"If it offers even token resistance to the weapon, then I can't estimate the effect on the surrounding countryside," the lieutenant said. "Unless it stays integral, which I really doubt, there's going to be hot rock and shrapnel all over this valley. I don't know how far away you'll have to be, sir."

"I'll have a Jeep," Rogers said.

"Drive like hell," the lieutenant recommended. "And another thing. What sort of drive mechanism might it have?"

Rogers shook his head. "There's no outlets, no nozzles or . . . Nothing we've seen."

"If there is a drive mechanism—which seems logical, if we think of it as a spaceship—then the explosion could set it off."

Rogers took a deep breath. "I've thought about that," he said.

"We've detected no radiation in or around the bogey," Gilmonn said. "If there's any drive mechanism, I doubt very much they use rocket fuel."

"Yeah, but what do they use?" the lieutenant asked.

"Everything we do here involves some risk," Gilmonn said. "And if they think we can be bamboozled by our own imaginations . . . How much stronger does that make them? What has that kind of thinking done to us already?"

The sirens began to wail, echoing back from the mountains, painful and terrifying. Loudspeakers around the perimeter announced:

"This is an emergency. This is an emergency. Evacuate all personnel immediately." The message repeated, louder than the sirens, until Rogers felt he might jump out of his skin. Around the site, car horns began to honk. Headlights flashed like the eyes of wary animals. Gilmonn held his hands to his ears. "Are we going ahead, or are we going to stand here and waffle?"

Rogers nodded. "We're on."

The lieutenant reached into the bag and pulled out a white jacket with a crotch strap. "Residual radiation protection, sir. Put this on now," he shouted over the din. He pulled out another and donned it himself, connecting the crotch flap to a loop on the back.

The jacket weighed perhaps twenty pounds and seemed reasonably flexible, with overlapping sheets of leaded plastic sewn into its fabric.

"You do me, and I'll do you." Rogers helped secure the straps and the lieutenant reciprocated.

"Let's go, sir," the lieutenant said. Together, they lifted the weapon from its cradle in the car's trunk onto a hand truck. It weighed at least sixty-five pounds, perhaps seventy. "No need to be delicate, sir. It's made to withstand missile launch and ocean impact. We'd have to take a sledgehammer to it to do any damage."

Rogers opened the inner perimeter gate and they pulled the hand truck a hundred yards across the pounded sand and gravel trail to the entry hole.

The lieutenant lifted the cylinder from its cradle by himself and lowered it on one end into the sand. The sirens continued to scream and the loudspeakers repeated the evacuation order, over and over, painfully monotonous.