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and swung itself open.
I blinked at the darkness, then went down a central hallway and out through the back door. An old
man was lying in a swing there, with one foot propped up on pillows. He lowered his book and peered at
me over his glasses.
'What do you want of me, son?'
'Light.'
An hour later I was washing down the last of some superb enchiladas with cold, sweet milk. As I
reached for a cluster of muscatel grapes Father Baird concluded his instructions to me. 'Nothing to do
until dark, then. Any questions?'
'I don't think so, sir. Sanchez takes me out of town and delivers me to certain others of the brethren
who will see to it that I get to General Headquarters. My end of it is simple enough.'
'True. You won't be comfortable however.'
I left Phoenix concealed in a false bottom of a little vegetable truck. 1 was stowed like cargo, with
my nose pressed against the floor boards. We were stopped at a police gate at the edge of town; I could
hear brusque voices with that note of authority, and Sanchez's impassioned Spanish in reply. Someone
rummaged around over my head and the cracks in the false bottom gleamed with light.
Finally a voice said, 'It's O.K., Ezra. That's Father Baird's handyman. Makes a trip out to the
Father's ranch every night or so.'
'Well, why didn't he say so?'
'He gets excited and loses his English. O.K. Get going, chico. Vaya usted con Dios.'
'Gracias, senores. Buenas noches.'
At the Reverend Baird's ranch I was transferred to a helicopter, no rickety heap this time, but a new
job, silent and well equipped. She was manned by a crew of two, who exchanged pass grips with me but
said nothing other than to tell me to get into the passenger compartment and stay there. We took off at
once.
The windows of the passenger space had been covered; I don't know which way we went, nor how
far, it was a rough ride, as the pilot seemed dead set on clipping daisies the whole way. It was a
reasonable precaution to avoid being spotted in a scope, but I hoped he knew what he was doing-I
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wouldn't want to herd a heli that way in broad daylight. He must have scared a lot of coyotes-I know he
frightened me.
At last I heard the squeal of a landing beam. We slid along it, hovered, and bumped gently to a stop.
When I got out I found myself staring into the maw of a tripod-mounted blaster backed up by two alert
and suspicious men.
But my escort gave the password, each of the guards questioned me separately, and we exchanged
recognition signals. I got the impression that they were a little disappointed that they couldn't let me have
it; they seemed awfully eager. When they were satisfied, a hoodwink was slipped over my head and I
was led away. We went through a door, walked maybe fifty yards, and crowded into a compartment.
The floor dropped away.
My stomach caught up with me and I groused to myself because I hadn't been warned that it was an
elevator, but I kept my mouth shut. We left the lift, walked a way, and I was nudged onto a platform of
some sort, told to sit down and hang on-whereupon we lurched away at breakneck speed. It felt like a
roller coaster-not a good thing to ride blindfolded. Up to then I hadn't really been scared. I began to
think that the hazing was intentional, for they could have warned me.
We made another elevator descent, walked several hundred paces, and my hoodwink was removed.
I caught my first sight of General Headquarters.
I didn't recognize it as such; I simply let out a gasp. One of my guards smiled. 'They all do that,' he
said dryly.
It was a limestone cavern so big that one felt outdoors rather than underground and so magnificently
lavish in its formations as to make one think of fairyland, or the Gnome King's palace. I had assumed that
we were underground from the descents we had made, but nothing had prepared me for what I saw.
I have seen photographs of what the Carlsbad Caverns used to be, before the earthquake of '96
destroyed them; General Headquarters was something like that, although I can't believe that the Carlsbad
Caverns were as big or half as magnificent. I could not at first grasp the immensity of the room I was in;
underground there is nothing to judge size by and the built-in range-finder of a human's two-eyed vision is
worthless beyond about fifty feet without something in the distance to give him scale-a house, a man, a
tree, even the horizon itself. Since a natural cave contains nothing at all that is well known, customary, the
human eye can't size it.
So, while I realized that the room I stood in was big, I could not guess just how big; my brain scaled
it down to fit my prejudices. We were standing higher than the main floor and at one end of the room; the
whole thing was softly floodlighted. I got through craning my neck and ohing and ahing, looked down and [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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