Chapter 8
Astrid stood on an outcrop and looked out over the Nevada desert. Even though it wasn't a particularly hot day, the sun was glaring on pale rocks and dirt.
A lizard scampered out of her way as she climbed down to rejoin Walter and Agent Mulder.
"I don't see anything," she said.
Mulder nodded. He was feeling better after taking some painkillers for his headache, but being out in a desert looking for signs of UFO activity was bringing back too many memories. It was an effort to keep Scully out of his thoughts.
"In a lot of cases, UFOs leave marks on the ground: scorch marks, vortex marks, radioactivity."
"Is the Geiger counter picking anything up?" Astrid asked Walter.
"Yes. There is radioactivity here. Of course, that could be coming from the minerals."
Nina Sharp, dressed in a maroon pantsuit that was entirely out of place in the desert, walked up behind him, followed by a small team of professional searchers. "It isn't," she said. "Our geologists have already confirmed the radiation isn't coming from the rocks. Agent Mulder, it's an honor to meet you. I've been studying your work for many years. My name is Nina Sharp. I can't tell you how grateful I am to have you with us searching for our missing scientist."
Mulder wasn't sure what to say in response, so he said nothing as she shook his hand.
Then he turned his attention back to the search operation. "Abductees are usually returned within hours of being taken, sometimes days, but they're usually returned near the place they were taken."
"That's good to know," Nina said. "We'll have helicopters fly over the area, including the launch site."
The search continued, but after a few minutes Mulder had to sit down in the shade of a jeep in exhaustion. His muscles were weak after years of disuse. And, he had to admit to himself as he gulped lukewarm water from a bottle, he wasn't as young as he used to be.
There was a question that came unwelcome to his mind: did he wish they hadn't woken him up? What if they'd just left him in the coma until he died? He'd always thought of himself as a person who prefered harsh realities to pleasant fantasies, but he felt old and weak and useless here. It would be different if Scully were here, the real Scully, with her brilliance, her dedication, her flashes of inspiration, the way she never backed down when she thought she was right, never agreed with something just to avoid confrontation.
Was that the real Scully, or the Scully his mind had created? It was hard for him to sort the memories of the one from the other. The real Scully was the one who hadn't loved him, and who would never have left her career at the FBI to be with him.
"Hey, you okay?"
He squinted up at Astrid. "Yeah. I just needed a break."
"It's going to take your body and your brain a long time to get back to normal. Maybe you should head back to the hotel. We'll let you know when we find anything."
Mulder shook his head. "I want to keep looking. I'll be fine in a minute."
"Don't kid yourself." She shouted to a nearby searcher in a Massive Dynamic uniform. "Hey, can you take Agent Mulder back to the hotel please?"
"Of course."
At the hotel, Mulder ate a sandwich, drank some coffee, then sat in the sofa staring out the window as the glaring sun over Las Vegas sank down and the city's garish neon came out. He felt acutely alone. His mother was dead. The Lone Gunmen, he'd learned, had died in a bizarre accident in the course of one of their investigations. Skinner was retired, and no one he'd talked to at the FBI knew how to get in touch with him. And Scully was gone. Quite likely dead, if his memory of the night he was shot was accurate. But was it? He remembered almost kissing her, and her having a sudden violent reaction to a bee sting, and he remembered being shot by a man posing as an ambulance driver, but was that memory accurate, or just part of the fantasy he'd constructed?
Either way, she was gone, and he was alone in the world.
He went to bed with a pounding headache that his pain medication didn't seem to be touching. He found he couldn't think right now about the years he'd lost, the world he'd woken up in, the case of the missing scientist, or what he was going to do after the case. All he could think about was what happened to Scully.
There was a flash of light behind his eyes that seemed to correspond with a sharp stab of pain. He saw himself, lying on a dark street, bleeding from the head as an ambulance drove away. He heard a cry, so anguished it sounded inhuman, almost like the sound of a seagull.
