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CHAPTER FOUR

"Well, that tears it!" Dan Pirelli leaned back in his chair and flung his napkin down disgustedly. "The whole operation is screwed, blued and tattooed!"

"What are you farting at the wrong end about?" Ben Roark inquired. He'd just entered the canteen, after an exercise in which he'd been able to demonstrate in satisfactory fashion to that young puke Carl Travis that forty-two was not old enough to merit the nickname "Pops."

"Hadn't you heard, Pops?" Roark gritted his teeth but let Pirelli continue. "A Lokaron trade delegation in New York was attacked. A couple of local cops got killed. But the important thing is, so did one of the Lokaron. Now they're shitting in their pants, or whatever it is they do. They've buttoned up the Enclave tighter than old lady Kinsella's ass. We'll never get in there!"

Travis had come in out of the Nevada sun just behind Roark, in time to catch Pirelli's words. "Did any of the attackers get caught?"

"No. Nobody knows who they were . . . or if they do they're not saying. But it's a pretty easy guess, isn't it?"

"Yeah." Travis seemed to want to spit. "Who else? The goddamned grandstanding Eaglemen!" He turned to a machine and punched up a coffee with unnecessary violence.

An uncomfortable flurry of frowns and hastily averted glances ran through the few men in the canteen. Travis' vehemence clearly wasn't popular. These were all picked members of various specialized military units, temporarily assigned to the Company for the operation that now looked like it might have to be abandoned. Among them and others like them, admiration of the Eaglemen ran deep and—of necessity—silently. Even the ones who disapproved of the secret organization didn't like to listen to other people doing so. Some of them, Roark imagined, knew Eaglemen—or at least people they strongly suspected were Eaglemen—personally.

But none of them spoke up to take issue with Travis. They wouldn't have done so even if this had been an ordinary military base—you never knew who might be listening. The same went double for a place as spooky as Area 51.

Could that be why you're sounding off? Roark wondered in Travis' direction. Performing for the microphones?

He walked to a window and looked out toward Wheelbarrow Peak and the dusty Nevada desert beyond. It was a sunny day, as usual. A silvery glint in the sky caught his eye: a plane circling around to land on the airstrip on the dry lake bed. It wasn't one of the potbellied transports that ferried supplies and occasional personnel out here to the ass end of nowhere. It was a lightweight, modern executive jet—the sort he'd been expecting Havelock to arrive in.

"I think," he remarked to the room in general, without turning around, "that we're about to find out where the operation stands."

Havelock was a civilian, so they all remained seated as he entered the briefing room, accompanied by a young Hispanic-looking woman in camo fatigues with Army captain's bars and parachute wings sewn on. A couple of Air Force enlisted men followed, carrying an unfamiliar device which they set up on one of the two folding metal tables at the head of the room while Havelock and his companion stood behind the other one. (The accommodations at Area 51 were most generously described as "functional.") They then departed, leaving Havelock to face the half-dozen men.

"Good afternoon, gentlemen. This is Captain Rivera, Army Special Forces. She'll be your on-scene control in the Enclave."

Nobody said anything, but Roark was conscious of an undercurrent of discomfort in the room. Havelock felt it too. His neatly trimmed gray mustache quirked upward. "Set your minds at rest. Lieutenant Rivera has certain specialized knowledge necessary to the mission's success—indeed, it makes the entire business possible. It's perhaps unfortunate that she hasn't had the opportunity to train here with you. But she's at least as familiar as you are with our intelligence concerning the Lokaron in general and the Enclave in particular. And you need be in no doubt as to her qualifications."

Roark didn't doubt it a bit. Rivera was only about five feet two and economically built, but she was obviously one solid muscle. Her dark eyes were as hard as the rest of her. His companions, appraising her, wore a variety of expressions. Pirelli looked like he was in love.

"Now, then," Havelock continued briskly, moving on from the fait accompli of Rivera's inclusion in the operation. "Knowing as I do the workings of Rumor Central, I'm sure you've all heard about the incident in New York. And there's no point in denying that it's queered the pitch for us." He paused significantly. "Nevertheless, I believe we can get you people into the Enclave despite their heightened security precautions. So does the Director. Therefore, the operation's timetable is unchanged."

All at once the atmosphere in the room somehow tightened. Havelock picked up a remote, and the obscure device on the other table projected a simulacrum of the Enclave.

Lokaron stuff, Roark knew. They'd all studied maps and diagrams covering the same ground, and gone through dry runs in mockups of certain portions of it. But now they gazed at a holographic image so real that a solid, though translucent, model seemed to have magically popped into existence out of thin air. Staring at this product of technologies from beyond the sky, Roark felt the hairs at the nape of his neck bristle.

