Majestic (9 page)

Hesseltine said. The four of them walked it, making rough measurements and kicking under the sheets of foil, the wooden beams, the parchment, looking for any large objects.

It took them about an hour to examine the area and fill the jeeps with as much debris as they could conveniently carry.

When they returned to the house they transferred some of the material to the rear of Gray's wagon. Then they headed back to the field. The rest of the stuff remained with Walters. Don Gray was now excited, even elated.

He had forgotten the cries in the night, and was now thinking only of the incredible thing they had found. It was one of the most momentous discoveries in history, and he had made it. Just absolutely incredible. "We are going to have a hell of a lot of work to do on this," he said to Hesseltine.

"What work? This is gonna be Eighth Air Force business. Pentagon business. We've done our work. You'll see. The brass is gonna be all over this thing." "Maybe and maybe not."

I believe that this was the moment that Donald Gray became a hero. To his own considerable surprise, he found that he had formed a powerful conviction about this. It was not going to be a military secret.

"What about the threat to the 509th? I mean, why are they out here in this godforsaken place, anyway? Could be because it's close to the squadron." Hesseltine's hands gripped the wheel. "The A-bomb is a big thing.

Maybe even big enough to be of concern to people on other planets." Now that he had seen the danger, his sense of duty was finally aroused.

After that they were both silent for a long time, trying to absorb the import of his statement. Soon Hesseltine turned on the radio and picked up the ten A.M. news out of Albuquerque. Then there was a soap opera, Young Doctor Malone. Gray listened without interest to the complications of the doctor's life. It was nearly one when they finally reached the outskirts of Roswell. "Let's stop at my house for lunch," Gray said. "I want my son to see this stuff."

"You sure about that?"

"I'm certain."

"It's gonna be classified."

"Well, it's not classified now, and I want my boy to see it and hold it in his hands. It'll be something to tell his grandchildren."

"He's twelve. Say he has grandchildren when he's fifty. That'll be, let's see, nineteen-eighty-five. By then everybody will know all about this. There'll probably be aliens living down the block. And the fact that he saw a few pieces of a wrecked disk in 1947 won't amount to a hill of beans."

"Well, Jennine still makes a better ham sandwich than you'll find in the officer's club."

"I could use a whole ham. A couple of hams. Those poor devils live on beans and bread."

"And I've got a six-pack of White Label beer."

"Trommers? Where the hell did you get that?"

"Three hundred ninetieth Air Service at your service. Some of the guys brought it back on a run from D.C."

"Does Jennine know how to make a hoagie?"

"Which is?"

"It's real food from Philly."

They dumped some of the stuff on the kitchen table. Gray called Don Jr., who was in his room struggling with a balsa model of a Zero.

Don Jr. is now a doctor living in Southern California. His office bustles with patients; he is a successful man and honored in his community.

I asked him to please tell me if this really happened. He looked me square in the eye and said, "Mr. Duke, it did." And he proceeded to relate the story of how his father had showed him the debris.

"Identify it," the major had told his son.

The boy looked at it, touched it. "Private plane?"

"See the balsa parts."

"Is that Egyptian writing?"

"Nope."

"What is it, then, Dad?"

Jennine took out a box of Cut-Rite and compared the wax paper to the parchment. "It certainly isn't normal wax paper," she said.

"Donnie, I'll give you a dime if you guess correctly. The debris comes from something that crashed up near Maricopa."

"Not a balloon, not a plane." He looked at his father, smiled. "Flying disk?"

"Smart," Hesseltine said.

"Don't be silly, Don," his mother told him. "Your dad wants you to learn these things."

"Jennine, the boy has just won a dime. He's exactly right. Our opinion is that this material came from a flying disk like the ones they've been reporting in the papers."

Donnie was awed, and the awe remains with him to this day. Gingerly, he touched some of the wooden beams. He looked at his dad. "What happened to the pilot?"

