ROB LANGFORD HAD NOT BEEN called by Lewis Crew in months, but he was not surprised to receive a summons on this night, when a glowboy had acted up like this. He had driven hard up from the Mountain, and now moved carefully along Lost Angel Road in the Boulder foothills, trying to find the address Crew had given him. He’d never met the owner of the house, Dr. Peter Simpson, but he’d heard Crew mention him often enough. In their field, need-to-know was so extremely strict that this kind of compartmentalization was normal. They all knew the reason, too. In fact, once you were told, it became the center of your life, the one thing you never forgot.
Back in 1954, long before the empath program existed, there had been a brief, fumbled meeting between President Eisenhower and a triad of grays at an air base in California. The president had come away shattered, saying that if we revealed that they were here, the aliens would destroy Earth completely.
This extraordinary threat had built the absolute wall of secrecy and inspired the intricate labyrinth of need-to-know that surrounded the reality of the grays.
Bob and Adam had never responded in a coherent manner to questions about it, either, which had made the threat seem more dire.
Rob found the house, set well back from the road, and turned in the driveway. As per regulations, he was in civilian clothes. Even the license plate on the car he was driving was registered to a civilian. He carried both false and real identification. The false ID, provided by AFOSI, would hold up under police scrutiny—say, if he got stopped for speeding.
Simpson’s house was dark in front, but the door opened before he rang the bell. There stood the imposing Mr. Crew, looking a bit older, his white hair even more white.
As Rob entered the tiled foyer, a compact man appeared behind Lewis Crew. “Rob, this is Dr. Pete.”
“It’s a pleasure to meet a legend.”
Simpson laughed a little. “I wish the circumstances could be more pleasant. Come on back.”
They went along a hallway, then through a room cluttered with books. Surprisingly, Dr. Simpson read a great deal of poetry. He unlocked a door into a small office. There was some damaged equipment there. Rob asked what it was.
“A quantum communications device,” Dr. Simpson said. “It passed signals between entangled particles, and thus was capable of instantaneous transmission across the entire universe. But no longer.”
“Things have been at crisis for some time now,” Crew said. “And we’ve reached a very serious point. A flash point, we believe.”
Given the threat they were under and the absolute inability of the Air Force to offer any defense against the grays, those words made Rob feel a little sick. “What sort of a flash point?”
“We need to take you to another level, Colonel,” Simpson said. “I’ve revised your job description and your need-to-know.”
“You can do this?”
He laughed a little. “Colonel, you’re talking to your boss—for the first time in your whole damned career. Isn’t it the damnedest thing?”
Rob shook his head. “Maybe we’re a little too bound up in need-to-know.”
“I’m a Defense Intelligence Agency specialist and chairman of the Special Studies Sciences Committee.” Special Studies was the umbrella euphemism for all the scientific groups that worked on the problem of the grays.
The Sciences Committee, Rob knew, oversaw the whole operation, including his own Air Force mission. The poetry man was indeed his boss.
“How has my mission changed, sir?”
“We’ll get there. First things first. I brought you here for the specific purpose of showing you this device, because you need to understand exactly what it did, why it’s been destroyed, and by whom. Because you are about to be tested, Colonel, more rigorously than you have ever been tested before. I cannot stress this enough. In a few moments, I am going to ask you a question. Your answer will be crucial.”
“If I answer wrong?”
Simpson gazed at him. The man’s eyes were rat-careful. “This machine gave us communications access to Mr. Crew’s species,” he said. “Which we very much needed, because they were generating questions for Bob and Adam that were, frankly, a lot more subtle and a lot more effective than anything Michael Wilkes has ever come up with himself.”
Rob realized that he’d just been told that his old friend Crew was an alien. He looked at him, pale in the dim light that filled the room. He appeared human enough. But then again, Rob had read enough UFO folklore to know the stories of a tall, blond race from a planet somewhere in the direction of the Pleiades. “You’re what the UFOnauts call a Nordic.”
“Ours is a very stable agricultural world with as much land mass as Earth, but barely a million people.”
“But you look so much like us. What are the odds of that?”
“We’ve done DNA studies,” Dr. Simpson said. “We and Crew’s line split from one another about a hundred and fifty thousand years ago.”
“But we—we’re the same species? On two different planets?”
“So it would seem,” Simpson said. “The most bizarre part is that the DNA trail is quite clear. We are not their colony, Crew’s people are our colony.”
“But in the past, uh, weren’t we pretty damn primitive? How could we possibly have colonized another planet? We couldn’t do that now, couldn’t begin to.”
“The past is a greater mystery than we allow ourselves to believe,” Crew said.
Rob’s mind raced. “All of those ruins that nobody can understand, things like the pyramids and the fortress at Sacsayhuaman in the Andes and that impossibly huge stone platform at Baalbek in Lebanon—all of those ancient engineering impossibilities… does this explain them?”
“The remains of our lost civilization, or so we believe.”
“The legends of the fall… Atlantis, that sort of thing, the war in space narrated in the Vedas—”
“Distorted memories of a world that was lost in a ferocious war that plunged Earth back into savagery and caused you to lose contact with us altogether. The Book of Ezekiel in the bible is a confused account of a failed mission on our part to rescue you, when we built the Great Pyramid at Giza. We had to come physically, and that is extremely slow. The journey took thousands of years on a multigenerational starship.”
“The Great Pyramid is dated. We know who built it.”
“You know that Khefu put his mark on it. We returned in force about thirty-five hundred years ago. For a time, we ruled Egypt. The Pharaoh Akhenaten and his wife Nefertiti were from our world. We attempted to reestablish essential lost technology, which is the technology that enables the movement of souls across space. A journey that takes eons in the physical can be accomplished in a few moments by a being in a state of energy. The Great Pyramid is a device that enables this. The Egyptian religion of the journey of the soul to the Milky Way is not imagination, but mythology based on lost science.”
“And did it… work?”
He nodded. “It still does. At present, I can use it to return home, but nobody else can come here.” He gestured toward the blackened console. “That new device had a lot of capability. Among the things it could do was transmit the entire record of somebody’s DNA at faster than light speed. A clone could then be grown using stem cells and DNA matching. Using pyramids on both planets, the soul could cross from one body to the other. But that’s all impossible now, because of what Michael Wilkes did.”
