Journal of a UFO Investigator (17 page)

I screamed, whether from the terror of the dream—which I'd felt to be deeply frightening, I didn't know why—or from this thing coming up from behind as if to ram me. My foot had slipped off the gas; I was hardly moving. I floored it but couldn't pick up speed fast enough. Just ahead the road forked, curving to the left, a sharp turn to the right. I hooked to the right, screamed again as the wheels beneath me lifted from the road. Almost wept as they slammed down once more.

The other car careened off to the left and was gone. Honking? With a shouted curse? Something like a beer bottle thrown out the window in my direction? I hoped so. But I couldn't be sure. I kept my foot heavy on the accelerator, even as the narrow, pothole-filled road began to twist and turn, for some reason I couldn't imagine. Even as I pushed my idle left foot hard against the floor, to keep myself awake.

The gauge hovered a tick above empty. I bounced, almost flew, over unpaved stretches. I kept away from the road's crumbling edge. Peculiar vegetation on both sides hemmed me in. Bushes, it seemed, tall as palm trees yet covered top to bottom with broad, thick leaves. Had this last turn carried me into the Everglades? Surely it was buggy as a swamp, the windshield covered with their bodies. I turned on the wipers, a mistake. All they did was smear insect slime over the glass.

I looked at the gas gauge. Empty. Yet the car kept moving.

What
were
these trees?

And what were the pairs of gleaming slitlike ovals that appeared every so often beside the road, eight or ten feet above the ground? The eyes of unseen animals, crouching amid the dark branches?

But how would animals' eyes have shone like that?

Farther away, off to my right: the red glow once more. Larger now, and brighter; but still close to the ground, and I knew it couldn't be the moon. While I pondered what it could be, what I already knew it must be, the engine coughed. The speedometer needle slid to zero.

The car plowed into a bushy thicket, a foot or two off the road, before stopping. Without gas I'd have to spend the night here, in the morning try to hitchhike. I left the lights on, so nobody'd come crashing into me by mistake. I thought it over, turned them off. There were worse things than accidents.

Two luminous slits, each swelling in the middle and tapering to points at the ends, hung in the air directly in front of me, some twenty feet away. Farther apart than any animal's eyes could be.

Hot as it was, I rolled up the window. Made sure both doors were locked. I slid over to the passenger side, bumping into
The Case for the UFO
, which I'd forgotten was there, and hunted in vain through the glove compartment for a flashlight. I turned on the radio, was greeted by a burst of static so earsplitting I switched it off. Through the fragments of what had been the rear windshield, mosquitoes swarmed. I tried to keep them away from my neck, let them feed as they liked on the rest of me.

Somewhere on my right the red glow dimmed slightly. Brightened. Dimmed. Brightened.

 

A car sped by. Down the road brakes squealed, doors slammed. I pushed open my right-hand door, grabbed
The Case for the UFO
, jumped from the car into the bushes. Crashed through the foliage, down an embankment, toward the red shining. From the road I heard running footsteps, then the doors to my car opening, closing.

“He's gone!”

Pockface's voice. The bushes thinned; I ran faster. Some animal, very close to me, gave out a loud ululating howl. “This way!” Pockface shouted, and I heard the crackle of branches as they pushed their way through.

Before me, a large clearing sloped down and away. At the bottom of the slope, resting on the ground, a huge disk, glowing fluorescent red. Last seen nine months earlier, a few yards from my home. Tumbling on me from the sky.

Just like then, a buzzing sensation, a tingling in my feet. Not holding me still; tugging me, rather, toward the disk. Yet I stopped. I resisted. “Promise me you won't get inside,” Rosa had said. She'd known what was waiting. For that one moment the three men seemed inconsequential.

They leaped from the bushes, began shooting.

“Aim for the legs!”

My feet ran. I ran with them.

Any second I would feel the pain, the crippling. I would topple helplessly into the thick, tall grass. The disk would vanish like the mirage it had to have been. Instead it grew larger, more solid. As wide across, maybe, as three automobiles laid end to end. Silent, though somehow alive. At its top a dome-like protuberance pulsated. Along the rim a low dark oval, like an egg laid on its side.

