The Grays

ONE

BECAUSE WE KNOW IT IS there, danger in an obvious place—on a battlefield, say—is often far less of a threat than it is on a quiet street in a small town. For example, on a street deep in America where three little boys rode interlocking figure eights on their bicycles, and on a sweet May evening, too, any danger would be a surprise. And a great and terrible danger—impossible.

Not all of the boys were in danger. In fact, two of them were as profoundly safe as anybody else in Madison, Wisconsin, on the scented evening of May 21, 1977. The third boy, however, was not so lucky. Not nearly.

Because of something buried deeply in his genes, he was of more than normal interest to someone that is supposed not to exist, but does exist—in fact, is master of this earth.

It was too bad for this child—in fact, tragic—because these creatures—if they could even be called that—caused phenomenal trauma, scarring trauma… to those of their victims who lived.

Play ended with the last of the sun, and lights glowed on the porches of Woody Lane, as one by one the boys of the lane retired.

Danny rode a little longer, and was watched by Burly, the dog of Mr. Ehmer. Soon Mr. Ehmer himself came across his lawn. His pipe glowed as he drew on it, and he said, “Say there, Danny, you want to come night fishin’ with me and your Uncle Frank? We’ve been getting some good’uns all this week.”

Danny was a lonely child, saddled with an alcoholic mother and a violent father, so he welcomed these chances to be away from the tensions of home. He could take his sleeping bag and unroll it in the bottom of the boat, and if his line jerked it would wake him up. But not tonight. “I got Scouts real early,” he said, “gotta get up.”

Mr. Ehmer leaned back on his heels. “You’re turnin’ down fishin’?”

“Gotta be at the park at nine. That means seven-thirty mass.”

“Well, yes it does. It does at that.” He drew on the pipe again. “We get a sturgeon, we’ll name ’im for you.” He laughed then, a gentle rustle in his throat, in the first gusts of the wind that rises with the moon. He left Danny to go down the dark of Woody Lane alone, pushing the pedals of his Raleigh as hard as he could, not wanting to look up at the darkening sky again, not daring to look behind him.

As he parked his bike and ran up to the lit back door, he was flooded with relief as he hopped on the doorstep and went into the lighted kitchen. He smelled the lingering odor of fried chicken, felt hungry but knew there was none left in the house. He went into the living room.

He didn’t stay long. Love Boat was like a religion with Mom and Dad, and then came Fantasy Island. He’d rather be in his room with the Batman he’d bought from Ron Bloom for twenty cents.

At the same moment a few miles away, Katelyn Burns, who adored Love Boat, watched and received advice from her mother about painting her toenails. Very red, and use a polish that hardens slowly. They last longer, chip less, good on the toes. Next week school was out and she wanted—had—to paint her toenails for Beach Day.

A magnetism of whispers that Katelyn assumed were her own thoughts had drawn her to Madison, Wisconsin, and to this shabby apartment near the water. An easy place, Madison, the thoughts whispered to her, for a divorcee to find a man. An easy place, they most certainly did not tell her, from which to steal a child, carry her out and take her far, so that when her screams started, there would be none to hear her but the night wind. And so it would be this night, after the Love Boat sailed away and silence filled the house.

As Saturday evening ended, the moon rode over houses that, one by one, became dark. Madison slept in peace, then, as the hours wore past midnight.

Sometime after three, Danny Callaghan became aware of a change around him, enough of a change to draw him out of sleep. He opened his eyes—and saw nothing but stars. For a moment, he thought he’d gone night fishing after all. Then he realized he was still in bed and the stars were coming from his own home planetarium, bought from Edmund Scientific for nine dollars. It was a dark blue plastic sphere with a light in it. The plastic was dotted with pinholes in the pattern of the night sky, and when you turned out the lights and turned the planetarium on, magic happened: the heavens appeared all around you.

He hadn’t turned the planetarium on, though, and that fact made the acid of fear rise in his throat. He opened his mouth to call for his dad, but there was no sound, just a puff of breath. As the stars crossed his face, twisting along his nose and across his eyes, his tears flowed in helpless silence.

The only sounds were the humming of the planetarium’s motor and the breeze fluttering the front-yard oak. Dan sat up on the bedside. Like a man buttoning his coat for a journey, he buttoned his pajama top, until all four big buttons were neatly closed. A thought whispered to him, “Stand up, look out the window…” He clutched the bedsheets with both hands. The old oak shook its leaves at him, and the thoughts whispered, “Come on… come on.”

Then he knew that his toes had touched the floor, and he was up in the flowing stars. Then he floated to the window. As he moved closer, he saw it sliding open. Then he went faster and moved through it. He tried to grab the sash as he passed, but missed. Then he was moving through the limbs of the oak that stood in their front yard, struggling and grabbing at them.

He got his arms around one, but his body turned upward until his feet were pointing at the sky. He held on with all his might, but the pull got stronger and stronger. “Dad,” he yelled as he was dislodged and drawn into the sky.

He heard a dog raise a howl, and saw an owl below him, her wings glowing in the moonlight, her voice swept away by the wind.

He rose screaming and struggling, running in the air, clawing at emptiness. Far below him, moonlight danced on Lake Monona’s baby waves. And then he was among the night clouds, and he flew in their canyons and soared across their hills, and heard their baby thunder muttering.

The wonder of it silenced his screams at last, but not the tears that poured down his face, or the trembling gasp that came when he slowly passed across the top of a cloud and saw, so very far below, the silver lake and the dots of light that were Madison. He closed his eyes and covered his face with his hands as he moved up toward what looked like a silver island in the sky.

The island had a round opening in it, dark and black.

Then Danny was through the round opening. He stopped in the air, then fell to a floor. Opening his eyes, he found himself in darkness, but not absolute darkness. Moonlight sifted in the opening. Far below, he could see the pinpricks of light that marked fishing boats on the lake’s surface.

A cold sorrow enveloped him. Now, here, he remembered this from before. He did not want the little doctors to touch him ever again. He knew, also, that they would, and soon. He thought of jumping back out through the opening, but what would happen then? He went closer to it, leaned out as far as he dared. “MR. EHMERS! UNCLE FRANK! HELP ME! PLEASE, UNCLE FRANK!”

A rustling sound. He cringed closer to the edge, wishing he dared jump through. A voice whispered, soft: “Hello?”

He backed away from the form. He could see white—a white face, loose white clothes.

“Help me,” the form said.

It was a girl, he could see that now, could hear it in her voice. She was standing on the far side of the opening in the floor, her face glowing in the faint moonlight that slanted in.

“Are you from Madison?” she asked. Her voice trembled.

“Yeah. I’m Danny Callaghan.”

“I’m Katelyn Burns. I never saw anybody else here before.”

“Me, neither.”

“Where are we?”

“I’m not sure.”

“’Cause when I come here I remember I was here before, but then when I go home I don’t remember anymore.” She lowered her head. Her voice dropped to a hesitant murmur. “Do they take your clothes off, too?”

