Greg Bear: The Forge of God

“We should get the hell out of here,” Minelli said.

“We’ll stay,” Edward said.

“Right.” Minelli’s expression changed from concern to puzzled curiosity. He might have been staring at a museum specimen in a bottle. “This is really, wonderfully ridiculous.”

“Bring night,” the thing pleaded.

Shoshone seemed little more than a truck stop on the highway, a caf6 and the rock shop, a post office and grocery store. Off the highway, however, a gravel road curved past a number of tree-shaded bungalows and a sprawling modern one-story house, then ran arrow-straight between venerable tamarisk trees and by a four-acre swamp to a hot-spring-fed pool and trailer court. The small town was home to some three hundred permanent residents, and at the peak of the tourist season — late September through early May — hosted an additional three hundred snowbirds and backpackers and the occasional team of geologists. Shoshone called itself the gateway to Death Valley, between Baker to the south and Furnace Creek to the north. To the east, across the Mojave, the Resting Spring, Nopah and Spring ranges, and the Nevada state line, was Las Vegas, the closest major city.

Reslaw, Minelli, and Edward brought the miter-headed creature into Shoshone after joining California state highway 127 some fifteen miles north of the town. It lay under moistened towels in the back of their Land Cruiser on the spread fabric of the tent, where once again it seemed dead.

“We should just go into Las Vegas,” Minelli said. He shared a front seat with Reslaw. Edward drove.

“I don’t think it would last,” Edward said.

“How can we find help for it here?”

“Well, if it really is dead, there’s a big meat locker in that grocery.”

“It doesn’t look any more dead than before it spoke,” Reslaw said, glancing back over the seat at the still form. It had four limbs, two on each side, but whether it stood or walked on all four, none of them knew.

“We’ve touched it,” Minelli said mournfully.

“Shut up,” Edward said.

“That cinder cone’s a spaceship, or a spaceship is buried underneath, obviously — “ Minelli blurted.

“Nothing’s obvious,” Reslaw said calmly.

“I saw that in It Came From Outer Space. ”

“Does that look like a big eye floating on a tentacle?” Edward asked. He had seen the movie, too. Its memory did not reassure him.

“Meat locker,” Minelli responded, his hands trembling.

“There’s a phone. We can call ambulances in Las Vegas, or a helicopter. Maybe we can call Edwards or Goldstone and get the authorities out here,” Edward said, extending his actions.

“What’ll we tell them?” Reslaw asked. “They won’t believe the truth.”

“I’m thinking,” Edward said.

“Maybe we saw a jet plane go down,” Reslaw suggested.

Edward squinted dubiously.

“It spoke English,” Minelli commented, nodding.

None of them had mentioned that point in the hour and a half since they had hauled the creature away from the base of the cinder cone.

“Hell,” Edward said, “it’s been listening to us out there in space. Reruns of I Love Lucy. ”

“Then why didn’t it say ‘Hey, Ricky!’?” Minelli asked, covering his fear with a manic grin.

Bad news. Like a mole that shouldn’t be there.

Edward pulled the truck into the service station, its heavy-duty tires tripping the service bell. A deeply tanned teenage boy in jeans bleached to nondescript pale gray and a Def Leppard T-shirt walked out of the garage attached to one side of the grocery and approached the Land Cruiser. Edward warned him back with his hands. “We need to use a phone,” he said.

“Pay phone right there,” the boy drawled suspiciously.

“Anybody got quarters?” Edward asked. Nobody did. “We need to use the store phone. This is an emergency.”

The boy saw the towel-shrouded shape through the Land Cruiser windows. “Somebody hurt?” he asked curiously.

“Stay back,” Minelli warned.

“Shut up, Minelli,” Reslaw whispered through gritted teeth.

“Yeah.”

“Dead?” the boy asked, one cheek jumping with a nervous tic.

Edward shrugged and entered the grocery. There, a short and very wide woman clerk in a muumuu adamantly refused to let him use the phone. “Look,” he explained. “I’ll pay for it with my credit card, my phone card,” he said.

“Shoa me the cahd,” she said.

A tall, slender, attractive black-haired woman came in, dressed in unfaded jeans and a white silk blouse. “What’s wrong, Esther?” she asked.

“Man’s givin’ us a royal payin,” Esther said. “Woan use the pay phone ahtside, but sayes he’s gaht a credit cahd—”

“Jesus, thanks, you’re right,” Edward said, glancing between them. “I’ll use my card on the pay phone.”

“Is it an emergency?” the black-haired woman asked.

“Yeah,” Edward said.

“Well, go ahead and use the store phone.”

Esther glared at her resentfully. Edward sidled behind the counter, the clerk moving deftly out of his way, and punched a button for an open line. Then he paused.

“Hospital?” the black-haired woman asked.

Edward shook his head, then nodded. “I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe the Air Force.”

“You’ve seen an airplane go down?” the woman asked.

“Yeah,” Edward said, for the sake of simplicity.

The woman gave him an emergency hospital number and suggested he use directory assistance for the Air Force. But he did not dial the emergency number first. He dithered, glancing nervously around the store, wondering why he hadn’t planned a clear course of action earlier.

Goldstone, or Edwards, or maybe even Fort Irwin?

He asked directory assistance for the number of the base commander at Edwards. As the phone rang, Edward hunted for an excuse. Reslaw was right: telling the truth would get them nowhere.

“General Frohlich’s office, Lieutenant Blunt speaking.”

“Lieutenant, my name is Edward Shaw.” He tried to be as smooth and calm as a television reporter. “I and two of my friends — colleagues — have seen a jet go down about twenty miles north of Shoshone, which is where I’m calling from—”

The lieutenant became very interested immediately, and asked for details.

“I don’t know what kind of jet,” Edward continued, unable to keep a slight quiver from his voice. “It didn’t look like any I’m familiar with, except maybe…Well, one of us thinks it looked like a MiG we’ve seen in AvWeek. ”

“A MiG?” The lieutenant’s tone became more skeptical. Edward’s culpable squint intensified. “Did you actually see the plane go down?”

“Yessir, and the wreckage. I don’t read Russian…But I think there were Cyrillic markings.”

“Are you positive about this? Please give me your name and proof of identity.”

Edward gave the lieutenant his name and the numbers on his license plate, driver’s license, and, for good measure, his MasterCard. “We think we know where the pilot is, but we didn’t find him.”

“The pilot is alive?”

“He was dangling on the end of a chute, Lieutenant. He seemed alive, but he went down in some rocks.”

“Where are you calling from?”

“Shoshone. The…I don’t know the name of the store.”

“Charles Morgan Company Market,” the black-haired woman said.

Edward repeated the name. “The town’s grocery store.”

“Can you lead us to where you saw the aircraft?” the lieutenant asked.

“Yessir.”

“And you realize the penalty for giving false information about an emergency of this sort?”

“Yessir, I do.”

Both women regarded him with wide eyes.