He saw Scully, saw her eyes look up at him. He couldn't see anything but her eyes.
He opened his eyes. His hotel room was dark. He realised the sound he'd heard had come from his own throat. He sobbed into his pillow.
The search in the desert continued as the heat of the day gave way to the icy chill of night.
Astrid wished she'd packed a jacket.
"So what do you think really happened to Dr. Wang?" Peter asked.
"I don't know. I'm starting to wonder if he sank in some quicksand."
"There's no such thing as quicksand. It's just a myth."
"How do you know? People think everything's just a myth until it gets proven true."
"You may have a point there."
"Of course I have a point," she said. "What people used to call sea monsters we now call whales, sharks, giant squid. The whole ocean was mysterious because humans didn't have the technology to look into it. People used to dismiss the existence of meteorites by saying rocks couldn't fall out of the sky because there were no rocks in the sky. Aliens might turn out to be just the same kind of thing."
Peter shrugged. "They might. But, honestly, quicksand seems more plausible, and the most plausible scenario is Dr. Wang fell down a canyon or sinkhole somewhere out here."
Astrid looked at him and chuckled.
"What?"
"You're awfully skeptical for a guy from another universe."
"Touché."
They kept walking, scanning the ground with flashlights and marking off their search area grid by grid with a GPS transmitter.
"I'm guessing you had a telescope as a kid, right?" Astrid asked.
"Yeah, I did."
"Did you ever try to signal UFOs?"
"As a matter of fact, I rigged up a radio to automatically send out an automated sequence of prime numbers in rapid sequence at summer camp when I was thirteen. I never heard anything back."
"But it was worth a shot, right?"
"I think humans want to believe in things like aliens, or elves, or sea monsters because we're afraid of being alone."
Astrid pointed her flashlight beam up toward the black sky and the brilliantly bright stars, and started turning the light off and on, trying to remember how to say "Hello" in Morse code.
"That light wouldn't be nearly powerful enough to make it out of Earth's atmosphere, much less…"
"Shh." Astrid held up her finger. "Do you hear that?"
Peter tilted his head and listened. There was a sound, a low humming or whirring.
"Probably an ATV."
"An ATV out at night?"
"Sure. Why not?"
Astrid turned off her flashlight. A moment later, Peter turned off his.
It was a strange sound. Perhaps it was a swarm of night insects, but it sounded too regular.
A yellow-white light grew at the crest of a nearby bluff.
"See, what'd I tell you?" said Peter. "It's an ATV."
It wasn't.
The object that rose above the horizon was definitely airborne. It moved too slowly to be an airplane, too quiet for a helicopter, too loud for a hot air balloon. It had one large light surrounded by a perimeter of smaller lights that bounced back and forth like they were bouncing off each other. It was shaped like an equilateral triangle with rounded corners.
It appeared to be a solid, physical object, it was unquestionably flying, and neither of them could identify it.
U. F. O.
It was gliding slowly maybe 50 meters above the ground, though it was hard to tell how big it was.
Peter slowly raised his radio. "This is Peter Bishop to MD search central. Do you copy?"
When he released the talk button, no sound seemed to come from the radio, not even static.
He turned up the volume. There was something there, neither static nor voice. It was a rhythmic undulating buzzing. Rhythmic, but not regular.
"Oh God," Peter whispered.
The UFO stopped, hovering in one spot in the sky, then turned and floated in their direction.
"Duck!" Astrid said as she grabbed Peter's sleeve and pulled him down between some nearby sagebrush.
The UFO slowed right above them. Suddenly a blindingly bright light, like the beam of a giant flashlight, shot down to exactly where the had just been standing. Seconds later, all lights shut off at once and the darkened craft shot away at seemingly impossible speed. It was gone in a second.
When the shock began to wear off, Peter tried the radio again. "Peter… This is Peter Bishop to MD search central. Do you copy?"
"Loud and clear, Bishop," came an immediate reply. "What is it?"
He took a deep, tremulous breath. "Did you guys see that thing?"