“But it wasn’t a meteor.”
“No.”
“And?”
“It landed in the middle of a field.”
“Inside the base?”
“Yes.”
“What did it look like, falling to the ground?”
“I just told you.” Joe tried to hide his frustration. “At first, it looked like a meteor. A falling star. It had a trail. But as it came closer, we realized it was very small, and it was going to hit the ground.”
“How small was it?” asked the Agent in Black for the hundredth time.
“About the size of a basketball,” Joe answered tiredly.
“And you two just ran over to it?”
“Yes.”
“You didn’t think to report an unidentified object landing on military ground?”
“No, I...we...weren’t thinking, I guess. We’d had a few beers...we were off-duty.”
“Lieutenant commanders are never completely off-duty.”
Joe Carter remembered that he was supposed to be on leave. “I know. It was a mistake.”
“So, what did it look like?”
Joe looked longingly at the water. He lit a cigarette instead. He raised his bloodshot eyes to the Agent in Black. “It looked like a sphere, I told you. About the size of a football...” Joe trailed off. No, that wasn’t right.
“A football?” The Agent in Black was right on it.
“No, that’s not what I meant.” Joe Carter’s brain felt like jelly. He felt truly ill. He frowned. He concentrated. “A basketball. I meant it was the size of a basketball.”
“You just said football. Which was it?”
“A basketball. It was round. I got my words mixed up. I’m sorry.”
The Agent in Black regarded his detainee, for a detainee was exactly what Lieutenant Commander Joseph Carter was. For the moment, anyhow. The Agent in Black studied the man below him, and figured the man was either withholding information, or was coming down with something. Or hung-over, which the agent doubted. After all, Carter had been under surveillance for the last forty-three hours, ever since “The Incident.”
In fact, both Lieutenant Commanders Joseph Carter and Mike Mendoza had been watched closely—followed, even, from San Diego to Seal Beach. The Agent in Black was slightly surprised that they hadn’t been aware of it. At least, they hadn’t given any indication of knowing that they were being tailed, other than nearly missing their freeway exit.
The agent sipped his coffee, and glanced at Carter’s untouched water. “You thirsty?” he asked.
“No.”
Silence.
“What did you do when you reached the fallen object?”
Carter sighed. “Like I said, we got to it and...we looked around to see where it came from. It just fell out of the sky. We didn’t see any aircraft, and no, the wind wasn’t blowing, and no, the thing wasn’t hot, and yes, it looked like a round rock. Gray in color, but that impression might have been due to the moonlight.”
While the agent watched him closely, the lieutenant commander stood and crossed over to the room’s only window. The guards watched him closely, too. Carter tried to close the blinds just a little more, but couldn’t seem to make the damn things work. Blast it! The light was just too damn bright.