Majestic by Whitley Strieber Page A

guess. We'd better get going if we expect to get out there before dark."
    Hesseltine glanced at his watch. It was past three. When Gray got rolling, he was perfectly capable of continuing all night if the matter seemed important enough to him. "Why not first thing in the morning,"
    Hesseltine asked briskly.
    As he had feared, Gray had other ideas. "I think that we should go out there immediately, Lieutenant. And take Walters of CIC."
    There was no point in arguing. Hesseltine called Counterintelligence. Walters wisely decided to come in his own Jeep.
    Hesseltine would have liked to take a Jeep, too, but he knew that Gray preferred his staff car. Hesseltine kind of enjoyed getting in Jeeps and putting on his dark glasses and sitting with his foot up on the dash like a pilot being ferried out to the flight line. He had washed out of pilot training due to his tendency to become sick during maneuvers such as taking off, landing, and flying through smooth, clear air.
    Hesseltine was convinced that he was second-rate. As far as he was concerned every officer in the Army Air Force who was not a flight officer had failed.
    That Gray did not share his feelings was incomprehensible to Hesseltine. The best men flew fighters, as Gray himself had during the war. Second-best were on bombers and other aircraft. The rest were nowhere.
    He was so humiliated by his failure that he would obsessively deadhead on bombers, taking the tail-gunner position. Nobody ever knew that his flight bag contained dozens of neatly folded canvas airsickness containers . . . nobody but Will Stone, who must at some time have ferreted it out of him. It is obvious from reading his meticulous notes and diaries that Will was obsessed with details like that, almost as if they might somehow provide the tiny, critical bit of information that would explain why things went so wrong.
    Gray had once caused Hesseltine to run to the can with his cheeks puffed out by simply saying the word
    "tailspin" and whirling him around a couple of times in his chair.
    Gray was one of those men who viewed such miseries as the will of God. "The Almighty made you quick to get an upset stomach," he had said earnestly as Hesseltine came staggering back from the men's room.
    Gray was also the man who had floored a viciously drunk captain from another bomber wing with a single, appalling left uppercut that had lifted this two-hundred-pound monster off the floor of the Lackland Army Air Force Base Officer's Club in Texas.
    It was one of many reasons that Hesseltine resented Gray, and found it interesting to needle him. Now that there was no war to fight, the fact that the mild and methodical Gray could sometimes be enraged was about the most fascinating thing left in Hesseltine's life.
    As I write, I try to imagine those two men as they were then. Strength. Promise. A little arrogance, perhaps.
    Now they are both dead, Gray after a long and distinguished career.
    Six months after the Roswell incident Pete Hesseltine began to hit the bottle so hard that he became pretty much of a professional at it. He died alone in a walkup in Sacramento, California, in September of 1955. He was not yet forty years old.
    But on this day they were both young and at least somewhat happy, two victorious soldiers looking forward to glowing careers in the finest military organization in the world.
    They went down the long, plywood corridor that led from their office to the front of the building and out into the blazing parking lot. As they crossed it soft tar stuck to the bottoms of their shoes. Gray seemed almost to prance as he moved along. He was a spit-and-polish dresser.
    "Gonna have to stay up half the night polishing the bottoms of our goddamn shoes," Hesseltine said.
    "Why polish the bottoms of our shoes?"
    "You can't eat off floors that have tar on them."
    "Is that an example of your wit?"
    "Maybe it's wit. Or maybe I'm just crazy."
    "I think the former." Gray stepped into an especially soft spot and lifted