Unassigned Territory (37 page)

“Well,” Richards asked him, “what do you think? Alien being? Missing link? You’re the judge now, Buford.”

“My guess would be early Hummer.” He was only going by what Delandra had told him. “Maybe 1955 or thereabouts.”

Richards did not seem to think this was funny. “You trying to be funny?” he asked.

Obadiah looked away from the case. “You asked,” he said.

“What you’re trying to tell me”—Richards spoke slowly, as if he was concerned about being understood—“is that this is not what all the fuss was about?”

Obadiah laughed. He couldn’t help himself. “The fuss,” he said, “was about something else.”

“Something else like this?”

“No,” Obadiah said, “the fuss was about the Mystery of the Mojave.” He found that he took some pride in saying it, as if he were the veteran of something. He found himself recalling with a certain fondness the expression on the face of Lyle Blackledge when he had first seen the Thing. He owed his life to that one, whatever it was, to the Thing itself for having crossed the line or to Sarge Hummer, for having gotten good enough at what he did to put the fear of God into one deranged hick. It all depended upon what you were willing to believe. It was the same old shit. What he knew for certain was that the one in front of him had no part in the debate.

“This is all you wanted me to see?”

Richards was still at his side, staring into the case. When he looked up, Obadiah’s first impulse was to duck because he had the feeling the man was going to swing on him. He stayed where he was. Richards stared at him, then looked past him and Obadiah realized they were no longer alone. Turning, he saw that the man in the vest had come to the trailer door. Obadiah could not say how long he had been there The light from the trailer shone on the bill of the man’s cap and on the leather which covered his shoulders. He had a big hard-looking stomach which stuck out through the open vest. The light shone on his stomach as well. There was a long pink scar running across one side of it, down into his jeans. He was leaning against the edge of the slider with one foot in the trailer.

“So okay,” Richards said. “Why don’t you go eat while there’s something left.” He was addressing himself to Obadiah. There was something strained about his voice, however, and Obadiah got the feeling the man in the doorway was making him nervous. Obadiah turned to go. He was on his way out when he noticed something which had been propped near the slider at which the man stood. A shortened, double-barreled shotgun.

Obadiah looked at it as he approached the man. The man was taking up most of the doorway and he moved just enough to give Obadiah room to squeeze through. Obadiah stopped short. He suspected it might cost him—which would make it stupid, but he found himself enjoying Bill Richards’s discomfort. “So tell me,” he said, “where did this one come from?”

Richards was a moment in replying. “It came from the stars,” he said. He said it without smiling.

Obadiah went past the man and into the evening. He found the conversation in the trailer had not done a lot for his appetite. He drifted across the compound and seated himself at the edge of the clearing. He was staring into the dwindling fire when the girl who had accompanied him and Bill to the hill approached him with a plate of food. “Hungry?” she asked.

Obadiah looked at the girl. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t remember your name.”

“Rachel.” She extended the plate.

Obadiah took it. He set it on the ground beside his leg.

“Not hungry?” Rachel asked. “Thirsty maybe? A beer?” Obadiah agreed to the beer. When the girl returned she sat down next to him. She had come with two beers. Obadiah listened to the soft hiss of air as she lifted the aluminum rings. “Found your crystals yet?” she asked. The crystals seemed to amuse her.

Obadiah drank some of the beer. “Tell me,” he said. “Are you part of Bill Richards’s group?”

“I thought it was Judy’s group.”

Obadiah shrugged.

The girl smiled. “No,” she said. “I’m not part of anybody’s group. Bill Richards is an old friend of the woman who runs this place.” She looked into the fire and drank some of her beer. “The fact is, the woman who started this had a grant. Now the grant has run out and she’s having a hard time getting the work financed.”

“Why is that?”

“Oh, it’s a long story. Basically, what it comes down to is that not everyone is so sure we’re really on to something here.”

“You mean the Table Mountain People?”