“Mike? But why?”
“Before we can answer that question,” Simpson said, “you need to understand a little more about why the grays are here.”
“They’re exploiting us somehow, I’ve always assumed. Feeding, perhaps, in some way that doesn’t seem to hurt people but that they regard as absolutely essential to themselves.”
“They’re here because they’re in terrible trouble,” Crew said.
Simpson joined in. “They have one hell of a problem. Genetic. Only in the past few years were we even able to understand it. But when you do a really good genetic study on them, you find all kinds of breaks, inserted genes, genes that must be from other species, artificial genes—they’re a genetic garbage can, is what the grays are. They’re not actually alive anymore. The grays have replaced so much of themselves that they’ve become, in effect, biological machines. If you can believe this, the few original genes we have detected are at least a billion years old.”
“A billion?”
“Or more. Maybe much more. What we’re looking at with the grays is a species so ancient that it has used up its gene pool. As a species, in their entirety, the grays are dying of old age.”
Crew continued, “Every gray we have ever recovered from crashes, a total of fifty-eight bodies over the last sixty years, has been suffering from this degenerative genetic disease, where the membranous nucleous of their cells hardens, until the genetic material that’s stored there can no longer be used by the cell. Then the grays replace the affected organ with an artificial substitute. Over time, the individual becomes a sort of machine. They have even created a prosthesis for their brain.”
“So, why are they dying? If they’ve become artificial versions of themselves, they’re immortal.”
“The more artificial they are, the less alive they are. Knowledge and intellect transfer to the artificial brain, but not feelings. They’ve gained a sort of immortality, but at the price of losing their heart. And every gray is like this, and they all remember their lost hearts, and all they care about is getting them back. What they have now is not life, but the memory of life.”
Rob had seen the Bob autopsy. He had been a living entity, but with things like a manufactured skin and metal bones, and a mind that was housed not in a brain as such, but in silicon filaments that filled his head in intricate patterns that looked something like Mandelbrot Sets. You could see, though, in the structures of the skull, that it had once contained a natural brain.
“So how does coming here help them?”
“The grays are trying to save mankind.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Oh, it’s not altruism. They’re getting access to our rich young gene pool. In return, they’re going to save us from the environmental catastrophe that’s going to ruin us. Together, both species survive. Apart, both die.”
“Then why—I’ve always had the impression from Wilkes that they’re evil.”
“He and his friends are at the center of the linkage of corporations, governments, and individuals who currently control the world. He sees any threat to that structure as an act of war, and what the grays are doing is such a threat, big time.”
“But what actually… are they doing?”
“That’s the incredible part. The miracle. They know what needs to be done for their survival. They need access to our genes. And they know what needs to be done for our survival. We need to understand how to fix our planet and how to start colonizing other worlds. But what they don’t know is how to communicate the information we need to do these things.”
Rob looked from Crew’s mild face to Simpson’s careful, acute eyes. “Who does?”
“They have found a way to give a super-intelligent human being access to their collective mind. This, we believe, is why they were on the ground tonight. They’ve begun this process.”
Rob felt his face flush, felt sweat breaking out under his arms. “And this person is…”
“It’s a child. Bred over dozens of generations for extreme brilliance. The smartest person humanity can produce. When they bridge him to their collective, he’ll be even smarter than they are. He will trump their genius and, they hope, figure out how to save us all.”
“A messiah?”
“You could say that, I suppose.”
“But this is all predicated on the collapse of our environment being a real thing. If it isn’t, then they need us but we don’t need them.”
“It’s real.”
“It’s not global warming, is it, because—”
“Global warming is one aspect of a very complex phenomenon. A sixty-two-million-year extinction cycle. The last time it struck, it killed off the dinosaurs.”
“Which was sixty-five million years ago. So what is it, late for the bus?”
“It started right on time, three million years ago, when what is now Central America rose up out of the ocean. This destabilized ocean currents and led to what we have now, a devastatingly lethal oscillation between ice ages and warm periods. The number of species has been declining since before there was a single human being on Earth, and the climax has now been reached. We’re finished, basically—at least, as far as nature is concerned.”
“But why? And why sixty-two million years? I don’t get it, who’s behind it?”
“Ah, the silent presence. Nobody knows. The grays don’t know. But they hope that their brilliant child will understand. They hope he will understand the universe, the work of God, as it were, because, unless he does, we are all going to suffer extinction, both species, for different reasons. Twelve billion vital, living minds, all hungry for life, for love, for children and all right about one thing: every single one of us, whether human or not, is exactly as important as he feels.
“The grays are going to arrive on Earth in force in 2012, around the time the planet comes apart at the seams. They’ve been racing against time for thousands of years, and now it’s down to a clock that’s ticking fast, and either they get that kid to figure this all out and fix the world, or both species crash and burn.”
“This is beginning to sound—well, to be blunt, horrible. Truly horrible.”
“You can understand the reason for the secrecy. For the grays’ terrible threats.”
“Keeping us from panicking and shooting ourselves in the foot.”
“And them.”
“So what has Mike got against all of this? And how can he stop them?”
“He and his buddies see this as an invasion, pure and simple. The grays are gonna show up in force and cream us and take our planet.”
“Why do they believe that?”
“They don’t know. Can’t know. They fear it.” Crew looked at Rob. “Do you fear it?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Good answer. Truthful. Neither are we. But Eamon Glass—you know, he was the first empath—he felt that the grays did indeed need us, and if they need us, they aren’t coming here to take the planet.”
“But how can Mike and friends possibly stop them?”
“First, they kill this child. That throws the grays off their timetable, because there won’t be time to breed another one before mankind goes extinct. They lose the tool they’ve been breeding across a hundred generations, that’s endgame for them.”
“But the other consequence—the environment falls apart and we go extinct. Where’s the win?”
“Mike and his group—they call themselves the Trust—intend to save about a million. Who they regard as the best people.”
“One million? Out of six billion?”
“There’ll be a few survivals on the outside, but the million people the Trust save are going to be the core of a new humanity, as defined by the Trust, of course. Their million survivors represent every race they consider valuable, every DNA group, all chosen to ensure an adequate long-term gene pool. It’s scientifically sound, certain to continue the species, and a nightmare of racism.”
