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looked like a tiny flashlight with bumps dotting the base. "Ms. Helschmidt?"
She fumbled with a chain about her neck and withdrew an identical-looking rod.
The major motioned to the security policemen to stand aside. The guards
stood around the bunker in a semicircle, facing outward with weapons ready.
Pritchard glanced around the empty desert, trying to find any evidence of a
threat.
At first it seemed ludicrous to Pritchard that such precautions were
being taken deep inside of Alpha Base, already past four barbed-wire fences
and dozens of intruder-prevention measures. Perhaps the extra show of security
was to impress either himself or the IVI team.
Major Felowmate escorted Francine Helschmidt and Pritchard around to
the side of the bunker. A shoebox-sized panel protruded from the wall at
shoulder height. Felowmate motioned for Pritchard to step back. "Stand outside
of the red lines, sir. That's where the bunker doors will swing open."
Pritchard took a step back to be completely away from the semicircle
only half-visible on the dirt-covered concrete slab.
Felowmate wiped dust from the top of the box and squinted at a number
engraved on its surface. "SK-3452," he said. He checked a number written on a
small card he withdrew from his pocket. "This is it. Doublechecked." Both he
and Helschmidt made some sort of adjustment to their keys.
Pritchard fidgeted on his feet in the desert sun. He should have
delegated the tedious retrieval task to someone else -- but he wanted to keep
this under his own close supervision.
"Bunker number is keyed in," said Helschmidt.
"Have you done this before?" Felowmate asked her.
Helschmidt hesitated. "No." She seemed embarrassed, but Felowmate
ignored it. "I'll go first. You'll have ten seconds to insert your key or
every alarm on base will go off. Ready? Here goes."
Felowmate inserted the squat rod into the box. Beside him, Helschmidt
added her holo-key to an adjacent receptacle. Inside the shielded box, lasers
scanned the keys' interference patterns. A green light glowed at the bottom of
the box.
"Please wait until the doors stop moving," Felowmate said as the two
massive doors began to crawl open, like the gaping entrance to some ancient
tomb.
Felowmate said, "Each one of these steel doors weighs somewhere around
twenty tons. They're five inches thick and reinforced with rebar -- built to
withstand a twenty-thousand-pound bomb going off right next to them."
When the doors stopped moving, they looked like the giant jaws of some
behemoth, waiting to swallow anything that came too close. "General, Ms.
Helschmidt?" Felowmate motioned to them, then pointed toward the waiting
security policemen. "Smitty -- you, Witz, and Dardanelle follow us in. You
know the drill."
"Yes, sir," all three answered at once. They drew up their weapons.
Felowmate said, "They've got orders to shoot, General, if anyone tries
anything."
Pritchard smiled to himself. "Don't worry, I won't."
"We are waiting, Major," said Helschmidt. She stood by the entrance
with the other three members of the verification team.
When they stepped into the shadows, a hint of coolness along with a
musty smell wafted from the bunker. The small man in the big suit pulled out a
computerized notepad. He made notes with a stylus as they entered the bunker.
Stark screened-in lights cast shadows across the floor. Yellow lines were
painted on the rough-surfaced concrete.
Felowmate pointed to a yellow band. "Follow the yellow brick road,
please -- we need you to stay inside the path." He turned to Pritchard. "The
devices are dispersed here inside the bunker. Can't risk having too many nukes
too close together, otherwise the probability of spontaneous fission goes up.
Too many stray neutrons in the air."
As his eyes adjusted to the light, Pritchard could see corridors
running off in different directions. After walking past two intersections,
Felowmate stopped and pointed toward the right. "This is the chamber we want.
Ms. Helschmidt?"
They approached another steel vault door. A second shoebox-sized panel,
identical to the one outside, was embedded in the wall. Felowmate extracted
his holo-key. "Same procedure as before."
After inserting their keys, he and Francine Helschmidt stepped back and
allowed the vault door to open. Felowmate said, "This is it, General. Here's
your nukes."
If the alien artifact on the Moon turned ou;t to be an immediate
threat, and if Pritchard had to jump through this many interlocks and
doublechecks before they could use their defenses, they might just as well
kiss Earth goodbye. He would have to speak with Celeste about streamlining the
command and control process.
Pritchard waited for the major to enter the chamber first. When no one
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