Don's mind went back to that wild, awful howling. "There wasn't a sign of a pilot."

He thought of the poor rancher with his wife and kids. Tonight and every night, they would be out there alone with whatever had done that howling.

He bit into the sandwich that Jennine had made for him, and ate with the gusto of the survivor.

Chapter Six

The Chronicle of Wilfred Stone

It is curious that distant memories become so vivid in old age. I first noticed this perhaps ten years ago; I remember my father commenting on it when he was in his seventies. When I was fifty my recollections of early childhood were little more than shadows. Now I can remember the lace collar I wore, and how Momma tied it behind my neck, and the smell of the lucifers they used to light the gas.

I remember other things too, oh, I certainly do. They are most appalling things, and I don't know how to cope with them.

Are they real, or is my mind beginning to mix memory and imagination?

That would be fatal to understanding, of course, and I cannot know if it has happened.

However, I do know that what I am about to describe has been done to many children of this generation. The Children's Circles that the others formed in the fifties and sixties were part of this phenomenon.

I should know all about that: I personally agreed to let them enter the lives of fifty of those children. They submitted a list.

I did not allow myself to suspect that they would use my agreement as an excuse to affect thousands more.

But they did, of course. I told myself, only fifty. A small price.

Were they doing it as far back as 1916, and did they do it to me? The question makes me sorrow and makes me ache. It is so important to my understanding of what has happened to me - and to us all - and so impenetrable.

All I can do is focus myself on those days, and repeat the recollections that age has returned to the forefront of my mind.

Once again it is early July, but this is the year 1916 and the location is Westchester County.

This is not the suburban glut of today, but another place entirely, a land of rolling hills and comfortable, elegant homes. There are farms in the valleys, and wagons are more common than trucks and cars. Where great malls will spread across the land there are now apple orchards, and the trees show promise of a rich harvest in the fall.

One of these houses in particular is of interest to us. In July of 1916 the house was owned by Herbert Stone, a man skilled in the application of law to the problems of the corporation. Among his clients are the National Biscuit Company and the Hill Coffee empire.

He was there with his wife, Janet, and their two children,

Monica and Wilfred.

Monica was four, and I was three.

Before God, I wish I could go back with a warning.

The children are playing, the parents sipping scotch and water. The katydids are arguing, the butterflies fluttering. Westchester smiles.

Like his father, Herbert is a lawyer. He loves us with the kind of simplicity that I value so much and do not myself possess. My work has denied me peace in these aged years. Instead I live like an anguished ghost.

They were the last family I had, mother and father and my dead sister. I have been cursed to outlive my generation, and to do so without the comfort of a family.

When this young journalist appeared, attracted like a little trout to the bait of my letter to his paper, he found me as I am now, and as I will no doubt be when I finally expire.

If I ever do. Two years ago my doctor told me that my disease would kill me in six months. My death is as hesitant as were my loves.

I am sitting in my garden here in Bethesda, smoking and watching the weeds grow, and scribbling in what young Duke calls "my dense and careful hand" on a yellow legal pad.

He has never met any of the young men from the agency, and so he does not know what they call me.

I am the T.O.M. The Terrible Old Man. They think that I am infected with alienness, that I am not really human anymore. Overexposed, they say.

Deep in the night I sometimes awaken and feel a sense of passing presence, and I must admit that I long to join the drift in the sky.

Some say that they eat souls. That is not true. What they do is more profound, more private, more final.

"Don't let him catch your eye," the young men say. "They'll see you, and they'll get you, too."

I wore my lace collar and my Fauntleroys and was washed in Pear's soap. My voice was high and happy when I was three.

This is what I remember.

When they came I was rolling a red fire truck up and down across the board floor of the porch, causing a rattling that reminded me of an engine.

