Unassigned Territory (33 page)

“Through exercise?”

“I don’t know that I like his tone,” Judy said. She addressed herself to Bill once again, speaking of Obadiah in the third person. “I thought you said he was interested in learning something.”

“He is,” Bill replied, “he’s here.”

Obadiah was about to say something else but found that the finality of Richards’s statement had cast a shadow upon his enthusiasm. He was, after all, here. He settled back into his seat and looked in an easterly direction from the rear window of the Land-Rover. He looked toward a dusty sky, a white and merciless sun. It was indeed, he thought, a cramped and narrow road.

The road continued to climb. It felt like a long time. Eventually the thing jackknifed hard to the east, rose steeply, and then left them at the crest of a ridge. Bill Richards killed the engine and they sat, for the first time since leaving the motel, in complete silence while the dust settled about them.

Facing them from across the valley was another ridge, and at its base Obadiah could see the town of Table Mountain, a single row of buildings set like bad teeth in barren soil.

They were perhaps a mile away. The town looked bone-dry and deserted in the heat. “Empty,” Obadiah observed.

Judy made a short snorting noise and looked away, out the window of the Land-Rover.

“Yes, yes,” Richards said. He sounded pleased with himself. “The dipshits have definitely blown it in a large way.”

Obadiah had, while needling Judy on the road from Trona, learned a number of interesting things about Ceton Verity and the Table Mountain People. It seems that Verity’s work in the desert had indeed attracted some marginal types. The hippies, as Judy liked to call them, had taken up residence in the ghost town of Table Mountain, where, upon Verity’s death, they had taken to mixing his ideas with a lot of drug-induced idiocy of their own. They had also taken to doing odd things with animals. They were even, according to Judy, responsible for her father’s death.

This last bit had perked Obadiah’s interest considerably. Pressing her further, however, he found her theory less dramatic than his own—probably more believable as well, so that he was able to imagine Delandra Hummer nodding her head, smirking at him as Judy spoke.

Apparently the old man had had a bad heart and was supposed to take it easy. The Table Mountain People, however, had encouraged what Judy would only refer to as “certain excesses.”

“It was all,” she told him, “part of a lowlife plot.” At which point he had learned that shortly before his death, Ceton Verity had done a very silly thing. He had signed over all of the land he owned in the Mojave to the Table Mountain People. The Electro-Magnetron. The landing strip. The museum. Ceton had made to the hippies a love offering of the whole righteous mess. The reasons for this rash act were still unclear to the rest of Verity’s followers but ran the gamut from electromagnetic manipulation, through disintegrant energy flows in the ion flows along the neurons and connecting tissues and visualization screens in the mind, to simply too much pussy. It seems that the Table Mountain People were a loose-living lot—though this last bit of information was passed on by Bill Richards while Judy was off taking a leak behind some rocks. It was, however, Obadiah guessed, what she had meant by the aforementioned excesses.

And finally, he had learned that since the deaths of Jack and Lyle and the woman, all of the Table Mountain People had been rounded up for questioning, leaving both the town and the site of the Electro-Magnetron empty, and closed to public access, and Bill Richards was still grinning about it.

“I believe,” he said, “that our friends have at last managed to fuck themselves in their collective asshole.”

“Must we put it so crudely?” Judy asked.

Richards looked at Obadiah in the rearview mirror and winked. “You might get away with cutting the tits off a few cows,” he said, “you start separating men from their
cojones
and you start putting folks up real tight.”

Obadiah looked once more at the town. “But Jack and Lyle were with them, or so I thought. You really think the Table Mountain People would kill three of their own?”

Judy snorted. “You’re talking as if these were rational human beings,” she said. “These people are animals.”

Bill, in his present good humor, seemed to find this amusing as well. “Come on,” he said, looking back over his shoulder at Obadiah, “let’s get up on top of those rocks and have a better look.” Having said that, he reached around behind his seat and pulled a cardboard box off the floor. Inside the box there was what looked to Obadiah to be an aluminum pith helmet, except that the metal had a slightly bluish tint to it. Bill Richards set the cap on his head and got out of the Land-Rover.

