supernatural evasion cars.” He turned his head to look toward the street, past one of her men who, sure enough, was holding a semi-automatic pistol aimed at his middle. “Very quickly, if you don’t mind. The, uh . . . world? . . . hangs in the balance.” He ventured a smile. “Again.”
He held the smile, but he could feel sweat at his hairline in spite of the cold breeze. A rumble of thunder rolled across the cloud-streaked sky.
Galvan was staring at him with no expression. After several seconds in which, uncharacteristically, there was no chugging of an air-compressor or clang of a dropped wrench from the open bays, she looked past him and clearly got a shake of the head from one of the mechanics, indicating that Vickery wasn’t armed. Then she held open her khaki jacket to show the black rubber grip of a revolver tucked behind her wide leather belt.
“You—” she said to Vickery, and seemed unable to think of anything further to say. She started to turn away, then spun and drove her fist with surprising force into Vickery’s abdomen.
Vickery bent double and fell heavily onto his shoulder on the asphalt, unable to breathe. His throat spasmed, trying to draw air, but his diaphragm was paralyzed. His cheek rolled on the gritty asphalt and his hands clenched and unclenched as if trying to encourage his lungs to work.
At last he was able to suck air in, in noisy whoops, though he immediately lost it all each time in painful involuntary coughing—but eventually he was able to breathe in and out steadily. He sat up, wiping drool and sweat from his cold face and wondering if the ONI agents had arrived yet.
“I,” he gasped, squinting up at Galvan, “think you ruptured—everything.”
She squatted and grinned at him face to face. “The guy can take you to a hospital when he shows up. I owed you that since August before last, when you punched me in the stomach. And I did you a favor here, you know—you insulted me in front of my men, and really I should have killed you for it. They’ll probably think I’m getting soft, and I’ll have to crack a few heads.”
Vickrey started to get up, then thought better of it and just looked around. The mechanics had all gone back into the bay and seemed to be deliberately occupying themselves with work at benches along the far wall. One, before turning away, gave Vickery a mildly sympathetic glance, and Vickery believed he remembered the man from his days as a driver here.
“I didn’t—” Vickery began; then reconsidered and said, “How did I insult you?”
She laughed and slapped his face hard. She began counting on her fingers. “Three years ago you stole my Ford Taurus and left it in Hell, then you stole one of my taco trucks and left it in Hell too, and I . . . forgave you for those!—because you saved my nephew—”
“And your whole family. And everybody else in L.A.”
“Do you know what that car and truck cost? And then! After that! A year and a half ago you punched me and stole my best car! That one you returned, but even after I changed out the wrecked seats it never stopped smelling like a swamp.”
Her eyes had narrowed as she spoke, and Vickery thought she might be about to hit him again.
“And,” he said hastily, “that time when I took your best car I saved your nephews and nieces who had looked at that brainwashing coloring book. They’d have—”
“I know, their minds would have been eaten by that egregore thing. But today you come in here and say give me another of your cars, Galvan! Quick! Kiss off all that money the Navy man will give you! You say it in front of my men!”
“I’m sorry, that was—abrupt, but—”
“And some kind of ’nother damn save the world? What now, zombies, dinosaurs?”
Vickery took a deep breath and let it out, and decided that he might not, after all, have suffered some internal injury. “Up around the cathedral on Temple Street, and north to Cesar Chavez, have you seen the lines people are making on the streets? With sugar, and honey?”
Galvan rocked her head back and gave him a quizzical look. “Sure. It’s to catch spacemen. I have family around there, they say there’s lines under the streets, and if the spacemen can see enough of the lines they’ll be stopped, like a chicken if you draw a line in the dirt and lay him down with his beak on it.” She must have caught Vickery’s incomprehension, for she added impatiently, “The chicken can’t stop staring at the line, can’t move. He’s hypnotized. When I was a kid there was sometimes six or eight chickens in the yard, laying down like that.”
“Okay, yes, it’s like that.” Vickery restrained himself from looking again toward the driveway. What if the ONI agents had followed the course indicated by Castine’s blood cloth? They might be arresting her right now. “There’s a guy who has figured out all the lines,” he went on quickly, “and wants us to make the, uh, spacemen look at them, and that will—yeah, like the chickens, it’ll make ’em . . . stop.” He was still sweating.
