Mulder looked puzzled. "What are you implying, Scully?"
"I thought you may have gotten drunk and decided to come here to talk me out of quit-ting."
"Is that what you'd like me to do?"
Scully shut her eyes and leaned against the wall. Recalling how fifteen minutes ago, an hour ago, she had been thinking exactly that. After a moment she opened her eyes and sighed. "Go home, Mulder. It's late."
He shook his head, with a resolute, slightly manic gleam in his eyes. A look Scully knew all too well and usually to her peril. He reached down to pick up her windbreaker, still lying on the couch where she'd dropped it last night, and held it out to her. "Get dressed, Scully."
"Mulder, what are you doingl"
"Just get dressed," he said. The manic gleam grew even more intense, but it couldn't hide the begi
CHAPTER 5
BLACKWOOD. TEXAS
The night breeze swept across the prairie relentlessly. After a while the wind seemed to rise, as though heavy weather was moving in.
Above the desolation of sage and dust, two black, unmarked helicopters appeared, swoop-ing perilously close to the ground.
They buzzed past, flying at dangerously low altitude toward their destination: several large, ominously glowing domes, duplicates of the moon's own reflection upon the prairie. Only a few hundred yards away, the commonplace lights of the housing development sparked the night, white and yellow and ice-blue where a television was on. But there was nothing com-monplace about the work site that had sprung up where, only days before, four young boys had knelt digging in the brick-colored earth.
Now, the white hoods of several geodesic dome tents stretched over nearly the entire patch of ground. They were surrounded by long white cargo trucks, their tanks devoid of any markings, and a number of anonymous support vehicles: cars, vans, pickup trucks. Between these, figures in black fatigues moved purpose-fully, their somber uniforms in stark contrast to the white Hazardous Materials suits worn by their counterparts who stepped in and out of the central dome and support tents.
Overhead the hum of the choppers became a drone, as the two aircraft banked and then slowly settled upon the ground. Dust devils spun up around them; tents billowed and tugged at their struts. The eerie daylight glow of the main dome washed over one of the heli-copters, as several men in fatigues gestured at the pilot. An instant later and the chopper's door swung open. A man stepped down, mov-ing with studied, almost casual ease as he shielded his eyes from the dust and blinding light. He lowered his head instinctively as he walked beneath the whirring propellers, head-ing to where a line of trucks provided a makeshift windbreak from the helicopter's prop wash. Once there, he stood with his back to it all—choppers, drones, the huge and weirdly glowing tent—and lit a cigarette.
"Sir?"
The Cigarette-Smoking Man replaced his light and inhaled, then turned to look at the uniformed man addressing him. "Dr. Bronsch-weig is waiting for you in the main staging area."
The Cigarette-Smoking Man regarded him through slit eyes, his weathered face dull gray in the dome's glare. His expression was cool, almost disinterested, but after a moment he nodded and without a word followed the other man across the field. At the entrance to the central dome, the uniformed man nodded curtly, indicating the bulky white form of someone in a Haz-Mat suit. "Dr. Smith will escort you inside," he said, and left.