Strangers

onto the stone floor. He put one hand upon the door to pull it open, then stopped when he heard low voices inside. He listened until he ascertained there were only two of them, both men. They were speaking too softly for him to follow their conversation. Dom considered turning back, but he had a hunch that if he had an opportunity to look into any one room before being apprehended, he could do no better than this one. He pulled open the small door in the huge door and walked through.
        The ship was there.
        

        
        Ginger stood with one hand on her breast, as if to restrain her heart from hammering loose.
        The cavern beyond the wooden doors was enormous, fully two hundred feet long and varying between eighty and a hundred-twenty feet in width, with a high domed ceiling. The rock floor had been chiseled, planed, and abraded to form a level surface from wall to wall; all the deep holes and crevices had been filled with concrete. Judging from scattered oil and grease stains, and from recessed ringbolts in the floor, the chamber had once been used for storing or servicing vehicles. To the right of the entrance, along the wall, were more trailer-like buildings with small windows and metal doors, a dozen stretching almost to the end of the chamber. Though probably used as offices or living quarters at one time, they'd been converted to research facilities. Hand-lettered signs were fixed to some doors: CHEM LAB, CHEM LIBRARY, PATHOLOGY, BIO LAB, BIO LIBRARY, PHYSICS I, PHYSICS 2, ANTHROPOLOGY, and others too far away to read. In addition, work tables and large machines - a conventional X-ray unit, a large sound spectrograph of exactly the kind in use at Boston Memorial Hospital, and many other pieces of equipment Ginger did not recognize - stood in rows or clusters in the open area immediately in front of the metal buildings, as if someone were conducting a sidewalk sale of high-tech laboratory equipment. The amount of research to be done had outstripped the available quarters, which was no surprise, considering the object of the inquiry.
        The ship from another world lay to the left of the entrance. It looked exactly as Ginger had recollected minutes ago, when the forbidden memory had at last pushed through the block and returned to her: a cylinder between fifty and sixty feet long, fifteen feet in diameter, rounded at both ends. It had been set upon a series of five-foot-high steel trestles to keep it off the floor, rather like a submarine in dry dock for repairs. The only thing different from its appearance on the night of July 6 was the absence of the eerie glow that had changed from moon-white to scarlet to amber. It possessed no visible propulsion system, no rockets. The hull was nearly as featureless as she recalled: here, a ten-foot-long row of shallow depressions in the metal, each big enough for her to insert her fist, but without evident purpose; there, four protruding hemispheres like halves of cantaloupes, also without apparent function; here and there, half a dozen circular elevations, some as large as the lid of a trash can, some no bigger than the mouth of a mayonnaise jar, none higher than three inches, all quite mysterious. Otherwise, but for the marks of wear and age, the long curving hull was smooth over ninety-eight percent of its surface. Yet its unspectacular design did not prevent it from being by far the most spectacular thing Ginger had ever seen. She was simultaneously terrified and joyous, overcome with a dread of the unknown yet exultant.
        Two men were sitting at a table at the foot of portable stairs that led up to an open hatch in the flank of the elevated spacecraft. The most imposing was a lanky man in his forties, with curly black hair and beard, wearing dark trousers, dark shirt, and white lab coat. The other was in an Army uniform with the jacket unbuttoned, a somewhat portly man ten years older than his bearded companion. Now, seeing their three visitors, they fell silent, rose from their chairs, but did not shout for guards or rush to trip an alarm switch. The two merely watched Dom, Jack, and Ginger with interest, gauging their first reactions to the trestled craft that loomed over them.
        They were expecting us, Ginger thought.
        That realization should have concerned her, but it did not. She had no interest in anything but the ship.
        With Dom close by her right side and Jack on her left, she moved with them in