“My nephew Carlos borrowed money from me, to buy sugar to make lines in the streets. He’s plenty scared about the spacemen.” She shrugged. “But you remember Carlos is crazy.”
“Dammit, boss—” He paused; it had been a long time since he had called Galvan boss. “Trust me, the spacemen aim to fly away, but for fuel they’re going to take all the Earth’s heat.” Close enough, but he sounded insane even to himself. “The Earth will freeze. No joke. And the spacemen have been very active lately—it’s probably going to happpen soon. Those people around Cesar Chavez, your family, they sense it.”
“Hah!” Galvan smiled and squinted at him. “You believe it!”
“Yes, I—dammit, yes, I believe it.”
She looked at her right hand, and flexed it gingerly. “You’ve been right about some things before, I think.”
“You think? Do you remember the—”
“Shut up.”
Galvan straightened up smoothly and extended a hand to Vickery, who took it and got to his feet like an infirm old man.
“You see that 1970 Cadillac DeVille?” Galvan said, pointing at a gleamingly white 20-foot long sedan in the bay. “That’s my best car, not a single microprocessor in it, and a big damn EMP generator in the trunk. And it’s insulated against every kind of attention—ghosts, angels, devils, electromagnetics, baptism-signature scanning . . . it’s hard to even focus your eyes on it for very long. The fare’s a thousand an hour, and I got a waiting list for rides in it. Rich old folks hiding from God, mainly.” She grinned and punched him in the arm. “I wouldn’t let the Pope borrow it, if he was to come here and beg me.”
Vickery nodded, trying to conceal his mounting anxiety. He forced himself not to look at his watch.
It was Galvan now who cast an uneasy glance toward the street. “Why does the Naval Intelligence man want you so bad?”
Vickery burst out, “They don’t want us to draw the line in front of the chicken! They want to talk to the chicken!”
Galvan bit her lip. She gripped Vickery’s arm and said fiercely, “Okay, pendejo. I got a busy schedule today, lots of urgent rides, but over there’s a 1998 Dodge Intrepid, and it’s plenty shielded enough to at least hide your blood like you don’t even exist.”
Vickery squinted at the dusty car, noting that a stick of bamboo stood where an antenna should be. No radio reception, probably.
Galvan went on, “Is Betty Boop with you?”
Betty Boop was the name Castine had given when first introduced to Galvan. “Yes, around the corner, along with that kid Santiago. The Navy guy is following her blood too.”
She looked past him and called, “Tonio! The keys to the old Dodge, rapidamente!” To Vickery, she said, “Save my family again and I’ll cut your debt in half. And that Dodge isn’t much, but if you leave it in Hell, I really couldn’t go on doing business unles I have you killed. You’re way past due already, if I wasn’t so sentimental.”
“I understand,” said Vickery, and when Tonio tossed the keyring he caught it and limped toward the Dodge. Thunder boomed across the northern hills.
Vickery pulled the Dodge in behind his camper truck and got out without turning off the engine. He hurried to the passenger side of the truck, and when the door proved to be locked he banged on the window. Behind the glass, Plowman frowned at him.
“Out!” Vickery called. “Everybody into the Dodge!” He hit the window again as Castine opened the driver’s side door and Santiago opened the camper hatch and hopped to the pavement.
“Castine,” Vickery said to her over the truck roof, “grab the briefcase—and the first aid kit from under the seat. And Yoneda's gun! Quick, quick, everybody!”
When Plowman and Santiago had climbed into the back seat of the Dodge, Castine got in on the passenger side and Vickery folded himself painfully into the driver’s seat.
Castine had tossed the briefcase and Yoneda’s gun on the floor and was holding the old metal first aid box. “Did she hit you, or did she get one of her guys to do it?” she asked, rocking in her seat as he started the car and reversed away from the camper truck.
“She did. A debt of honor.” He looked at the street and snapped, “Get down out of sight!—you too, Pierce!”
He stopped the car at the parking lot entrance while a black SUV drove past slowly; and when it had caught a green light and driven on north past Eighth Street, Vickery swerved out of the lot and caught the end of the light to make a left turn on Eighth. He remembered to look at the gas gauge, and was reassured to see that the tank was half full.