Obadiah climbed out of the back and started with him toward the rocks. “Unusual-looking helmet,” Obadiah observed.

“Isn’t it,” Richards said.

“Aluminum?”

“No. It’s a special material that Judy’s father invented. It’s... well, I won’t go into how it’s made. The deal is, it can protect you from electromagnetic radiation.”

Obadiah looked at the hat once more. “Electromagnetic radiation?”

They had by now reached the rocks and had begun to climb toward the top. It was an easy climb, and Richards answered as they moved. “You should read the book you bought,” he said. “But, to put it as simply as possible, electromagnetic radiation may be a tool of the manipulators. Military intelligence, both in this country and in Russia, were doing research on the subject as early as 1945—the effects of electromagnetic radiation on humans, what we also call extremely low frequency, or simple ELF. Verity believed it was possible that ELF might be used to induce hallucinations, possibly paralysis; in other words, something connected with mind control. He believed the Germans had a device by the end of the war that made use of ELF in this way. The Russians may have a similar device now. The United States may too. It’s hard to say.”

“But I thought you said it was a tool of the manipulators. What do the United States and Russia have to do with the manipulators?”

They were by now on top of the rocks and looking down on the town once more. It didn’t appear to Obadiah that they could see much more from here than from the car. The place still looked empty. Richards was shaking his head, apparently at the naïveté of Obadiah’s questions. “Read the book,” he said.

“And you think there is some danger of the ELF out here?” It was the first time he had noticed Richards wearing the hat.

“Take a look around you,” Richards said. “That’s all owned by the military, brother. Try and find out what they do with it sometime.” Richards paused to chuckle. “And down there”—he waved toward the town—“an outpost of full-on manipulator drones. All in all, I would say yes, we are in a high-risk area.”

“What do you think they do down there?” Obadiah asked. He was speaking of the weaponry ranges to the south.

Richards looked at him for a moment and smiled. “If I told you,” he said, “you wouldn’t believe me.” He clapped Obadiah on the shoulder with the palm of his hand. “Now let’s get back to the car and get out of here.”

Obadiah followed Richards out of the rocks. He thought about ELF and a military in the hands of the manipulators. He supposed it was something like believing the world was in the power of the Wicked One. After all, how could Satan have tempted Christ with the kingdoms of the earth if they were not his to give? Ahead of him Bill Richards’s metal helmet bobbed up and down, a silver light among the red rocks.

Once again in the Land-Rover, they set out for the dig Richards had spoken of. At the dig they would compare the crystals found in the dispenser with those found at the site and they would begin to see about getting back into the Electro-Magnetron. Right now the place was off-limits to everyone. But Richards had heard rumors of some kind of underground access route that not many knew of, and he was eager to find something out. There was also the possibility that Judy, as an immediate family member, might be able to gain legal access. At any rate, once inside they could begin the experiments with the crystals.

It sounded bizarre enough when you said it. And yet, Obadiah thought, he had seen the Thing. And now a fragile network of possibilities had been erected in its honor—like some rickety suspension bridge, they spanned the void beneath them and one could only wonder about where the whole thing might lead. Into the past? Across another dimension? Or would a man go halfway only to find the whole silly thing breaking apart beneath him and a tiny voice singing somewhere in the back of his mind: “Welcome to the funhouse, fool”?

But then what, he wondered, was a poor boy to do? It was a counterfeit world men had made for themselves and one could hardly get very interested in it. The Thing, on the other hand, at least had the look of something genuine. And so an opportunity like this came along and you went with it or you stayed home. You could risk playing the fool in this life or you could take your place among the countless bovine householders he had faced across the countless porches of his youth. He had made a decision and he would have liked to stop second-guessing himself. But he couldn’t. He had begun the moment it became clear Delandra was really not going to accompany him. Did he want it that badly? He tried to console himself with clichés. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. He might have felt better about it right now had he not gotten a look at Bill Richards’s hat. The foolish thing lay on the seat beside him, the metallic spark he had followed off the ridge. He looked once more from a dust-streaked window into the light of the Mojave. “Happy,” he said to himself, “is the man conscious of his spiritual need, for the Kingdom of the heavens belongs to him.”

