The Grays

ELEVEN

MIKE WILKES WATCHED AS, ONE by one, the members of the Trust filed slowly through a large white device that was set into the doorway to the conference room on the second floor of his Georgetown home.

As each trustee stood waiting in what was essentially a magnetic-resonance-imaging system reconfigured and retuned to detect very small metallic objects, Mike watched a whole-body image come into focus on a flat-panel display located beside the entrance.

“Come in, Charles,” he said to their chairman, Charles Gunn.

“I’m wiped every morning at home,” Charles said. “I had one pulled out of my damn neck last week.”

“Uh-oh, hold it, Richard.” The display showed a bright spot deep in the brain of Richard Forbes, the Trust’s security chief. “They got one in your damn temporal lobe, buddy.”

“Is it deep?”

“Oh, yeah. You’re gonna need a neurosurgeon, big time.”

“Well, guys, I’m out of this for the duration, then. I’ll see you after my lobotomy.”

There was nervous laughter. Brain implants were rare. They required an abduction, while an object that went in under the skin could be placed while the host was wide awake. All it would do would be to cause some pain, but there would be no wound, certainly no scar. The grays were, among other things, masters of atomic structure. They could walk through walls if they wished, and they could certainly deposit an implant under the skin without surgery. The terrifying thing about a brain implant was that it could be used for subtle mind control, detectable only by someone with profound understanding.

“They anticipated this meeting,” Charles said.

“Yeah, they know damn well we’d want our security guy in a meeting called because of a security issue,” Henry Vorona added as he came through.

Then Ted Cassius had one under his scalp. These were nasties, too, because that close to the brain, they could be used not only for monitoring, but for a degree of mind control as well.

“How long have you had this, Ted?”

“I got a splitting headache two days ago. Jesus, I should have known.”

“We need to assume that you’re both under mind control and we have to get your asses out of here fast.” He opened his cell phone. “I’m calling for a Secret Service escort for both of you guys to Walter Reed. If you go under your own steam, you just might change your minds, as you know.”

“Thank you.”

Nobody else, thankfully, was implanted, and Mike finally was able to take his customary place at the conference table, second from the head on the left. Charles Gunn was head of table. Normally, he would not be at a meeting of the security-operations committee, but Mike had specifically requested his attendance.

Henry Vorona shuffled some papers as the Three Blind Mice took their places, three sour and mutually indistinguishable liaison officers from the main corporate groups that accepted delivery of the technologies and processes that evolved out of the liaison with Adam. They were Todd Able, Alex Starnes, and Timothy Greenfield, all in their forties, all looking like undertakers. It was their corporate dollars that funded the survival program. Creating the database of people who would be sheltered was costly, and monitoring their movements even more so. But those things were nothing compared to the cost of the underground shelters themselves, a hundred at half a billion dollars each, hidden around the world.

“Let’s get going,” Charles said. “I’ve brought a little patents-and-processes business to deal with first. Where are we with the plasmonics device?”

Mike was confused by that question. The invisibility fabric was deep in the pipeline. “Uh, do we need more from Adam? Because I wasn’t aware—”

Tim Greenfield said, “We have a report, Mike. It’s on its way to you.”

“Then there’s a problem, Timmy?”

Tim Greenfield’s pate flushed. “It doesn’t work.”

“Well, that is a problem.” The concept was a material that would reduce light scatterback to zero, thus rendering an object effectively impossible to see. They knew that the grays used invisibility cloaking in their abductions, in addition to their peculiar physical ability to lock movement with the slightest flickering of the eye, so their victim could not see them.

Adam and Bob had been queried on the cloaking, in the tiny bits and pieces necessary to extract information from them, for fifteen years. They had a ten-billion-dollar check riding on the success of the process.

“There’s a compositional issue. Chemical. We need a real formula. What they’ve given us is not real.”

So the grays had lied again. All of those years of work, those hundreds and hundreds of tiny, seemingly innocuous questions had led down another blind alley.

Not that they didn’t have successes. “How are we doing with the electrostatic anti-friction shield?” Mike asked Todd Able, who was team leader on that project. He knew the answer better than Todd did, but he wanted to remind everybody that his work with Bob and Adam had resulted in its share of successes.