“Can I get up?” said Castine at the same time that Plowman said, “Dammit, Bill, what did you see?” His camera and ground-penetrating radar device had fallen onto the floor.
“An SUV that might have been them. Ingrid, get a couple of gauze pads out of the kit—and the razor.” He was driving fast, peering ahead. “What,” he muttered, speaking to himself, “a bus, a delivery truck . . .”
Castine had torn open a cardboard package and was holding two squares of loose-knit white cotton. “You’re right-handed?” he said. “Cut a left-hand finger and get blood on one of them.”
She didn’t protest or ask why, and when she had done it he took his left hand from the steering wheel and held it toward her; he winced when she cut the knuckle of his little finger and blotted the blood with the other pad.
“You better stick them on some vehicle quick,” she said, wiping the razor on one of the pads. “If Harlowe’s old blood cloths go inert for too long back there, the ONI guy is going to think about how close it is to Galvan’s lot.” She put the razor back in the box and closed it.
They were driving past markets and offices and restaurants that all had Korean letters over the doors, and when he was approaching Western Avenue he swerved into a strip-mall parking lot, grabbed the bloodied gauze pads from Castine, and opened the door. He took a deep breath, got out and straightened up in spite of the ache in his abdominal muscles, and walked as fast as he could to the the intersection.
To his relief, an orange L.A. Metro bus was idling at the curb, the entire side of it covered with a wrap-decal advertising Star Trek: Picard, and the LED lights in the destination sign on the back read 207. He recalled that the 207 line ran up Western to Franklin Avenue in Hollywood.
He hurried across the sidewalk and stood by the back of the bus. Below the three stacked right-side tail-lights was a broad black composite bumper, and when the air brakes released with a hiss and the bus began to move, he reached out and tucked the two spotted gauze pads behind the upper edge of it.
He walked quickly back to the Dodge and got in. The engine was still running, and he waited for a gap in traffic and then accelerated to make a left turn on Western, heading south.
“If they are using our blood to track us,” he said, “they’ll chase that bus up past Hollywood Boulevard. I’ll just get out of the area and then we can get lunch—there’s a good Korean barbecue place on Olympic—though we’d better eat in the car. Castine and me, anyway.” Seeing Plowman’s irritated puzzlement in the rear view mirror, he added, “This car is insulated against supernatural attentions.”
The explanation sounded crazy, but Plowman’s eyebrows lifted and he nodded.
“And if they are following the blood,” said Castine, nodding toward a four-inch metronome mounted on the dashboard, “the insulation’s working.”
The metronome’s pendulum was intermittently swaying back and forth, no more than would be caused by the motion of the car.
All of Galvan’s stealth cars were equipped with metronomes like it, each one capped with a lump of something organic—bone, wood, leather—into which a ghost had been subsumed. The ghosts were inert, but they made the pendulums knock back and forth quickly when they were in a strong supernatural field. Rapid clicking could indicate a particularly powerful field being generated by the motion of free wills on a nearby freeway—which was cause for caution—or it could be in response to a reciprocating hunting signal, in which case the car’s location had been supernaturally detected—which would be cause for immediate alarm.
Plowman demanded to know what Castine was talking about, and Vickery explained the metronomes. “It’s like piezo quartz crystals that contract when an electric current runs through them,” he said in conclusion.
“Huh!” said Plowman, sitting back. “Does that Galvan woman sell those things? I’d like have one in my car, one in my house . . .”
“And one on a hat,” agreed Castine. “This negation symbol you found under the cathedral parking lot—this ‘deeper grave’—what is it, exactly?”
“I’ll show you when we’re parked.”
“Can you front me the price of lunch?” asked Santiago from the back seat.
“Sure,” said Vickery. “You saved us from getting caught by the ONI team. Naval Intelligence,” he added, seeing the boy’s blank look.
“After leading them to us,” whispered Castine just loud enough for Vickery to hear.
Vickery made a right turn onto Olympic and drove for half a mile past obscure medical and chiropractic offices, then steered into a parking lot on the south side of the street, in front of a two-story building with a blue-tile roof and a couple of restaurants occupying the bottom floor. The one on the right, Bak Kung, was fronted with false stonework between the windows, and it was to this one that Vickery directed Plowman and Santiago, after giving them five twenty-dollar bills.