“But why would doing this stop the grays?”
“For the same reason that they’re not coming to my world,” Crew responded. “Too little genetic material to help them. They need to create a new genetic foundation for billions of their own people. That’ll take a huge number of human donors. A million would be useless to them, so they’d go away and, presumably, die somewhere off in space.”
“The Trust isn’t stupid,” Rob said, “and Mike’s had unlimited access to Bob and Adam for years. He knows the grays as well as anybody.”
“And he would rather see the human species essentially brought to an end than live with the grays on what we believe will be at least equal terms. After all, this person who’s brighter than them, and thus able to control them, is going to be a human. They’re doing that for a reason, to give us a basis for confidence.”
“But if Mike’s concluded that life with the grays wouldn’t be worth living, I think we have to respect that.”
“Evil is a funny thing. It comes out of fear. Mike and his people think of themselves as the saviors of mankind. But they’re genocidal monsters.”
Rob found the scale of the thing so large he could hardly think about it intellectually, let alone morally. He shook his head.
“Here’s your question,” Crew said gently. “The one we need to ask you. In your mind, which is worse? Die, as a species, or take our chances with the grays?”
“Think carefully before you answer,” Simpson added.
The only possible answer was immediately obvious to him. “I don’t have a right to make a decision like that. None of us do.”
“You pass,” Simpson said. “Any other answer, and you would have failed the test, as a result of which, you would now know too much.”
“I came close, then,” he said.
“I don’t think so,” Simpson said. “I’ve always respected you. You have a good, strong conscience. You realize that this decision has to be made by every individual human being. This child, when he grows up, is going to give us the chance to do that.”
Rob thought of a question so crucial that he almost didn’t want to ask it. He did ask, though, he had to. “Are you saying that they might give us a choice? I mean, if we don’t like the idea of sharing our genes with them?”
“We won’t,” Simpson said. “We’ll say yes.”
“How can you be sure?”
“The grays will be here, billions of them, asking for life. We will say yes, it’s human nature, because we are fundamentally good. And this child, grown up by then, will help us do it right.”
“You know, I have another question. Why are we like we are? Why are we so much less intelligent?”
“We have less knowledge. We lost it during that ancient war, the basic knowledge of how the world really works, knowledge the grays have preserved intact. This is why we can no longer account for those engineering marvels you mentioned—Baalbek and such. We’ve literally forgotten how we did that.”
Crew gave Rob a long look. “We’re trying to sell you on something I sense you’re still dubious about. That’s how you see this whole conversation.”
“You’re not reading me right,” Rob responded. “I don’t see any alternative. We have six billion lives to save. It’s a completely unimaginable responsibility, and this poor damn kid, boy, there is one hell of a lot on his shoulders. You know how I feel? I feel like I would give my life, without hesitation, to protect him.”
“That might happen,” Simpson said. “Because Mike will go after him if he finds out about him, and Mike is good.”
“Then we’ve got to put him under arrest. Roll up these friends of his.”
“We cannot even consider that,” Simpson said. “They’re more powerful than we are. Anyway, it would show our hand and we don’t want that. We’ve been lucky in one respect, that Mike doesn’t understand this child thing at all. He has no idea that the grays are even trying to save mankind. He’s sitting back, confidently waiting for the extinction to ruin their plans. And they’ve played that like the experts that they are, warning him constantly about the environmental crisis, in order to make him think they’re helpless to prevent it.”
“What happens to this kid? Does he suffer?”
“Does he suffer? Being that intelligent? That alone? I don’t think it’s an answerable question.”
“So we protect him. Can do. But why did they do this glowboy thing? Point him out like that?”
“It looks like some triad being bad. Not all that unusual. It’s actually a signal to us, and it’s full of information. It tells us that the child is right in the area of Wilton, Kentucky, and that they’re going to begin the process now. It’s up to us to do our part, find the child in our own way, and put down the kind of protection the grays can’t.”
“Which is?”
“Up close and on the ground, supported by good threat intelligence. Their ability to determine things like what’s going on in a human social group is very limited. They’ll be there to react if somebody jumps out of the damn bushes, but we’re the only ones who are going to be able to see a threat developing.”
Pete Simpson leaned forward. “Which gets us to your new mission. We need you to move your operations to Alfred AFB, Rob. Right now. Your orders are to identify and protect that child. We know that he’s somewhere in Wilton. Possibly even on Oak Road, where the glowboy touched down. But don’t be too sure of that. The grays are very, very careful, remember. Assume he could be anywhere in the region.”
The three men fell silent then, each sinking into his own thoughts, all feeling the same sense of being swept up by a current that was easily powerful enough to drown them.
Through the last darkness at the end of the night, a black triangular object had been coming, flying just feet above the treetops, taking its time, moving in absolute silence. Fifteen minutes ago, it had arrived over the house. It hovered overhead now, enormous, darker than the night itself, a triangle three hundred feet long, two hundred feet across at its base… and six inches above the roof.
Inside the triangle, in a low-ceilinged cockpit, a woman in a USAF flight suit sat adjusting a sensitive device. Every word being said below was being recorded and transmitted with digital clarity.
Literally as they spoke, Mike Wilkes listened. He sat in the facility in Indianapolis feeding Lauren questions based on what he was hearing.
His mind raced. This child—dear heaven, it was the single most toxic thing on Earth, the most dangerous creature ever to live. He would lay Wilton, Kentucky, to waste.
Or no. He had to be certain that he’d gotten the right child. Absolutely certain. He needed to be careful, here.
He watched Lauren sitting in the easy chair she’d insisted on bringing into Adam’s hellhole, watched and considered how to form his next question, which would be the most important one that, in his whole career of dealing with the grays, he had ever asked.
OVER THE THREE YEARS SHE’D been working here, Lauren had done what she could to make Adam’s cell more endurable. Rather than the steel table and hard chairs that seemed to have been enough for her dad, she’d made a very unwilling Wilkes get her a Barcalounger and had a daybed installed. On the walls, she had a copy of one of Renoir’s Aline and Pierre paintings, of Aline holding little Pierre in a way that she hoped one day to hold her own babies… off in the future when her life was no longer at risk and she was no longer tangled in an ever-growing web of secrets, and she could finally settle down to a husband and a family. There were also views of forests and mountains, intimate little waterfalls and another one that she especially liked, Van Gogh’s Starry Night, that seemed to contain, in some way, the same fiery and mysterious energy she found in Adam.
