From a Buick 8

'If the car's fine, why's he taking pictures of it?' Buck asked.

'Y's a crooked letter that can't be made straight,' Sergeant Schoondist replied, as if this explained everything. He kept his eye on Curtis, who went on circling the car like a fashion photographer circling a model, snapping photos, tucking each Polaroid as it came out of the slot into the waistband of the old khaki shorts he was wearing. While this was going on, Tony allowed the rest of those present to approach by fours and take a look. When Sandy's turn came, he was struck by how Curtis's ankles lit up green each time the Buick flashed out. Radiation! he thought.

Jesus Christ, he's got radiation burns! Then he remembered what Curt had been doing earlier and had to laugh. Michelle hadn't wanted to call him in to the phone because he was mowing the grass.

And that was what was on his ankles - grass-stains.

'Come outta there,' Phil muttered from Sandy's left. He still had the dog by the collar, although now Mister D seemed quite docile. 'Come on out, don't be pressing your luck.'

Curt started backing toward the door as if he'd heard Phil - or all of them, thinking that same thing. More likely he was just out of film.

As soon as he came through the door, Tony put an arm around his shoulders and pulled him aside. As they stood talking, a final weak pulse of purple light came. It was really no more than a twitch. Sandy looked at his watch. It was ten minutes of nine. The entire event had lasted not quite an hour.

Tony and Curt were looking at the Polaroids with an intensity Sandy couldn't understand. If, that was, Tony had been telling the truth when he said the Buick and the other stuff in the shed was unchanged. And to Sandy, all of it did look unchanged.

At last Tony nodded as if something was settled and walked back to the rest of the Troopers.

Curt, meanwhile, went to the roll-up door for a final peek. The welder's goggles were pushed up on his forehead by then. Tony ordered everyone back into the barracks except for George Stankowski and Herb Avery. Herb had come in from patrol while the lightshow was still going on, probably to take a dump. Herb would drive five miles out of his way to take a dump at the barracks; he was famous for it, and took all ribbing stoically. He said you could get diseases from strange toilet seats, and anyone who didn't believe that deserved what he got. Sandy thought Herb was simply partial to the magazines in the upstairs crapper. Trooper Avery, who would be killed in a rollover car crash ten years later, was an American Heritage man.

'You two have got the first watch,' Tony said. 'Sing out if you see anything peculiar. Even if you only think it's peculiar.'

Herb groaned at getting sentry duty and started to protest.

'Put a sock in it,' Tony said, pointing at him. 'Not one more word.'

Herb noted the red spots on his SC's cheeks and closed his mouth at once. Sandy thought that showed excellent sense.

Matt Babicki was talking on the radio as the rest of them crossed the ready-room behind Sergeant Schoondist. When Matt told Unit 6 to state his twenty, Andy Colucci's response was strong and perfectly clear. The static had cleared out again.

They filled the seats in the little living room upstairs, those last in line having to content themselves with grabbing patches of rug. The ready-room downstairs was bigger and had more chairs, but Sandy thought Tony's decision to bring the crew up here was a good one. This was family business, not police business.

Not strictly police business, at least.

Curtis Wilcox came last, holding his Polaroids in one hand, goggles still pushed up on his forehead, rubber flip-flops on his green feet. His T-shirt read HORLICKS UNIVERSITY ATHLETIC

DEPARTMENT.

He went to the Sergeant and the two of them conferred in murmurs while the rest waited. Then Tony turned back to the others. 'There was no explosion, and neither Curt nor I think there was any sort of radiation leak, either.'

Big sighs of relief greeted this, but several of the Troopers still looked doubtful. Sandy didn't know how he looked, there was no mirror handy, but he still felt doubtful.

'Pass these around, if you want,' Curt said, and handed out his stack of Polaroids by twos and threes. Some had been taken during the flashes and showed almost nothing: a glimmer of grillwork, a piece of the Buick's roof. Others were much clearer. The best had that odd, flat, declamatory quality which is the sole property of Polaroid photographs. I see a world where there's only cause and effect, they seem to say. A world where every object is an avatar and no gods move behind the scenes.

'Like conventional film, or the badges workers in radiation-intensive environments have to wear,' Tony said, 'Polaroid stock fogs when it's exposed to strong gamma radiation. Some of these photos are overexposed, but none of them are fogged. We're not hot, in other words.'

