Free Majestic by Whitley Strieber Page B

it?" Walters asked.
    Gray spoke. "The lack of large debris does suggest a balloon or some such thing."
    The rancher walked into the mess. "I want y'all to take a look at something." He pointed at the ground.
    "Those things."
    Gray saw some small balsa beams, some shaped like the letter I and others like a T. He picked one up. It was marked by violet hieroglyphics.
    "Cyrillic?" Hesseltine asked.
    "No," Walters said as he examined it.
    "Jap?"
    Gray looked at the writing. It was vaguely reminiscent of Egyptian, but there were no familiar animal shapes.
    "I've never seen anything like it before."
    The little girl held up a piece of what seemed to Gray to be parchment. There were rows of little squiggles on it. They were pink and purple, and Gray couldn't make anything out of them at all.
    "Maybe they're numbers," Hesseltine said. "The way they're in columns like that."
    The little girl held another piece of the parchment up to the sun, the disk of which had just cleared the horizon. "You can see yellow flowers inside. Its real pretty."
    The torn pieces of parchment were abundant, and all four soldiers picked them up and held them to the sun.
    "Cornflowers," Gray said.
    Walters grunted. "Primroses. Cornflowers are blue."
    "You can't burn it, bend it, tear it or nothin'," the rancher said. "Just like the tinfoil."
    PFC Winters spoke. "What I think you all have here," he said in his drawl, "is the pieces of one of them flying disks like folks've been seeing."
    Nobody replied. Suddenly Walters grabbed a large piece of foil and begun struggling furiously with it. He pulled it, ripped at it, stood on it and tried to stretch it. Nothing.
    Finally he took out his pistol. "Okay, folks, we'll see just how strong this stuff really is." He laid the three-foot-square piece of material out on the ground and fired into it.
    There was a blast from the gun, and the foil swarmed into the ground behind the bullet. "That tore it," the PFC
    said. He and Walters pulled it out of the ground.
    The flattened bullet was lying in the middle of the foil, which was completely unmarred.
    "You sure that's not Cyrillic on that paper," Walters asked again.
    The bullet just lay there, flattened. The foil shone in the sun. Gray took out his Old Golds and with shaking hands pulled the foil from around the few cigarettes that remained in the pack. He took a piece of the strange metal in one hand and the cigarette wrapping in the other.
    The metal was thinner by a considerable margin. He was a methodical man, and not quick to make decisions. He carefully returned the cigarette wrapping to the pack and put his cigarettes in his pocket. He then picked up a piece of the parchment and attempted to burn it with his lighter. It would not burn.
    "Nothin' burns," the rancher said. "And the wood doesn't break."
    Walters grabbed a piece of the wood. It bent like rubber. No matter how he twisted it around he could not make it snap. Finally he threw it to the ground. "What the hell is it?"
    Gray looked at the PFC. "I think you're absolutely right, soldier. I think what we have here is the remains of an exploded flying disk."
    "Oh, Lord," Walters said. "What are they doing here? What are they up to?"
    "Maybe just looking around," Hesseltine replied.
    "By dark of night? In secret? I hardly think that's all they're doing." Walters looked grim. He had taken his pistol from his shoulder holster and stuck it in his belt.
    "We don't know what they're doing," Gray said. There was annoyance in his voice. He didn't like loose speculation. They weren't equipped even to think about things like intent. "What we need to do is gather up as much of this stuff as we can, and get it back to the field pronto." "We ought to recce the whole site,"
    Hesseltine said. The four of them walked it, making rough measurements and kicking under the sheets of foil, the wooden beams, the parchment, looking for any large objects.
    It took them about an hour to examine the area and fill the jeeps with as much