Thunder rumbled in the distance, and Castine remarked that none of them were dressed for rain. Vickery replied that it wouldn’t matter unless the car’s roof leaked.
When Santiago and Plowman had got back to the car ten minutes later, carrying several bags, paper plates were passed back and forth and over the front seats, and soon the air inside the car was stuffy with the smells of marinated beef and spicy chicken and seafood pancakes. Plowman took a deep sip of his iced tea and then topped up the cup from a flask.
When everyone had finished and Santiago had carried the plates and empty cartons to a trash can and hurried back, Castine turned around in the front seat to stare disapprovingly at Plowman.
“So what exactly is this ‘deeper grave’?” she asked him.
Plowman took a long sip of his fortified iced tea. “You saw Frankie’s map? The three crash lines? That’s where the things happened to intersect with our sort of spacetime, and a lot of them got simplified down to mass—died is the closest word for it. And the patterns they leave when they die, your crop circles, induce more of them to die, so the lines are always getting more emphasized, more compelling. You said yourself the numbers of them are increasing.”
Plowman drained the cup and set it on the floor. “I told you yesterday that they don’t exactly think—they’re deterministic, and it was the . . . cloud of supernatural indeterminism on Earth that tripped them up, confounded them, caught them in a sort of accretion disk. Free will all over the place down here, violation of strict cause-and-effect everywhere you look. So they’re stuck here, and more and more of them are what-you-might-call dying.”
“Lazaruses,” prompted Castine.
“Yeah. All the crashed ones, the ones in the crop circles, have found themselves occupying our stuff, our atoms, which are like a lot of stretched rubber bands—they’re gonna release ’em all at once and slingshot themselves right out of their entanglement with our irrational local spacetime. It’s like they got stuck in Alice in Wonderland, and they’re gonna bounce back out to where they came from.
“But, see,” Plowman went on, “a few of the ones who crashed kind of committed suicide. I mean, they died, but they also turned all the way inward, negated their potential to rise again.” He stopped talking and looked out the window, and the lines around his mouth and eyes seemed deeper now.
After a few seconds of silence, Santiago asked, “You gonna take me back to my bike?”
“Oh, right,” said Vickery. He started the truck’s engine and backed around to face the street.
“Go on,” said Castine to Plowman.
“Those suicide ones,” said Plowman, “they left patterns, too, symbols, but not on the surface. This . . . species? . . . mostly comprehends surfaces—topology. The patterns the suicide ones leave are off the surface—underground.” He cocked his head. “Maybe they do ’em up in the air, too—but those wouldn’t show up, or last. Anyway, I know of four sites where these underground patterns are. One’s in the mountains in Nepal, one’s in Peru, one’s in Africa—and one’s under L.A., between Sunset and Temple.”
“The lineas de muerta,” said Santiago softly, watching the traffic as Vickery made a right turn on Olympic. “Where the people are making lines with sugar and honey.”
“Yeah,” said Plowman, “I admire the effort they’re making, but you need the whole symbol, and anyway these entities have got no reason to look at lines of sugar, they’re not houseflies. But if they could be forced to see a full negation symbol, they’d comprehend it—helplessly—”
“Like laying a chicken down in front of a line in the dirt,” said Vickery. He was driving east on Olympic, and sped past the Western intersection in case the SUV he had seen might have doubled back.
He noticed that Castine was staring at him blankly. “A chicken?” she said.
But Plowman nodded. “Exactly. They’d all crystallize, fossilize, die for real.”
Castine shifted around to face him. “You’ve got the whole symbol now?”
Plowman reached into the pocket of his leather jacket. “I only had to fill in the corner the L.A. Times left out. Yeah, I’ve got the whole thing now, as of this morning.” He pulled out a dozen Polaroid photographs and some folded sheets of paper.
He handed the papers over the top of the seat to Castine. “You gotta line ’em up, they’re photocopies of newspaper pages, which were too big to fit whole on a photocopier.”
Vickery glanced at the sheets as Castine held them up. “What are they?”