His face grew hot. He clutched his own shoulders. “Uh-huh.”

“They do stuff to me that’s weird.”

“Some kind of operations.”

Her eyes flashed. “Yes, but this isn’t a hospital!”

As the two children came together and held each other, they were watched by cold and careful eyes.

The embrace between the children extended, the girl in her nightgown, the boy in his pajamas stained with yesterday’s oatmeal. It had nothing to do with sex, they were too young. They were like two little birds stolen from the nest, trying to find some safety where there was none.

“If we dive down to the lake, would that work? Instead of just jumping?” Dan asked Katelyn.

“I don’t know. Maybe not.”

“I’ve got a diving merit badge. I’m going to try,” he said.

She sighed, understood. The children moved along a rickety catwalk, going closer to the opening they had been drawn through. The ship wasn’t high tech. It didn’t even have a way of closing its hatch. It was old and handmade, but the materials involved were far in advance of our own. It was constructed of sticks that would not break or burn, and aluminum foil you could not penetrate even with a bullet. There were no glowing control panels, nothing like Star Trek. Just tinfoil and plywood, and a tin box full of an extraordinary substance mined out of the Earth, that resisted the pull of gravity.

The creatures hiding near the children knew what they were thinking because they could see not only their fleshy bodies wrapped in their fluttering cloth covers, but also their electric bodies, a shimmering network of lines that coursed through them, the fiery nerves that carried sensation and love and memory, and blue fear racing from the heart.

They could see, in the heads, lines of gold and green changing to red and purple, and they knew that these were also the colors of fear.

Katelyn and Dan gazed down at the shimmering, wrinkled surface of the lake.

“You gonna?” Katelyn asked.

Danny could imagine Mr. Ehmers on the lake smoking his pipe and watching his line. He took a deep breath. What would Mr. Ehmers see, though—a boy falling out of the sky? Maybe, but probably not. Probably they’d think the splash was just a fish jumping.

Then he heard the fluttering sound in the dark that meant the things were on the move.

Katelyn drew close to him. But then the slowest trace of a smile flickered on her lips, and she raised her hand. In it was a match.

There was buzzing now, urgent, coming closer.

Katelyn shouted out the opening, “I live in Madison! I live in Madison, Wisconsin!” Her voice carried past the thin walls, echoing loudly, but only the clouds heard it.

Cupping his hands around his mouth, Dan shouted, “Uncle Frank, help us!”

“Who’s that?”

“My uncle. He’s down there fishing.”

She struck the match, and in its flare something moved behind her. A green glow. As he watched, it resolved itself into the slanted shape of an insect eye, but huge. It was right behind her, just inches away. It glittered and disappeared into the shadows, and then the match burned out, and then something slid up under his shirt and slithered along his chest.

He heard Katelyn gasp, heard a scream explode out of her and screamed himself, screamed with all his voice and soul. Arms came around him, and a prick like fire penetrated his chest, went deep, made him gag and filled his mouth with a taste like a dead thing smells.

Now he could not move, could not make a sound. He felt himself being carried, felt his stomach twisting and knotting until gorge came up into his throat.

He could see nothing, hear nothing except Katelyn breathing in little, shocked cries.

There came a hand, extended into a faint light, as if it was meant for him to see, a long hand with fingers like naked branches, each tipped by a black, curving claw. In this hand was a kitchen knife with specks of rust on the blade.

The knife came down on his chest, pricking, then, as the tip of the blade ran along his abdomen, tickling. In the dark nearby, he heard a slicing sound, then a crack, and the bubbling of breath being sucked through liquid. Then a coldness came that extended from his neck down to his groin, and he saw the handle of the knife, which was being used like a saw. As it rose and fell, a coldness grew in his chest. Then, with a sucking sound, two great white things were lifted away from him. He raised his head, looking down at himself. What he saw was so bizarrely unexpected that he just stared. He saw what looked like a wet hamster curled up in the center of his chest, shivering furiously. It lay in a pool of ooze. On either side of it, things like big rubber bladders were expanding and contracting, and hissing as they did so.

Freezing cold and deadly weak, he fell back, his head hitting the hard iron of the bedstead upon which he had been laid.

Then stars came, millions of tiny stars all gold and green and speeding like sparks on a windy night. They surrounded the children, swirling around their bodies. They moved with the grace of a vast school of fish, swarming through the body of one child and then into the air, then through the body of the other. Again it happened, and again, and each time the stars invaded the profound nakedness of their open bodies, the veins and organs glowed. Light poured from their screaming mouths, blasted out of their ears and eyes.

The children struggled but could not rise, screamed but were ignored. The torture, terrible, somehow beautiful, went on.

HALFWAY ACROSS THE CONTINENT IN Colorado, a young officer picked up a phone and called Washington. “Sir, we have a glowboy hovering over Madison, Wisconsin.”

“How long?” came the tired voice of Lieutenant Colonel Michael Wilkes.

“Twenty-two minutes, sir. Shows no sign of moving.”

Wilkes glanced at his watch. Pushing four in the morning. “You were right to inform me, uh—”

“Lieutenant Langford, sir.”

“Yes. Thank you.” He put down the phone. The spruce-sounding young lieutenant would order a jet up if the glowboy stayed very much longer. Couldn’t have one of the damned things lingering over a major metro area after sunrise. Mike wondered what deviltry it was up to, sighed at his own helplessness, then tossed a pill out of a bottle, knocked it back with a glass of water he kept at his bedside, and hit the sack again.

He might request Eamon Glass to ask Bob about the stationary glowboy, but probably not. Bob was one of the two living grays they had acquired during an extraordinary incident in the New Mexico desert when one of the grays’ craft had crashed after it had moved into the range of powerful new radars being tested at White Sands. They had not expected these radars to be there, and their ship’s ability to stay aloft had been affected.

The Air Force had raced to the site of the crash and recovered two grays alive, one dead. Three were a triad, the equivalent of a single human being. Without their third partner to complete their decision-making process, the two that remained alive had been relatively helpless, and the capture had been a brilliant success… unless, of course, it was, instead, an even more brilliant deception on the part of the grays.

You communicated with Bob and Adam via thought—or rather, Eamon, who was the only person they’d ever found who could manage it, communicated with them.

Somehow, the man used his mind to exchange pictures with them. It was a very strange business, and nobody was sure if it was even really working, but it was all they had, and some of the technological information Eamon had gotten from the creatures was making valuable scientific sense, so there had to be something in it.

But they could not find out what the grays did with people. It was awful, though, that was certain. Awful and it came from the sky and the Air Force couldn’t do a damn thing about it. So it was secret, and would remain secret.

He groaned, turned over, waited miserably for the pill to work.

IN THE SILVER VEHICLE, THE children struggled, twisting and turning in their captivity. Dan saw something white. He looked at it, trying to resolve its meaning in the haze that still obscured his vision. It was very dark, but he could still see this thing. It dangled as if it was hanging on a clothesline, and he thought it might be a big sheet, wet, because it was dripping, the drops pinging on metal somewhere below.

