Journal of a UFO Investigator (31 page)

He stood by the curb and held my arm tightly and waved his other arm in a great sweep. He shouted something, very loud. A taxi braked. He yanked open the rear door, pushed me in, and jumped in beside me. He spoke to the driver in rapid Hebrew. “Hadassah,” I heard him say. “Hadassah.”

I slumped in the seat. I stared at two huge foam rubber dice that hung from the rearview mirror, while I caught my breath. “
Todah rabah
,” I said as soon as I could talk. “Thank you very,
very
much.
Todah rabah
.”

The sergeant looked out the window. He gave a deep sigh. He said: “Oh, you're very welcome, I'm sure. But really, Mr. Shapiro, I'd have expected a
somewhat
more effusive greeting from you. We haven't seen each other since our drive to Miami three years ago, have we?”

“Sssh! Sssh!” He choked with laughter; his face was red from struggling to hold it in. “That's not my name anymore. Hasn't been for years now. They don't look kindly on Diaspora names in these parts.”

“But how in the
world
did you—”

“I'm Yehoshua now. Or Joshua, if you really must. That's the way you say Yehoshua in English.”

“I know.”

His laughing fit had passed. He relaxed into the seat. “I've made aliyah. But surely you'd guessed that. You know what making aliyah means, don't you?”

“It's the expression for immigrating to Israel. Right?”

“Absolutely right.
May-achooz
, one hundred percent, as we say around here. Literally, it means ‘going up.' You want to
go up
, my boy, this is the way to do it. Fine view from up here.”

I supposed he meant that last remark figuratively. But it might have been literal too. We'd left the downtown streets behind, winding our way up into the barren brown hills around Jerusalem. Their slopes glared hot in the morning sun.

“Julian. I mean, Yehoshua. There's a lot of talking we need to do.”

He nodded and said something I couldn't catch. His buckteeth, which I only now noticed, pressed into his lower lip.

“How did you happen to be on guard at the border at the time I was crossing? Was that just coincidence or what?”

“Coincidence,” he said thoughtfully. He seemed to relax a bit, as though he'd expected me to ask a different question—like where had he been that night at the airport?—and now was relieved I hadn't. “That would be an awful lot of coincidence for one night, wouldn't it? Still, coincidences do happen. So it might have been coincidence, really. What do you think?”

“Don't be cute, Julian. I don't have the energy. I haven't slept since the night before last. And you and your friend Shimon weren't exactly good company, remember?”

“No,” he said, “I guess we weren't.”

“You and Shimon and that third character—what was his name? Somehow I never got his name.”

“Itzig.”

“Yes, that's right. Itzig the wit. Itzig the humorist.”

“Now, take it easy, Danny—”

“Itzig, with his jokes about my
baytzeem
.”

He fumbled nervously at a pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket. “Incidentally,” I said. “Speaking of my
baytzeem
. What kinds of things would your—your
comrades-in-arms
be doing to me right now? If I hadn't managed to escape.”

Out came the cigarettes. He looked toward the tiny, frail creature who lay in my arms, her breathing louder and more strained than I'd ever heard it. He put the cigarettes back into his pocket.

“Nothing very terrible,” he said. “They might have roughed you up a little bit. More to scare you than anything else. You don't have to worry. I'd have found a way to stop it if it had gotten out of hand.”

“ ‘Found a way'? Aren't you the one giving the orders?”

“Yes and no. Yes, I'm the sergeant, they're the privates. I'm the one who tells them what to do. But no, I'm not a free agent. There are limits. I'm under those limits, just as you are.

“Believe me,” he said. “These are strange times. And my guess is you haven't grasped just how strange.”

“Explain it to me,” I said.

“You must understand, Danny, that Shimon and Itzig don't know a lot of the things you and I know. Neither do most of the people in the higher ranks. Some do. That's how I was able to get myself posted to Abu Tor. But most don't.”

“Get yourself posted? So then you
did
—”

“No, no. Let me finish. They know there's something odd going on. But they won't let themselves think about it. For everything that happens there's an official explanation, and they believe it all. Just like the man in the street. Like back in the States when it came to UFOs. You remember that, don't you? They pride themselves on being very
practical
, very
matter-of-fact
. We're very much the
realists
, we Israelis. So
realistic
we can't see that the ...
curtains
are fraying. They're almost worn away by now. Only a few threads left—”

“The
curtains
?”

“And those threads are already beginning to snap.”

“Julian, what—”

“They've heard something about the Makhtesh. You can't be in the army and
not
hear about the Makhtesh, these days. They think it's all just rumor. There was a leak at the Dimona reactor, they think, and that's why the roads are blocked off—”

“Julian,” I said, “what the hell are you
talking
about?”

THEY PUT HER ON A COT UNDER AN OHYGEN TENT, WHILE THEY
paged Dr. Zeitlin. Julian and I sat on vinyl chairs beside the cot. He explained to me why we had to wait for Dr. Zeitlin. Of all the Hadassah doctors, he said, only Zeitlin knew what was going on at this Makhtesh. Only Zeitlin would have some inkling of what the creature was that he needed to treat. Every several minutes there was an announcement on the public-address system, of which the only word I could make out was
Zeitlin
.

Dr. Zeitlin didn't appear. I sat slumped in the chair, going in and out of a doze, wondering from time to time what the Makhtesh was and what might be happening there.

Finally they found a cot for me, and I got a few hours of real sleep. We were up before dawn. Julian brought me a uniform.

“I forgot to tell you,” he said as I followed him out the hospital doors. “You're honorarily in the army till this business is finished. Nobody's going to stop a pair of uniformed soldiers.”

