The skin of the flying saucer was formed of riveted plates. The junctions of the plates and the individual rivet heads stood out despite the nimbus because the portion of the field emanating from those surface irregularities was of a shade which contrasted with that of the plates themselves.
The whole aura shifted across the spectrum and, as the saucer continued to -rise, faded. The craft climbed vertically. A bright line appeared from the rim to the central axis, as if the nimbus had been pleated there and trebled in thickness. The line rotated across the circular undersurface faster than the second hand on a watch dial, hissing and crackling with violent electrical discharges. The rate of the saucer’s rise accelerated with the sweep of the line, so that there was only a speck of dazzling corona by the time the full surface area should have been swept. Then there was nothing at all.
“It was Dora,” said Gisela brokenly. She touched the truck’s fender with a hand for balance, looking as staggered as she had been the moment Doug had slapped her with a shot-loaded hand.
“Have the aliens come and taken your friend?” Kelly demanded harshly in order to be understood through the woman’s dismay.
“No, not the crabs,” Gisela said petulantly, turning so that both her palms were braced against the vehicle.
The breeze that was too constant to be noticed made enough noise in the background that she was hard to hear, since the truck separated her from Kelly. He stepped around the front of the vehicle to join her, though he was nervous that his appearance of haste would silence her. By focusing on the details of gathering information, Tom Kelly was able to avoid boggling inertly as a result of what he had just seen.
Whatever he had just seen.
Gisela met his eyes and straightened. “That was Dora,” she said in a firm, emotionless voice. “The first of the Special Applications craft, the prototype which escaped to the Antarctic base from the Bavarian Alps in 1945. She must have been sent to make the final pickup. And we have missed her.”
The blond woman’s face was as cool as that of a marble virgin, but tears had begun to well from the inner corners of her blue eyes. “We may as well go back into the city, Thomas Kelly. We’ll be able to communicate from the office there, but I’m sure no one will have time for us until everything has been accomplished.
“They have begun to execute the Plan already, and I am not a part of it.”
Tom Kelly took the woman’s hands in support, but only a small portion of his mind was on Gisela anymore. He was far more concerned with the fact that not all of the UFOs being sighted were under the control of aliens whose motives were at least uncertain.
Some of the spacecraft were in the hands of Nazis whose motives were not doubtful in the slightest.
Kelly started back to Diyarbakir with Gisela slumped as his passenger against the other door. He drove with the caution demanded by the loose steering and his own unfamiliarity with the roads.
Besides, there was no longer any reason for haste.
“I didn’t think they’d leave before dark,” Gisela said.
A front wheel bucked in a rut, jolting her hard against the doorframe and recalling her to her dignity. She straightened in the seat and gave a body-length quiver like the motion of a snake casting its skin. “But of course, now it doesn’t matter – secrecy. No need for it, no chance for it either. And they left me behind.”
The sky had darkened abruptly, as if the flying saucer had punched a hole in the stratosphere and let the storm rush in. That was what had happened, near enough in the larger sense, Kelly supposed. Not asking the question wouldn’t make the situation go away, though.
“Exactly what is the Plan?” the veteran asked, while his hands and eyes drove the truck and left his intellect free for things he would have preferred not to think about.
“To control the world by using your Fortress,” the dancer said, destroying with her flat voice any possibility that Kelly’s imagination might have run away with him.