A door?

I must have passed through.

Once inside, I had no memory of how I'd got in. I knew only that this was a place of fluorescent glow, white now and not red. A wall of pure whiteness gleamed before me.

Outside, the gunfire kept up. It sounded dim, remote. I should have heard bullets pinging against the shell of the disk. I didn't.

There were buttons. I knew which ones I needed to press and in which order. I don't know how I knew. I lowered my hands; the disk shuddered. It sank into the earth.

Down.

Down.

THE THIRST WAS WITH ME FROM THE BEGINNING—MORE AN
annoyance at first than a torment. I had to find water, or something that could take the place of water, inside the disk. I was afraid to go outside; I delayed until I became desperate. By then it was almost too late.

Again and again I circled the disk's interior. I examined the rows of buttons and switches and small lights that surrounded me on every side, searching for something that might pass as a faucet. When thoughts skittered across my mind, frightening me, I calmed myself with acts of measurement.

Not of time. That wouldn't have been possible. My watch had stopped the instant I plunged into the earth. Weirdly, the moon was over my head. I could see it through the transparent dome at the top of the disk, always in the dome's exact center. It didn't budge from that spot, didn't rise or set. Always full. Three times its normal size. Since it was the same moon I'd always known—the same seas, the same craters—that meant I had to be three times closer.

But how could that be if I'd gone inside the earth? I had no clue; I didn't try to guess. Instead I measured space. I paced off the diameter of the disk, and although each time I did this, I got a slightly different result, it always came to about thirty feet. I did the same for the circumference and got ninety-five feet, which was close enough to 30 x pi. This reassured me. My physical circumstances might make no sense at all, but at least the laws of mathematics still seemed to work.

Meanwhile I was getting thirstier. Also, I couldn't see very well. The right lens of my glasses had a long vertical crack from what the three men had done to it. Through that lens everything shifted and shimmered and wouldn't stay in one place. When I felt too dizzy to stand, I sat on the floor. I closed my eyes. I could have sworn I had a canteen that I lifted to my mouth, tilted my head back, drank deep. I felt no relief; my throat was still dry. Then I saw what I had pressed to my lips: the book.

The Case for the UFO.
Marked up by the Gypsies. Lost, then found; rescued or stolen by Rochelle, then by me. The book that revealed all secrets. Including the ones I needed to know if I wasn't going to die here? I started to turn the pages; I held back. I wasn't yet ready for disappointment.

 

The disk's inner walls and floor were blinding white, the kind that gives you a headache if you have to look at it for long. No seats, nothing that might be identified as furniture, except at the center a bulky object that reminded me of a closed sarcophagus. One solid mass, white like the disk, about three feet wide and long enough to lie on. In height it came to a little below my waist; it was like smooth, hard rubber to the touch. All around the sides, about three inches below the even rectangular surface, ran a series of small protruding knobs, spaced a few inches apart. I couldn't allow myself to imagine what they might be used for.

I tried sitting on it. Immediately I jumped off, as if I'd sat on a red-hot burner. Yet it wasn't hot. I just had the sense, ungrounded but very strong, that I mustn't be there. Something awful would happen on that table—altar, it occurred to me to call it—if I didn't get off at once. I leaped away, toward the control panel that ran all the way around the inner wall, with its oval buttons and tiny levers. I kept my hands glued to the wall, my back toward the table, until I felt safe again.

 

There had to be water somewhere in there. Living creatures of some kind must pilot these disks; all life needs water. That's why there can't be life on the moon. The moon is waterless; the “seas” people used to imagine are vast deserts, burning under the sun, freezing in darkness—But if there was water within those strange walls, I couldn't find it.

I had no choice but to go outside, and unless everything I'd learned was wrong, the dero or something like them would be waiting. Not to mention that I didn't know how to get out. The wall, as far as I could tell, was smooth, seamless. I sat cross-legged on the floor and slowly opened the book, willing myself to breathe steadily, evenly, deeply. With hands that would not stop trembling, I began to turn the pages.