It was a very strange sort of a sheet, though, because it had a kind of face, a mouth gaping like that of a big lake bass, with two distorted black sockets above it. Were they eye sockets? He thought they must be, because there was also a darkness above them that looked like it might be hair. Then he saw a curliness to it, and a lightness and he knew that it was blond hair—and he had seen blond hair on Katelyn when she lit the match.

He tried to say her name, but there was only a gusty whisper. He wanted his mother, he wanted his dad, he wanted Uncle Frank, who was damn tough, to come up here and help them!

Drip, drip, drip.

Then he saw that there was another one, and it had short brown hair and its face was all wobbled like a mirror in the Crazy House at Madison Playland.

When he stared at it, though, he knew: it was his skin. But if it was up there and he was down here, then—

His stomach churned, his heart began raging in his chest, and his throat became so dry it felt as if it had been stuffed with ashes. He wanted to scream, he wanted to beg God for help, but he couldn’t make a sound.

Off in the dark, a buzzing sound started. The things in the dark were coming. He looked, but he knew he would not see them, he never had.

Then his skin flew up and out, and spread like a huge cloud above him, a cloud with a gaping mouth and holes for eyes, and it came down on him as gently as dew falls when you are camping under the stars, and enclosed him in the deepest warmth he had ever felt in his life.

He uttered a long, delicious groan of raw human pleasure and profound relief. Beside him, Katelyn groaned, too, and he knew that she had, as well, been covered once again in her own skin.

Instantly, without them going out through a door or anything, the silver ship was rushing away overhead, turning into a dot. Wind screamed around them, their hair blew, and Dan thought they’d been pushed out and were going to die in the lake.

Below, Mr. Ehmers saw beams of light playing out of the summer clouds. “What the hell,” he said. Then Frank said, “Ho, got a strike goin’ here.” They brought up another bass.

DAN WOKE UP SCREAMING. HE was upside down and the covers were all over the room. He got out of bed, immediately felt incredibly thirsty, and went into the bathroom and drank and drank. His mother heard him and came in behind him. “You okay, Dan?”

Then he cried, clutching her with all his might, burying his face in her nightgown that smelled of cigarettes and gin.

“Hey, hey there—”

“Mom, I had a dream. It was real bad, Mom.”

She went into his room with him and sat at his bedside.

“It was these Indians, they got us, and they skinned us alive.”

“Skinned who alive?”

“Me! Me and—her. I don’t know. Me and this girl.”

A cool hand touched his forehead. “You dreamed you were naked with a girl, and that’s a little scary, isn’t it?”

“The stars,” he said, “the stars…” But what about the stars he could not recall. He closed his eyes, and his mother’s hand on his brow comforted him, but deep inside him, down where screams begin, there was a part of him that remembered every terrible moment, and would never forget.

His mother, drunk though she was, sad though she was, sat a while longer with her child, then went back down to the kitchen and resumed her mechanical and relentless assault on a bottle of cheap gin.

Katelyn found herself on the floor naked and covered with sweat. Not understanding how she had gotten there, she scrambled to her feet—and found that she was afraid to look in the mirror—terribly, agonizingly afraid. She stood, her head bowed, holding onto the sink and crying bitter, bitter tears.

Her mind could not seem to make sense of what had just happened. Why was she naked? What was she doing on the floor? Who was that boy, and why did she remember a boy at all?

She returned to her room, found her nightgown, and put it on. She went to her window seat and sat down, and watched the moon ride low over the lake, and smelled honeysuckle on the air.

Then she was sick, and ran into the bathroom and threw up. She washed her face, brushed her teeth, and finally saw in the mirror her own haggard face. As if she was seeing a miracle, she touched the glass. Tears beaded in her eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She went to her bed, then, and lay down, and slept the dismal and uneasy sleep of a captured soul.

TWO

ON A SOUR OCTOBER FORENOON in 2003, Lieutenant Lauren Glass watched her father’s coffin being lowered. She was now alone, given that her mother had abandoned them when she was twelve, returned to Scotland, and no longer communicated.

Also at the graveside were four men, none of whom she knew. They were, she assumed, members of whatever unit he was involved in. She did not know its name, what it did, or anything about it at all.

The wind worried the flowers she had brought, the chaplain completed his prayers, and she threw a clod of earth and said inside herself, You will not, you will not and then she cried.

He had died on duty, somehow. She had not been told how, she had not been allowed to see his body. The coffin was sealed with federal seals warning that it was a crime to open it. Lead solder filled the crack beneath its lid. She had wanted to at least be alone with it for a short while, but not even that had been allowed. There had been no obituary, nothing to mark all he had done in this world, what she believed must have been a heroic life.

She had been given a five-thousand-dollar death benefit, and he had been listed as killed in action.

Killed how? In what action? He’d left home as usual that morning, then driven to his work, she assumed. They lived on Wright-Pat in Dayton, but he commuted to Indianapolis on the days he worked, which were sporadic.

As the ceremony concluded, to her amazement a missing-man formation flew overhead, wheeling majestically away toward the gray horizon. Then, down at the end of the field, an honor guard she had no idea would be there fired twenty-one times. The highest salute. Taps were sounded.

He was being buried with the highest of honors, and she felt bitter because she did not know why.

The four men were walking away from the grave when she caught up with them. “Can you tell me anything?”

Nobody answered.

“Please, I’m his daughter. Tell me, at least, did he suffer?”

One of the men, tall, so blond that he might have been albino, dropped back. “Should I say no?”

“You know how he died?”

“I know, Lauren.”

He knew her name. But who was this man in his superbly tailored civilian suit, as gray as the autumn clouds, with his dusting of white hair and his eyes so pale that they were almost white as well?

“Who are you? Can you tell me what my dad did?”

“I want you to come to an office. Can you do that?”

“Now? Is this an order?”

“I’m so sorry. Are you up to it?”

This walk across this graveyard was the saddest thing she had ever done. She did not understand grief, it was a new landscape for her. Could you go to an office in grief? Talk there in grief? In grief, could you learn secrets? “I want to be at home,” she said.

He gave her an address on base. “You think about it, and I want you to bear in mind that we wouldn’t be asking this if—”

“I know it’s urgent. Obviously it’s urgent.”

“I’m Lewis Crew,” he said. “If you don’t mind, please do not mention the appointment to anybody, or my name.”

“Okay,” she said. “Will you tell me what happened to my dad?”

He gave her a long look, long enough to be disquieting. He was evaluating her. But why? She had no clearance, she was a lowly procurement officer, she had not cared to follow her dad into Air Force Intelligence.

“Will you?” she asked again.

“I’m so sorry to have to ask you to come in on a day like this.”

“So am I.” She walked away from him then, passing among the neat lines of identical military graves into which the Air Force had poured so many lives, in so many steel coffins, most of them too young, too innocent, too good to die the sorts of improbable and terrible deaths the Air Force had to offer.

