Close Encounters of the Third Kind (12 page)

“Hello?” a woman asked.

“Roy!” Jillian’s voice was a frightened croak.

“He’s not here,” Ronnie said matter-of-factly. “I’m his wife. Who’s calling, please?”

The overload was so ferocious that even the air in the rooms seemed to burn orange-hot with a fearful buzzing noise. It was as if some giant high-tension tower, carrying thousands of volts, had toppled down on this house and charged it so thickly with power that—

The vacuum cleaner, like a prisoner being tortured in a cell, screamed in horror. The stereo speakers vibrated and burst apart.

A metal ashtray rose into the air and hovered for an instant, suspended in the terrifying heat of the air. She could hear the clattering on the roof again.

Jillian lost track of what was happening. The phone dropped from her hand. She slid to the floor. Barry was nowh—

“Barry!”

Racing into the room like an auto run amok, the vacuum cleaner began howling across the floor, chasing her as she jumped out of its way. It wheeled, charged again. Jillian ran.

In the horror of crashing, grinding noises and flashing, blinding lights, Jillian lost track of what was happening. Barry was—

“Barry!”

Somewhere in the distance she could hear over everything Barry’s gleeful laughter. The kitchen. Jill, beyond walking, started the endless crawl across the room to the kitchen.

The refrigerator was vibrating intensely. The door swung open, the light inside blinking on and off spastically.

Then she caught sight of her son. He, too, was crawling on the floor. Toward the dog-door opening. He reached it and started trying to wriggle through the narrow opening.

Jillian lunged forward and grabbed for Barry’s foot. She caught it and started to haul him back in. She pulled hard. He slid across the linoleum toward her. The air smelled brassy and dank with electricity.

Then something pulled him away. Some force was tugging him outside the house.

“Let go of him!” she screamed.

Jillian gritted her teeth and pulled back. The boy’s body shifted forward and back a few inches.

Jillian held on to her son until she felt, she knew, that if she did not let go, he would be dislocated. Sobbing, Jillian loosened her grip and Barry slipped away from her hands and out the little door.

In a flash, he was gone.

Jillian heaved herself up off the floor and threw open the kitchen door, staggering into the back yard, but Barry was nowhere in sight. She saw the tornadolike formation hovering above the house, as if parked, lit up by the tiny geodesic points of flashing and bursting lights.

Then the cloud eased away into the gathering darkness. And Jillian, not really knowing what she was doing, not really caring about anything anymore, started to follow, started to chase after it, until an immense shape loomed up, gigantic arms enfolding her. All the breath came out of Jill. She fell to the stubble of a cornfield.

Cringing, she glanced at the giant figure entangling her. A straw-stuffed scarecrow looked down, smiling his idiot grin, arms flapping loosely as she slapped them away. Jill had lost.

Barry was gone.

For a moment, Jillian lay there, sobbing in anger and pain. As she looked up through tears, she saw a lone star overhead change from white to blue to red.

And then disappear.

16  

“W
hat were you doing up on the garage roof?” Ronnie asked.

Neary had come in and gone straight to the bathroom to wash. “Some carpentry,” he shouted past the noise of running water.

Ronnie went to the kitchen window and saw that he had knocked together some sort of platform at the peak of the garage, a platform on which a folding deck chair sat. “It’s a lookout, isn’t it?” she called.

She turned away from the window to find him with his face buried in a towel, scrubbing himself dry. “Roy, instead of building platforms . . .”

She let the idea drop. She didn’t want to become the wife who nagged her unemployed husband into finding work. But she also didn’t want to be the wife of the neighborhood fruitcake, sitting up there in his makeshift planetarium watching for orange Betty Crocker crescent rolls.

“You had a phone call,” she said.

He dropped the towel. “Big storm toward Harper Valley!” he announced. “You can see for miles up here!”

“She didn’t give her name.”

“She?”

“Or wouldn’t.” Ronnie took a small, measured breath. “Seemed kind of shattered to be talking to your wife.”

“Who?”

“Hung up, finally, after a lot of thrashing-around noise.”

Neary nodded absentmindedly, his glance going past Ronnie to the kitchen clock. “We don’t have that much time. It’s an hour’s drive. Baby-sitter here yet?”

“She’s here.” Ronnie took another small, cautious breath. “Roy, I hope you understand that, after this, we can’t be laying out money for baby-sitters. Not until . . .”

He had the good grace to look guilty. “I know. I appreciate your going along with this, Ronnie.”

“But it’s on one condition.”

“Which is?”

“That when the meeting is over, you drop the whole thing. Isn’t that why the Air Force announced this meeting?”

The fifty-mile drive went slowly, Neary realized, because Ronnie was not in a talkative mood. They approached the outskirts of DAX Air Base with about ten minutes to spare before the start of the meeting, whose time had been announced over radio and TV for several days now.

Up ahead the first sentry post loomed. Ronnie sank down in her seat. “I’ll never forgive you,” she said, “if we run into anybody we know here.”

He stopped to ask the sentry for directions to the Civilian Information Center. “It’s that big all-glass building,” the corporal said, tucking a green visitor’s pass in behind the windshield wiper. “You can’t miss it.”

“I sure can’t,” Neary commented. The building was huge, flat and thin, like a matchbook on end, acres of picture windows framed in anodized aluminum mullions. He parked next to someone’s battered old farm pickup truck, another green card on its windshield.