As Mike watched her, he reflected on just how careful he had to be right now. The grays must not find out that he knew about this little monstrosity of theirs. “I want you to transmit an image of the satellite photo again, Lauren,” he said smoothly.
She closed her eyes.
“Lauren, pick it up and look at it. Do it right.”
“I’ve already done it ten times! Come on.”
“You barely glanced at it.”
“Shut up and let me work!”
Her dad had been a guy you could settle down with after work and knock back a few drinks. In fact, Mike had wanted to bring him into the Trust. It was too dangerous, though. For some years, it had been obvious that the grays couldn’t read minds well—not normal minds. But Eamon’s mind was a different story, like hers. They had to be kept strictly unaware of any secret the grays shouldn’t know.
Although the daybed appeared empty, Lauren knew that Adam was lying on it. She had learned to see him in her imagination, even though his tiny movements, synchronized to her flickering eyes, prevented her from observing him in detail.
Mike wanted her to be careful, so she’d be careful. She formed a thought series this time. First, a picture of a map of the state of Kentucky. Then a vision of the satellite image of the event in the field behind the Oak Road houses.
Nothing came back.
She formed another thought: React, Adam. She called up a sense of urgency, stared, tensed her muscles.
There exploded into her mind an image that at first seemed to make no sense. She was looking up at a towering, immense wall of ice, ghostly white and iridescent, blue against a deep blue sky. And then she heard a sound, a gigantic snapping noise that combined with a strange sort of sigh, as if a thousand people had simultaneously gasped.
She was on the upper deck of a cruise ship. They were glacier-watching. The deck was jammed with people… and the ice was curving slowly over them, bringing with it a shadow that turned the bright afternoon an eerie, glowing blue.
The ship’s huge horn began to sound, thundering again and again. The whole body of the vessel shuddered as it strove to get underway, the propellers churning, smoke gushing from the stacks.
With a boom to wake the dead, a gigantic boulder of ice—an ice mountain—slammed down on the foredeck. The whole ship lurched violently upward and forward. Water, clear and frigid, surged over the bounding deck, and the passengers were hurled screaming into the waves.
Lauren looked up again and saw, dropping toward them, an even greater mountain of ice, an eternity of ice.
She was back in the cage. She asked Adam a question with her mind, felt the question in her heart: what does it mean?
Then she saw—
A supermarket, bright lights… voices bellowed, a little girl toddled past with a tin of sardines, a man swooped down, grabbed it, knocking the child aside. Screams came, merging with the bouncy shopping music. People clawed for bread, raced down long, empty aisles, hollow people, their eyes wild, ripping open boxes of uncooked pasta, gobbling it, throwing back raw oatmeal, eating from the mashed garbage on the floor.
Gunshots. Soldiers in dirty uniforms, tired young faces, terrified eyes, shot into the crowd—and people just sat there, staring like a dumb animal stares who has no idea what’s about to happen. As they got shot, they crashed back with astonishing force into a shattered freezer, and then the soldiers passed down another aisle.
“What’s going on in there?”
“I don’t know! He’s showing me some sort of tragedy.”
“Wha-a-at?”
“Ships sinking, people starving in a supermarket—”
“Christ, will you get me what I need!”
“Damn you, Mike, what I am gonna get you is what I always get you. I am gonna get you what he has to give!”
Because Adam was showing Lauren images of the coming extinction, he might be aware of the conversation Mike had been listening to, which made continuing this way too dangerous. “Okay, that’s it. Come out. We’re done.”
“I love my baby,” she whispered, getting up from the Barcalounger. She reached out, touched the cool, soft skin of a hand that only became visible when she held it, the narrow fingers and lethal black claws fading when she withdrew.
Adam shot back an image of a mother nursing an infant, his standard good-bye. As she got up, he made one of his audible sounds, a cry like a shocked and despairing woman. Did he feel anything? She didn’t know. But she did know that he was trying for sympathetic attention.
“Adam, I know you have a message for me connected with all these disasters, and I know I’m not getting it. However, we’re asking you about a specific incident, and—”
She got no response from him. She knew why: he’d heard the words, but unless you formed your thoughts in your mind, he didn’t understand you.
“Lauren, break it off!”
“Mike—sir—”
“Lauren, there’s no time!”
No time? What the hell was he talking about? She had all the time in the world. And God knew, Adam had time. “I’m going to get this thing rolling.”
“There is no time!”
But Adam had different ideas. Adam’s mind was all around her, she could feel it. She closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and let herself go blank.
He came into her, as always, like a dog sniffing for a buried bone. Letting him get inside her felt kind of good, but also oddly sad… a sadness that he brought with him. He would go into her memories and kind of troll there, bringing up all sorts of things from her past, things she’d just as soon have forgotten, stuff done when drunk, that sort of stuff. He liked the intense things. Sort of ate them, she thought.
She let him go deep into a familiar little corner, the cardboard box experience when she was about ten, one of the first things she’d ever done that was related to sex. She smelled the slightly damp cardboard box again, saw Willy Severs’s plump, white body, felt his hand go under her blouse—and then shut that door with a great crash.
She shot her question at Adam: the satellite image again, the town of Wilton, the houses on Oak Road.
For the split of an instant, she thought she glimpsed a boy’s face, but it was not Willy Severs. Curly hair, slightly chunky, looked about fourteen or fifteen.
“I have something,” she said. “A face.”
“What sort of a face?”
“A kid. I asked him about Oak Road and I got the face of a kid.”
“Bring it out.”
Mike was all over her the moment the door closed. “Got what? What did you get?”
“They’re interested in a child.”
“Say more.”
“He’s a boy of fourteen or fifteen, curly hair, and another thing, I glimpsed a dog. He has a dog.”
Mike became furtive. “Okay,” he said, “that makes no sense.”
“Yes it does. They’re interested in this kid.”
