Close Encounters of the Third Kind (11 page)

“Okay, gang!” It was the operations advisor who was speaking now. “Here’s the pattern. We’ve received two fifteen-minute broadcasts. One hundred and four rapid pulses before a five-second pause, then, forty-four pulses and another five seconds’ rest, then thirty RPs and a sixty-second interval before an entirely different set of signals, which go as follows: forty plus five. Thirty-six plus five. Ten, then sixty, rest, and back to a hundred and four.”

Lacombe played the five notes into the transmitting equipment, and a Cal Tech advisor was quick to ask, “What about a response to that?” Lacombe looked up at him and shrugged. Maybe tomorrow they would learn what the notes meant. But now, the race was on, and twenty-four mission advisors became think-tank executives.

One shaggy-headed man spoke first as he sorted through the repeated numbers. “It’s not my social security number. Too many digits.”

Somebody else quipped, “Maybe it’s how many Quarter Pounders Ronald McDonald sold last month.”

Everybody laughed at this except Lacombe. He didn’t understand the joke and looked to his interpreter for the translation. But Laughlin didn’t respond. He wasn’t even looking at his employer, but instead was up to his armpits in hardcopy. Lacombe studied him. Laughlin was in a sweat over something, and when he looked up everyone was looking the other way. Everyone but Lacombe. The Frenchman nodded to his interpreter, encouraging him to say what was on his mind. Laughlin did just that.

“Excuse me!”

Everyone was pondering the big question and talking amongst themselves, so Laughlin screwed on his lumberjack voice and overdid it slightly. “EXCUSE ME!”

The room fell silent. Even the readouts stopped printing. Ironically, it was the end of a receiving cycle.

“Uh . . . before I got paid to speak French, I got paid to read maps and that number looks like a longitude to me.”

Nobody budged. Laughlin’s opinion drew blank stares. So he went on. “Two sets of three numbers, right? Well, the first number’s got three digits, the last two are below sixty.”

Laughlin stood up and moved to join Lacombe. Lacombe was already on his feet ready to burst loose with Eurekas! The room remained in a stupefied silence. Then, as everyone grappled with the idea, a core of excitement formed in the center of the group and rippled outward.

“Maybe . . .” someone spoke out, “maybe they’re telling us a location in right ascension and declination on the sky. Maybe giving us galactic coordinates.”

“No way, man,” someone was quick to say. “That doesn’t correspond to the direction of our ‘Big Ear.’ I think the man’s right! I think were getting terrestrial coordinates.” And that was the pin buster.

Every project official was screaming for a map. A burst of manpower left the audio cubicle and raced to the corridor, heading for the mission supervisor s office.

Inside the office a large globe rested in its steel cradle. Suddenly the door flew open and the hallway light spilled in. Dawn broke on Rand McNally’s western hemisphere, and excited project members rushed in like teenagers vandalizing the principal’s office. They tried to move the globe in its stand, but it must have weighed three hundred pounds. A mathematics wizard used his shoulders to pop the globe from its moorings and bobble it back into the corridor.

Other members formed a relay team, and planet Earth, tossed like a volleyball, rounded a corner and flew toward the communications cubicle. Once inside, Laughlin slapped away the extra fingers and traced the longitude from the South Pole.

“Antarctica, ocean . . . ocean . . . ocean . . . just missing Easter Island, just missing Sala-Y-Gomex Island. Landfall in Mexico. Just missing Puerto Vallarta . . . crossing into New Mexico and picking up Carlsbad Caverns but continuing on and—”

Another man’s fingers started tracing another line westward across the heartland of the United States. “Maine . . . New Hampshire . . . Great Lakes . . . Minnesota . . . South Dakota—”

And then their fingers came together in the northeast corner of the state of—

“Wyoming?” Laughlin looked up at Lacombe. “Wyoming.” The silence was shattered by the Texas drawl of the team leader.

“Well, what are we waiting for, get me a geodetic sectional map of Wyoming. Get me everything on it!”

Meanwhile Lacombe sat back down, donned his headphones, played the five musical tones into the great transmitter and waited, listening. Nothing. He keyed the Yamaha again. Nothing. Lacombe sat forward, intently. He played again, but this time the sounds were all but drowned out by two-dozen project members celebrating their first definitive breakthrough.

15  

T
he toy xylophone was poorly tuned. That was why the five notes sounded so strange when little Barry played them.

He didn’t learn them all at once, Jillian noted from the other room. He had kept working on the tune until he got it . . . well . . . the way he wanted it.

To Jillian’s ear, even though the tune was strange, Barry’s chuckles were reassuring. He was there. He was happy. The tune’s curious sequence of five notes—where do kids get these ideas?—was oddly disturbing, but of course these toy xylophones were never accurate. It was easy to make them sound . . . well . . . peculiar.

Jillian had spent the day, as she had the day before, making endless charcoal and pastel sketches. She had abandoned a career in art by the simple act of moving this far from big cities. But the habit of it was difficult to shake. She would find herself sketching Barry, a chair, a random arrangement on the kitchen table of a ketchup bottle, salt shaker, and dirty plate.

Today she had been drawing landscapes, mountainous ones. In the way they looked—distant uneven rows of teeth, peaks at odd intervals—they somehow reminded her of the tune Barry kept repeating on his xylophone.

The purest form of total random choice made mountains look as they did, the merest chance crisscross of volcanic thrust and gravity and the beating down of weather over centuries of time.