“It’s copies of a couple of pages of the L.A. Times,” Castine said, “from January 29, 1934.” She raised one and read,“C. W. A. Will End Abuses . . . The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, that looks dire . . .”
“That’s the top of the page, about an art exhibit,” grated Plowman. “Look at the copy of the bottom of the page.”
Castine looked at the next sheet. “Oh—‘LIZARD PEOPLE’S CATACOMB CITY HUNTED’—is that it?” When Plowman nodded, she read, “‘Engineer Sinks Shaft Under Fort Moore Hill to Find Maze of Tunnels and Priceless Treasures of Legendary Inhabitants.’ Uh . . . ‘the secrets of the Lizard People of legendary fame . . . Warren Shufelt, a geophysical mining engineer . . . a radio x-ray perfected by him for detecting the presence of minerals and tunnels below the ground, an apparatus with which he says he has traced a pattern of catacombs and vaults . . . continued on page 5.’”
She gave Vickery a tired, skeptical look, which Plowman caught.
“So look on page five,” the old man said, “you’ve got it there.”
Castine looked at the next page. Vickery saw her visibly restrain a laugh, but her voice was level as she read, “‘Did Strange People Live Under Site of Los Angeles 5,000 Years Ago?’ And it says there’s gold down there.”
When Vickery glanced at the page he saw what appeared to be a map of very crooked interconnected roads. Castine held up another page, which was evidently the bottom half of the map.
“The spacemen are lizard people?” asked Santiago.
Castine gave Plowman a brightly inquiring look.
“No, that was just what a clan of the Hopi Indians was called. There was also the Snake People, the Sand People, the Cactus People, I don’t know what all, and none of ’em had anything to do with this besides living in the area. But white folks heard ‘Lizard People’ and pictured something you’d need Spider-Man to deal with.”
“I saw that movie,” said Santiago.
“Well, they weren’t that. And what Warren Shufelt’s radio x-ray machine detected weren’t catacombs, they were the lines of the alien’s suicide pattern.”
Vickery looked at Plowman in the rear view mirror. “No gold?”
“No gold. That was all a misunderstood Hopi myth. But the suicide inversion compacted sand and stone down there, dense enough to register on a detector.” He leaned across the seat and pointed at the two papers Castine was now holding. “Put them edge to edge,” he told her. “Shufelt did track the lines—see?—back when you could walk everywhere, when they hadn’t yet built a big robot on Fort Moore Hill—and the lines are all right there, except for that area in the bottom corner where the Times overlaid a picture of Shufelt and his machine.” He leaned forward to wave the photographs in front of Castine. “Those were under the cathedral parking garage,” he said. “Here, take the pictures. Now you’ve got that missing section too.”
Castine hesitated, then put down the papers and took the photographs. “We’ve got it? So what do we do with it? Make a poster and wave it in the air?”
Vickery saw tension behind her reflexive sarcasm, and touched her arm. She nodded and slumped in her seat, squinting at the tall glass front of the Koreatown Galleria as it swept past.
Plowman’s face was bleak. “I don’t know. Figure something out.” He leaned back and exhaled. “Shit. I really wish all this had come up about ten years ago—or ten years from now.”
When he didn’t go on, Vickery started to speak, but Plowman was talking again. “I was a contracted security guard at Groom Lake in ’67 and ’68. That’s Area 51, at the Nevada Test Site.”
The old man’s voice was low, and Vickery had to lean back to hear him. Castine had turned half around in her seat, and her face had lost its derisive squint.
“I was mainly assigned to the North Gate,” the old man said, “what we called Second Base, right off Highway 375, and if any unauthorized people—hunters, campers—happened to drive up the road, I told ’em they had to turn back because of unexploded ordnance in the desert. Actually the Air Force was testing weird new airplanes out there, like what they called the Oxcart, which I saw a couple of times. Looked sort of like a modern Stealth bomber, but longer and flatter.”
Vickery caught Castine’s eye and shook his head slightly. Let him work through whatever it is, he thought.
