It had been in sight for nearly an hour. Less than ten miles away now, it dominated the flat black landscape. It had fallen several miles. It was foreshortened, its hull split, like a Navy battleship dropped on its nose. It must have loomed large in the refugees’ eyes.
Like a coyote on a freeway, a fi’ corpse lay in the road, flattened to a pancake silhouette and rotted almost to its crushed bones. Its hang glider hadn’t opened. She’d seen dead snouts here and there. They stripped their dead, but often left them where they lay. Cremation would have been easy enough: stack the bodies, and one blast of a fithp laser would do it.
The helicopter settled near the stern. Jenny and Jack got out.
They walked alongside the ruined hull. Only the warship’s tail, an outsize rocket-nozzle-shape with jet scoops facing forward, had survived the crash intact. The hull had split halfway along its length. Jack chinned himself on the edge of the rip. “Nothing. A fuel tank.”
Forward of the tank wall, the hull had wrinkled and torn again. From the bent nose a glassless window winked, the opening squeezed almost shut. Where ripped metal gaped conveniently wide, they climbed inside, Jack leading the way.
They came out faster than they went in. Jenny took off the gas mask and waited. Jack Clybourne ran into the cornfield. After a few moments she heard sounds of gagging. She tried not to notice.
“Sorry,” he said when he came back.
“Sure. I almost lost my lunch too.”
“First assignment I get Outside—”
“You haven’t done any harm,” Jenny said. “We’re not likely to do any good here, either. The ship’s a mess, it’s a job for experts.”
“Experts.” He looked at the wreckage. “You’d send your dreamers-for-hire into that?”
“It’s their job.”
Jack shook his head. He said. “Well, it’s for sure there weren’t any survivors.”
“Yes. Too bad.”
“Damn straight. Jeez, you’d think they’d have left some of their troops behind.”
“They must have been ready to evacuate. Just in case,” Jenny said.
“Maybe they planned it that way. Maybe they did just what they came for. Kansas is gone. This place is a wound, a cemetery. We’ve got no dams, no highways, no railroads, and we’re afraid to fly. And we’ve got one prisoner. How many of our people did they get?’
Jenny shook her head. “I don’t know. A lot, from the missing persons reports. But we can’t rely on those.” We’re stalling, she thought. “Look, I’ve got to go back in. Alone. No need for both of us to get sick.”
“No. I wanted to come. I wasn’t doing any good inside the Hole.” Clybourne put on the gas mask. “Rrready.” His voice sounded hollow from inside the mask.
They reentered the rip in the life support system.
The interior was twisted and bent. Crumpled walls showed crumpled machinery and torn wiring buried inside. Alien bodies lay in the corridors. They stank. Too many days had passed since the combined U.S. and Soviet bombardment had driven the aliens back to space. Alien bodies had bloated and/or ruptured. Jenny tried to ignore them; they were someone else’s job. She hoped the biologists would come soon to remove them.
Not that I know what I’m looking for. She went deeper into the ship. Her flashlight picked out the remains of equipment; wherever she pointed, Jack took photographs. The whine of the recharger for his electronic flash sounded loud in the dead ship.
Nothing was intact. There can’t be anything here, or they’d have melted it from space. Wouldn’t they? How do they regard their dead? I’ll have to ask Harpanet. Get Reynolds to ask him, she cotrected herself. The science-fiction writers seemed to spend all their time with the captured alien; and Jenny couldn’t face one, not after this.
A large steel door lay ahead. It had been locked, but sprung partially open in the crash. Jenny pulled and it moved slightly. She wasn’t strong enough to move it farther. Jack slung the camera over his shoulder and took a grip on the door. When they pulled together it opened just far enough to let them squeeze by.
The room was tremendous, with a low ceiling and a padded floor that was now a wall. It was filled with death.
For a moment she didn’t recognize what she saw. Then her flashlight played across a human face, a child’s face, sweetly smiling-she was relieved to see that it was a doll. There was a white bloated thing wrapped in bright colored tartan under the doll. Jenny moved closer until her light showed what the doll rested on.
Like a find-the-face puzzle: now her eyes found human shapes, a knee, the back of a head, a man folded in two around a snapped spine; but all piled together like melting clay. They must have been jammed in like cattle. Here a shape that made no sense at all, with human and snout features, until it snapped into focus. An alien guard must have struck like a bomb when the ship came down, and at least three prisoners had been under him.
She gagged, and bile filled her mouth, splashed against the gas mask. Reflexively she lifted the mask. The smells of death filled her lungs. She turned and ran from the ship.