Near the center of the irregularly shaped area, the towers of the main buildings soared skyward. None of the architectural conventions represented—and there seemed to be several—were any more Islamic than they were anything else from Earth's repertoire; but it was hard not to think of a cluster of minarets from the Arabian Nights. The Lokaron preferred buildings which were, to most human eyes, disproportionately tall and slender, giving them a fragile look which Roark knew to be completely spurious. It had nothing to do with a shortage of square footage on the ground—spacious plazas and lawns stretched between the towers—or any other utilitarian consideration. Nor could the relatively low gravity which Earth's scientists had postulated for their homeworld account for it. No, it was an aesthetic impulse, doubtless unconscious—an aspiration for the infinite.

Jerry Chen's face reflected a struggle of emotions. His curiosity won, as it so often did. "Excuse me, sir," he addressed Havelock, "but there's something I've wondered ever since I've been here, and now I'm wondering even more. How did we get such detailed information about the inside of the Enclave?"

Roark grunted agreement. "It's not as if we had spy satellites like we used to."

"Strictly speaking, you gentlemen do not need to know that. However, at this stage of the game it can't do any harm to tell you the broad outlines. The fact of the matter is, some time ago the Eaglemen managed to get an agent in there. In the course of an operation against their organization, we came into possession of the data with which their agent had supplied them."

"But, sir," Chen spoke above the flabbergasted hubbub, "is this agent still in place?"

Havelock spoke in measured tones. "Even at the time of the operation to which I've just alluded, their agent had apparently ceased reporting. So"—he gave a wintery smile—"you'll have to get along without whatever help or hindrance an Eagleman agent might provide."

"But," Chen persisted, "how did they—?"

"The same way we're going to insert you people, Lieutenant Chen: under the guise of hired local workers. Of course, they did it back in the days when the Lokaron were, by our standards, remarkably uninterested in security. Now, for reasons to which I alluded earlier, it will be much more difficult."

"Then, sir . . . " Chen began.

"I said `difficult,' Lieutenant, not `impossible.'" Havelock permitted himself a look of self-satisfaction. "We've already sent your well-prepared doubles through the screening process for employment in the Enclave. Those doubles were supplied with your documented genetic records. You will, of course, appear in their place for the actual arrival at the Enclave. Thus you'll be able to pass muster when you're scanned on arrival, as you will be."

Now Chen's face was a mask of incredulity. "I can't believe the Lokaron simply take the genetic documentation we give them at face value."

"They used to, Lieutenant. I theorize that's how the Eagleman agent was able to get past their security, if it can be so dignified. But now they verify the data with their own scanners at the time the workers are hired."

Chen struggled to cope with the unaccustomed sensation of just not getting it. "But if they did their own scan of these doubles of ours, it must have been immediately apparent to them that the documentation was faked."

"As you're all aware, the Company is allowed a certain latitude in making use of illegal Lokaron technologies. Some time ago, we learned that they have a device which can deceive their own ranged genetic scanners. They never offered it to us for sale, of course. But they freely discussed the principles involved, secure in their belief that we could never duplicate it. But by intensive study, and at enormous expense, we have duplicated it, using components from other devices which are part of their trade inventory. Using this cobbled-together equipment, we were able to get your doubles past the scanning, without any discrepancy between its results and their official records—which, of course, are your records."

Roark broke an uncomfortable silence. "You're saying they sold us the stuff from which this gizmo could be put together? But . . . but . . . "

Chen put it into words for him—an irritating habit of his for which, just this once, Roark was grateful. "Damn it, sir, a race of interstellar spacefarers can't be stupid!"

"No, unforunately they're not stupid. Far from it. But they're unused to taking aliens like ourselves seriously as security threats. We've gathered that ours is the most advanced civilization they've ever happened on . . . the only one, in fact, to have discovered the scientific method."

"You mean," Pirelli asked, "they were expecting us to take these components and try to work a magic spell with them?" Uneasy chuckles chased each other briefly around the room.

"Something like that," Havelock allowed, in a tone of subject-closing dryness. "And now, let's go into the details of how you're going to establish yourselves in the Enclave."

Chen spoke up. "May we also know some of the details of what we're going to be called on to do once we're there?"

"No," Havelock replied with an axe blade's finality. "That falls into the realm of things you don't need to know just yet. And, inasmuch as you're all grownups, I shouldn't need to recite the platitude that you can't be made to tell that which you don't know—not by any technology. Suffice it to say that you've been given the knowledge and training you'll need. Now, let's get down to cases. . . . "

They had transferred to ordinary civilian transport at Denver, and proceeded onward to the various eastern cities from which they would arrive at the Enclave, for it would have been poor technique for them all to arrive as a group. Roark and Chen were the only ones aboard the commuter jet to Washington Dulles. So they were the only ones to get a glimpse of the Enclave itself from aloft.