I have established the time as approximately five-thirty. My father had just driven up from New York, arriving perhaps half an hour before. He was still wearing his black broadcloth suit, tie and waistcoat. He had come from a meeting with Vincent Carney, a developer of office buildings. Mr. Carney had entered into an agreement to construct the new National Biscuit Building, and Herbert Stone, Esq., had made ten thousand dollars in an afternoon.

Father was sitting in a big wooden chair with his feet up on a stool.

He leaned his head back, imagining that he was lying in the castles of summer cloud that were passing by.

Janet also closed her eyes.

As far as they were concerned they were innocently drowsing on a summer afternoon. Neither of them imagined that somebody very strange and very close was generating a sound that was causing their drowsiness.

Or that they were being watched by careful eyes.

Only we children remained active. Monica played with a doll she had named Ricardo, and I with my beloved red fire engine.

What my father had seen as a cloud in the sky was something very, very different. It was gray and tremendous and slow, this thing that had come over the house. Had he seen it as it really was, my father might have thought it an organic thing, something like a gigantic wasp's nest Boating in the sky.

And what watched from within, with great, black eyes and spindly limbs - what would he have called them in their thousands? Giant hornets? He would have understood the fierceness, but never the intelligence.

Afternoon became evening, and cowbells began to sound lazily across the valley below. A woman's voice rose, calling the cows to their barn.

This voice was dampened by a sound that could almost be heard, a deep buzzing that seemed to pulsate in the gut and chest, to caress the heart and slow the blood.

The voice faded away. The cowbells stopped. Birds stopped, katydids and cicadas stopped. A snake paused in its patient stalking of a rabbit, and its nictitating membranes slipped over its eyes. The rabbit paused in its chewing and fell to its side. Still we children played. "Rum-m-m," I said, "clang, clang, clang!" "Ricardo, are you ever going to get married? Only to you, my dear. I love you. You need a wipe. Okay . . ."

Nobody saw the line of dots that were coming from the gray thing, saw them twisting and turning in the sky, moving as gracefully as a column of geese, slipping quickly down from the land of the clouds to the land of the stones.

These appalling things stepped lightly into the yard, into the soft, hot grass, and they began to move forward in lockstep, closer and closer to the porch where our parents slept and we played.

They were small and fragile, as gray and spindly as insects. Their heads were huge and had the texture of something that had been inflated. Their prominent eyes glittered in the afternoon sun. As they moved their heads bobbed.

Every few moments there would be an angry buzz and they would sail a few feet through the air.

"Ricardo, I love you!"

"Rum-m-m - clang!"

They came closer. Someone watching might have thought that these creatures were engaged in some sort of ritual. In addition to their lockstep and their gliding jumps, they were making a whole host of other gestures, moving their thin arms, chattering their mouths, turning their heads first left, then right, then toward the sun.

Again they stepped, jumped, jutted out their hips, twisted their arms together, then turned their black eyes toward the sun.

"Rum-m-m! Clangclangclang!"

"Ricardo is sleeping! He is a man like daddy and he is sleeping in my arms."

"Brum-m-m-m!"

"Please don't wake him up, Wilfred."

Three steps forward. Monica wrinkled her nose. There was an overpowering odor coming with the dancers, a stink of molten sulfur.

Abruptly the adults stood up. They began walking like robots. Down the porch they went and into the living room. They stood staring at the floor like tongue-lashed children.

"Mother and Father are marching," Monica said happily. But as her parents passed her she fell silent. She was not afraid, just confused. Why was everybody marching into the living room?

When she got up to follow, carefully cradling Ricardo, she found herself looking into a pair of huge, black eyes.

She experienced a burst of extreme dizziness and reeled back, twisting as if a bullet had hit her in the face.

She lay still, her doll beside her. There was a movement too rapid even to perceive and the being had twined its arms and legs around her.

She knew it too. It must be understood that she was totally conscious during this ordeal. Her mind was not in any way altered. She felt, heard, saw everything that happened to her. And she suffered. It was the first of the secret, stifled memories that would in the end destroy Monica Stone.