Close Encounters of the Third Kind (22 page)

They were two hundred, perhaps three hundred feet above the great open-ended stadium that had been blasted and carved out of the box canyon, and as their eyes and minds adjusted to the fantastic scene below, Roy and Jillian, without saying anything more, decided to scramble down lower and closer. They moved cautiously down the granite edges to a perch some fifty feet below where the brush provided excellent cover.

Now they could make out men, technicians apparently, working in and around the cubicles. They were dressed in jumpsuits—the white ones had
McDonnell-Douglas
written on the backs, the blue,
Rockwell,
and the red,
Lockheed.
The cubicles seemed to be set up as small laboratories. Roy and Jill could not make out what all the equipment was for, but they did recognize some laser apparatus, biochemical instruments, devices for thermal and electromagnetic measurements, looking like bazookas on their tripods, a couple of spectrographic analyzers, and a lot of complicated-looking instruments intended to monitor and measure God only knew what.

Inside three of the cubicles sat black-suited men, all wearing dark glasses, guarded by military personnel, the only military that Neary could spot. Around the base were great radar dishes, constantly panning around and occasionally stopping for a moment and then moving on again. There were television monitors everywhere and at least a hundred film cameras, fifty still cameras and twenty-five videotape TV cameras set in banks on swivels. There were perhaps thirty operators and loaders for all cameras; the rest evidently were operated by remote control and connected to the tracking radar.

Despite its size, the area was both cluttered and a mess. There were Coca-Cola and snack food machines scattered about indiscriminately, portable outhouses around the perimeter, and a small catering area that reminded Roy of an army soup kitchen under a canvas overhang. There were a lot of unopened crates that had
McDonnell-Douglas, Rockwell
, and
Lockheed
markings on the sides, and there was debris—paper cups, napkins, plates, empty soda cans everywhere. In fact, some guys in jumpsuits were sweeping up the stuff just as an apparent tour of executives in sunglasses, led by a white-haired man in a jumpsuit, strolled by.

A bunch of technicians were clustered around the synthesizer, and one character, at the urging of the others, sat down at the large console and began picking out “Moon River” with one finger. The squeals and wows echoed across the canyon and vague forms of light and color shifted and faded across the giant scoreboard. The “musician” was shouted down by other technicians across the gridiron.

“I know what this is!” Neary said, more to himself than to Jill. “I know what this is! This is unbelievable!”

A gentle chime sounded below them.

“Gentlemen, ladies—”

A voice came over the loudspeaker system. He must have been in one of the cubicles, perhaps the communications cubicle, the one with all the computers. No, now they saw him.

A fellow in a white jumpsuit, holding a small microphone, the cord trailing out behind him, was walking out to the center of the arena. “Gentlemen, ladies. Take your positions, please. This is not a drill. I repeat: This is not a drill. Could we have the lights in the arena down sixty percent? Sixty percent, please.”

Gradually the stadium lights started dimming, and the landing lights were dialed up. For five miles down the strip—all the way to the horizon—Roy and Jillian watched the lights come up. Suddenly they noticed that inside the modules the computer and instrument lights were going from white to red. Red working lights were now glowing from almost all the cubicles.

“Good, good, good,” the man who was acting like a master of ceremonies enthused. “I don’t think we could ask for a more beautiful evening. Do you? Well, if everyone is ready—”

Neary understood that these several hundred scientists and technicians had been holding a vigil every night for some time, and every night had been a false alarm. Nothing had happened. No one had come. Now he noticed that all the radar dishes had stopped sweeping and were focused in one direction, directly at them.

“They’re staring at us,” Jillian gasped, scrunching down even flatter on the rock.

“Not at us. At the sky. Look.”

Roy and Jill turned their faces to the stars.

Something was beginning.

At first, Neary and Jillian had no idea what it was. Their eyes slowly adjusted from the glare of the stadium lights to the almost total darkness above them. The first thing they picked out was the Milky Way, then in the northern sky they saw the constellation of Orion. They stared hard at the cluster of stars they had seen so often before.

