The ground became broken to either side of the road, lifting in outcrops of dense rock shaded by brush instead of sere grass. Gisela downshifted again into compound low. A moment later, the hood of the truck dipped as the ruts led into a gorge notched through the plain in two stages.
They drove down the upper, broader level; then Gisela cramped the wheels hard left to follow the track across a single-arched bridge of stone, vaulting the narrow center of the gully. There was enough water in the rivulet below to flash in the sun before the truck began climbing from the declivity with a shiver of wheelspin.
“How old was that bridge?” asked Kelly, craning his neck to look out the back window, an effort made vain by the coating of dust over the glass.
“Seljuk at least,” answered the woman with a shrug which merged into a shoulder thrust as the steering fought her when they rattled out of the gully. “Maybe Byzantine, maybe Roman, maybe – who knows? There’s probably been a bridge there as long as men have lived here and farmed . . . and that is a very long time.”
“And now you’re here,” Kelly said quietly. “The Service.”
“Here.” Gisela’s smile was more arrogant than pleased. “And soon, everywhere. To the world’s benefit.”
The ground dropped a few feet on the left side of the road. Gisela swung to the right around a basalt rock face and then pulled left toward the recently refurbished gate of a han, a caravanserai, ruined by time.
The walls of basalt blocks weathered gray gleamed in the sunlight, but the shadowed gaps in the dome of the mosque which formed one corner of the enclosure were as black as a colonel’s soul. The dome was crumbling; but, though the ages had scalloped the upper edge of the wall around the courtyard, it was still solid and at no point less than eight feet high.
The original gateway had been built between the mosque and a gatehouse, but part of the latter had been demolished when the new gate was constructed. This was steel, double-leafed and wide enough to pass a semi-trailer. The posts to which the leaves were hinged were themselves steel, eight inches in diameter and concrete-filled if they were not solid billets.
In the far corner of the facing wall there were arrow slits, in the walls and the blockhouse. It struck Kelly that the stone edifice was proof to any modern weapons up through tank cannon, and that the embrasures could shower machinegun fire on trespassers as effectively as the arrows for which they had been intended.
Gisela pulled up to the gate and honked imperiously. The dust cloud they had raised in their passage continued to drift forward, settling on Kelly’s right sleeve and the ledge of his open window. The back of his neck began to tingle. He shifted in his seat, unwilling to draw his revolver but certain that a premonition of danger was causing his hair to bristle.
The woman honked again and said, “If somebody’s asleep at this time, they’ll – ”
“Jesus Christ!” shouted Kelly. He unlatched his door so hastily that his feet tangled as he got out of the cab. He did not draw his gun, any more than he would have thought to do so if he found himself in the path of a diesel locomotive.
At first it was more like watching time-lapse photography of a building under construction, for the object was huge and silent and rising vertically in a nimbus of brilliant light. Hairs that had been prickling all over Kelly’s body now stood straight out, and when he reached for the car door to steady himself a static spark snapped six inches from the metal to numb his hand.
It wasn’t a cylinder rising on jacks from the han courtyard: it was a disk fifty feet in diameter with a bluntly-rounded circumference and a central depth of about twelve feet.
It was a fucking flying saucer.
Gisela was out of the truck also, shouting and waving her clenched fist in obvious fury. The underside of the saucer was clearly visible, so it could scarcely be called an unidentified flying object. The veil of light surrounding the vehicle as it rose was pastel and of uncertain color, shifting like the aurora but bright enough to be visible now in broad daylight.