Close Encounters of the Third Kind (13 page)

“Fine. Great,” Neary responded. “Lets say the Russians are building and flying them. So what are they doing in Indiana airspace?”

That got a laugh from everyone—Air Force, civilians, press, and “witnesses.”

Major Benchley waited for order and started over. “We have had some high-altitude refueling missions in the visible vicinity, and I’m told of a high build-up of static electricity—heat lightning. Also we have a condition called temperature inversion whereby a layer of cold air is sandwiched between layers of warm air.”

Neary looked around the packed conference with mock incredulity. “You guys called this meeting to tell us what’s going on and all we’re getting are weather reports.”

“What would you like to believe is going on?”

Ronnie tried to pull Roy down, but he took her hand away and said, “I’d like to believe the United States Air Force knows.” Then he sat down.

“Who’s going to pay for the damage to my land?”

Major Benchley blinked. “Pardon me?”

“I own the land where these people have been squatting at night,” said the man, whom Roy recognized as the well-to-do gentleman he had noticed earlier. “This man over here”—he indicated Neary—“tore down several yards of my snow fence. There’s trash all over the place from where these people have been staying up all night, eating Kentucky fried chicken and drinking beer. Who’s going to pay for it all?”

Major Benchley pointed a finger at the landowner. “Did you see anything that night?”

The man laughed. “My family has owned that piece for more than eighty years and we’ve never seen one damn thing.”

The television cameras had swung quickly to the landowner, and Neary realized that the meeting was starting to fall apart. If he didn’t jump in fast, the focus would be lost forever.

“Wait a goddamn minute!” he said loudly, sensing Ronnie physically edge away from him as he jumped to his feet again. “I saw something.” The cameras swiveled back to him. “This thing has cost me my job! That’s how serious it is to me. It happened to me, it happened to some of you, and we want to know what it is!”

Benchley had begun talking over the last of Neary’s words. “If the evidence is good, the case will stand up and the existence of extraordinary phenomena will have to be taken seriously.”

“We are the evidence!”
Roy shouted. “And we want to be taken seriously.”

“Please, Mr. Neary.”

“Please, Major Benchley,” Neary mimicked him. “I would like to believe that I’m not going crazy. There are other people in this room who saw what I saw and they would like to believe that they are not going crazy. Is that such an unreasonable request?”

Major Benchley was silent for several moments and when he spoke again it was spontaneous. “I think there are all sorts of things that would be great fun to believe in. Time Travel and Santa Claus, for instance. You know, everybody, I wish I’d seen it. For years I’ve wanted to see one of those darn silly things hopping around in the sky, because I believe in life in the universe. Odds are against there not being life. The extraterrestrial hypothesis is merely one of many alternate possibles. We seem to want proof that out there is something that can solve our problems for us. It’s an emotional situation we have here. We want answers too, not mysteries.”

Neary sunk into his aluminum folding chair.

“Can you tell us . . . is your Air Force base conducting any tests in Tolono area? You know—secret testing, maybe?”

Major Benchley hesitated again and then, looking straight at Neary, said, “It sure would be easy to lie to you and say yes. You’d walk away with an answer you could live with. But this is not the case and I won’t mislead you. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what you saw.”

Neary smiled, and then said, “You can’t fool us by agreeing with us.”

That produced a burst of laughter, which confused Neary for a moment. He had meant what he said; it was not a joke.

Benchley laughed, too. Then he held up his hand for quiet, saying, “You must understand, all of you, that there are other considerations at work here. A certain hysteria sets in. We’ve had some schoolchildren burned quite seriously because they were playing with flares. Tonight we even heard from a lady in Harper Valley who blames this thing for the disappearance of her four-year-old son.”

It was at this point that the old farmer decided to share his experience with everyone. “I saw Big Foot once,” he announced. “It was up in the Sequoia National Park. The winter of nineteen fifty-one. It had a foot on him, thirty-seven inches, heel to toe. Made a sound I would not want to hear twice in my life.”

“What about the little star of Bethlehem that led the three wise men to Jesus?” an addled lady with bluish hair and a Gideon bible asked. “This star has never been satisfactorily explained by astronomers.”

The television cameramen were having a wonderful time.

“Sir, is there any truth at all to this Loch Ness monster crap?”

As they were heading through the lobby for the outside, Major Benchley came up to them, his right hand outstretched.

“Mr. Neary,” he began. “I just want to say—”

“Why the hell did your helicopters blow up that ridge without any warning the other night?” Roy shouted. “What the hell is that?”

“Roy?”

“Mr. Neary, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just came over to—”

“I don’t believe you!” Neary exploded. “I don’t believe anything you say, Benchley.”

Benchley, truly stunned by this outburst, backed off.

Ronnie pulled Neary away from the officer with both hands. “Roy,” she said. “Stop it! Stop it!” She pushed him across the lobby in the general direction of a Coke machine, and went back to make their apologies to the Major.

Neary fed his coins into the machine and, Coke in hand, wandered off down a corridor, trying to cool off, trying to figure out what was the matter with him. He wasn’t like that, blowing off at guys unprovoked. Benchley hadn’t really done anything to him; the guy was just doing his job.