They were moving. The stars were moving.

The stars that made up the constellation shifted slowly at first, then more rapidly, some edging away, leaving the constellation.

Neary turned to search the sky. He found another Orion at the opposite horizon.

“There’s the real one,” he said, pointing it out to Jillian.

When they looked back at the changing Orion, it had already become something different, its “stars,” which clearly were not stars, shifting constantly. A number of them had moved until they had formed an almost evenly spaced curved line. Then from the end “star,” as if attracted by it, three more moved in with majestic speed to form an oblong shape.

The Big Dipper.

Neary started laughing. He was no longer afraid at all. He was just very happy.

Below them, the hundreds of scientists and technicians were reacting like ordinary mortals at a show of fireworks,
oohhing
and
aahhing
and finally bursting into applause when the Dipper was fully formed.

“We’re the only ones who know. The only ones,” Roy said. “Did you see that?” he asked her, checking.

“Yes,” Jillian reassured him and herself.

“Good.”

All of a sudden what appeared to be three shooting stars came out of the western sky. They shot right overhead and abruptly stopped, as if putting on brakes, in midspace, exploding in a moment every known law of physics. The stars executed—on a dime—a complete 180-degree turn and then each point of light broke off into four different points and shot back off into the night sky.

Inside the stadium the audience went wild.

Roy and Jill looked at each other.

“Did you see
that?
”

“Yes.”

“Good.”

The show was not over. It was, in fact, just beginning.

A cloud, what appeared to be a simple, lonely cloud, floated over the base, escorted by two very bright blue points of light within it. The two blue lights began to swirl faster and faster around the cloud, which started losing its form and reshaped itself into a nebula that resembled a spiral nebula.

One of the lights penetrated the nebula and turned on even more brightly so that the whole cloud was lit up from within. No longer blue, but a deep amber. And then the other light took up a position in the outer arm of the spiral and began blinking on and off.

It was an extraordinary sight, a vision that seemed to flash and swirl with meaning, if only they could apprehend it. It was a demonstration, there was no doubt of that. But a cosmic demonstration of what? Of the place in the cosmic galaxy where we live? Yes! Perhaps that was it. A scale model of our planet’s location. Incredible!

Roy and Jillian did not speak. They were trying to catch their breaths, trying to assimilate these sights and perceptions. They were crouched on a small promontory. Behind them was nothing, just the night sky and distance. Suddenly, in that sky, were clouds moving on both sides behind them. And from the clouds a light—like heat lightning except when the light flashed stroboscopically it did not go off. The flash froze midsky.

Then the light got brighter still in one part of the cloud, and bursting out of the cloud came an intensely bright pencil point of orange light, followed by two more brilliant pencil points of orange light. In a moment, as the lights approached an unbelievable speed in a sort of wing formation, Neary and Jillian just had time to cover their faces as the vehicles made a slow, screaming pass right over their heads.

They were the same ones—the monster klieg light, the flashing, beautifully colored sunset, the enormous jack-o’-lantern with its leering, phantom face—that had appeared so spectacularly to them on the Indiana summit so many nights ago.

As these enormous furnace lights—vehicles without wings or physics, brilliant, flashing, colored lights that blew away one’s security, the belief in your own existence and that of the “real” world—passed over them, a huge displacement of air and heat blew dust everywhere. Their hair went in all directions, the static electricity made all the hair on Neary’s arms and chest stand up on end.

Again they felt buffeted and seared by the heat. Again the very breath was sucked out of their lungs. They had just enough time to inhale as each of the three vehicles, wailing mournfully like a million banshees, swept over. This time the sounds they made were frightening. A thousand voices wailing, sending chills up their backs right in the middle of the intense heat. Neary realized that the sounds were the noises of foreign machinery, but this realization did not make him feel any more secure.

By the time Roy and Jill had cleared the dust and the tears from their eyes, the monstrous, flashing, brilliantly colored vehicles were swooping low over the stadium area, sending the scoreboard off into a riot of scuttling colors and the scientists and technicians scuttling for cover. The cameras followed the objects on their swivels and the radar dishes panned all the way round.