It was duty that had taken them. Duty, always, her dad’s breath and blood. “The oath, Lauren, never forget the oath. It might take you to your death, and if it does, that’s where you have to go.”

She’d thought, If some stupid president sends me to some dumb country where we shouldn’t even be, is it my duty to die there?

She’d known the answer.

Had Dad died a useless death? She hoped not, she hoped that the missing-man formation was more than just a passing honor.

Her life with her dad had not been perfect. Eamon Glass could be demanding, and he had not been happy with the way her career was unfolding. “You need to push yourself, Lauren, Air-Force style. Be ready when it matters, be willing when it counts.”

Boy, was he out of it. He was part of another Air Force, as far as she was concerned. In her Air Force, the main issues were things like padded bills and missing laptops, not duty and dying amid huts and palm trees.

“Who were you, Dad? Why did this happen?”

Dad had nightmares. God, did he have nightmares, screaming cyclones of terror from which he could not awaken. And you couldn’t get near him. He’d belt you and then in the morning be so upset by what he had done that he’d be in a funk for days.

Often, he would ask if he’d said anything in his sleep. It worried him, obviously, worried him a lot.

She’d listened for some meaning in the screams, but never found any.

She got in her car and started it, eager for the heater to drive out the deep Canadian cold that was sweeping down the vast plains from the north, shivering the naked trees and the stubble-filled fields.

She drove home across the great, gray base to their apartment. She stood in the living room thinking how anonymous it all seemed, the inevitable landscape on the wall, the not-too-challenging books on the shelves, the oldish TV. And his chair, big and comfortable, and beside it the magazine rack filled with Time and the National Review and National Geographic.

All so ordinary, and yet so filled with him that every step deeper into the place was a step through more memory and greater loneliness.

She made coffee, and was drinking it when she realized that it was Dad’s mug in her hand. That did it: she cried again. These, she knew, were the anguished tears of the bereaved, that belong both to grief and defeat.

She had a last confession of love that must remain frozen in her forever. Most importantly, there was the conversation that had been their life together, that could never now be brought to rest.

A whole career, and there had only been five people at his funeral. But it hadn’t been announced in any way. So his unit was not large, obviously. A colonel, looked about fifty, with the name tag Wilkes. A younger one, Lieutenant Colonel Langford. Maybe thirty-eight. Then a civilian, dumpy, wearing an ill-fitting suit. He’d cried, the civilian had, silent tears that he had flicked away as if they had been gnats landing on his face. And then Mr. Crew, tall, no way to tell the age, looking a little like the Swedish actor Max von Sydow. Great suit, and those eyes. White-gray. Unique.

Dad’s people. His coworkers. She shook her head, considering the little collection of silent men.

She went into her bedroom and lay down, closing her eyes and contemplating what the voyage of her life would be like now.

Dad had had one of those stealth tempers that would boil up out of nowhere and, for a few minutes, rock the world. He had been bitter about never making general. “It’s the damn work I do, nobody else can do it and it’s not a general’s job.” He had hated it and loved it. He would drink at the kitchen table, lifting shots of vodka, and then he would be poetic, which was beautiful and awesome and scary, because he had such a huge memory for quotations, and because when he was like that, being with him was like looking into the darkest room in the world.

“When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes,” she could hear him reciting, “I all alone beweep my outcast state…” and then looking at her and adding, “pardon my bathos.”

“Oh, hell,” she said, “I’m going to miss you! I am going to miss you!”

How could he be dead? How in God’s name do you get KIAed in Indianapolis?

Well, hell. As far as he was concerned, the day she received her commission, she had been on her way to general. He would manage her career. “You can’t fly combat, so you need to get on a hot staff.”

He had stared at her orders to report to the supplies depot for a long time. Stood there and stared, so still she thought he might have gone to sleep on his feet. He put them down far too carefully, on the back of the couch. Then he had marched off into his office. She’d heard him yelling, and gone to his door, which was not right, she knew, but she was involved, for God’s sake. She’d only heard one thing, but it had been repeated a number of times, “put her on ice.” And he’d cursed the person at the other end of the line with a venom that was far beyond his worst tantrums, that had frightened her because it had implied that the hidden thing in his life somehow also involved her.

Thinking back, she closed her eyes for a moment. Fortune and men’s eyes…

There had also been another thing between her and Dad, that would come at moments of silence and his strange sorrow, a kind of bond that would seem to enter the air between them, almost as if they could somehow link their minds. Or so she imagined.

The phone rang. She looked at the incoming number. Base call. Could it be the guy from Dad’s funeral? Could he actually be pressing her this hard, on this day? She didn’t believe it.

“Hello?”

“Lieutenant—”

“Look, mister, are you somewhere in the chain of command, because if you aren’t, very frankly, I am here trying to deal with the death of my father and really my only friend, and I am just not doing this.”

There was a silence. It extended. “I am in the chain of command,” he said at last. “My orders are legal.”

Could this be real? Could this guy really, actually be on the phone pushing her around like this now?

“I’d like to do this tomorrow.”

“You have your orders, Lieutenant.”

She hung up the phone and wanted, very badly, to do something hurtful to this man. But that was military life, wasn’t it? You weren’t here to grieve.

She reported to an impressive but sterile office suite that had all the anonymous earmarks of being some kind of official visitor’s lair. She was called in immediately.

With Mr. Crew was the younger of the two colonels, Langford. She was just as glad—the older one had exuded something that had made her uneasy, Wilkes or whatever his name was.

The office was large and the furniture real wood, but there wasn’t a single citation on the walls, nor a photograph, nor anything that might identify him further. Obviously, a spook, but not Air Force or he’d be in uniform.

She saluted the colonel. He returned. “At ease, Lieutenant,” he said, smiling and shaking his head slightly.

“Please take a seat,” Crew said.

“I want to extend my sympathies, too,” Langford added. “Your father was a great man and a national hero. You should know that he’s going to receive the Intelligence Medal.” He paused. “And also the Medal of Honor.”

She knew that her mouth had dropped open, because she had to snap it closed. “The Congressional Medal of Honor?”

Crew nodded.

She was stunned silent. In awe. In sorrow that he had not been able to share what terrors must have beset him in his work, and had killed him.

“Do you remember the tests you took at Lackland?”

What in the world did that have to do with anything? “I took a lot of tests during basic.”

“One of them involved a page of numbers, and you were supposed to draw lines between them.”

“Sure, I remember it,” she said. The test had been tucked in among the standard battery of aptitude tests she’d taken as a recruit. “Sort of connect-the-dots type thing.” She’d sort of doodled it, as she recalled. “I messed it up.”

The two men stared at her, saying nothing. They looked, she thought, like people must look to an ape from inside his cage. “What on earth does it matter now?”

“I have another test for you,” he said.

“Another test? That’s what this is about? Because—”

“Lieutenant, it’s terribly important.”

Langford’s voice had an edge that told her to listen and keep her mouth shut.

“You need to fill out a consent.”

