Strangers

with both hands, his head hanging down between his arms. He felt a hand on his shoulder, turned, and saw Ginger. Jack was standing behind her.
        She said, "What's wrong?"
        "I remembered… more.
        "What?" Jack asked.
        Dom told them.
        He didn't need to convince them that contact with an extraterrestrial craft had been made that summer night. The moment he reminded them of what they'd seen, their own memory blocks crumbled as quickly as his. In their faces, he saw the singularly unique blend of awe, terror, joy, and hope that the event aroused.
        "We went inside," Ginger said wonderingly.
        'Yes," Jack said. "You, Dom, and Brendan."
        "But," Ginger said, "I can't… can't quite remember what happened to us in there."
        "Me neither," Dom said. "That part hasn't come back to me yet. I recall everything up to the minute we went through the hatch, into that golden light… then nothing."
        For a moment they were oblivious of their perilous surroundings.
        Ginger's lovely, delicate face was bone-white. Partly, it was the bloodless look of fear. But not fear alone.
        Dom now understood, as Ginger did, why they had responded to each other so powerfully the instant that she had gotten off the plane at the Elko County Airport on Sunday. That summer night, they went into the ship together and shared something that had forever bonded them.
        "The ship's here, inside Thunder Hill," she said. "It must be."
        Dom agreed. "That's why the government took the land away from those ranchers. They enlarged the grounds of the Depository to make it more difficult for anyone to spot the truck that brought the ship in."
        Jack said, "It would've been a hell of a big load."
        "Like those huge trucks they haul the space shuttle on," Dom said.
        Jack said, "Yeah, but why would they hide what happened?"
        "I don't know," Dom said. He tapped the button that would summon the elevator. "But maybe we can find out."
        The elevator arrived with a quiet hum, and they rode down to the second level. Judging from the length of the ride, the top two floors of the installation were separated by several stories of solid rock.
        The doors opened at last, and they stepped into an immense circular cavern three hundred feet in diameter. From far above, the scaffolded lights shed wintry beams on an odd collection of sheet-metal buildings that hugged the walls most of the way around the chamber. Warmer light shone at small windows in two of those structures; otherwise, they were dark and appeared untenanted. Dom thought it looked a little like a film crew on location, a bunch of dressing-room trailers. Four large caverns branched from the main chamber, one of which was closed off by huge wooden doors that were curiously primitive for an otherwise highly modern facility. In the three adjacent open caverns, lights glowed, and Dom saw stored equipment - Jeeps, troop carriers, trucks, helicopters, and even jet aircraft - in addition to other trailer-like buildings with more lights at the windows than those in the main chamber. Thunder Hill was an enormous arsenal and a self-sustaining subterranean city, which Dom had known, but he had not guessed at the immensity of it.
        More mystifying than the Depository's many wonders was its air of abandonment. The second level was as deserted and silent as the first. No guards, no busy personnel, no voices or sounds of labor. True, the caverns were slightly cool; and at this time of the evening, most of the staff would probably keep to the heated living quarters. But a few should have been in sight. And if most were off duty, there should have been music, T-V, voluble poker-game conversations, and other muted recreational sounds waiting from the farther reaches of the facility.
        In a whisper so thin it was little more than a subvocalization, Ginger said, "Are they all dead?"
        "I told you," Jack said in an equally quiet voice, "something's wrong…"
        Dom felt drawn toward the huge wooden doors-almost three stories high, at least sixty feet wide-that sealed the entrance to the fourth cavern, so he allowed his feelings to guide him. Followed by Ginger and Jack, he walked as quietly as he could toward a smaller, man-sized door set in the bottom of one of those giant wooden portals. It was ajar, and a wedge of light, brighter than that in the main cavern, fell out