Manchek kept hearing that brief communication, in his
mind, over and over. Each time, it sounded more bizarre and
terrifying.
He looked out the window at the cliffs. The sun was
setting now, and only the tops of the cliffs were lighted by
fading reddish sunlight; the valleys lay in darkness. He
looked ahead at the other limousine, raising a small dust
cloud as it carried the rest of the team to the crash site.
"I used to love westerns," somebody said. "They were all
shot out here. Beautiful country."
Manchek frowned. It was astonishing to him how people
could spend so much time on irrelevancies. Or perhaps it was
just denial, the unwillingness to face reality.
The reality was cold enough: the Phantom had strayed
into Area WF, going quite deep for a matter of six minutes
before the pilot realized the error and pulled north again.
However, once in WF, the plane had begun to lose stability.
And it had finally crashed.
He said, "Has Wildfire been informed?"
A member of the group, a psychiatrist with a crew cut--
all post teams had at least one psychiatrist-- said, "You
mean the germ people?"
"Yes."
"They've been told," somebody else said. "It went out on
the scrambler an hour ago."
Then, thought Manchek, there would certainly be a
reaction from Wildfire. They could not afford to ignore this.
Unless they weren't reading their cables. It had never
occurred to him before, but perhaps it was possible-- they
weren't reading the cables. They were so absorbed in their
work, they just weren't bothering.
"There's the wreck," somebody said. "Up ahead."
***
Each time Manchek saw a wreck, he was astonished.
Somehow, one never got used to the idea of the sprawl, the
mess, the destructive force of a large metal object striking
the earth at thousands of miles an hour. He always expected a
neat, tight little clump of metal, but it was never that way.
The wreckage of the Phantom was scattered over two
square miles of desert. Standing next to the charred remnants
of the left wing, he could barely see the others, on the
horizon, near the right wing. Everywhere he looked, there
were bits of twisted metal, blackened, paint peeling. He saw
one with a small portion of a sign still intact, the
stenciled letters clear: DO NOT. The rest was gone.
It was impossible to make anything of the remnants. The
fuselage, the cockpit, the canopy were all shattered into a
million fragments, and the fires had disfigured everything.
As the sun faded, he found himself standing near the
remains of the tail section, where the metal still radiated
heat from the smoldering fire. Half-buried in the sand he saw
a bit of bone; he picked it up and realized with horror that
it was human. Long, and broken, and charred at one end, it
had obviously come from an arm or a leg. But it was oddly
clean-- there was no flesh remaining, only smooth bone.