“I thought you were going to let me know something about my dad.”

“I am.”

She took the form he handed her, and was very surprised, as she read it, to see that it was no ordinary medical consent.

She looked at Langford. His face was bland. A dentist’s face—that is to say, a mask. She read aloud, “Any commentary or discussion or unauthorized record of any subject or meeting or action carried out within the context of the project is prohibited conduct and subject to prosecution under provisions of the National Security Act of 1947 as amended.” She tried to laugh. They remained silent. “This is very heavy stuff.” Still nothing. “Excuse me, but this is a very serious document, here.” She pushed the paper back toward Crew’s side of the desk.

“We can’t bargain with you,” Langford said, “and we can’t talk until you sign.”

“Volunteer or be shot, in other words.”

Langford pushed the paper back toward her. “Don’t miss this,” he said. “You’re first in line, Lieutenant Glass, but there is a line.”

“If I sign and don’t like what I hear, can I walk away?”

Langford turned toward Crew, who didn’t so much as blink. “I’m sorry, but the agreement is binding,” Langford said.

“It commits me to something I can’t learn about until I’m in it? And then I can’t get out?”

“I know it sounds unreasonable.”

“Unreasonable? It’s downright scary. More than scary. I mean, the Air Force doesn’t handle things this way.” She wondered if that was actually true.

“Sign it. It would be very helpful.”

Maybe her dad was looking down on her right now. Probably was, assuming there was anything left of him, any sort of a soul.

She picked up a pen off the desk… and had the odd feeling that these two guys were waiting, but in a funny way… like they were hungry, almost, and she was lunch.

“So, I don’t think I need to do this,” she said. “No.” And she was more than a little ashamed. Sorry, Dad, but this does not feel right.

Crew unfolded his long legs and leaned forward. She expected him to speak. But he did not speak. He just looked at her. It wasn’t a special expression, not at all. But it moved her. It did, definitely. A very serious, very important moment.

“I can’t very well jump off a cliff without knowing what’s at the bottom, can I?”

Crew sighed. Was it anger? Suppressed impatience? Boy, she could not read this guy. You thought saint, then you thought—well, something else.

“We want you to continue your father’s work,” Crew said. “If you pass this small test.”

“It’s urgent,” Langford added. “You’ll need to start this afternoon.”

Crew pushed the agreement back at her.

“But… what did he do?”

“Please help us,” Crew said. His voice was still as soft as ever, but the desperation in it was somehow terrifying.

“What if I… can’t?”

He smiled then, very slightly.

Suddenly she knew that she would not walk away from this. She could not live the rest of her life in ignorance of what her dad had done, knowing that she had passed up this chance.

He had been killed, though.

She grabbed the paper, signed, then thrust it back.

Colonel Langford took it, folded it once, and slipped it into a manila envelope. “You’ll get a copy countersigned by the Secretary of Defense,” he said.

“You’re kidding.”

“Lauren, you have a very unique ability,” the big man said, “inherited, we believe. That first test you took, you passed. You were the only person to have done so in the forty years it has been administered, in one form or another, to every military recruit in the United States, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, and Australia. The only one who even came close. But we weren’t surprised, given who your father is.”

That sort of sounded… whoa. “Did you say, uh—what’s that?”

“You are one in many millions, Lauren. You have inherited an absolutely unique skill from your dad.”

What in the world could this be? “I have to tell you honestly, I have no unusual skills.”

“I want to warn you, you’re going to have a very extraordinary experience. I want you to understand that it will not be in any way pleasant or easy. I won’t pretend that there is no danger, because it must be obvious to you that there is great danger. What’s more, we’re not going to be able to help you. You have to do it on your own. And you are on your own.”

“But, uh, you said there was a list, Colonel Langford. And you were going to… you were going to the next person if I didn’t sign.”

“I lied. And you will, too, many times. It will be a big part of your job.”

“If I’d said no—despite Dad, absolutely and finally no—what then?”

Crew said, “We would have had to say something dramatic, like the survival of the human race might depend on you.”

The words hung in the air. Unbelievable. Crazy, even. She didn’t know whether she should be scared or what. Finally, the whole idea just seemed so overblown that she burst out laughing—and it was the only sound in the room, and it stayed the only sound in the room. She looked from one deadly serious face to the other. They actually were not in any way kidding.

But she was a girl, she was twenty-two, and, while she liked being both things, neither suggested that she had any sort of amazing mission in life. “This is too weird,” she said slowly. “I mean, are you telling me I’m some kind of outrageous, like, freak?”

Langford cleared his throat. “You know nothing about your father’s work?”

She shook her head.

“You’re what we call an empath. You can hear thought and you can transmit it to others who can hear it.”

“Yeah, Dad used to say that. He read science fiction, too. Arthur C. Clarke kind of thing.”

Crew handed her a yellow pad. “Write down the first thing that comes to mind.”

She took the pad, thought for a moment, then scrawled the first word that came to mind. “The name of my dad’s barber,” she said. “Adam.”

Now Langford pulled an envelope out of his pocket. “The person you will be working with cannot speak. His brain is so entirely different that, without a person like you, we can only exchange the most rudimentary ideas. At present he is terribly upset, but we have succeeded in getting him to transmit the name we call him to you.”

He handed her the envelope.

In it was a note scrawled on a piece of paper that smelled oddly of what she thought might be Lysol. The single word written there was “Adam.”

She looked at it. She looked back up at the two men. “Who… who is this guy, anyway?”

“That’s part of what we’ve been trying to understand, Lieutenant Glass. What your father spent his career working on.”

“His name is Adam but you don’t understand… what?”

“They don’t have a naming convention in their culture. Adam and Bob are really just our labels.”

“Bob?”

“Died.”

Another death. She noted that. But who in the world would communicate via thought and not use names?

“Our next step will be to send you to meet the head of your part of the project. He operates a very small unit and runs a very, very tight ship,” Colonel Langford said. “You have to understand, you are never to speak to him about your background, about your meeting with us, about anything that you do not absolutely need to talk to him about in order to do your work. Do you understand that?”

This was sounding crazier and crazier. “So I just walk up to the guy—my commanding officer—and I say—what?”

The colonel handed her an envelope. “You don’t say anything. You give him this. He’ll take it from there.”

She recognized the envelope, of course: it carried orders. She started to open it.

“No.”

“No? I don’t open my own orders?” She shook her head. “Why am I not surprised?”

He gave her a card with an address in Indianapolis on it. “You’ll drive to your new assignment. Colonel Michael Wilkes will be expecting you. You saw Mike at the funeral. You will receive further orders from him verbally.” He paused for a moment. “Lauren,” he continued, “I want you to understand that there is an extremely good reason for all this secrecy. In time, you’ll come to know this reason, and you will find yourself in the same position we are—it’s a secret that you won’t hesitate to defend with your life.”

