Strangers

order. He said, "Did you actually see the accident, the tanker truck?"
        Ernie shook his head. "No, the truck overturned a couple miles from here." He spoke in that by-rote tone that had marked Faye's speech. "The Army experts from Shenkfield were concerned the chemicals would be dispersed by the wind, so the quarantine zone was very large."
        Chilled by the unconscious artificiality in Ernie's voice, Dom looked at Faye and saw that she too had noticed her husband's unnatural tone. He said, "That's what you sounded like a moment ago, Faye." He looked at Ernie. "You two have been programmed with the same script."
        Faye frowned. "Are you saying the spill never happened?"
        "It happened, all right." Ernie told Dom. "For a while we saved a bunch of newspaper clippings about it from the Elko Sentinel. But I think we eventually threw them out. Anyway, people around these parts still wonder what might've happened if we'd gotten big winds and been contaminated with that top-secret stuff before the evacuation order was even given. No, it's not just some delusion of Faye's and mine."
        "You can ask Elroy and Nancy Jamison," Faye said. "They were here that night, visiting. When we had to evacuate, they offered to take us back to their place and put us up for the duration."
        Dom smiled sourly. "I wouldn't put much credence in their recall of events. If they were here, then they saw what the rest of us saw, and it was scrubbed from their minds. They remember taking you back to their place because that's what they were told to remember. In fact they were probably right here, being brainwashed with the rest of us."
        "My head's swimming," Faye said. "This is positively Byzantine."
        "But, damn it, the toxic spill and evacuation happened," Ernie said. "It was in the newspapers."
        Dom thought of a disturbing explanation that made his scalp crawl. "What if everyone here at the motel that night was contaminated with some chemical or biological weapon headed for Shenkfield? And what if the Army and the government covered it up to avoid bad press, millions of dollars in lawsuits, and the disclosure of top-secret information? Maybe they closed the highway and announced that everyone was safely evacuated, when in fact we had not been gotten out in time. Then they used the motel as a clinic, decontaminated us as much as they could, scrubbed the memory of the incident out of our minds, and reprogrammed us with false memories, so we'd never know what had happened to us."
        They stared at one another in shocked silence for a moment. Not because the scenario sounded entirely right, which it did not. But because it was the first scenario they'd come up with that made sense of the psychological problems they had been having and explained the drugged people in those Polaroid snapshots.
        Then Ernie and Faye began to think of objections. Ernie voiced the first: "In that case, the logical thing for them to've done was to make our false memories tie in closely with their cover story about the toxic spill and evacuation. That's exactly what they did with Faye and me, with the Jamisons, Ned and Sandy Sarver. So why didn't they do the same with you? Why'd they program you with different memories that didn't have anything to do with the evacuation? That was irrational and risky. I mean, the radical differences between our memories is virtually proof that you or we - or all of us - were brainwashed.
        "Don't know," Dom said. "That's just one more mystery to unravel."
        "And here's another flaw in that theory," Ernie said. "If we'd been contaminated by a biological weapon, they wouldn't have let us go in just three days. They'd have been afraid of contagion, epidemic." Dom said, "All right. So it was a chemical agent, not a virus or bacterium. Something they could wash off or flush out of our systems."
        "That doesn't make sense, either," Faye said. "Because the things they test at Shenkfield are meant to be deadly. Poison gas. Nerve gas. Hideous damn stuff. If we'd got caught in a cloud like that, we'd have been dead on the spot or brain-damaged or crippled."
        "Maybe it was a slow-acting agent," Dom said. "Something that generates tumors, leukemia, or other conditions that only begin to show up two or three or five years from the date of contamination."
        That thought also shocked them into silence. They listened to the ticking of the