The waiting room of this all-glass skyscraper was huge, endless. A civilian woman sat at a desk, took Neary’s name, and gave him a name tag to wear, as she had the more than thirty people already sitting there.

“These people,” Ronnie whispered in Neary’s ear as they sat down. “They’re all misled.”

“Shssh.”

“I knew it would be like this.”

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Neary whispered fiercely.

“Look at that one over by the elevators,” Ronnie whispered back. She indicated a woman in her late fifties, raddled, white hair flying in several directions at once, her gaze as empty as an ancient headstone.

“Halfway over the edge,” Ronnie murmured.

“On her way to the rocks below.”

Just then, Jillian Guiler came through the door, and the reporters came to life, surrounding her instantly.

“Could you give us a statement, Mrs. Guiler?” a reporter asked as the hot lights were turned on her and the cameras started grinding.

Jillian, looking distraught and very tired, said nothing.

“Your report to the police was . . . ah . . . really quite breathtaking. We’d like to make the six o’clock. We lose our young audience at eleven.”

Jillian seemed not to have heard.

Another journalist said to a colleague, “That’s her, isn’t it? That’s the lady in the clouds.”

“We understand no ransom note has been found.”

The first reporter tried to follow up. “What about the FBI story? Is there any truth to that . . . that the child is missing? You gave the police a report. Would you mind repeating it for television?”

Jillian started to panic. The questions were furious, maligning, and irrational. Jill was retreating to the elevators when she caught Neary’s eye across the room. As the elevator arrived she formed the words, “They got him!”

“What?” Roy hadn’t read her, but Ronnie sure did and buried her husband with one of her prize-winning rotten looks as the elevator doors opened and swallowed Jillian from view.

A master sergeant in full-dress uniform came into the room.

“Folks . . . you can go in now. Room 3655. Just follow me.”

The Tolono group, lead by Neary and Ronnie, headed for the corridor. TV news cameras were waiting this time just on the other side of the doors. On went the quartz lights and the cameras started to whir.

Ronnie jerked her purse up to cover her face, just as if she had been arrested. “Damn you, Roy!” she muttered behind the bag.

The thirty or so civilian witnesses looked suddenly seedy, bleached out by the brilliant light from quartz bulbs in reflectors towering toward the ceiling of the room.

With the entrance of the Air Force team, and a phalanx of accompanying newspaper reporters and photographers, it became clear to Neary that whatever he had hoped to get from this meeting, what the Air Force wanted was publicity. So be it. For a change he and the military saw eye to eye. Let the whole world know what happened.

His initial feeling of satisfaction was dampened a bit when he saw that the Air Force spokesmen, all in civilian suits, would be sitting at ease on bent-plywood-and-foam-rubber contour swivel chairs, elevated on a platform a little above the rest of the room. In a hollow square around them ranged the voluntary witnesses, uncomfortable on folding chairs, unprepared for being the focus of so much publicity, still dressed for the most part in clothes they’d worn all day at work or on the farm.

“I’m Major Benchley,” the younger man mused. “And this,” he continued, holding up a large color blowup of an eerie high-resolution disc in blurred motion, “is a flying saucer.”

That got everybody’s attention, producing some “oohs” and “aahs” and ad-libbed responses to the effect that “I saw that one.” and “That’s the one.”

“Made of pewter,” Benchley went on after the stir had subsided. “Made in Japan. And thrown across the lawn by one of my children. I wanted to open up with this to show you that were not all polished brass about these things and to make another point clear. Last year Americans took more than seven billion photographs, spending a record six point six billion on film equipment and processing. With all those clicking shutters, where is the indisputable photographic evidence that extraordinary phenomena exist in the skies over your homes?”

The “witnesses” seemed stunned or intimidated in silence until one of the journalists said, “How many times can we reach for our cameras when a sudden surprise catches us off guard? How many actual automobile or plane crashes are filmed and make the evening news?”

There were sounds of general agreement from the Tolono group, and one of the more rational of their number stood up and said, “To dismiss out of hand the evidence for UFOs will not quiet the fears that we may be living through the first stages of exploration from elsewhere.”

“I am a reasonable person,” said the little old lady with the remains of her photo album. “A reasonable person,” she repeated reasonably enough. “All I know is that I saw something that was unlike anything I have ever seen before.”

Nobody spoke for a while so Neary raised his hand.

“Let someone else speak,” Ronnie hissed, reaching out to pull down his arm.

But Roy was already on his feet. “Look, sir. You people run the sky, right? Have you looked up recently? There’s a whole airshow going on.”

“I can only reiterate,” the major said, “that after ten years with the Air Tactical Intelligence and the Office of Special Investigations there has been no indisputable proof of the physical existence of these things.”

“Which things?” Neary asked.

Major Benchley had leaned over to confer with two colleagues. Now he straightened up and peered at Roy’s name tag. “Please understand me, Mr. Neary. I’m not attacking your credibility . . .”

“That’s okay. Just tell us what’s going on.”

“Were not sure. We can’t just assume, as you seem to, that these were excursion vehicles from another planet.”

“Well, it sure wasn’t the Goodyear blimp,” Neary said.

Many of the “witnesses” laughed. Ronnie did not.

“Let’s say it’s foreign technology,” the major said in a conciliatory tone. “Why assume it’s
that
foreign?” He gestured with his thumb to the sky.