She found herself walking toward the parking lot with this weird verbal order to report to an address in University Heights in Indianapolis, and to be there by six this evening. Not impossible, given that it was a little over a hundred miles and she had five hours. Typical of the Air Force, though, she’d been sitting in procurement for two years and then, with barely time to go back to the apartment and grab her toothbrush, she was on the move to, of all places, Indianapolis, and not even a USAF facility as far as she could tell.

“You just get your belongings out of your billet and go,” Langford had said. “No good-byes, no e-mails, no cell calls.”

She had friends, a life, at least something of a life. No, hell, there was Molly at the office who was going to wonder, there was Charlie Fellowes who was getting to be more than just a friend, but he was out on a refueling mission and wouldn’t be back for forty-eight hours—so he was just going to find her apartment empty, her cell phone disconnected, and her e-mail bouncing everything back.

She worried that she’d run into a familiar face on her way home, but all was quiet. She knew the Air Force: her current commanding officer, General Winters, would have been duly informed of her transfer, etc., but nothing would run smoothly. Undoubtedly, the next thing she’d get from her current unit would be a notice that she was AWOL.

She spent three quarters of an hour packing. At the last, she put their small photo album in a suitcase. Her and Dad through the years. She staggered down to the parking lot under her bags, and got the Focus pretty much stuffed to the roof liner.

Then she was gone, outta here, no looking back.

It was not until she was sailing west on 70 and WTUE was rocking into her past that she began to think again about Dad’s dreams.

As a little girl, she’d covered her head with her pillow and begged God to help him. Later, she’d gone into his bedroom to try to provide him with whatever support a daughter could. She would find him with his eyes wide open, screaming and shaking his head from side to side, and you could not wake him up.

He’d said it was ’Nam coming back to haunt him. He’d flown Hueys in ’Nam, and he had two Hearts for his trouble. Also a scar down his back where he’d been wounded. His story was that a lot of guys had burned alive in a hospital tent that had been torched by the V.C. Helpless guys, guys with no faces, guys with no legs. He’d had a broken arm and a bad infection, but he could run, at least.

There was, of course, a problem with this. It was that, as she knew, her father had not served in Vietnam. She’d seen his duty book, and he just had never served there.

In fact, her father had served at White Sands, then at an army base in Arizona called Fort Huachuca. Her earliest memories were of the wonderful rocks around Fort Huachuca. After that, they’d come to Wright-Pat, where he’d been connected with the Air Materiel Command. She knew that because his unit was attached to the Behavioral Research Directorate, which was a division of AMC. She knew that behavioral research was about understanding things like pilot alertness and endurance. Also, muddier stuff, nonlethal weapons and such.

It was a nice drive, once you got out of Dayton traffic—which was, truth be told, pretty minor.

Farms, midsummer corn, a different way of life out here. She’d like to run tractors and combines and things. She liked big machines.

She’d been around the Midwest for a while now, so Indy was no stranger to her. Back before Mom moved home to Glasgow, they’d gone to the 500 here practically every year. Mom was into fast cars—or rather, the drivers, the mechanics, and just about anybody connected with racing. Actually, just about anybody else at all, as long as it wasn’t Dad.

She was expecting an office building at least, or maybe some kind of lab facility tucked away next to the university. But this was pure residential around here. Wide streets, big old houses, quiet in the late afternoon.

She drove past 101 Hamilton and was, frankly, confused. It was a house. Looked like it had been built around 1910 in the Craftsman style. Beautiful place, for sure. But a house? An Air Force facility was in a house in a neighborhood?

Okay, so be it. She pulled into the driveway behind a very sweet-looking SLK convertible, that was, no, not your usual Air Force colonel’s automobile. It was possible, of course, that the car belonged to somebody else, but she’d been told that the chilly Colonel Wilkes ran the place and this car was in a special little chunk of tarmac all its own. Commanding officer’s privilege, for sure; she knew her Air Force.

There was only one other vehicle there, though, and the garage was padlocked. The other car was an Acura, not too young. So there was Colonel Wilkes with a fast car and a flunkie to be named later. Not the lowest of the low, they’d be in your Focus or your Echo like her, trying to make ends meet on just enough money to make that impossible.

As she mounted the stairs to the porch she noticed, of all things, a pair of longhorns over the front door. She stood looking at this incredibly improbable choice of decoration for Indianapolis, Indiana.

The front door had one of those old-fashioned bells on it that you twisted. She turned it and was rewarded by a dry crunching sound, not loud. In fact, hardly audible. So she did it again, a couple of times.

She was still doing it when the door swept open and Colonel Wilkes, looking shockingly older than this morning, stood there staring at her out of bloodshot eyes. “Please come in,” he said, stepping aside.

His voice sounded sad, and she had the odd impression that he might have actually been crying. She noticed that there were boxes against the wall.

“They’re yours,” Wilkes said. “Eamon’s things.”

“Colonel, nobody has told me yet what happened to my dad. I’ve been ordered to come to this place and I have no idea why, beyond reasons that sound like some sort of science fiction crap to me, and I have to tell you that this is not being done right. Couldn’t someone have at least warned me that I’d come here and see Dad’s stuff in damn boxes!”

“Who sent you here?”

She could not believe that he actually didn’t know. “I’ve been ordered not to tell you.”

He nodded, as if that was the most natural thing in the world. She followed him into an office that had clearly been carved out of what was once the master bedroom.

“This place was built in 1908 by Indy’s only cattle baron,” he said as he dropped down behind his desk.

There had been no exchange of salutes. But he was her superior officer, so she brought her hand to her forehead and said, “Lieutenant Lauren Glass reporting as ordered, sir.”

He looked up at her. “Obviously. Please go to the scrub room and get prepped.”

“Excuse me?”

“The scrub room. You’ll find it at the base of the shaft.”

“Sir, I have to explain to you, I have no idea what’s going on here. I would like a little more information, sir.”

“You’ll get the hang of it.”

“Uh, look, what is this scrub room? What do I have to scrub for?”

“Listen, I know you don’t understand any of this. We were planning to bring you along as your dad reached retirement. Nobody thought it would be like this. But we have a desperate situation, Lauren.”

She found a chair. “Sir, I’m sorry to disabuse you, but I have not been on any training program in any way, shape, or form. I am not prepared for whatever this is. I basically have no idea what you’re doing here at all, but whatever it is, it killed—” She had to stop. Her grief, appearing suddenly, had choked her on her own words.

“Lauren, I knew your dad for a long time. So you’ll know that what I’m about to say is not meant to be hard or callous. It is what your dad would say to you if he could talk right now. Your dad would say to you, ‘Soldier, you have a duty. Do your duty.’ ”

“Sir, respectfully, you tell me in one breath that my predecessor is a KIA, then you tell me to proceed into whatever situation he was in with no training or prep whatsoever. Sir, I would like to understand this order a little better. I know that I am dealing with somebody called Adam, and my father dealt with him and with somebody called Bob, and my father died as a result. That is the extent of my knowledge.”

He stood up so suddenly that she did, too. He turned his back on her and strode to the window. “There is no training, and there is no time. I want you down there now, because we have a situation, Lieutenant, and I believe—no, I know—that you are the only person remotely available to us who might be able to help.”