First impressions were blurred, confused. I saw intricate diagrams drawn in the spaces empty of print, which I imagined bore some resemblance to the disk's control panel. My eye fell upon a sketch—which I hurried past, with a faint nausea—of a praying mantis and a pencil. The handwriting that framed these drawings was mostly illegible. A string of capital letters leaped out at me: “DO THEY NEVER INQUIRE INTO THE MANNER OF THE SEEDING?” In the surrounding scrawl I made out the words
Baby-Girl Christ, born of a Virgin
.

Religion,
I thought.
All God and Christ, nothing about UFOs
. Certainly nothing about the one particular UFO that I happened to be trapped inside. I snapped the book shut and pushed it away. It slid across the floor, coming to rest at the foot of the casketlike altar. And a dreadful thought came into my mind:

Placed at the surface as a trap .
. .

I wailed and howled. My mind, my body twisted together within a spinning tunnel of terror. I beat my fists against the wall. “Please, please let me out!” I screamed, to whom or what I don't know. My brain switched itself off, and I lost consciousness.

 

I must have dreamed.

A lot like the dream that had come to me when I nodded off driving. Only a bit more detail; a sense of it lasting longer . . .
Night, and I'm with my father, and he feels like a giant, because I'm small. His hand is on my left shoulder. We look through a window into the street, and it's raining, and the streetlights and automobile lights glare off the pavement. I hear an engine start up. My father points and says, “Look, look,” and I look as hard as I can . . .

Someone stood up beside me, squeezed my shoulder—firmly, not painfully.

No. This had to still be part of the dream.

Dazed, blinking, I turned toward the wall and saw a crack. Vertical, nearly three feet high. It hadn't been there before. On the other side: blackness.

I squeezed both hands into the crack and pulled hard, in opposite directions. Slabs of the wall shifted, slid stubbornly apart. It was like prying open a closed metal eye. Forcing a window, long rusted shut. The edges of the crack cut into my palms. At last I made enough of an opening to crawl through, to the moonlit darkness outside.

Then I waited.

Half crazy with thirst, I flattened myself on my stomach, raising my head so my eyes were level with the bottom of the opening. Ten minutes I watched, maybe fifteen. No motion outside, nor any noise. The silence was absolute, unlike any I'd felt before. I heard my breathing like a windstorm. I heard the beating of my heart.

I dragged myself through the space I'd made. The wall of the disk was only inches thick—a foot at most. Yet passing through it, I felt myself half walking, half floating through a series of rooms, all of them empty, a dull white. Curtains, as though spun by spiders from ceiling to floor, waved softly back and forth in the breezeless passageway. I passed through them, or around them, without touching them. Drops of whitish liquid descended slowly from the ceiling, as though along milky threads.

Then I was outside, struggling to my feet, leaning on the slanted exterior of the disk. To the touch, neither hot nor cool. Yet it glowed a dusky red, like metal approaching red hot; and stepping away, I saw it was the only bit of color anywhere in this world to which I'd come.

ASHES. MOONLIGHT. THAT WAS WHAT I SAW WHEN I LOOKED
around. Right behind me, the disk. In front of me, I couldn't tell how far away, a shining, shimmering surface that might have been water.

The moon, huge and ferocious, hung over my head. I kept my eyes turned away from it. My shadow, cast narrowly around my feet, was as crisp as in noonday sunlight. Under my shoes the ground was ashes, or something very like ashes. It was slippery to walk on yet crunched like snow. The squeaking
t-ss-ss-t
of each footstep was the only sound in a silent world. It wasn't hot, nor was it cold. I felt no wind.

The disk lay in a clearing, about twenty feet in each direction. Beyond, solid vegetation encircled me, the bushes unlike anything I'd seen before. They were thickly planted; they came up to my waist. They had a stunted look, as if there were too many of them, too feebly nourished. The leaves and branches were gray. Everything but the disk was gray, or black, or silver in the moonlight.