Strangers

panel that read palmprints and fingerprints.
        Jack lowered his hand from the switch that he'd threatened to hit, and glanced at the stormy night beyond the outer door. He whispered so softly to Ginger that Dom, at the far end of the tunnel, could not have heard: "I get a creepy feeling that, any minute now, the giant's going to come down the beanstalk and stomp us all flat."
        She knew then that he would not have risked their destruction, that he would probably just have led them out to the guardhouse at the main gate and asked to be arrested. But with his murderous glower, he had been thoroughly convincing.
        Abruptly, the inner door whooshed open. Even though Dom was the agent of its movement, he was so startled that he jumped back a step instead of rushing through immediately, as Jack had told him to do. He realized his error as he made it, and he leapt across the threshold, into the subterranean world beyond.
        Jack hit the button to close the outer door even before Dom was across the inner threshold, then ran after the writer.
        Ginger followed. She expected the sounds of struggle or gunfire, but heard neither. When she stepped out of the concrete tunnel, she found herself in another, huge tunnel with natural rock walls, where lights were suspended from scaffolding overhead. The passage was about sixty feet across, at least a hundred yards long, beginning inside the massive steel blast doors, and ending far away at what appeared to be banks of elevators. Three yards in from the door, a guard's table was cemented to the concrete floor. A watchman's log was chained to the table. A few issues of recent magazines were stacked beside the log. There was a computer terminal as well. But no guards were in sight.
        In fact, the entire tunnel was deserted. The place was as still and silent as a mausoleum. Not even the drip of water from a stalactite or the rustle of batwings in the vault above. But Ginger supposed that a multibillion-dollar facility designed to weather World War III would not be plagued by either condensation or flying rodents.
        "Should be guards," Jack murmured. His voice echoed sibilantly off the rock walls.
        "What now?" Dom asked shakily. Clearly, he had been surprised by his ability to focus his power so soon after the near-catastrophe in the diner last night.
        "Something's wrong," Jack said. "I don't know what. But no guard… something's wrong." He skinned back the hood of his ski suit and pulled the zipper down a few inches, and the others did the same. Jack said softly, "This is just the cargo-receiving area. Trucks come in and unload. The main part of the installation must be below us. So… I don't like this emptiness… but I guess we go down."
        "If we've got to go, then let's stop shmoozing and get a move on," Ginger said, heading toward the far end of the tunnel.
        She heard the inner door swish as Jack closed it.
        They went farther into Thunder Hill.
        

    2.
        

    Fear
        
        They made hardly more noise than three mice easing past a dozing cat, yet their footsteps echoed in the rock-walled vault.
        Not loudly. The echoes did not sound like footsteps but rather like the whispers and murmurs of conspirators hidden within the shadowed niches on all sides.
        Dom's uneasiness grew.
        They crept past a couple of enormous elevators. Each of them was seventy feet wide and nearly as deep, open platforms that were raised and lowered by synchronized hydraulic shafts at each corner, more than big enough to move fighter aircraft in and out of the bowels of the mountain. They passed smaller cargo lifts, too, and finally came to a pair of standard-size elevators.
        Before Jack could press the call button for the lift, Dom was hit by another flash of memory. As before, it was sufficiently vivid to displace current reality. This time, he recalled the crucial event of July 6: the white-to-scarlet metamorphosis of the moon, which suddenly proved not to be the moon at all but a head-on view of the rounded bow of a descending ship. It was a plain cylinder with few features, none remarkable, almost homely in a way, yet he sensed immediately that its journey, ending here, had not begun anywhere on this world.
        When the initial power of the memory faded enough to allow reality to impinge upon him once more, Dom found himself leaning against the closed doors of the lift