“Probably some kind of breeding issue. We’ll never figure it out. You’re dismissed. Operation complete.”
He was lying and he was scared—and she was suspicious. “What’s the deal with this child?”
“Look, I have to go to Washington and I’m already late. You’re done, Lauren. Thank you.”
She watched him leave. The one pleasant thing about her relationship with him was knowing that he wanted her, and denying him. She did it because—well, she didn’t like him. Just did not like the man. She was not nice to him, couldn’t be. Why, she thought, had something to do with Adam. Adam seemed suspicious of him, somehow. Wary.
“What’s going on, Andy?” she asked as she came into the control room still drying her hair.
“The boss is sure as hell in a lather.”
She went topside, and when the elevator doors opened found Mike just leaving. He was in full uniform, which was pretty unusual around here. He had his briefcase in his hand.
“You’re moving fast,” she said.
“Yep.”
“Are you going to do something to that child, Mike?”
“Look, this is not your issue. Your issue is to communicate with Adam, and to take that job one hell of a lot more seriously than you do.”
“How dare you.”
“How dare me? You’re the one with pictures on the walls down in that hellhole. That thing is a predator. It’s a monster. It’s not a damn pet, for God’s sake, woman.”
She made a decision. He was going to Washington. Fine, she was coming back here and going at it again with Adam. She would get to the bottom of this without Mike around. Because, if this child was in some kind of danger due to her report, then she had a very clear moral duty: no matter the legal blockade her clearance created, she had to protect the kid. She would not be a party to murder, and she would not follow orders that she considered to be illegal.
She watched Mike hurry out to the parking lot, and take off in his latest car, a brand-new VW Phaeton. She knew the value of that car, she’d looked it up. He’d just driven off in half a year’s pay. Where his real money came from she didn’t know, but it sure as hell was not the United States Air Force.
THE SUN PEEKING OVER THE Warners’ roof woke Katelyn. As usual, she rolled over, at first feeling entirely normal. She considered turning on the news.
And then it hit her: she was upstairs in bed, not in Conner’s room where she had gone to sleep.
Dan chose that moment to slide an arm over her. Katelyn leaped away from him as if his body was on fire.
“Hey!”
“Conner!” She ran downstairs, ran across the kitchen, took his stairs three at a time, and burst in.
When she saw that the door to the outside was open, she stifled a cry. But the lump in the bed seemed entirely normal. She knelt beside him and peeked into the covers. Conner was deeply asleep.
She kissed his freckled cheek, inhaling the milky-sour smell of his skin.
Dan came in, went over and closed the door that led out under the deck and into the backyard. “Look,” he said.
There was a puddle of water on the floor in front of it, standing on the linoleum.
“And outside.”
In the sparse grass that clung to life under the deck, were numerous small holes. They looked for all the world as if somebody had walked there on stilts.
She went to Dan, looked down at the water, out at the peculiar holes. This was not right. None of this should be here. She rushed back to Conner, drew down his covers. Again she kissed him. She pulled him into her arms.
Conner moaned, then suddenly stiffened. “Mom?” he said.
Kneeling beside the bed, she held his face in her hands and looked into his eyes.
He asked, “What’s the matter?”
She hugged him to her, feeling the heft of him against her. Her boy was on the verge of becoming a young man, and he was so beautiful, and you had to be so very careful not to let him know how beautiful you thought he was.
“Could you guys let me get dressed, here?”
The little boy who had cheerfully laid naked in her lap just a few short years ago now did not want to get out from under the covers in her presence, not even wearing pajamas.
She kissed his cheek. “Six months to your first shave,” she said. “Mom predicts.”
“The sooner the better.” He looked at her. She looked back at him. He moved his eyes toward the door.
“Breakfast in ten minutes.”
She and Dan went upstairs.
“What was that about?” Dan asked as she closed the door.
She whispered, “It’s about his growing maturity. Problems controlling what’s up down below.”
“You think? Puberty?”
“Bright kids reach it early, so it says in the book.” As they mounted the stairs, she saw the CONNER ZONE sign in his recycling bag and took it out. “The Conner Zone was so cute,” she said.
“Cute is the problem,” Dan said. “Part of it. The other part is being too smart in a world that glorifies the lowest common denominator. Conner’s intelligence is not fashionable, and it’s too big for him to conceal.”
“Oh, I never want him to do that. How’s your ear, by the way?”
“Not actually okay. I could stand to get an X-ray.”
“You’re kidding. On your ear?”
“Well, there’s something there.”
“Something there?” She reached up and touched the outer edge of the ear. “It’s a little sort of a knot.”
“I know what it is.”
“Relax, Dan, I’m not the enemy.”
For the past half hour, the smell of coffee had been getting stronger, and she went into the kitchen and poured them both mugs. Dan took his over to the table. She went into the pantry and got Conner’s latest cereal, some kind of amaranth flakes thing. Conner had his own dietary ideas, most of them pretty smart—and pretty awful. He was a modified vegetarian except when Dan grilled steaks. Then he was a sullen but voracious carnivore.
There was no cancer of the ear, was there?
Conner appeared, poured himself coffee. She waited to see if he put the required amount of half and half in it. Did—but just a drop.
“Eggs?” she asked as she turned on the skillet.
“I’m going to be eating really pure for a while,” Conner said. “No dairy, no alcohol.”
“You don’t drink alcohol,” Dan said. “Better not.”
“I mean, no wine with dinner.”
“Wine belongs to the soul, son. No man can be fully himself without wine.”
“The other kids can’t drink it.”
“Which is why they’ll all be bingeing like the college students in a few years. Did you know that binge drinking among the young is unheard of in Europe, but common here and in the UK? What does that tell you—children have to learn wine early, get used to it. Which is why you’ll continue with a glass of wine at dinner, thank you.”
“I love the irony. Most kids would do anything to drink even so much as a sip. But I don’t want to, so it’s forced on me.”
“Well, you get a glass. One glass. Which is mandatory.”
“Do you want to have the fight now or schedule it for later? Because I will not be drinking wine.”
Dan sighed. “I’ve got to go to the health center to get my ear amputated. Let’s do it when I get back.” He picked up Conner’s cereal box. “I saw this lying open in the pantry last night. Are roach eggs okay for vegans?”