Rachel smiled once more. “No,” she said. “The Table Mountain People are what Bill is interested in. We think the dig may date to a much earlier period, which in fact is what a lot of the controversy has been about. That’s what I was trying to tell you about on the hill. We think the dates of some of these rocks go way back.” She paused to look into the fire. “Unfortunately not everyone agrees. If we don’t get some more funding soon, we may have to shut down.”

“And this woman, she’s probably hoping that Bill and Judy will come up with some.”

“Probably.”

“Particularly if they think this place has something to do with the Table Mountain People.”

“Bill and Judy have some funny ideas,” Rachel said.

“And money.”

“And money.”

Obadiah finished his beer. As he did so he noticed for the first time that the jeep which had arrived while he was on the hill was gone. And then he noticed a couple of other things as well. He noticed the skinny redhead with the hat. The man was coiled in the shadow of a trailer, gnawing at a bone. His companion, the man with the vest, had come with Bill Richards out of the trailer. The two men were now standing with Jim, watching as he scraped one of the grills into the fire. “Those men,” he asked. “You know anything about them?”

“I know they’re friends of Bill Richards’s.”

“Anything else?”

“I don’t know that I would want to know anything else.” She said this as she was standing up. “It has been my experience that Bill Richards’s friends are about like his ideas.”

“That Land-Rover,” Obadiah said. The woman had started away from him. When he spoke she stopped and looked back. “Is that the only vehicle in camp?”

“I’m afraid so, for this evening at any rate.” The shadows made it difficult to tell, but it seemed to Obadiah that she was smiling at him. “Why, Mister Wheeler,” she said. “You’re not thinking of leaving us? Without your crystals?”

With the woman gone Obadiah felt suddenly quite alone. The sky was black now. Arching above him, the Milky Way had the look of something that had been spilled there, the work of vandals. He found that his mouth had gotten dry and there was a peculiar burning sensation at the center of his chest. It runs in threes. Someone had told him that once, speaking of bad luck. And it seemed to him just now, seated alone before dying embers in a camp whose founders may or may not have been on to something, that he was in fact acutely aware of exactly three things. He had seen a third man from the hillside. Wherever the bogus Thing in the storage trailer had come from, it wasn’t from the stars. And the last time he had seen a gun like the one in the doorway, he had gotten hit with it.

W
hat, eventually, Obadiah decided he wanted was another look at the gun. He had this idea that if it really was the one which hit him he would recognize it. There would be a name, a mark. There would be vibrations. There would be something.

It was necessary of course to wait. He made a camp for himself not far from the Land-Rover and lay down to watch. He watched Bill Richards go into one of the trailers. He watched the man in the leather vest walk into the desert. He watched until everyone, one by one, had turned in somewhere for the night. And then he waited some more. The camp grew quiet. The embers lost their glow. The passage of time seemed to him something he could feel, along the skin of his arms, the back of his neck.

Eventually he pulled himself out of the sleeping bag and stood up. It wasn’t that he thought he had waited long enough so much as it was a fear that if he didn’t move soon he would never move at all. Already his legs had grown stiff and uncooperative beneath him, making it necessary for him to coax them forward. Small steps. Over the rocks and into the center of the camp. He went right up through the middle of it—past the blackened fire ring, the trash can which had held the beer. He figured it was best to look like he knew what he was doing.

The glass slider was still open, just as he had left it. The bogus Thing was still in its box, and the gun was still propped against the wall. He lifted it, held it on his palms, waist-high, as if it were an offering. There were no perceptible vibrations. There was, however, something. He found it changing positions, letting one hand move along the smooth wood of the stock until it found the mark—a rough spot beneath his thumb.

He took the gun to the step and turned it toward the moon. It seemed that someone had carved a small hand there. It was poorly done. There was even an extra finger. Now who, he asked, among his most recent acquaintances, might do such a thing? Certainly not a smooth operator like Bill Richards. One could, however, with a minimal amount of work, imagine the narrow bony face of a certain Lyle Blackledge contorted in some weird attitude of concentration, intent upon just such a task.

