“Yes, Louise?”

“Mr. Hoskin on line one.”

Walt Hoskin was his vice president for financial operations, a fussy little man who had never learned to think outside the parameters. Which was why he would never rise higher than he was now. It was Hoskin’s plan that lay on his desk. And it was perfectly satisfactory within the general rules and principles of company policy and past practice. But the man did not know how to kill sacred cows. If Treadline was to take full advantage of recent market trends, they had to get out of the old buggy Hoskin was driving. He picked up the phone. “Yes, Walt?”

“Ed, have you seen the news this morning?” Hoskin’s voice was reedy and thin.

As a matter of fact, he hadn’t. Uncle Ed was a bachelor. On days when he worked late, as he had last evening, he often stayed overnight at the office. He hadn’t been near the TV either last evening or this morning. “No,” he said quietly. “Why? What’s going on?”

“We opened seventeen points down.” Hoskin delivered the news like a sinner announcing the Second Coming.

Uncle Ed prided himself on his ability to react coolly to crises and shocks. But this blindsided him. “Seventeen points?” he bellowed. “What the hell’s going on?” He knew of nothing, no bad news, no market speculations, that could produce this kind of effect.

“It’s that thing in North Dakota.”

“What thing in North Dakota?”

“The UFO.”

Uncle Ed had discounted the reports from Johnson’s Ridge as a mass delusion. “Walt,” he said, struggling to regain his composure. “Walt, what are we talking about?”

“There are reports that it’s about to become possible to make automobiles that will run damn near forever!”

Uncle Ed stared at his phone. “Nobody’s going to believe that, Walt.”

“Maybe not. But people might think other shareholders will. So they’re dumping their stock. There was a woman on ABC this morning saying that a car made of this stuff would last the lifetime of the owner. Provided he changed the oil and didn’t have any accidents.”

Hoskin was on the verge of hysteria. Uncle Ed eased into his chair.

“Are you there, Ed?” asked Hoskin. “Ed, you okay?”

The markets had opened mixed, unable to make up their minds for an hour or so. Then a wave of selling had set in. By late morning they were in free fall. The Nikkei Index lost 19 percent of its value in a single day, while the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed down 380 points.

They ran the sequence through the VCR.

The chair.

The light.

The empty grid.

They ran it a frame at a time, watching the incandescence build, watching it acquire a sparkle effect, watching it reach out almost protoplasmically for the chair. “Go slow,” said April.

The chair looked as if it was fading.

There were a couple of frames during which Max thought he could see through the legs and back. It looked like a double exposure.

They were in the control module. Around them, phones continued to ring. Helicopters came and left every few minutes. April had hired a bevy of graduate students to conduct the tours and coordinate visits by VIPs. Two of these students, wearing dark blue uniforms with a Roundhouse shoulder patch, were busy at their desks while simultaneously trying to follow April’s progress.

“We need to try this again,” said Max. “And use a filter.”

But they would apparently have to try a different icon: Like the tree, the egg seemed to have only one charge to fire and was no longer working.

She seemed not to be listening, but was instead staring into her coffee cup. At last she looked up. “What do you think it is, Max?”

“Maybe a garbage disposal.” The thought amused him. He looked back at the image on the monitor. Something caught his eye.

“What?” she said, following his gaze.

Behind the nearly transparent chair, against the wall, Max could make out two vertical lines.

“Those are not in the Roundhouse,” he said. He tried to visualize the space between the grid and the rear wall. There was nothing that might produce such lines. Nor anything on the wall itself.

“What are you thinking?” she asked.

Max’s imagination was running wild. “I wonder,” he said, “whether we haven’t sent an old chair into somebody’s vestibule.”

Randy Key was rendered even more desperate by the conviction that he was probably the only person on the planet who understood the truth about the ominous structure on Johnson’s Ridge. He had tried to warn his brother. Had tried to talk to his ex so she could at least hide their son. Had even tried to explain it to Father Kaczmarek. No one believed him. He knew it was a wild story, and he could think of no way to convince his family and friends of their danger. To convince anyone. So he had no choice but to take the situation into his own hands.

The thing they called the Roundhouse was in fact a signaling device left to sound the alarm that the human race was ready for harvest. Randy suspected it had been atop the ridge far longer, many times longer, than the ten thousand years the TV stations were talking about. He could not be sure, of course, but it didn’t matter anyhow. The only thing that did matter was that he understood the danger. And knew how to deal with it.

Randy worked for Monogram Construction. He was currently assigned to a road crew that was out restoring Route 23, in the Ogilvie area, north of Minneapolis. It pained him to think what it would all look like, these pleasant little white-fenced homes, and the lighted malls, and the vast road network, after the enemy had come.

It was, of course, too late now to stop the signal from being sent. It was on its way. All that remained to do, all that could be done, was to punctuate that signal in such a way that the creatures at the other end would understand there would be no free lunch on Earth. He would show them we knew about them and that they should be prepared for a long, hard fight if they came.

He would ride to the top of the ridge and gun the engine and crash into the son of a bitch. There were five hundred pounds of C4 in back of his Isuzu Rodeo, connected to a remote-control device that he’d purchased with a model car outfit. If everything went well, he would get out of the Isuzu quickly, warn any bystanders to take cover, and turn the Roundhouse into rubble. He hoped nobody inside would be killed, but he couldn’t help that. In the end, people would understand. It might take a while, but once they realized what he had done, he would be on television. And his ex would be sorry she hadn’t listened to him. But it would be too late then for her because he’d be damned if he was going to take the bitch back. Not even to get his boy.

He cruised along the expressway, staring placidly out at the barren, snow-covered fields. A sense of repose had been creeping over him since he’d left Minnesota. He’d be at Fort Moxie by midafternoon. He had read there was no space in the Walhalla motels, but Fort Moxie was close enough. He hadn’t figured out how he would return to his motel after he’d destroyed his means of transportation. But that was okay. Once they saw the inner workings of the Roundhouse, they would be grateful, and someone would understand and give him a ride.

He’d used the workings of the model car to make the switch that would blow his bomb. He’d armed it but had put a wooden wedge between the electrical contacts to make sure they could not accidentally close.

Randy ran into two pieces of bad luck that afternoon. The first occurred as he passed Drayton on I—29. A red station wagon with Manitoba plates cut in front of him; Randy slammed on his brakes, slid sidewise, and bounced out onto the median. A tractor-trailer roared past, almost taking his front end off. But it missed him, and Randy, who ended up facing south, felt very fortunate. He shouldn’t have. His wedge had shifted, and it shifted again when he had to gun his engine to climb the narrow snow-covered embankment below which the pickup had come to rest. By the time he got back onto the freeway, it no longer served its purpose, and the contacts, although not actually touching, were close enough to permit a spark to cross. The bomb was, in effect, armed.