When he attempted to smile at her, she saw that coldness again, this time more clearly than she had at the grave. This was a driven man, she thought, a fanatic. And she wondered, should she trust a fanatic?

Well, Dad had. This was his commanding officer, this frosty man with his carefully decorated office and his fabulous car.

He showed her to a small elevator that opened under the front stairs. “There’s a very skilled man at the other end who will be there to help you.”

She stepped into the dim interior and descended. It felt as if it was moving fast, and continued for more than a minute. When the doors opened, she found a chunky young man in a white sterile suit waiting for her… and saw that he had been the fourth man at the funeral.

“I’m Andy Morgan,” he said. “Welcome to the facility.”

“This place is deep.”

“We’re two hundred and eighty feet down. Deep in the bedrock.” He tapped a foot on the floor. “Basalt.”

Faintly, she could hear another voice. It was groaning and sounded tired. Also angry. She looked around but saw nobody.

“Who is that?”

Andy Morgan shook his head. “You’re good,” he said.

“Who’s moaning? What’s going on in here?”

“Lauren, listen to me. You’re going to meet him in a moment. Sort of meet him. What you’re hearing is coming through a six-foot-thick tempered steel wall that is further protected by a high-intensity electromagnetic field.”

“Then how can we possibly be hearing it? Because it’s perfectly clear. And the man is in agony.”

“I can’t hear it.”

“But that’s crazy. Listen to him, he’s wailing!”

“The fact that you can hear his thoughts is why you’re here.”

“What thoughts? He’s crying!”

“You need to go in there,” Andy Morgan said. The same tone, she thought, that he might have used if he had told her it was time for her to do her wingwalk, or perhaps go over Niagara Falls in a barrel.

Behind him was a steel door, armored and locked with great, gleaming bolts. Why in the world would anybody be that locked up? What did they have in there, some kind of deranged superman? She tried to conceal her total and complete mystification, not to say her fear, and to concentrate on what she needed to know, here, on a practical basis. “Now, is this person going to be violent?”

“Baby, he is flyin’ in there! He’s been bouncing off the walls ever since the colonel bought it. Excuse me! Since your dad passed away.”

“Before I go in there, I think you’d better tell me exactly what happened to him.”

He lowered his head. “Nobody told you?”

“They did not.”

“Okay. Your dad got a scratch.”

“A scratch?”

“That caused an allergic reaction so intense that he bled out.”

She did not need to think very long about that. She sat down in one of the two chairs that stood before the control panel. “I’m not doing this.”

He was a gentle-looking guy, more than a little overweight, with sad, sad eyes. “They sent you all the way down here without telling you a damn thing, didn’t they?”

“That would be correct.”

“Okay, I’m going to level with you. Have you ever heard of aliens?”

“Yeah. No green card.”

“The other kind.”

“Oh, that stuff. I have no interest in that stuff.”

“Perhaps you had better see your dad’s office.”

“God, I’d love that.”

Across the small room was a door. The nameplate holder was empty. He unlocked the door and she saw a small, windowless space that had a steel desk, a couple of chairs, and a cot. There was a bookcase, also, and it was filled with books on electromagnetism and, of all things, UFOs. She read the titles, Intruders, Communion, UFO Condition Red, UFOs and the National Security State, and dozens more.

“You can pick what you’d like to keep. We’ll ditch the others.” He lifted a picture that was lying facedown on the desk. “I knew you’d want this.”

It filled her heart and her eyes, the picture of the two of them taken when she was twelve. They were at Cape May, New Jersey, she was wearing her new bathing suit, and her Boston terrier, Prissy, was still alive. For a moment she smelled the salt in the air, remembered a radio playing down the beach, and heard the breeze fluttering in their cabana.

He took the picture and set it on the desk. “This is your office, now.”

“There’s an alien down here.”

“And your father was his empath, and you will be his empath.”

“Meaning?”

“You are going to find that you can see pictures he makes in his mind, and describe what you see to us.”

Her father had kept quite a secret. “I should have been trained.”

“Your dad wanted to wait until you’d had a little more Air Force. You know, you sign up and you wear a uniform, but really becoming part of this crazy organization takes time. Your dad wanted you to have that time.”

“I’m an Air Force brat down to my toes.”

“He knew that. He respected that. But duty is something different. I mean, our kind of duty. Keeping a secret so big that it is a kind of agony. Above all, knowing every time you go in that room over there, that you might die. Every time. But doing it like your dad did, on behalf of the Air Force, the country, and future of man.” He took the picture from her, looked at it. “We need you to get in there and calm Adam down. If we can’t get him to pull himself together, he’s going to literally be busted apart by knocking into those walls in there. Considering that he’s been doing this since your dad passed, we’re desperate, Lieutenant.”

Either she took up her dad’s sword or she let it lie, and let the meaning of his life lie with him in his grave.

There was no real choice here. Never had been. She took a deep breath. “Okay, what do I do?”

He drew her through a steel door into a tiny dressing area. She stood naked in a shower with nozzles on the ceiling and walls, turning slowly as instructed with her hands raised over her head while green, chemical-stinking liquid sluiced over her.

Still wet, she donned an orange isolation suit and what felt like asphalt gloves, they were so thick. “He’s electromagnetically active,” Andy explained. “If you touch him, he’ll extend into your nervous system and take over your body. You don’t want that.”

“No.”

“Cover your face with Vaseline. And here’s an epinephrine injector. If you get the least feeling of even so much as a tickle in your throat, press it against your leg and get out of there.”

As she dug into the Vaseline container, she reflected that her father’s hand was probably the last one to do this. She could almost feel him beside her right now, telling her not to be scared, to remember her duty, that he was with her every step of the way.

Then something changed. The room, the guy—everything around her disappeared. She was suddenly and vividly in another room. It had stainless-steel walls, a black floor, and a fluorescent ceiling. There was a man on a table, naked, surrounded by people in full protective gear, sterile suits, faceplates down, the works. The man was purple, his chest was heaving, and blood was oozing out of his eyes, out of his nose, down his cheeks like tears.

The hallucination, or whatever it was, was so vivid that she might as well have actually been standing in the place. She could even hear the air-conditioning hissing, and the muffled voices of the doctors behind the masks, who were trying to save the man on the table.

He gasped, gasped again as they set up an IV. A nurse intoned, “BP 280 over 200, heart rate 160, basal BP rising, glucose 320 rising, we have another infarction—”

There was a high-pitched whine and blood began spraying out of his skin, spraying their face masks and their white sterile suits, beading and running down to the floor as he bled from every pore, a haze of blood pink and fine, like it was being sprayed from a thousand tiny high-pressure nozzles affixed to his body.

Then his head turned and she saw his face, and an ice cold spike stabbed her straight in the heart.

In that instant, the vision of her dad’s death ended.

She realized that she was still in the basement room she had entered in the first place, and Andy was supporting her under her arms.

