"That's not really a priority here, sir," Lieutenant Sanborn said. "It would be next to impossible to harden the launch sites and runway."

"This is the Experiment Receiving Lab," Colonel Hall explained. "ERL for short. ERL holds our civilian guests and the specimen."

In a broad garage below ground level, the bus parked beside a rubber-buffered concrete loading dock. The front passenger door opened with a hiss and their escorts led Harry and Arthur out of the bus, across the dock, and into a long, pastel green hallway lined with sky-blue blank-faced doors. Each door was described by numbers and cryptic acronyms on an engraved plastic plaque mounted in a small steel holder. Somewhere, air conditioners hummed quietly. The air smelled faintly of antiseptic and new electronics.

The hall opened into a reception area equipped with two long brown vinyl-upholstered couches and several plastic chairs spaced around a table covered with magazines—scientific journals, Time and Newsweek, and a lone National Geographic. A young alert-looking major sat behind a desk equipped with a computer terminal and a card identification box. One by one, the major cleared all four of them and then punched a code into the keypad lock of a broad double door behind his desk. The door opened with a sucking hiss.

"The inner sanctum," Hall said.

"Where is it?" Harry asked.

"About forty feet from where we are right now," Hall said.

"And the civilians?"

"About the same distance, on the other side."

They entered a half-circular room equipped with more plastic chairs, a small wash-up area and lab table, and three shuttered windows mounted in the long curved wall. Harry stood by the bare lab table and rubbed his hand along the shiny black plastic top, examining his fingers briefly for dust—the gesture a professor might make in a classroom. Arthur's mouth twitched in a brief smile. Harry caught the twitch and lifted his eyebrows: So?

"Our Guest is behind the middle window," Hall said. He spoke into an intercom mounted to the left of the middle window. "Our inspectors are here. Is Colonel Phan ready?"

"I am ready," a soft, almost feminine voice replied over a speaker.

"Then let's get started."

The shutters, mounted on their side of the window, clacked and began to rise. The first layer of glass behind was curtained in black. "This is not a one-way mirror or anything fancy," Hall said. "We're not concealing our appearance from the Guest."

"Interesting," Harry said.

"The Guest has requested a particular environment, and we've done our best to meet its requirements," Lieutenant Sanborn said. "It is most comfortable in conditions of semidarkness, at a temperature of about fifteen degrees Celsius. It seems to enjoy a dry atmosphere with approximately the same mix of gases found in our own air. We believe it exited its normal environment at about six o'clock on the morning of the twenty-ninth of September to explore . . . well, frankly, we don't know why it left, but it was caught by daylight and apparently succumbed to the glare and heat by about nine-thirty."