CHAPTER TWENTY THREE

It was late in the day, after they’d eaten the snake seasoned with some pepper that had survived the Old Man’s charity, when they began the climb up and out of the valley. The grade was gentle and the climb little more than a final sweep up onto the eastern desert plain.

There are maybe eight miles between here and the secret testing area.

You are trying to think of other things.

Yes.

The Old Man watched the Boy as he rode atop the turret, eyes constantly scanning the far horizon.

Yes, I am trying to think of other things than the right tread of this tank.

“What shall we call the valley now that we have seen it?” he asked his granddaughter over the intercom.

There was a pause and he knew she was thinking. He knew her face when it thought. The pressed lips, the eyes searching the sky. Thinking.

“It wasn’t scary, Poppa.”

“No, not so much.”

Remember the fall to the bottom. That was scary to me when we drove in the dark and I could not tell where the edge was and what would happen next. It is even scarier to me now when I think back about it. That is how you know things were really very dangerous, when you think back and are still frightened about what might have happened. That is the fear of what-might-have-been.

“How about …” she said through the dull hum of the communications net.

The Bottom of an Ocean Valley.

The Roller-Coaster Valley.

The Valley of the Longest Night.

“How about the ‘There Is Nothing to be Afraid of Here Valley,’ Poppa?”

How about that?

Since that afternoon, after the long night of driving through the bottom of the once-ocean, the Old Man had felt the falseness in the right tread, and if he listened closely, a metallic clank that had not been there before. A clank he sometimes heard and other times, when he was sure he would hear it, not at all.

Maybe it is just an uncertainty and nothing more?

For now?

Yes, for now. And it could be these jury-rigged joysticks Sergeant Major Preston fixed up. That could be the problem.

Then you should ask your granddaughter to take over and guide the tank from the driver’s compartment. See if she notices it also.

But the Old Man could not bring himself to ask her.

If it’s true …

Then it is true.

Yes.

That night under desert skies turned western flames surrendering to the blue comfort of night, they sat and watched their fire.

I cannot stop thinking about the bad tread.

But what can you do about it?

“Where are we going?” asked the Boy.

The Old Man looked up to see both of them watching him.

“Tomorrow,” he began, “at noon, I’ll call the General and find out where we must go exactly. From what she has told me, we must find a device somewhere within this area. She tells me the device will help free her and those trapped within their bunker.”

“What does this device do? Is it a weapon?” asked the Boy.

“I don’t know,” mumbled the Old Man, feeding dry sticks into the fire.

But you should know.

Yes.

“Poppa?”

“Yes.”

“I’m hungry.”

And there is that too.

Just before noon the Boy raised his hand. The gesture was so sudden and the Boy so long unmoving, the Old Man felt electrified at its sudden movement and meaning. The Old Man stopped the tank. Below them, in a long valley amid the salt flats, lay the once-secret base, Area 51, where Natalie had directed them to find the Laser Target Designator.

The Boy scrambled across the tank and shouted above the engine’s roar in the Old Man’s face.

“There are goats, big ones, along that ridge.” The Boy pointed toward a jumble of rocks that looked like some bygone battleship crossing the ocean of a wide desert. The Old Man could not see any goats.

But he is young and his eyes are good.

“I’ll hunt one and bring it down into the base. It might take me a while.”

The Old Man nodded and the Boy climbed down from the rumbling tank and loped off in his awkward manner toward the distant rocks.

Later, after the engine had faded from whine to silence, as the wind whispered through the ancient hangars, sweeping tumbleweeds along the dry runway, the Old Man watched the distant rocks and saw nothing of the Boy.

“Where is this laser machine, Poppa?”

The Old Man turned to the base.

There is no one here and there hasn’t been for a long time.

The broken stalk of a control tower rose above the airfield. Debris remained scattered across the blistered tarmac.

“She said we would find it in there,” said the Old Man, pointing toward the tower. “In the basement.”

They began to cross the runway.

“What is this place, Poppa?”

I know.

I knew.

It was a myth. Even then.

“A place where they kept and made weapons.”

“Do you think there will be salvage here, Poppa?”

“It seems like a good place for salvage.”

It was a place they made weapons we should have never needed. I can say that. I have seen what happens if you make a weapon. If you hide it somewhere secret and even pretend that you will never use it. Pretend that it doesn’t even exist. Someday, you will use it.

And others must live with the consequences.

Yes.