Strangers

it's poetry that persuades you to kill for me and save my ass. Coming to the armory, Dr. Bennell?"
        Miles rose from his chair and joined the general in the spill of frosty light in the doorway. He said, "You realize that Falkirk is, in essence, acting in the name of the Army Chief of Staff himself and even higher authorities. So after you've killed him, you'll have General Riddenhour and maybe even the President coming down hard on your neck."
        "Fuck Riddenhour," Bob Alvarado said, clapping a hand on Miles's shoulder. "Fuck all the politicians and their toadying generals like Riddenhour. Even though Falkirk will take the security computer's new codes with him when we kill him, we'll get out of here in a few days, even if we have to dismantle the damn exit. And then… do you realize, when we take the news to the world, we're going to be two of the most famous men on this sorry planet? Maybe two of the most famous men in history. Fact is, I can't think of anyone in history who had quite such important news to spread… except Mary Magdalene on Easter Morning."
        

        
        Father Stefan Wycazik drove the Cherokee because he had experience with four-wheel-drive vehicles from his service with Father Bill Nader in Vietnam. Of course, those adventures had been laid in swamp and jungle, not in a blizzard. But he discovered the Jeep handled about the same in either condition. And though his daredevil experiences were long ago in time, they seemed recent in his heart and mind, and he controlled the wheel with the same reckless disregard for danger and sure-handed expertise that he'd shown in his younger days, under fire. As he and Parker Faine headed away from the lights of Elko into the snow-blasted night, Father Wycazik knew that God had called him to the priesthood precisely because, at times, the Church required a man who carried a thick splinter of an adventurer's soul lodged in his own.
        Because I-80 was closed, they went north on State Route 51. They switched to a series of westward-leading county roads - macadam, gravel, dirt, all under a mantle of snow. The roads were marked by cat's-eye-yellow reflectors on widely spaced posts along the berm, and the luster of those periodic guideposts, casting back the headlight beams, was frequently the only thing that kept Stefan from going astray. Sometimes, he had to drive overland to get from one lane to another. Fortunately, they had bought a dash-mounted compass and a county map. Although their route was winding and rough, they made steady progress in the general direction of the Tranquility Motel.
        On the way, Stefan told Parker about the CISG, about which he had learned from Michael Gerrano, after Michael had gotten the news from Mr. X, Ginger Weiss's friend. "Colonel Falkirk was the only military member. The CISG looks like a typical waste of tax dollars: a study group funded to do a think-tank-type assessment of a social problem that would most likely never arise. The committee consisted of biologists, physicists, cultural anthropologists, medical doctors, sociologists, psychologists. The acronym CISG stands for Contact Impact Study Group, which means they tried to determine the positive and negative impact on human society of first contact with an intelligent species not of this world."
        Keeping his eyes on the snowy road, Stefan paused to let his meaning sink in, smiled slightly when he heard the artist take a sudden sharp breath. Parker said, "You don't mean… you couldn't mean "Yes," Stefan said.
        "Something came… you mean that… something… " For the first time in Stefan Wycazik's acquaintance, Parker Faine was speechless.
        "Yes," Stefan said. Although this amazing development was no longer news to him, he still shivered at the thought of it, and he appreciated what Parker was feeling. "Something came down that night. Something came down from the sky on July sixth."
        "Jesus!" Parker exclaimed. "Uh, sorry, Father. Didn't mean to be blasphemous. Came down. Holy shit. Sorry. Really. But… Jesus!"
        Following cat's-eye reflectors along an especially twisty gravel road that hugged the lower contours of folded and refolded hills, Father Wycazik said, "Under the circumstances, I don't think God's grading you on verbal restraint. The CISG's primary purpose was to arrive at a consensus of how human cultures - and human beings themselves - would be affected by face-to-face contact with