The stars glittered above us as, in the strange khaki clothing, I climbed behind the wheel of the jeep. Venus, more brilliant than I'd ever seen it, rose in the east. Julian showed me how to shift the gears.

I wish I could say it broke my heart to leave my baby in the care of strangers, that I could hardly bring myself to begin our journey, that my spirit stayed with her in her hospital bed. Truth was, I felt liberated and exhilarated as I guided the jeep onto the dark, empty road and saw the hospital's dim bulk recede in the rearview mirror.

“Did Zeitlin ever show up?” I asked.

“Oh, eventually,” Julian said with a yawn. “Everybody shows up eventually. You just have to spend half your life waiting for them.”

“He examined her?”

“Yes, he examined her. He also read the letter you brought across from that Arab doctor—what was his name?—Talibi. He read it very attentively. He's obviously got a lot of respect for Talibi. I have the impression the two of them know each other.”

“How would that be?” I asked. “An Israeli and a Jordanian—how could they ever meet?”

“International conferences maybe.” He yawned again. “Or maybe from the time before independence. Zeitlin's old enough to have been in practice back then, and I assume Talibi is too. In those days there wasn't any barbed wire border slicing Jerusalem in two, the way there is now.”

“Jerusalem will be one,” I said.

“
What?
” said Julian.

I gripped the wheel hard. My voice sounded as strange to me as it evidently had to Julian, and I was overcome by the feeling I was speaking and acting in a dream. I was afraid I'd run the jeep off the road.

“Who said that?” said Julian.

“I don't know. I think it was
them
. The aliens, the Elder Gods—I don't know what to call them. But
them
.”

“Think, Danny, think.” I could hear the fear and excitement in his voice. “Did they say Jerusalem was going to be
one
, O-N-E? Or
won
, W-O-N?”

“I don't know,” I said.

It was a long time before either of us spoke.

“Is there hope?” I said finally.

“Hope? For what?”

“You know. For
her
.”

“There's always hope,” Julian said. “Even on the truck taking you to the gas chambers there's hope. That's one thing you learn every day, being in Israel.”

“But is there hope for
her
?”

“Just drive, Danny.”

 

The road snaked down from the mountains into the desert. The sun rose upon us as we passed Peniel.

I mean, Beersheva.

It was a dusty, ramshackle place, hot even at that hour. A few trucks lumbered through the rutted dirt streets. A few bedouin led their camels. By the edge of town, not far from the last rows of prefabricated apartment buildings, the bedouin had pitched their black goat-hair tents. Then we left these behind too, and we were alone in the flinty barrenness of the Negev.

“Like to switch drivers?” Julian said.

I did, very much. My swollen foot felt made of lead. I braked in the middle of the road. It didn't matter; we were the only traffic. We climbed out of the jeep and urinated on the stony ground.

At the Yeroham intersection we turned left. We kept on until we reached the roadblock. It took Julian nearly twenty minutes to talk our way through. I understood then why he'd wanted me to be in uniform.

“You're sure there's no radiation?” I said once we were on our way. The warning sign at the roadblock had been so emphatic I needed his assurance one more time.

“Of course I'm sure. The government had to come up with some plausible reason why all the roads to the Makhtesh are cut off. Everybody knows Dimona is only ten miles away. Everybody knows there's a nuclear reactor at Dimona. So,
voilà
, a radiation leak at the reactor, blown this way by southerly winds, danger to life and limb. Et cetera and so forth.”

“And they went and evacuated everybody out of Dimona, just to make the story believable?”

“And out of Yeroham, for good measure.”

“That's pretty extreme, isn't it?” I said.

“They're pretty scared,” said Julian.

 

The Greater Makhtesh, he explained, was a huge crater that looked as if it had been scraped off the lunar surface and dropped into the Negev desert. One of the geological wonders of Israel.

For weeks now, odd things were happening there.

He spoke of white globes bubbling up from the crater's floor. The layers of ancient rock in its walls changed colors, even shapes. The bands of red sandstone, or the yellow or the white, might thicken. They might contract. They might shift their positions. They might change, in broad daylight, right before your eyes—

“That doesn't make any sense, Julian.”

“It doesn't? Why not?”

“Layers of
rock
, in place for hundreds of millions of
years
, suddenly start shifting all by themselves?”

He shook his head.

“The curtains are fraying,” he said. “The fabric is unstable. Something is bursting in on us, and we don't know what it is.”

—and finally came the night of the red mist. It began as a shining red globe, swelling up, darkly luminous, like a balloon from the crater's floor—

“Or like that thing I saw through the telescope! Remember, Julian? That night in the tower, observing the moon—”

“The old SSS house,” he said. “How I do miss it.”

—then pulsating, then throbbing. Then exploding; and the Makhtesh filled with a thick red mist, a lake of luminescent blood. At dawn the mist faded. The tower remained, with the disk perched at its top—

It was the first thing I saw that desert morning as we drew near the rim of the Makhtesh. It looked exactly the way the Gypsies had drawn it in their book. The metal gleamed dully in the fierce sunlight.

“Julian! I've been there before!”

I think I fainted. I would have fallen out of the jeep if Julian hadn't grabbed my shoulders and held me all through the dizzy ride to the crater's floor.

Abandoned mining machinery lay scattered around the tower, like Tinkertoys at the feet of a giant.

I looked around, still out of breath from climbing the tower. Outside, everything had seemed a bizarre chaos, as if this were the moon after all and not the Negev. Here in the disk it was all familiar. There was the control panel with its buttons and switches and levers, arranged as I'd come to know them beneath a swollen moon, in a time outside time. I knew it all, the way you know a home in which you haven't been very happy, perhaps, but where you've lived so long you can't imagine home anywhere else.