Conner took the box, poured himself some cereal. “Amaranth is one of a handful of dicots which photosynthesize directly to a four-carbon compound.”
“Ah. So the reason you’re now eating nothing but horrible-looking little crumbs is explained. You want that four-carbon compound.”
“Actually, I want the protein and the lysine without meat, plus I get a designer-quality lipid fraction. I have the cholesterol readings of a twelve-year-old, you know.”
“You’re eleven.”
“It’s a joke, Dad.”
“Ah. Of course.”
Katelyn put down her and Dan’s eggs and sat at the head of the table. “May I know the why of the vegan thing?”
“The aliens.”
A silence fell, extended. “Are you about to piss me off?” Dan asked.
“I am eating pure because this neighborhood is in a close-encounter situation and it’s the eating of animals that triggers the kind of fear response I experienced last night. I don’t want to fear the aliens. I want to face them.”
“Oh, boy,” Katelyn said. “Dan—”
“No. No, I understand that I’m being baited. It’s not a big deal, Katelyn.” He watched Conner digging into the amaranth, and as he watched, he got angrier and angrier. He was being baited, damn right. Conner was masterful at it. And here he’d been the confidante, the father confessor, just yesterday. Now he was the enemy and his ear hurt like hell, to tell the truth, and he really did not need this just now.
“We had a visit from the grays, and they had an abductee aboard the craft, and the Keltons probably have video. A first in history. The world is changing, lady and gentleman, and I am preparing myself.”
“What grays?” Dan asked carefully.
“Try Googling ‘gray aliens’ sometime. You’ll find more than four thousand references. Plus, this business of a UFO descending with a screaming woman inside happened in Kentucky before. Moorehead, 2003, same situation, with one difference—no video. Lots of nine-one-one calls, but no video and therefore no story.”
The sanctimonious singsong, the eyebrows raised to make the face appear absurdly credulous—it was all calculated to infuriate. Conner knew perfectly well how ridiculous Dan considered the whole UFO/alien folklore to be, and how damaging to the culture.
“Goddamnit, it was nothing but some kind of dope-inspired prank!”
“Dad, please. You’re embarrassing yourself.”
Dan’s hand had slammed down on the table before he could stop it.
Conner seized the opportunity. “Right, go physical yet again, Dad. It’ll make a juicy story for my psychiatrist-to-be. Another one.”
Dan had spanked Conner exactly one time, when, at the age of three, he had rewired the toaster and caused a dangerous fire in the wall of the kitchen. It had been a single, sharp blow to the left buttock… which had been thrown back at him perhaps ten thousand times since.
“Conner, listen to me. I’m up for tenure, which the entire college knows. It’s terribly important to us. If I don’t get it, I have to resign, which means that we have to move to some other college where Mom and I can both get work, and she has to give up her own tenure here—it’ll be a mess, son. And something like this—a UFO in the backyard—can ruin my chances. Marcie Cotton already wants to write me off. So please, for me, do not say anything about us seeing it for at least another few weeks.”
Conner gazed off into the middle distance. “Prediction: the Keltons’ tape, if it is halfway decent, will make this place famous. Prediction: Dr. Jeffers will make a total idiot of himself about it and he’ll end up with walking papers. Prediction: you will not be damaged by this, but Dr. Cotton will still screw you to the wall.”
Every time Conner used the word “prediction,” a chill went right through Dan. Their son was never wrong. Actually, he found that he was so on edge and Conner sounded so right that he almost burst into tears—and was instantly appalled at himself. How could he possibly react like that? That wasn’t him.
But then he thought—the pressure of the tenure conference coming up, the bizarre events in the night, the sleeplessness, Katelyn’s waking up in near hysterics, this damned lump in his ear—of course he was on edge. Stressed. Big time.
“Look,” he said, “thanks for a perfectly delicious breakfast. Tomorrow’s my turn and it’s waffles unless there are objections.” He looked down at the still-gobbling Conner. “I’ll make yours without egg.”
“Fine.”
“They’ll be fascinating. I’m going to the health center, I’ll call you with a verdict.”
“Prediction,” Conner said. “They will find a small object enclosed in a membrane made of cutaneous tissue. And, if you search your body, you will find an indentation where that tissue was taken from. It’s called a witch’s mark.” He smiled up at Dan. “The grays have been with us for some time.”
“Conner, this happened last night in a kitchen full of people. I hardly think the grays could have operated on me without anybody noticing.”
“There was a moment—probably just a few seconds—when you were all turned off. The grays did what they did and turned you back on as they left. It’s called missing time. It’s the way they handle us. We’re their property, you know. You know what the great anomalist Charles Fort called the world? A barnyard. The grays are the farmers, and right now they’re doing a little farm work right here on Oak Road.”
“Okay, I’ll bite. What are they doing?”
“For one thing, they’ve got some kind of a plan for you, which is why they gave you that implant. You’re involved, Dad.”
“Let’s look,” Katelyn said. “I want to see this thing for myself.”
But Dan did not want them to look at it. He retreated upstairs and took his shower. Safe in the stall, shaving and soaping himself up, he felt his body for the sort of indentation Conner had described.
Nah, there wasn’t one. They’d X-ray him at the health center and tell him what he already knew: he had a cyst that was mildly infected. The doctor would prescribe a couple of weeks of an antibiotic, and if it got worse, he’d go in and open the damn thing up.
He had to wash his hair, anyway, so he sat down on Katelyn’s shower chair that she used for shaving her comely legs and—well, what the hell, he felt along both ears and across the back of his neck.
There was nothing there. Thank you, Conner, it’s so delightful the two or three times a year that you’re wrong. As he stood back up, though, he felt a very slight soreness in his right buttock. He felt back there, just above the cheek. As his fingers ran along the smooth, wet skin, he knew. He felt again to be sure.
Then he was having an aura, one of those odd sequences of perceptions—in his case, a vision of stars all around him from his childhood planetarium, followed by a feeling of floating—that were the prelude to one of the seizures like he’d had in childhood.
He leaned up against the side of the shower. “Katelyn,” he managed to say. Not yell it, couldn’t do that. “Katelyn.”
