Close Encounters of the Third Kind (10 page)

13  

H
e’d gone back the next night. Of course. And when none of the strange objects or colors appeared, he swore he was going to give up the whole idea. But the night after that he returned again.

The people he found there were getting to know one another. Old friends. The farmer in his pickup, with his pint bottle of whiskey, was on hand. So was a lady who had brought along a rocker and sat there doing needlepoint, to fill in the time before the next appearance of what everybody had taken to calling “the night things.” Another elderly woman had an album of photographs of “them,” the by-product of other nights in other places. A sound made everyone look toward the northern skies. Jet aircraft could be heard passing in the rarefied distance. “We’ll be here all night if that keeps up,” one of the elderly people complained. Roy knelt down by a lady who was eighty if she was a day. “Are they coming over tonight?” he whispered gently. Those words were like magic, for her very pressed face blossomed years off her, as though Neary had told her the meaning of life. She became teary-eyed, saying, “Oh, I hope so. Don’t you?”

“Yes,” he answered her in all seriousness. The old lady measured his fervor, blinked an eye and hefted to her lap a leatherette volume-sized photo album. She opened it to the first page.

“I took these myself,” she said smartly. “Out by the parochial school.”

Neary looked at her six color snapshots, a splash of yellow, a slit of white, a blur of out-of-focus blue. Anybody who didn’t know how to use a camera produced mistakes like that for the first few rolls of film.

It wasn’t that they were kooks, the kind of crazies who were always sighting flying saucers. It was just that, except for her, Neary didn’t sense in any of them the same yearning need he had to find out what had happened. They seemed content simply to witness it, like the crowd at the circus who watches the fire-eater spew great sheets of flame but doesn’t care how he does it.

The second night after the “night things” had appeared, quite a crowd seemed to have collected. There were people Neary couldn’t remember seeing before. And, for the first time, he noticed the young woman and her little boy whom he’d pulled from the path of the wildly careening police cruisers.

Neary nodded to her over the heads of the crowd. She took her boy’s hand and came over. “You do remember us?”

“How can I forget?”

“Jillian Guiler,” she said, shaking his hand. “This is Barry.”

“Roy Neary. That was some night, wasn’t it?”

“It doesn’t feel like it’s over.” She touched his cheek. “You’re sunburned.”

“Hoping to tan the other side tonight.”

“It got my face and neck.” She opened her blouse to reveal the upper curve of her breasts and the hollow at the base of her throat.

She watched as Roy’s cheek turned a shade darker. “I’m sorry,” she said, buttoning up. “I just had the feeling you were my oldest friend.” She laughed. “It only takes one experience like that, doesn’t it?”

Neary nodded, no longer embarrassed. As he did so, a genial-looking man in unmatching slacks and a sports jacket shone a flashlight on them. Their sunburns seemed to stand out in his beam. This seemed to please him, and with a Pentax and strobe, he snapped their picture. Jillian blinked and turned toward him as the man focused at little Barry, sitting near the fence and playing with a mound of dirt.

Moving swiftly, Jillian got in the way of the amateur photographer. “He’s a little young to have a record,” she told him angrily.

Neary watched the man cough up an apology and ankle away. “Where do you think he’s from?”

“Earth,” Jillian muttered bitterly. She bent down to wipe dirt off Barry’s face. He was busily patting together a tall, conical mound.

“I, uh, have three of my own at home,” Neary announced.

“Did you tell your wife about what we saw?”

“Of course.”

“What does she think?” Jillian asked.

“She understands,” Neary said with some sarcasm, “perfectly.”

Jillian grinned. “I called my mother to tell her. She said that’s what I got for living alone.” She paused, and Neary saw that in some way she felt embarrassed, as he had before at the sight of the breasts—well, part of them.

“I’m not alone at all,” she covered quickly. “There’s Barry and the neighbors and I’m . . . not really . . . alone at all.”

“Barry’s father?”

“Died.” She paused. She looked away from him. “I don’t suppose he’d have understood this any better than your wife does.”

There was nothing Neary could think of to say at this point. Instead he hunkered down to Barry’s level and helped him pat dirt into place. “Working kind of late tonight, huh, kiddo?”

“I know he should be in bed,” Jillian said in a guilty tone. “But after the way he ran off the other night, I’m not letting him out of my sight.”

Neary nodded. He stared for a moment at the cone of dirt the little boy had built. He fingered a twig and etched fluted sides into the mound. “Hm.” He reached for some pebbles nearby. “Try these,” he offered.

Barry arranged them around the base of the cone, as if they were boulders thrown there by some explosion of natural forces.

“That’s better,” Neary said. Oddly enough both the boy and his mother accepted this as perfectly natural behavior.

“Hey,” Neary asked, suddenly puzzled. “What does this remind you of?”

Jillian dug deep for an answer but she didn’t know what. Then she bent over Barry to gently rough up the smooth side facing her. “I like it better like so,” she said.

“Me, too,” he breathed.

“Here they come!” a voice shouted.

