Altair Grus was just finishing his first day on the job at with the Mendel’s space agency. His job description was pretty simple—all he had to do was stand guard outside the elevator on Mendel’s floor, four thousand feet below the Earth’s surface, and don’t let anyone but Mendel and his technicians through the door. Occasionally, there would be visiting dignitaries or other authorized officials, but Grus just could not see the point of securing an elevator lobby inside a secured facility, especially since there were already three levels of security to get to the elevator lobby on the ground floor level. It was going to be a boring job full of long days of, well, nothing.
The secured facility was inside a fenced compound situated about thirty miles from the nearest town. Grus had been interviewed at a coffee shop in that town, by a man who came heavily armed and driving an old and non-descript car. He wondered if this interview was even legitimate, and that fear was reinforced when he went to the address on the business card he got from the interviewer. He drove the thirty miles out into the desert, and when he got there, there was only a chain link fence. It was padlocked, and posted with several government-type signs giving various “enter at your own risk” statements, and other veiled warnings about staying off the premises. He waited for five or ten minutes. He wasn’t sure whether to just sit there, or turn around and go home. He checked his wristwatch, and when he looked up and looked back through the chain link fence, he saw what looked like a cloud of dust swiftly approaching him from somewhere behind the fence.
When the dust settled, a round vehicle appeared before him. There were no wheels that he could see, and he couldn’t remember seeing any tracks of any kind.
“Is that a hovercraft?”
The driver or pilot or whatever he was called didn’t respond to the question. He walked calmly to the gate, removed the padlock, and spoke to Grus.
“Pull your car inside the fence and pull up next to the transport.”
“The transport? What is that thing?” Grus made another attempt at finding out what the vehicle was, but again, got no response.
“Move your vehicle now, please. We’re on a very tight schedule.”
“Okay, I’ll move it already.”
Grus moved his car next to the “transport” and got out. The man climbed into the transport from the top center through what looked like a manhole cover, and simply motioned to Grus with a hand out of the hole to climb in after him. He couldn’t see how to climb on top, and struggled to get on top. Finally, the man emerged half way from the transport and offered a hand to Grus, and pulled him up, and they were both inside. The top sealed behind them. Grus couldn’t believe what he saw. The top of the transport sealed by fading to black with a final burst of bright white light much like when you turned off a really old television set and the image recedes into darkness with a burst of residual radiation.