B
y late afternoon they had reached the site. Half a dozen run-down house trailers and one shiny new Winnebago sat grouped at the base of a large rocky hill. The hill had paths cut into the sides of it, winding round it like seams in a baseball. Near some of the paths Obadiah could see a few holes and ditches. Some of the holes had sticks of wood coming out of them and bits of canvas awning stretched between the sticks to provide shade for the holes.

The road which led to the dig had, for the last two hundred yards, been covered with loose gravel and looking back now in the direction from which they had come, Obadiah could see the gray dust raised by their tires still hanging in the air. The rocks in the area were of a uniform color, a kind of dirty copper which ran to a deep reddish brown or black—as if everything had been baked in some tremendous kiln, or tossed out in a volcanic upheaval—which, he supposed, was a good possibility. There was very little vegetation—just a few bits of sage here and there, struggling for life among the volcanic stones, and the only available shade was provided by the awnings erected between the trailers. The whole encampment had a kind of naked arbitrary look about it and Obadiah was reminded—as he had been in the town of Trona—of some encampment on an alien planet.

In this case all Obadiah could see of the landing party itself were two women and a man who were just now emerging from the clearing between the trailers. The women wore work boots, cutoff jeans, and blue cotton chambray work shirts with the sleeves rolled up on their forearms. The man wore jeans and a T-shirt. He held a beer out in front of his stomach.

“You must be exhausted,” one of the women said. She was a large woman, with mousy blond hair pulled back beneath a red and white bandanna. She had heavy breasts and a slightly pockmarked face.

“We are,” Judy said. She stood in front of the Land-Rover wiping her forehead with the back of her hand.

The man said there was more beer on ice and Bill and Obadiah went with him back toward the awning. Bill, Obadiah noticed, had left his hat in the car. Apparently the site was not in the high-risk zone. Judy went into one of the trailers with the two women. Later, one of the women—a short, athletic-looking woman with brown hair whom Obadiah guessed to be in her early thirties, came back out and joined them in the shade. “It will be cooling off soon now,” she said to no one in particular. Obadiah pressed the sweating aluminum can the man had given him to the side of his face. He seated himself Indian style at a corner of the shade.

“Not out of gas, are we?” Richards asked. He had been in a cheerful mood ever since their view of an empty Table Mountain. “Come on,” he said. “I want to show you what we’re up to here.”

Reluctantly Obadiah hauled his ass off the ground and followed Richards toward one of the paths leading up into the side of the rocky hill.

The sun had slipped low into the western sky but the heat upon their backs as they climbed was still quite intense. The path was narrow and steep. The man who had given them the beers stayed below but the woman had come with them. They moved single file—Richards out front, then Obadiah, with the woman in the rear.

Richards talked as he went. “We have reason to hope,” he said, “that this may prove to have been an encampment of the first Table Mountain People—there have been some bits and pieces of pottery, nothing conclusive as yet, however.”

“The ground here is difficult,” the woman said. “Very alkaline. It eats things up.”

They stopped at the edge of a long, narrow ditch and the woman showed Obadiah a number of stones which had recently been exposed. The woman told him they were tools but they looked more like simple rocks to Obadiah. He said nothing, however, and tried to look interested. The woman bent to replace the stones, rattling off some dates as she did so. As she leaned forward, her breasts, loose beneath the faded cotton shirt, were exposed to the nipples. Obadiah felt the beginnings of an erection pressing against the hot fabric of his jeans. He looked away, into the barren acres of volcanic rock which lay beneath them. He felt tired and gritty and somewhat disgusted with himself. He didn’t even feel like asking the woman about the methods used to arrive at her dates. That once he would no doubt have done so with great zeal served now only to fuel the disgust.

He wondered how many more uninteresting holes it would be necessary to peer into before starting back. Richards was already out of the ditch, moving ahead of them, farther up the mountain. Obadiah wiped his brow with the back of his hand The woman was still with him in the ditch. They had been introduced but Obadiah had forgotten her name. They were both standing now and he noticed that the woman was smiling at him. “Pretty boring stuff,” she said.