Roark had a port window seat, and he gazed out at the rolling landscape east of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Here the copper and bronze of autumn still glinted amid the dead gray-brown of winter which now reigned unchallenged in the upper reaches of the mountains. The jet was sweeping around from the southwest, over Warrenton, where Mosby's raiders had once galloped. . . .

"There!" Chen exclaimed, looking over his shoulder and pointing.

Yes! In the haze of distance, rising out of a countryside where only a few farmers had needed to be bought out to make room for something that didn't belong there, soared the gleaming alien towers.

After a while, Roark became aware of Chen's voice. "Ever think about how differently it turned out from the way people used to expect?"

"Huh?" Roark turned to his right and considered his traveling companion. He hadn't gotten to know any of the other men at Area 51 closely—you didn't, under these circumstances. But Chen had stood out, and not just by being the only Asian-American in the group. He had an irreverent, inquiring intelligence which couldn't have been further removed from the traditional stereotype of a Marine, which he was. Not that any of these men were dummies; Havelock hadn't picked that sort. But Chen stood out as the unit intellectual . . . or the unit smart-ass, depending on one's perspective. Roark hadn't always found him comfortable to be around—actually, in his first week or so away from booze he hadn't found anybody comfortable to be around, and the feeling had been entirely mutual. "What're you talking about?" he demanded. "What's it?"

"Alien contact. Back before it actually happened, people were always imagining what it would be like if extraterrestrials appeared in the sky. Hell, a lot of people thought they already had, and were waiting to reveal themselves to us after we'd `proven ourselves worthy' by eliminating war and pollution and prejudice and so forth, so they could welcome us into the Galactic Federation of do-gooders." Chen grinned as Roark made a rude noise with his mouth, then resumed. "The other version was a bunch of slobbering, slavering uglies out to exterminate humanity, either so they could colonize the Earth or just out of sheer meanness."

"Yeah," Roark said, recalling some of the movies he'd watched as a boy. "Always angels or devils. Why didn't it ever occur to anybody that they might be just simply people? Odd-looking, sure, and probably with some funny ideas, but subject to the same basic needs and driven by the same basic motivations as ourselves. I guess that way they wouldn't have been much use as a substitute for religion."

Chen gave him a sharp look. Like the others, he'd never known quite what to make of Roark. The ex-Company man (they knew that much about him, at least) was the only one among them who wasn't active-duty military; and he was old enough to be, if not their father, certainly an uncle. But rumors about his reputation in covert ops abounded, and he'd proved able to keep up with them physically. And whenever you got past his habitual surliness, he was capable of startlingly out-of-character insights.

"Right," Chen agreed. "And the idea of `incomprehensible alien worldviews' was always a crock. If they weren't rationalists, they wouldn't be able to get here in the first place. It's like George Orwell once said. In religion or philosophy, two plus two may equal five; but when you're designing a rifle or an airplane, they'd damned well better equal four."

"And the same probably goes double for designing a starship." Roark nodded. He stared moodily out at the glistening intruders in the autumn-clothed northern Virginia countryside. He spoke as much to himself as to Chen. "So why should we be surprised that they're treating us exactly like we've always treated other cultures on a lower technological level? Whether those cultures lived or died wasn't important, except as it affected the balance sheet."

Chen, suddenly worried, gave his companion another narrow look. Area 51 had buzzed with stories about "Pops" Roark's past, concerning which he was so reticent. One of them had dealt with an incident which had left him with a score to settle with the Lokaron as well as souring him on the Company. If he was on some kind of personal vendetta . . .

"You just got through saying they're people," Chen ventured cautiously. "Nonhuman people, but people."

"So they are," Roark agreed quietly. "So were the Europeans in Asia and Africa, century before last. At that, I suppose we ought to be grateful. The Nazis and the Khmer Rouge were people too, and we don't seem to be dealing with anything like that. No, the Lokaron are here just to make a buck."

He fell silent, and as the distant Enclave dropped out of sight astern he ceased to see the view. Instead, he was seeing his familiarity-dulled waking nightmare. It was a nightmare in two colors: the black of night, and red—the redness of the flames, of the highlight those flames brought out in the dying woman's hair, and of her blood. . . .

They spent the descent into Dulles in a silence Chen wasn't about to break, for Roark had clearly reverted to his surly norm. After getting through baggage claim, they proceeded not to Ground Transportation—for their destination was too far off the main roads to make conventional vehicular transport practical—but to a special, fenced-off area just off the runway where a wingless vertol awaited them. Its driver, a human, wore a nondescript uniform. He took them aloft, heading into the westering sun.

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