Roy caught himself staring at a small opening along one long wall. Still sipping away at his Coke, he swung open the panel door and there was a master control circuit box, an array of hundreds of circuit-breaker switches.

Neary’s forefinger traced the office diagram for the building, which was tacked to the inside of the panel door. Then, moving quickly, he began snapping circuit breakers off here and there. His fingers flipped back and forth as he checked the diagram, threw another set of switches, consulted the diagram and flipped off more circuits.

“Roy!” Ronnie had found him.

Neary was smiling now. Shutting the panel door, he took Ronnie’s arm and escorted her out of the building to the parking lot.

“Roy, what’s the matter with you?”

“I’m fine. Everything’s fine, just fine.” He felt foolishly pleased with himself.

Neary started the engine and gunned the car out of the lot toward the sentry post. A line of cars was stopped there, drivers and passengers—civilian and military—standing by their cars, looking back toward the tall glass building. He braked to a stop at the end of the line, and he and Ronnie got out, too.

It had come out just right. He’d darkened some offices and turned the lights on in others. Across the entire broad face of the DAX Air Force Administration Facility, shining forth into the night for people to see for miles around, the windows spelled out three letters: U F O

The photographer and reporter looked at the weeks worth of unwrapped newspapers strewn across the lawn, the bottles of spoiling milk in the delivery box, and then at each other. They continued up the walk to Jillian Guiler’s house and rang the door bell.

They rang the bell for several minutes and knocked on the door several more. They tried peering through the drawn blinds and then went around to the back door and tried that. But they were unsuccessful. They were convinced that Jillian was somewhere inside the dark house. Their FBI and police sources had assured their editor that she was. But eventually they gave up and went away.

Inside, Jillian had boarded up every window. The living room was in chaos, as were the kitchen and her bedroom. Although she’d cleaned up the mess in the kitchen, the rest of the rooms were beyond her—even making the bed had become impossible—and the house remained much as it had been since the night Barry had been taken and the day after, when the police and the FBI men went through it and the fields and woods surrounding the house searching for clues.

She had taken all the phones in the house off their hooks. The police and the FBI had nothing to tell her; they’d had nothing to tell for the week that Barry had been gone. They said that if he’d been kidnapped, the kidnappers would have been in touch days ago. They didn’t tell her what they thought had happened to Barry, but Jillian knew what they thought: that Barry had wandered away in the night, that he had fallen down or become frightened or lost and was now out there in the woods somewhere, dead.

But Jillian knew that Barry was not wandering around lost, and she was sure he was not dead. She just had to wait and hope “they” would bring him back to her. And so she was waiting . . . and hoping . . . and praying. That was why she had locked the doors and boarded up the windows and taken the phones off their hooks. She didn’t want to talk to anyone—police, FBI, press, neighbors, family, or cranks—millions and millions of cranks. She was waiting. For Barry. For a sign. For a signal.

To help her get through this waiting period, to help her keep her sanity, Jillian knew she had to paint. So she had set up her easel and her paints in a corner of the living room under a floor lamp—the light wasn’t very good, but it would have to do—and for the past week she had been hard at it. Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen hours a day.

And always the same picture over and over again. A mountain, not a range of mountains, with valley and canyons, but just this one mountain. With harshly grained sides. With outcroppings of trees and brush. She must have painted twenty, no, thirty different but similar pictures by now. Jillian did not find her behavior obsessive. Not even unusual. She was going to keep on painting that mountain until she got it right—whatever that meant—or until she got a signal about Barry.

And so, Jillian Guiler listened to the men ringing the doorbell and pounding on the doors and scratching at the windows, without really hearing anything. They would go away soon, they always did. And Jillian kept on painting the mountain.

17  

I
t was near Huntsville, Texas, in an abandoned sheet-metal factory, that all hell was busting loose. The vast floor space was overcrowded with semi-trailer trucks and work crews speedily and efficiently loading them. The cargo was a strange collection of boxes, cartons, and crates. The smaller items arrived on conveyor belts; larger ones by fork lift. In one corner, men in stainless lab coats were packing metal canisters into Styrofoam-lined cases all marked
Special Handling.
A line of olive-drab jeeps waited on standby to trundle aboard. They bore no markings. Nor did the fiberglass modules that sat in the center of the square next to a thousand feet of unassembled spidery metal scaffolding.

A Volkswagen bus pulled into the warehouse, and Lacombe got out, followed by Laughlin and Robert. Aides rushed around behind and unloaded some simple Samsonite luggage.

“Is there anything Mr. Lacombe wants from his luggage?” an aide asked Laughlin. “We want to get it on the airplane just as quickly as possible.” Lacombe understood most of the question and smiled a no thank you, continuing a tour of the mobilization all around him. Laughlin looked worried. After all, the Frenchman had been active without sleep for over thirty hours.

“I have excitement inside!” Lacombe told his interpreter. “Sleep will come when the excitement stops.”

Laughlin considered what little he already knew, and envisioned his employer awake for another ninety-six hours.

In another corner, away from the noisy activity, two dozen truckdrivers clustered around the dispatchers desk. They were a motley group, some peeling off military uniforms and donning workclothes and watch caps. The dispatcher was a no-nonsense lieutenant colonel with a very big stick. He used it to point at a mammoth map of the continental United States. The truckers pressed close and some chewed gum.