Phil Candleton said, 'No offense to you, Sarge, but I'm not crazy about trusting my 'nads to the Polaroid Corporation of America.'

'I'll go up to The Burg tomorrow, first thing, and buy a Geiger counter,' Curt said. He spoke calmly and reasonably, but they could still hear the pulse of excitement in his voice. Under the cool will-you-please-step-out-of-your-car-sir voice, Curt Wilcox was close to blowing his top.

'They sell them at the Army Surplus store on Grand. I think they go for around three hundred bucks. I'll take the money out of the contingency fund, if no one objects.'

No one did.

'In the meantime,' Tony said, 'it's more important than ever that we keep this quiet. I believe that, either by luck or providence, that thing has fallen into the hands of men who can actually do that. Will you?'

There were murmurs of agreement.

Dicky-Duck was sitting cross-legged on the floor, stroking Mister Dillon's head. D was asleep with his muzzle on his paws. For the barracks mascot, the excitement was definitely over. 'I'm all right with that as long as the needle on the old Geiger doesn't move out of the green,' Dicky-Duck said. 'If it does, I vote we call the feds.'

'Do you think they can take care of it any better than we can?' Curt asked hotly. 'Jesus Christ, Dicky! The Feebs can't get out of their own way, and - '

'Unless you have plans to lead-line Shed B out of the contingency fund - ' someone else began.

'That's a pretty stupid - ' Curt began, and then Tony put a hand on his shoulder, stilling the kid before he could go any farther and maybe hurt himself.

'If it's hot,' Tony promised them, 'we'll get rid of it. That's a promise.'

Curt gave him a betrayed look. Tony stared back calmly. We know it's not radioactive, that gaze said, the film proves it, so why do you want to start chasing your own tail?

'I sort of think we ought to turn it over to the government anyway,' Buck said. 'They might be able to help us . . . you know . . . or find stuff out . . . defense stuff . . .' His voice getting smaller and smaller as he sensed the silent disapproval all around him. PSP officers worked with the federal government in one form or another every day - FBI, IRS, DEA, OSHA, and, most of all, the Interstate Commerce Commission. It didn't take many years on the job to learn most of those federal boys were not smarter than the average bear. Sandy's opinion was that when the feds did show the occasional flash of intelligence, it tended to be self-serving and sometimes downright malicious. Mostly they were slaves to the grind, worshippers at the altar of Routine Procedure. Before joining the PSP, Sandy had seen the same sort of dull go-through-the-proper-channels thinking in the Army. Also, he wasn't much older than Curds himself, which made him young enough to hate the idea of giving the Roadmaster up. Better to hand it over to scientists in the private sector, though, if it came to that - perhaps even a bunch from the college advertised on the front of Curtis's lawn-mowing shirt.

But best of all, the Troop. The gray family.

Buck had petered out into silence. 'Not a good idea, I guess,' he said.

'Don't worry,' someone said. 'You do win the Grolier Encylcopedia, and our exciting home game.'

Tony waited for a few chuckles to ripple across the room and die away before going on. 'I want everyone who works out of this barracks to know what went on tonight, so they'll know what to expect if it happens again. Spread the word. Spread the code for the Buick as well - D as in dog.

Just D. Right? And I'll let you all know what happens next, starting with the Geiger counter. That test will be made before second shift tomorrow, I guarantee it. We're not going to tell our wives or sisters or brothers or best friends off the force what we have here, gentlemen, but we are going to keep each other exquisitely well informed. That's my promise to you. We're going to do it the old-fashioned way, by verbal report. There has been no paperwork directly concerning the vehicle out there - if it is a vehicle - and that's how it's going to stay. All understood?'

There was another murmur of agreement.

'I won't tolerate a blabbermouth in Troop D, gentlemen; no gossip and no pillow-talk. Is that understood?'

It seemed it was.

'Look at this one,' Phil said suddenly, holding up one of the Polaroids. 'The trunk's open.'

Curt nodded. 'Closed again now, though. It opened during one of the flashes, and I think it closed during the next one.'

Sandy thought of Ennis and had an image, very brief but very clear, of the Buick's trunk-lid opening and closing like a hungry mouth. See the living crocodile, take a good look, but for God's sake don't stick your fingers in its mouth.