The brilliant objects passed over the double-cross landing area that was flashing landing coordinates to them, swooped several hundred yards farther down the concrete strip where there was nobody around, abruptly stopped as if putting on brakes and then just . . . hovered.

They hovered in a sort of triangle formation, their brilliant, almost-impossible-to-look-at colors holding steady. The objects seemed to settle close to the tarmac, perhaps as close as five feet above it, then they would pop back up to about twenty-five feet. They seemed to be almost flirting with the ground, playing, tasting it, licking up some dirt and debris, but then popping up as if actually frightened.

Neary was bug-eyed. He wanted to climb down closer to it all but realized that Jillian was too freaked out to move.

Meanwhile, something that Roy realized had been planned and rehearsed and rehearsed a hundred, a thousand times for just this historical moment, began to unfold. The synthesizer was surrounded and boarded by a group of technicians wearing headsets and pencil microphones that they plugged into the console. Trailing their twenty-foot cords, they gathered around with their clipboards and penlights in hand.

One man, obviously the team leader, said into the almost-reverent hush, “All right, gentlemen. Shall we begin?”

In the communications booth, a technician spoke into his pencil mike. “TC stereo. Time and resistance . . . Auto ready. Tone interpolation on interlock.”

Another technician said, “ARP interlock now! Speed set at seven and a half. All positive functions standing by. Sunset!”

“Go.”

Lacombe and David Laughlin, clad in white jumpsuits, also stood by the console of the synthesizer. Sitting now before the double keyboard was a young man who resembled William Shakespeare. He was obviously very nervous, perspiring heavily, wiping his face and hands on a handkerchief, clearly aware of the tremendous responsibility that lay upon him.

The master of ceremonies said softly to him, “Okay. Start with the tone.”

Shakespeare played the first note.

The booth technician spoke into his pencil microphone. “Tang . . . go!”

An amber light appeared on the giant scoreboard, fading and disappearing as the note floated away across the canyon.

“Up a full tone,” the M.C. ordered, and Shakespeare sounded the second note.

The scoreboard lit up a deep pink.

“Down a major third.”

A new note and a new color. Violet, this time.

“Now drop an octave.”

The fourth note echoed and a beautiful, deep blue played across the scoreboard.

“Cool blue . . . Go,” the booth technician ordered.

“Up a perfect fifth,” the M.C. said.

The last note sounded and faded away. The scoreboard flashed a brilliant red and faded.

“Nothing. Nothing at all,” the team leader said.

The M.C. said to Shakespeare, “Give me a tone.”

A note sounded, a color flashed, and the five-note-five-color sequence was repeated, according to the M.C.’s instructions.

In the booth, the technician ordered, “
Re
to the second.
Me
to the third.
Do
the first.
Do
one-half one.
Sol
to the fifth.”

The notes and the colors faded away across the arena, and there was still no response from the three objects. They just hovered downfield, flashing and blinking inscrutably.

Lacombe stepped up to the console and said,
“Encore une fois.
Again. One more time.”

The five-note sequence sounded and echoed through the night and the five colors played and danced across the scoreboard.

“Speak to me, speak to me,” the team leader pleaded.

“Plus vite,”
Lacombe commanded. “
Plus vite.”

Shakespeare did as he was ordered. This time the notes and the colors cascaded around the arena.

High above on their ledge, Jillian Guiler hummed the five-note sequence through twice. “I know that,” she told Neary. Oh, my God, she thought. It’s Barry’s song. Jill was almost in shock, tears in her eyes, but Roy didn’t notice.

Below, Lacombe was saying, “Faster, Jean Claude. Faster.
Plus vite.
Faster.” He started walking down the landing strip toward the hovering vehicles. “
Plus vite. Plus vite.”

The sweat was really pouring off Shakespeare now, dripping onto the keys of the synthesizer. He was playing the notes very fast and loud now, and the scoreboard was zooming from amber to pink to purple to blue to red.