He stood by the door and stared out upon the failing dig, the black sweep of desert as it rolled away from him, down toward the great weaponry ranges, the salt flats of Trona. And it was like he had said to Delandra at the Blue Heaven Motel. There were these elements. He thought now they were not dissimilar to the pieces of the Erector sets he had played with as a boy. You could make things out of them. And he began to consider just what it was he was making out of them now. It was a devilish sort of thing. That much seemed certain—all gears and hooks, a regular death trap. The centerpiece was the gun with the hand on it—exhibit A. And Richards did have motive. He had Judy’s land. You wouldn’t, at first, suppose it was the kind of thing people killed for. But then the land did have something on it. It had Ceton Verity’s Electro-Magnetron. And Bill Richards was the owner of a silver hat. It was hard, Obadiah thought, to know what to make of the motives of a man with a hat like that one. Would he take someone out to impress a girlfriend? Or did he just like that sort of thing? Perhaps he was a man of faith. What it came down to for Obadiah was that he had been had. He was not sure how, exactly, only that he was supposed to be here. And so was Delandra. Why else had Richards asked him about her? It did make one wonder about that third man and the missing jeep. Because if the missing crystals were B, the gun A, then the jeep from Victorville was C, Victorville, after all, being the home of the man with the ax handle. So that what Obadiah was left with were the vague outlines of some monstrous agreement. A deal. Something between Richards and the Indian. The Table Mountain People for Delandra? The Electro-Magnetron for the Thing?

Having discerned the outlines, he tried to step back far enough to see whether it made sense or not—at least enough sense to send him packing, down fifteen miles of bad road in the dead of night. The trouble was he was having a hard time seeing anything but those fifteen miles of bad road. The urge to bolt was nearly overpowering. He was reminded, in the middle of it all, of a particular exploit on the part of Bug House. It was shelved under “Bug House Meets the Hit Men South of the Border.” It was a simple story. Bug House had planned to visit Cabo San Lucas by train. Halfway there two men in dark suits had boarded. Bug House, unable to shake the conviction they had come for him, turned around and came home. Obadiah had found the story amusing in its own bleak way when he first heard it. Now he wondered: the crystals. The gun. The jeep. He was certain the pieces could be put together in other, less sinister ways. And yet he had come to feel much the way he imagined Bug House must have felt waiting it out down there in some chicken coop of a station. South of the border. Way south. Harder in fact to get any farther south. Checking out the schedules and the time of day, the glint in the eye of the old woman back of what passed for a counter, wondering if he could trust the water supply to wash down the Thorazine, or if perhaps some lowlife just one step ahead of him had gotten to it first...

He was interrupted in the midst of this by the sound of voices in the camp. They exploded suddenly upon the stillness and continued, at odd intervals—sentries firing in the night. He stepped away from the glass and down into the full shadow of the storage room. He was too far away to hear what was being said. Once, however, when the man spoke, he heard the word
money.
The other voice belonged to a woman. The voices rose once more, both people talking at once, only to be cut short by a sharp, cracking sound—skin on skin. The slap was followed by several more, and then a kind of thumping sound. The woman, by now, had begun to sob. He knew that it was Judy Verity. Nothing else in the camp stirred. The sound had an odd effect on him. It was like watching something die.

He was about to break cover when the door of one of the trailers swung open, emitting the stumbling figure of a man—too big to be anybody but Richards. Even from a distance Obadiah could see the guy was drunk on his ass. He still wore the shorts and hiking boots. The safari shirt had been replaced by a white T-shirt. The T-shirt seemed almost to glow in the moonlight and there was something dark swung across one shoulder. Halfway to the Land-Rover he stopped and shouted back toward the trailer. “It gets it done,” he said. “You don’t like it, find yourself another boy.” In answer, the trailer door swung shut with a hollow pop. Richards responded by pausing long enough to urinate on the rocky soil. After that he was into the Land-Rover and headed up the grade, in Obadiah’s direction.

Obadiah moved along the front of the trailer. He rounded one end and crouched there in the shadows. He could hear Richards dragging things around inside the storage room. Finally he heard him load something into the Land-Rover and drive away. He hadn’t seen a thing but he had a pretty good idea of what had happened. Richards had picked up his bogus Creature and split.