The feeling of floating got stronger. It was uncanny, he even looked down to be sure his feet were still touching the floor of the stall. Then his eyes fixed on the drain, the silver circle of it with the water swirling down.
The drain became larger and darker, and now what he saw was a round black hole in a field of gleaming silver. Objectively, deep within himself, he knew that he was seizing. He felt nothing, you never did. All he could see was this opening that had been below him but was now above him, black and foreboding, getting bigger. It was like being drawn into the underside of a gigantic silver balloon, that was how the seizure affected his temporal lobe.
Then it was gone, bam. The shower was back, drumming on him. He coughed, gagged, recovered himself. Quickly, he rinsed his body, got out of the shower, and dropped down, still soaking wet, onto the toilet. Jesus God, he’d seized. After all these years, he had damn well seized.
In his late childhood, when the seizures had first been diagnosed, he’d been put on Dilantin. He had tolerated it well, and maybe he’d better go back on it. He hadn’t had actual spasms while in the shower or he would have gone down, so he was still dealing with a petit mal epilepsy. That was on the good side. On the bad side, for this to return after so many years suggested that there could be some other syndrome present. For example, maybe there had been epileptiform tissue in his brain that had developed a tumor. Maybe the thing in his ear was indeed a tumor. It would not be a primary, that did not happen to earlobes. It would be metastase of a hidden primary, asymptomatic until it began, last night, to press a nerve.
If this was a distal metastase of a brain tumor, he might well be a dying man.
He toweled himself and dressed fast. He went downstairs and through the kitchen again, where Katelyn and Conner were still breakfasting, Conner now absorbed in NPR on the radio, Meet the Press on TV, and the New York Times “Week in Review,” while Katelyn read the funnies in the Herald Leader.
“Zits is great,” she said as he headed out to the garage. “The father gets this—”
“Later. I’ll call.”
“Be sure they’re open.”
If they weren’t, he was heading to the Wilton City Hospital emergency room. There was no way he could make it through another night without knowing what this thing was.
In the event, the health center was open and staffed by a nurse and a squeaky little doctor who appeared to be just a hair older than Conner. He was tempted to head on to Wilton anyway, but his paranoia was running full blast, and he feared a note to Marcie from some tenure inquisitor: “Subject refused treatment at College H.C., preferred Wilton.”
Listen to that thinking, though. Paranoid. He was having seizures for the first time in over twenty years, and now entertaining lunatic paranoid fantasies… but how could he ask this freckled little boy with a sunburned skier’s nose for what he really needed, which was a damned Xanax drip to take home with him?
“Doctor, I have a little cyst in my left ear that’s giving me trouble. Mild trouble, but it’s waking me up at night when I lie on my side.”
He sat on the edge of the examining table while the doctor, if that’s actually what he was, gently examined the ear.
“I’m assuming a subcutaneous infection,” Dan said, aware of his own nervousness. He wanted to also say that he’d seized, but he dared not do that. Paranoid delusions aside, if that got back to Marcie, it might indeed have implications.
“There’s a mass,” the young doctor said.
Dan felt the blood drain out of his face, felt his heart turn over. He was forty. He was dying.
“Let’s do an X-ray,” the doctor said.
He followed him back into the green-tiled, Lysol-scented depths of the health center. Dan managed to get enough spit up to talk. “What do you expect to find?” he asked mechanically.
“Have you been doing any sort of carpentry?”
“Carpentry?”
“There’s a mass in there with something hard in it. I’m thinking a nail head. Something along those lines.”
“Can you see a point of entry?”
“Not anymore. When did it start hurting?”
“Last night.”
“That part of the ear’s not very sensitive. It could’ve been there for a while, just recently become irritated.”
They reached the X-ray room and the doctor turned on the lights, which flickered to life, revealing the same X-ray machine that had been there for all the years Dan had been involved with Bell College. Probably war surplus, and not from a recent war.
The doctor took four views of his ear and then he was sent off to the waiting area, an extraordinarily bleak little room with an anorexic gray couch against one wall, three plastic chairs, and two chair-desks for students who might wish to study while waiting for their bad news.
Dan would have taken out his iPod and listened to the New York Times, but his iPod was on his bedside. His choices were a coverless copy of Bicycling or the front half of a not-very-recent Newsweek.
Half an hour later, he began to fear that the young doctor, upon seeing the X-rays, had leaped into his car and rushed off to Wilton with them.
He went back into the depths of the place, where he found him sitting in a tiny office studying a thick textbook. “Oh, hi,” he said. “Let’s see if that e-mail’s come in yet.”
“E-mail?”
“Yeah, your X-ray’s being read by our radiologist. He got it online.”
Now, that was somewhat reassuring—a high-powered radiologist at another institution was reading his film.
“Here it is.” He opened an e-mail. “Boy, these guys need their English translated into English.”
“You can’t read medical terminology?”
“I can’t read a Sri Lankan’s idea of medical terminology. Your radiologist is in Trincomalee. Actually sounds rather romantic, Trincomalee.”
Dear heaven.
He reached across his desk and pulled out an X-ray folder. “This is interesting,” he said. He put two of the X-rays up on a wall light. “You have a foreign object in your ear,” he said, “as I suspected.”
Dan stared at the X-ray. The object was a tiny pinpoint of light. He could hear Conner’s precise young voice, “They will find a small object…” He asked, “Is it enclosed in a membrane?”
“A membrane? Not likely. Maybe a little calcification if it’s been there for a while. I think it’s a metal filing. It could have migrated from anywhere.”
“I have a sore place on my buttock.”
“Let’s take a look.”
He lowered his trousers.
“Nothing visible. Perhaps a slight indentation is all.”
Once again, Conner had been exactly right.
“So, what should I be doing about this?”
“If it bothers you, I can take it out.”
“You?”
He laughed a little. “Quite easily. It’s not deep, it’ll take five minutes.”
He lay on the examining table and let the nurse swab his ear with iodine. They injected him a couple of times, and went in.
“Feel anything?”
“No.”
“Okay, here it is. It’s a white disk. A—whoa.”
“What?”
“It just went—what the hell?”
“What?”
“I’m withdrawing.”
“Did you get it?”
He was silent as he took a stitch in the wound.