Curt went on, 'I also believe the windshield wipers ran briefly, although my eyes were too dazzled by then for me to be sure, and none of the pictures show it.'

'Why?' Phil asked. 'Why would stuff like that happen?'

'Electrical surge,' Sandy guessed. 'The same thing that screwed up the radio in dispatch.'

'Maybe the wipers, but the trunk of a car doesn't run on electricity. When you want to open the trunk, you just push the button and lift the lid.'

Sandy had no answer for that.

'The temperature in the shed has gone down another couple of degrees,' Curt said. 'That'll bear watching.'

The meeting ended, and Sandy went back out on patrol. Every now and then, when radioing back to Base, he'd ask Matt Babicki if D was 5-by. The response was always Roger, D is 5-by-5. In later years, it would become a standard call-and-response in the Short Hills area surrounding Statler, Pogus City, and Patchin. A few other barracks eventually picked it up, even a couple over the Ohio state line. They took it to mean Is everything cool back home? This amused the men working out of Troop D, because that was what Is D still

5-by? did mean.

By the next morning, everyone in Troop D was indeed in the picture, but it was business as usual.

Curt and Tony went to Pittsburgh to get a Geiger counter. Sandy was off-shift but stopped by two or three times to check on the Buick just the same. It was quiet in there, the car simply sitting on the concrete and looking like an art exhibit, but the needle on the big red thermometer hung from the beam continued to ease down. That struck everyone as extremely eerie, silent confirmation that something was going on in there. Something beyond the ability of mere State Troopers to understand, let alone control.

No one actually went inside the shed until Curt and Tony got back in Curt's Bel Aire - SC's orders. Huddie Royer was looking through the shed windows at the Buick when the two of them turned up. He strolled over as Curt opened the carton sitting on the hood of his car and took the Geiger counter out. 'Where's your Andromeda Strain suits?' Huddie asked.

Curt looked at him, not smiling. 'That's a riot,' he said.

Curt and the Sergeant spent an hour in there, running the Geiger counter all over the Buick's hull, cruising the pick-up over the engine, taking it into the cabin, checking the seats and dashboard and weird oversized wheel. Curt went underneath on a crawly gator, and the Sergeant checked the trunk, being especially careful about that; they propped the lid up with one of the rakes on the wall. The counter's needle hardly stirred during any of this. The only time the steady cluck-cluck-cluck coming from its little speaker intensified was when Tony held the pick-up close to the radium dial of his wristwatch, wanting to make sure the gadget was working. It was, but the Roadmaster had nothing to tell it.

They broke only once, to go inside and get sweaters. It was a hot day outside, but in Shed B

the needle of the thermometer had settled just a hair below 48. Sandy didn't like it, and when the two of them came out, he suggested that they roll up the doors and let in some of the day's heat.

Mister Dillon was snoozing in the kitchenette, Sandy said; they could close him in there.

'No,' Tony said, and Sandy could see that Curtis went along with that call.

'Why not?'

'I don't know. Just a feeling.'

By three that afternoon, while Sandy was dutifully printing his name in the duty-book under 2nd Shift/3P-llP and getting ready to head out on patrol, the temperature in Shed B had dropped to 47. That was forty degrees colder than the summer day on the other side of those thin wooden walls.

It must have been around six o'clock, while Sandy was parked around the side of Jimmy's Diner on the old Statler Pike, drinking coffee and watching for speeders, that the Roadmaster gave birth for the first time.

Arky Arkariian had been the first person to see the thing that came out of the Buick, although he didn't know what he was seeing. Things were quiet at the Troop D barracks. Not serene, exactly, but quiet. This was due in large measure to Curt and Tony's report of zero radiation emanating from Shed B. Arky had come in from his trailer in Dreamland Park on top of The Bluffs, wanting his own little off-duty peek at the impounded car. He had it to himself; Shed B was for the time being entirely deserted. Forty yards away, the barracks was midshift quiet, which was about as quiet as it ever got. Matt Babicki had clocked out for the night and one of the younger cops was running dispatch. The Sarge had gone home at five o'clock. Curt, who had given his wife some cock-and-bull story about his call-out the night before, was presumably back in his flip-flop sandals and finishing his lawn like a good boy.

At five minutes past seven, the Troop D custodian (by then very pale, very thoughtful, and very scared) went past the kid in the dispatch cubby and into the kitchenette, to see who he could find. He wanted someone who wasn't a rookie, someone who knew the score. He found Huddie Royer, just putting the finishing touches on a big pot of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese.