“Sorry,” she managed to mutter, regaining her footing and stepping away from him, “I—uh—I think it’s the… depth.”

“If you say so.” He put an arm around her.

“Back off!”

“Hey, okay! Okay. I’m just trying to help, here.”

She blew out breath, then shook her head. That had been vivid. That had been real vivid.

Andy watched her. “You sure you’re okay?”

“I’m not okay. No.”

“Uh, was that a seizure, because—”

“It’s my business, okay!”

“Okay! Sorry.” He paused, then, and when she said nothing more, continued. “I’m going to open up the cage itself. When you enter, you’ll see a chair and a table. Sit in the chair.”

“That’s it? That’s all I get to know?”

“It’s all any of us know. Frankly, what your dad did, and what we know you can do, is not understood. You just have to do it.”

“And what if I can’t?”

“You’ve passed the test.” He went to a small keyboard and keyed in a combination. “I’ll be in the control room. You’ll be able to see and hear me, and vice versa. If you get into trouble, I’ll pull you out. But obviously things can happen fast in there.”

He left the dressing room, closing the heavy outer door behind him. A moment later, his voice returned, tinny, coming out of a ceiling speaker. “You reading me?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, the door’s opening now.”

There was a loud click, then a whirring sound, and the wall of the little chamber slid back. She saw before her a room lit by what appeared to be ultraviolet light. It reminded her of the Animals of the Night exhibit at the Cleveland Zoo, where the vampire bats and things were deceived into thinking it was dark during the day. “Are there any lights?”

“Don’t worry about seeing him. You won’t. If you get so much as a glimpse, count yourself lucky. Pay attention to the corners of your eyes.”

“The corners of my eyes… you mean use my peripheral vision?”

Then the air hit her. It was dry—real dry. She could feel her face shriveling, it was so dry, feel her lips starting to crack. The function of the Vaseline was now clear, and she grabbed another handful of it right in the glove and slathered it on.

The room open before her was not large, maybe twenty by twenty. It looked like it had rubber walls. There was a window on the far side, and Andy could be seen sitting there at a control panel. His face glowed green from the instruments before him.

Suddenly something shot past so fast she lurched back waving her hands. It felt like nothing so much as being buzzed by a fly—but not a small fly, no. More like the size, say, of a buzzard.

There was also a voice: groaning, howling, wailing, and it was the strangest voice she had ever heard, because of the way it echoed in her ears and her mind at the same time, as if she was hearing both sounds and thoughts that were the same as the sounds.

A thud, bzzzt, thud, bzzzt, thud, bzzzt, shot around the room, and with it the wailing, mourning voice, its howl thin and pitiful now.

She saw something—a flash of something that gleamed black. It was big, the size of a hand, and slanted. It was also brilliantly alive—a big, gleaming eye. A sound came out of her that she knew, objectively, was a scream. Sharp, intense, made of pure fear.

The wailing at once increased. Now it was desolated, like he’d been instantly aware of her revulsion and her fright and it was making him feel really, really miserable.

“Hold on,” she said. Dimly, she was conscious that Wilkes was now standing beside the tech at the control panel.

Suddenly, the buzzing stopped. There was no sound now but the hissing of the powerful air-conditioning.

“Sit down in the chair,” Wilkes said over the intercom.

“Where is he?”

“He moves with your eyes, so he appears totally still. The eye doesn’t see anything that’s totally still.”

“Yeah, like a rock or a mountain.”

“No,” Wilkes explained, “when you look at anything at all, you’re in motion, so you see it. Since Adam is constantly making micromovements to match your eyes’ own natural flickering, he doesn’t register in the optic nerve at all.”

“What in hell is this about?”

“Tell you what. If you want to see him, make a very sudden move. As you do that, concentrate on the corners of your eyes, not your central vision. You’ll see him.”

She sat, took a deep breath, tried to concentrate on her peripheral vision, and leaped to her feet.

Not a foot away, there was a shadow. Then it was gone again.

“He’s right here! He’s right on top of me!”

Then he started wailing again, and she could feel him whizzing around the room. More and more, he was racing past her face at the distance of what felt like about an inch. Dad had gotten scratched. She sat frozen, terrified.

“Stay with it. You’re doing marvelously.”

She could see Wilkes nodding and smiling at her. “This is one hell of a sucker play,” she yelled. “False damn pretenses!” She got to her feet. Adam whizzed past so close she was forced to sit back down. She jumped up again. Same thing happened.

“He likes you, Lauren,” Wilkes said.

It felt a lot like getting a bat in her hair or something. How had Dad ever stood this, it was just way, way too weird.

“So what are we doing with an alien?” she screeched. “How in the world did we capture an alien?”

“We got two of them in a crash in New Mexico. They may have been given to us, we’re not sure.”

Bzzzt! Whooosh!

“Get away!”

“He wants to touch you. Let him touch you.”

She began waving her arms around her head. “No way, I’ll bleed out!”

“Remember, that was an accident. He’s in an agony of grief, that’s why he’s like this. Now you settle down, young woman, and follow your orders.”

Pictures of Dad kept flashing through her mind like photographs. With them came emotions of grief and the most acute regret. It was clear that they entered from the outside, although she could not say how she knew that. It was sort of like breathing a kind of emotional smoke.

“Shh,” she whispered, “now, baby…” She looked toward the control room. “The buzzing stopped again.”

Something brushed her cheek.

“I think he just touched me. I know you’re sorry,” she whispered, “I know…” She looked again toward the figures in the control room. “What am I supposed to do now?”

No response.

So she comforted him. She went through her mind, seeking for the words of some song from childhood, some sort of comforting song. Dad had not been a big singer. Mom had her Elvis, but this did not appear to be your basic Elvis moment.

Then a sort of hallucinatory flash took place. In it, the light in the room was deep red and there was a man at the table, sitting across from Adam. On the table, a bright green light like a laser that hopped up and down in the air. The man was her dad.

It was so real, it was so good to see him again, that the tears were immediate. And then she heard inside her head, oohhhhh, and she knew that Adam had realized who she was.

“Yeah,” she said, “yeah, he was my dad.”

Ohhhhhh! Ohhhhh!

“Oh, yeah,” she managed through her own tears, “I miss him, too, I miss him bad.”

She saw next a glowingly beautiful woman, her face surrounded by a halo of golden light. It was, she knew, herself as Adam saw her.

Empath. One who empathizes. Turned out it was in the blood. No training needed. Genetic thing, she supposed. Maybe their ancestors had been psychics or witches or something. Dad’s grandfather had come from Ireland, that was about all she knew of their bloodline.

In the control room, Colonel Wilkes and Specialist Martin exchanged looks. “He’s got her wrapped around his little finger,” Wilkes said.

“For sure, sir.”

“He knows how to handle ’em, the little bastard. That is one smart piece of work in there.”

They said no more. Lauren Glass had been captured. She would not escape, never, not until she followed her father and his predecessor, both of whom Adam had killed with a scratch.