“I did not get it,” he said at last. “I got a little sliver of it before it migrated. It’s down in your earlobe now.”
He felt the lobe. “How can that be?”
“I’m not sure. It’s not a normal object.”
He had to say the word, hard as it was. “Cancer?”
The doctor laughed. “Cancers don’t generally run like hell when you touch them with a scalpel.”
“Was it, uh, a living thing, then?”
“Dr. Callaghan, I have no idea what it was. But I am going to do two things to put that question to rest. First, I’m going to put this sliver under a microscope, then I’m going to send it to the lab.”
“Does this happen to people often?”
“First one I’ve seen. Foreign objects are a whole subdiscipline of trauma medicine. It’s nothing to worry about, though. I wouldn’t think twice about it.”
They went into another room, this one containing a lab bench with a fairly decent microscope on it. The doctor prepared a specimen slide and put it into the viewing area. He lowered his face to the binocular.
Dan watched him, waiting.
He lifted his head. “Okay, off it goes to pathology.”
“But—what did you see?”
“White material. Probably some sort of a protein.”
“Why did it move? Is it a parasite?”
“Lord, no! Here—take a look for yourself.”
Gratefully, Dan looked into the microscope. What he saw was shaped like a sickle of moon, and along the curved outer edge there was what looked like movement. “What am I seeing? It’s still moving, am I right?”
“That has to be a light effect.”
Dan adjusted the scope. Clearly, the thing had scilia on it, and the scilia were propelling it. He lifted his face. “Scilia,” he said, “look.”
The doctor barely glanced at it. “Well, call day after tomorrow, we’ll give you the pathology report.”
“But it has scilia on it that are moving. So it’s a living thing, it must be. And it can migrate. What if it goes somewhere else? Into my brain or my heart?”
“There are no ear parasites like this.”
And that ended that. Another two patients had come in, and the doctor was off to attend to their hangovers.
On the way home, Dan called and told Katelyn that he was fine. She asked him what they’d found, and he came, quite unexpectedly, to a powerful personal moment. He found himself shaking so intensely that he pulled over to the side of the road.
“Dan?”
“Sorry. It was a little something in there. They took it out.”
“What sort of a little something, honey?”
“Not a tumor.” He found that he very much did not want to tell her that Conner had been right. He did not want Conner to be right, and he never, ever wanted to ask Conner how he had known. “It was a little cyst. Took ten minutes to get rid of it. The main delay involved waiting for the radiologist to evaluate it… in Trincomalee. It seems we outsource our diagnostics to experts in the Third World. Or is it the fourth world? Is there a fourth world?”
“You sound a bit out of it.”
“It’s been a long twenty-four hours, dear. I’m coming home and I’m going to turn on the TV and watch Sunday golf and spend the afternoon in a coma.”
All the way home, without knowing why and without being able to stop, he cried. There was no sound. In fact, his expression never changed, except for wetness flowing down his cheeks. He felt like an idiot, he never cried. But he couldn’t stop himself now, because a tremendous sorrow was coming up from his depths, a hidden river exposed.
He remembered this so well, this anguish that he could not control. It had been a feature of his childhood, had come after his seizures.
He thought he knew why the syndrome had returned. This was probably the most tense period he had never known in his life. He was not a particularly successful teacher. In fact, he was pretty much a failure. Bell wasn’t just a holding tank for second-rate students, it was a refuge for dead-end teachers, too.
He had his good points. You could not find a more loving husband. You could not find a better man to father a kid as sensitive and exasperating as Conner. But he tended to the pedantic when he lectured. He was too careful, too humorless, too predictable.
Still, he had built a life for them at Bell. Conner’s life was here. Katelyn was having a successful career in the sociology department. She was tenured, popular with students, had crowded classes. She was pulling down seventy grand to his forty-eight-five, also. It would not be fair for his failure to uproot her.
Tomorrow at ten sharp, he would have his final tenure review with Marcie. Of course, it wasn’t the official word, that came from the tenure committee next week. But by the end of the meeting tomorrow, he’d know.
He drove past Marcie’s house, noted that all the blinds were down. A signal? An omen? He drove on, circling blocks—but not Marcie’s of course, God forbid—and forcing back these ridiculous, if thankfully silent, tears.
When he arrived home, he hoped to avoid Conner.
“I was right,” his son said as he got out of the car. “I was exactly right.”
“Conner, you were wrong. It was a cyst.”
“Where is it?”
“Oh, brother. Son, it’s in the garbage at the health center.”
“Dad, do you realize what that is? It’s an alien artifact! It’s important, there’s even a Web site about them. A lot of Web sites.”
Dan tried to get past his son and into the house.
“Dad, it’s important! You’re involved in a close-encounter situation and—”
“SHUT UP!” He ran across the garage. “Will you just SHUT UP!”
Katelyn appeared. “What’s the matter with you? What’s going on out here?”
“Katelyn—oh, God. Katelyn, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Conner. Please forgive me, both of you.” He tried to smile. Failed. Shook his head. “Look, Conner, you’re always asking for space. I need some space right now. I need some, okay?”
“Dad, are you crying?”
“It’s a mild allergy to the anesthesia.”
“Dad’s just had an operation, Conner. We need to back off.”
“But Mom, he’s letting them throw away an implant!”
“Goddamnit, there’s no such thing! Conner, for a supposed genius, you can be an amazing idiot. A Web site on alien implants is your source of information? You urgently need to learn some discrimination, son. You can do calculus backward and recite Wittgenstein, and yet you come up with this garbage.”
“Be careful, Dad. It was Wittgenstein who said, ‘Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.’ ”
Dan knew not to pursue it. No matter how correct he might be, in a sentence or two more, Conner would win the argument. To avoid that, Dan went inside, took a relatively good Barolo out of the wine rack, opened it and grabbed a glass, and headed for the family room. Golf, decent wine, and deep, deep sleep were what he needed.
He’d gone over the top, of course. The boy was terribly sensitive, of course. Well, he’d apologize later. Conner got under your skin. He really did have a skill at that.
He poured some wine, drank it… and felt his ear. The damned thing had moved again. It had returned to its original site, under the stitch.
He considered screaming. But no, that would be rude. Instead, he poured himself another full glass and drank it down.