“But in ’68,” Plowman went on, “the Air Force wasn’t doing much of anything there. They’d got hold of a lot of Soviet radar systems from Arabia or somewhere, and set ’em up in the hills around Groom Lake to see how they worked, and the Russians were mad about that. And then the Air Force got an actual working MiG to play with—that was the Russians’ supersonic fighter jet, very secret design—and the Russians got so mad they sent up orbital satellites that passed over the test site every forty-five minutes! So the Air Force guys couldn’t even bring the Oxcart out of the hangar because the commie satellites would photograph it from space. Every day was what we called Nightshot Condition, meaning don’t do anything satellites might see, and the Air Force guys got so bored that they started to paint silhouettes of impossible airplanes on the runway, and heating ’em with portable heaters, so the Russian satellites would photograph ’em and pick up the heat signatures and Moscow would think the Air Force had jets shaped like octopuses and eggbeaters.”
Vickery switched lanes to pass a Metro bus, and wondered if the ONI agents had already caught up with the Route 207 bus and discovered that the blood-spotted gauze pads—if the agents were indeed following those—had led them astray; and he wondered fretfully what other means ONI might have for finding himself and Castine.
Olympic slanted southeast at Alvarado by a car wash whose arches and tile roof made it look like a drive-through Spanish mission. Ten more minutes would get Vickery’s mismatched company up to Temple Street, where they could drop Santiago off. And then—a chess club?
The skyscrapers of downtown were visible ahead now. Castine was slurping through a straw at the last bits of ice in her cup.
“But one day in ‘68,” Plowman continued slowly, “they were using X-band and C-band radar frequencies at the same time that they had the very low-frequency L-band Soviet radar systems turned on, and somebody had painted a thing like a, a goddamn Moebius cat’s cradle on the runway—and then—” He cleared his throat and went on, “And then the sky was full of silver globes darting from horizon to horizon. Impossible changes in velocity, like . . . like laser dots if a bunch of people in a dark room were whipping laser pointers around. Too fast to be actual things, see.”
Vickery heard him pick up his cup from the floor and shake it, then grunt as he put it down again. “Well,” Plowman said, “you saw ’em. And that night all the field sensors went off at once and we had a Category Five alarm, ‘Bogey,’ which meant airborne intruder, which . . . was an understatement. A glaring white light, and this incandescent thing came down out of the sky and landed out by Pahute Mesa at the northwest end of the range. And when we drove out there with weapons and spotlights, there was nothing but an acre-wide sand angel.” He sighed. “At first.”
Plowman didn’t go on, and Vickery glanced at him in the rear-view mirror. The old man’s tanned, seamed face was like weathered mahogany.
“What after at first?” asked Santiago.
“There was . . . a thing, there. Not like your thing with huge hands,” he said, apparently speaking to Castine, “those didn’t start showing up till much later. This was . . . as if you took a child and stretched him till he was six feet tall; big eyes, spidery white fingers. It—moved, quickly.”
Vickery could almost feel the old man’s shudder.
Plowman was silent for several seconds; then, “After that,” he went on more easily, “it apparently fell apart, just blew away as a cloud of sand. By daylight we could see that the sand angel was a bunch of interconnected rings, like the Audi logo.” He looked up. “Triple-band radar and a cat’s cradle snagged the thing’s attention, and it died. I suppose there’ll be a column standing up on that spot too, soon, drawing all the heat for miles around, when all the things rise from their graves.”
“At the cemetery,” said Castine, “you said they don’t think, as we understand it. Uh . . .”
“I said what I said.”
None of them spoke for several moments; then Vickery cleared his throat and nodded toward the papers Castine was holding. “Well,” he said, “even if your negation symbol there is accurate, we can’t get radar to summon the things.” He turned to look briefly at Santiago. “We’ll be at the cathedral in a couple of minutes. I’ll—” I probably owe it to him, he thought, “— I’ll park around the corner and wait, and if guys are monitoring the parking garage you run back to the car and we’ll scram.”
Plowman rolled his eyes. “You’ve got your localized radiating discord, when you and Irene switch to viewing the infrared past in tandem, right? That might—”
“Ingrid,” said Castine.
“My bike will probably be safe there for a while longer,” said Santiago. “It’s a Catholic cathedral. I can ride along with you guys for a while.”
“Sure,” said Vickery tiredly, “Catholics don’t steal stuff. Pierce, how do I get to this chess club?”