“Out of the northwest!” someone yelled.

Neary and Jillian looked in the direction everyone was pointing. A hush descended over all. Adults and juveniles raised binoculars and cameras. On somebody’s transistor radio the Eagles were singing “Desperado.”

“There!” Jillian said pointing.

Two foggy pinpoints of light shifted back and forth, rising, falling, growing brighter in the darkness.

Neary raised his camera. “I’m ready this time.”

She had placed her hand on his arm. “You’re trembling.”

“I know.” Neary laughed recklessly. “What if were just two whackos standing on a hill with a dozen other loonies?”

“Your eyes burn, don’t they?”

“For two days now.”

“Mine, too.”

“But this is crazy,” he said, his teeth almost chattering. “It’s like Halloween for grown-ups.”

The lights were bearing down on them inexorably now, blinding, larger, merciless, painful to watch. “Trick or treat?” Jillian asked then.

Neary aimed his camera, but he had begun shaking so badly he wondered what kind of picture he’d get. “If those things stop and open their doors,” he asked her, “would you get in and go?”

“If those things stop, I’m going home.”

“Listen,” Neary said. “The sound . . . listen.”

The gathering in the field stirred as an unusual sound came over them, permeating the air. It was a rhythmical noise, blowing against the wind—louder now. And suddenly it was coming faster and more frenzied than any of them had expected, and fear shot through them all as they tried and failed to interpret the internal combustive pounding and . . . two blinding anticollision lights swallowed their world. The very air was displaced. And with the sky like summer noon, the lights suddenly gave way, clearly revealing two Air Force Huey helicopters that descended howling upon pockets of the idle curious, beating on them with hot air, gas exhaust, sucking dirt, napkins and human debris up into the spiraling convections, and still the screaming machines maneuvered around each other until even aluminum chairs, card tables, blankets, and picnic leavings were sent up and distributed to the next county.

In dismay, in self-disgust, and in some anger, too, he watched the two Air Force helicopters hover a dozen feet above them.

Neary saw the little old woman with the snapshots as he chased after them, whirling wildly in the wash from the two choppers, whose beams blinded her.

Barry screamed. He jumped and began to run. Jillian grabbed him. “Barry, it’s only helicopters, Barry.”

“Yeah,” Neary shouted over the noise and dust “They’re ours.”

The downwash from the rotors had set a road sign trembling. Neary watched it vibrate for a moment, just as the road sign had vibrated that other night. Then it had seemed wild, supernatural, something caused by . . . well, perhaps by night things.

Now he could see quite plainly that a sign was vibrating in the harsh wind of a maneuvering helicopter. It was happening right here in front of a hundred witnesses.

And for the first time in this whole insane affair, Neary began to doubt not only what he’d seen, but what he’d thought about it.

14  

O
ut here in the desert the stars were big and hard as diamonds. Some of the stars closest to the horizon scintillated from all the rising heat released after another desert scorcher.

It was midnight in Barstow, California, and the monstrous parabolic ear of the Goldstone Radiotelescope was listening to the sky. Station 14 was down for overhaul. That was the cover story. But the same 210-foot dish that tracked the Viking, Helios, Pioneer, Mariner, Jupiter, Saturn, and Voyager missions was honed in on a state vector in “deep space.” Inside the blockhouse a sign barked to all who entered: N
ETWORK
D
ATA
P
ROCESSING
A
CTIVITIES
. O
N-DUTY
O
PERATION
P
ERSONNEL
O
NLY
! C
ONTACT
MC COPSCON 5883. A handprint Ident. box blocked a vacuum-sealed doorway like a sentry. There was a lot of anxiety on this special night. Six right hands pressed down on the sentry box, handprint identifications were made, and the door hissed open. It looked more like a storage area than the mission control computing center. The core of activity was a geodesic cubicle that rested on a flatbed trailer in the center of this otherwise dark and empty warehouse. Inside, the cubicle looked like a college fraternity prank. Two dozen project members were scrunched up to their shoulders in CRTs, telemetry tracking hardware, command function consoles, transmitter and receiving units, and, most incongruous of all, a mini-Yamaha synthesizer and Claude Lacombe doing a five-note exercise on its keyboard. It seemed like he was sending a message. His fingers touched staccato, but the sound was undeniably India. Benares. The sky music. It was finally serving its hypothetical purpose.

And then came the response. The CRT readout was flooded with it. The hardcopy poured out of an IBM in reams. The paperwork was all over the floor, and project members were all thumbs trying to read it. It wasn’t coming back. It was numbers. For fifteen minutes there occurred a rush of pulses that dotted the paper. There were pauses and long intervals and then more rapid-fire communications. Lacombe was certain of that. Communication was taking place. He sat down and pressed his forehead to the palms of his hands. He took a breath and expelled the air, shuddering. The teletype noise was deafening to some of the younger people in this claustrophobic space, but when the chattering stopped it was Lacombe’s heart that sank. Only when the communication resumed would the Frenchman settle back and almost smile.