Only random choice could have brought Barry to pick out those five notes, and yet once he chose them, he remained with them as if, well, certainly, a randomness existed. It was all around them, in the way the veins in a leaf lay, unique to that leaf, never repeated in another. Each pebble on the beach was a bit different in size or contour or color or texture from every other pebble.

But the way Barry sounded those notes, it was almost as if in randomness there could be a message.

Jillian threw most of her sketches away in the cleanup process, but she saved one because it reminded her of something. She didn’t remember what exactly. This particular mountain she had drawn was terribly tall and thin, needly and distorted like one of those desert spires formed when wind and sand have eaten away the softer tone to lay bare the core spout of harder lava that formed the ancient throat of a volcano.

Its sides were gashed by harsh grooves as it rose out of a desolate landscape, like a misshapen finger thrust accusingly into the eye of the sun.

Thunder rumbled nearby. Jillian shivered and ran outside to see if rain was coming. Clouds had begun gathering in the west, obscuring the weak sun with masses of leaden gray. Behind the clouds Jillian could see lightning at work. A major electrical storm was coming. But the flashes were strangely prolonged, as if frozen. Small distant points of light began skipping from cloud to cloud.

The air began to thicken with the sound of swarming bees. The clouds now seemed to be actually moving . . . down.

Yes, down and in toward her. Within them, strange flashes of colored light seemed to ricochet from one cloud to another.

“No,” Jillian said in an undertone.

Across the rolling landscape, a kind of darker mass of cloud seemed to reach from the ground to the sky, a column that grew wider as it rose, almost like a . . . a tornado. Jillian felt defenseless, the way the girl Dorothy had felt in
The Wizard of Oz
as a giant tornado loomed on the Kansas horizon.

But this isn’t Kansas, Jillian told herself. And those bright-colored things dropping from cloud to cloud are not . . . not real? But of course they were real.

“No!” she shouted, suddenly frightened. Jillian eyed the safety of her house and turned slowly, very slowly taking the first of the long fifteen steps to the back door. She was terrified now and didn’t want to make herself panic by running. She continued toward the house in a kind of crazed slow motion. Jillian entered the house and slowly and deliberately she shut the back door and locked it. She moved into the living room now and began lowering the blinds. As Jillian moved from room to room her movements unwillingly became faster. She went from a walk to a trot to a run, jerking the blinds down as panic took control of her hands and made her fumble and miss.

She stood still for a moment, trying to make sense of everything. That
had
been thunder, hadn’t it? And lightning? That distant buzz, as of a swarm of bees, that had been something to do with the storm. And the clouds coming down toward her. But she’d never seen clouds do that before.

Barry was laughing. He’d never feared the violence of storms, for which Jillian decided she was probably grateful. But to hear the wholehearted way he laughed now, as the thunder clashed and the lightning flared, was a little too much for Jillian’s peace of mind. No child had a right to be that happy.

She hurried into his room. He had stopped playing the xylophone and was standing at the only window in the house whose blind was still up. He was staring intently out at the sky and what he saw filled him with great glee.

He began running through the house, raising the blinds, swinging open doors and windows. “Barry, no!”

Jillian ran after him, shutting, closing, locking. They came upon each other in the living room. The boy had just sent the shade rattling up.

Jillian pushed the boy to one side and yanked the blind shut. As if on cue, an immense roar of thunder shook the house. Behind the blind a flash of lightning flared with such an orange intensity that it seemed to set the entire wall aflame. The buzzing roared around her.

Jillian cringed from it, but Barry clapped his hands and laughed. Now the house was dark. Only the booming flashes of firelight outside illuminated it from moment to moment. Jillian took Barry’s hand and led him to her bedroom, where she picked up the telephone book and began searching for Roy Neary’s number.

As she did, another clap of thunder and orange light bashed at the house like a giant fist. The television set went on. So did the stereo. Electric lamps began to switch off and on. She could hear, in the vastness of her storage closet, the distant sound of her vacuum cleaner starting up.

Barry broke away from her grasp, ran to the window and sent the blind skyward with one happy swoop. As he did, a strange stillness fell on the place. The television and stereo were quiet. The vacuum cleaner stopped. There was no sound at all, not even of wind or the distant buzz of insects.

Then Jillian heard it. It sounded like . . . claws.

On the roof. Scrambling across the shingles. Claws. Or talons. Long fingernails or toenails. Sharp, scurrying sounds.

She stared at the ceiling above her, eyes moving along in the direction of the scraping, scrambling noises. They stopped for a moment at the chimney.

And now they began to come down the chimney.

Jillian dashed into the living room and raced for the damper handle. At any cost, she had to shut the flue. Barry followed happily.

“Come in!” he shouted. “Come in!”

The clawlike sounds skittered down the inside of the chimney. Jillian dived at the damper, slammed it shut.

Instantly, a harsh roar of noise shook the house. Orange light flooded every corner of the room. All the window shades snapped up.

Jillian dropped to the floor, hands over her ears. The television was blaring away. On the stereo, the turntable was revolving. From the loudspeakers, Johnny Mathis was singing “Chances Are” in a huge voice like the growl of a lion.

Jillian ran for the telephone again, dragging Barry with her.

Eyes wide with fright now, she found Neary’s number. As she held the telephone to her ear, instead of a dial tone, it gave forth the same five-note melody that Barry had been playing on his xylophone. Jillian jiggled the hook, got a tone like the angry
zzz
of bees, and dialed Neary’s number. The room lights were doing strange things, dimming to a fitful smoky red, then flaring to a blue-white that hurt her eyes. The telephone was buzzing.