NOW:

Arky

'Well?' the kid ask, and there was so much of his daddy in him just then - the way he sat there on the bench, the way his eyes stared into yours, the way his eyebrows quirk, most of all the headlong impatience. That impatience was his dad all over. 'Well?

'This isn't my part of the story,' Sandy tell him. 'I wasn't there. These other two were, though.'

So then, sure, the kid switch over from Sandy to me and Huddie.

'You do it, Hud,' I say. 'You're used to makin reports.'

'Shit on that,' he tell me right back, 'you were there first. You saw it first. You start.'

'Aw - '

'Well one of you start!' the boy tell us, and wham! He hit his forehead with the butt of his palm, right between the eyes. I had to laugh at that.

'Go on, Arky,' the Sarge tell me.

'Ah, nuts,' I say. 'I ain't never told it, you know, like a story. Don't know how it'll come out.'

'Give it your best shot,' Sarge say, and so I do. It was pretty hard going at first - seemed I could feel the kid's eyes boring into me like nails and I kept thinking, He ain't gonna believe this, who would? But it got easier after a little bit. If you talk about something that happened long ago, you find it open up to you all over again. It open up like a flower. That can be a good thing or a bad thing, I guess. Sitting there that night, talking to Curtis Wilcox's boy, it felt like both.

Huddie join in after awhile and started to help. He remembered all sorts of things, even the part about how it was Joan Baez on the radio. 'Redemption's in the details,' old Sarge used to say (usually when someone left something out of a report that should have been in). And all through it the kid sittin dere on the bench, looking at us, his eyes getting bigger and bigger as the evening darkened and give up its smells like it does in the summer and the bats flew overhead and thunder rumbled all the way in the south. It made me sad to see how much he looked like his father. I don't know why.

He only broke in once. Turned to Sandy, wanting to know if we still had the-

'Yes,' Sandy tell him right off. 'Oh yes. We certainly do. Plus tons of pictures. Polaroids, mostly. If there's one thing cops know about, kiddo, it's preserving the chain of evidence. Now be quiet. You wanted to know; let the man tell you.'

I know by that he mean me, so I started talking again.

THEN

Arky had an old Ford pickup in those days, a standard three-shifter (But I got four if you count d'reverse, he used to joke) with a squeaky clutch. He parked it where he would still be parking twenty-three years later, although by then he would have traded up to a Dodge Ram with the automatic transmission and the four-wheel drive.

In 1979 there was an ancient Statler County schoolbus at the far end of the parking lot, a rust-rotten yellow barge that had been there since the Korean War at least, sinking deeper and deeper into the weeds and the dirt with each passing year. Why no one ever took it away was just another of life's mysteries. Arky nestled his truck in beside it, then crossed to Shed B and looked through one of the windows in the roll-up door, cupping his hands to block the light of the sun, which was on the wester.

There was a light on overhead and the Buick sat beneath it, looking to Arky like a display model, the kind of unit that shows up so pretty under the lights that anyone in his right mind would want to sign on the line and drive that honey home. Everything looked 5-by except for the trunk-lid. It was up again.

I ought to report that to the duty officer, Arky thought. He wasn't a cop, just a custodian, but sometimes trooper gray rubs off. He stepped back from the window, then happened to glance up at the thermometer Curt and the Sergeant had mounted from one of the overhead beams. The temperature in the shed had gone up again, and by quite a lot. Sixty-one degrees in there. It occurred to Arky that the Buick was like some sort of weird refrigerator coil that had now turned itself off (or perhaps burnt itself out during the fireworks show).

The sudden rise in temperature was something else no one knew, and Arky was excited. He started to swing away from the door, meaning to hurry directly across to the barracks. That was when he saw the thing in the corner of the shed.

Nothing but an old bunch of rags, he thought, but something else suggested . . . well, something else. He went back to the glass, once more cupping his hands to the sides of his face.

And no, by God, that thing in the corner was not just a bunch of rags.

Arky felt a flu-like weakness in the joints of his knees and the muscles of his thighs. The feeling spread upward into his stomach, dropping it, and then to his heart, speeding it up. There was an alarming moment when he was almost certain he was going to drop to the ground in a faint.