“Did the driver pay by check or credit card?”
“I don’t take checks, and I don’t take no credit cards. He paid in cash.”
“Swiss francs?”
“Pounds.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes. I remember I had to check the rate of exchange.”
“Mr. Mandel, do you happen to have a record of the license number of the car?”
“Of course,” Mandel said. He glanced down at the card. “It was a rental. Avis. He rented it in Geneva.”
“Would you mind giving me that license number?”
“Sure, why not?” He wrote the number down on a piece of paper and handed it to Robert. “What is this all about, anyway? The UFO thing?”
“No,” Robert said, in his sincerest voice. He took out his wallet and pulled out an identification card. “I’m with the IAC, the International Auto Club. My company is doing a survey on tow trucks.”
“Oh.”
Robert walked out of the garage and thought dazedly, It looks like we have a fucking UFO with two dead aliens on our hands. Then why had General Hilliard lied to him when he knew Robert would discover that it was a flying saucer that had crashed?
There could only be one explanation, and Robert felt a sudden, cold chill.
Chapter Twelve
The huge mothership floated noiselessly through dark space, seemingly motionless, traveling at twenty-two thousand miles an hour in exact synchronization with the orbit of the earth. The six aliens aboard were studying the three-dimensional field-of-view optical screen that covered one wall of the spaceship. On the monitor, as the planet Earth rotated, they watched holographic pictures of what lay below while an electronic spectrograph analyzed the chemical components of the images that appeared. The atmosphere of the land masses they overflew was heavily polluted. Huge factories befouled the air with thick, black, poisonous gases while unbiodegradable refuse was dumped into landfills and into the seas.
The aliens looked down at the oceans, once pristine and blue, now black with oil and brown with scum. The coral of the Great Barrier Reef was turning bleach-white, and fish were dying by the billions. Where trees had been stripped in the Amazon rain forest, there was a huge, barren crater. The instruments on the spaceship indicated that the earth’s temperature had risen since their last exploration three years earlier. They could see wars being waged on the planet below, which spewed new poisons into the atmosphere.
The aliens communicated by mental telepathy.
Nothing has changed with the earthlings.
It is a pity. They have learned nothing.
We will teach them.
Have you tried to reach the others?
Yes. Something is wrong. There is no reply.
You must keep trying. We must find the ship.
On earth, thousands of feet below the spaceship’s orbit, Robert placed a call from a secure phone to General Hilliard. He came on the line almost immediately.
“Good afternoon, Commander. Do you have anything to report?”
Yes. I would like to report that you are a lying sonofabitch. “About that weather balloon, General…it seems to have turned out to be a UFO.” He waited.
“Yes, I know. There were important security reasons why I couldn’t tell you everything earlier.”
Bureaucratic double-talk. There was a short silence.
General Hilliard said, “I’m going to tell you something in the strictest confidence, Commander. Our government had an encounter with extraterrestrials three years ago. They landed at one of our NATO air bases. We were able to communicate with them.”
Robert felt his heart begin to beat faster. “What—what did they say?”
“That they intended to destroy us.”
He felt a shock go through him. “Destroy us?”
“Exactly. They said they were coming back to take over this planet and make slaves of us, and that there is nothing we can do to prevent them. Not yet. But we’re working on ways to stop them. That’s why it’s imperative that we avoid a public panic so we can buy time. I think you can understand now why it’s so important that the witnesses are warned not to discuss what they saw. If word of the Idents, as we refer to them, leaked out, it would be a worldwide disaster.”
“You don’t think it would be better to prepare people and—?”