“It’s deploying and we’re looking at a ninety-seven percent decrease in friction across angular surfaces. If we could mine gravitite, we could fabricate non-aerodynamic spherical vehicles and we’d be looking at the same zero-friction profile we see in the grays’ craft. All we’d be missing is their engine.”

“The coherent mercury plasma can’t be made more efficient,” Henry Vorona said. “We’re getting everything we can out of it.”

Mike knew that well. Using a combination of research into ancient Vedic texts about the technology of Earth’s previous civilization and questions to Adam, they had evolved a device that rotated a mercury plasma inside a powerful magnetic field, that reduced the weight of the craft that carried it by 40 percent. Simply knowing that the Vedic references to aircraft and weapons referred to actual devices had enabled scientists to proceed much more quickly.

“So what about gravitite? Progress?” Charles asked in his peculiarly cheerful voice, so improbable in a man who looked like the director of his own funeral.

“We know what it is and where it is, but extracting it is another matter,” Mike said. He looked toward Henry Vorona, who was a substantial shareholder in a dozen companies that were feeding off the grays’ technology. One of those companies, Photonic Research, had been mining for years in the same seams of iron in the southern Catskills that the grays used, pulling iron out of shafts directly adjacent to theirs, but failing to extract more than a few molecules of gravitite.

Henry said, “We’re not going to be saving the human race with gravitite. We can pull up the iron and cut it up atom by atom, but we find one atom of gravitite for every three hundred billion atoms of iron. The grays must have a more efficient process, otherwise they would have used up every bit of iron on the planet to get a handful of gravity-negative product.”

Charles now rested his eyes on Mike. “Colonel, if you’d like to go on to this security matter now.”

Mike told himself that he wasn’t frightened, but he was, he felt like a schoolboy about to get a thrashing. “We have a potential crisis that needs to be addressed immediately.”

“Adam’s not sick?”

Bob had been invaded by common household molds. This was why they kept Adam in an ultra-dry, ultra-clean environment. They were all terrified of losing their only captive gray. “Not that, thank the Lord, but something might be unfolding that could be bad for us.”

Henry Vorona sighed. He was not a patient man and Mike could see an explosion building. He hurried on. “Basically, we’ve obtained information about a very unusual operation on the part of the grays. Spectacularly threatening, I am sorry to say. What happened initially was that the triad that works Pennsylvania and up into Canada, came out of their boundaries and did an abduction in a college town in Kentucky.”

“Okay,” Todd said, “I’ll bite.”

“The grays have devised a way to communicate with mankind. To teach us how to save ourselves. They’ve been working on it for probably a couple of thousand years. And now, gentlemen, they are going to spring it on us. Of course, we save ourselves not for us, but for them. Mankind survives, but as a genetic milk carton for them. Slaves.”

That brought total silence. These men had counted on the coming catastrophe to free their carefully selected fragment of humankind from the grays. None of them liked the idea of the disaster that they knew was coming. But they feared this slavery more. If six billion were alive in 2012, they would all be enslaved. If only a million were left alive by then, they would be left alone. So, at least, went the theory.

“So, get on with it,” Henry Vorona snapped.

“Okay,” Mike continued, “we’ve known for some time, based on the abduction pattern we’ve observed over five decades, that the grays are especially interested in children.”

“Because they’re small, easy to control, and emotionally rich,” Henry said. “Easy to feed on,” he added in a tone electric with contempt. Every man here shared one truth: he despised the grays.

“That does not explain the ‘why,’ which has always been our problem. The grays can outthink us. They’re always ten moves ahead.”

Henry slammed his briefcase, which had been open on the table. “That’s it then. Let’s all go home. Follow Forrestal out the damn window.”

“I’m too old to jump out a window,” Charles said. “Mike, you finish this. What’s your problem and what do you need from us?”

“Well, wait,” Tim said, “what about the scalar weapons program? We’re going to have eighty of those birds up by 2012. We’ll be able to induce the destruction of most of the species ourselves.” He sighed. “God help us, I hope it doesn’t come to that.”

“You think they’ll sit back and let us kill their cattle?”

“They haven’t touched the scalar prototype.”

“Because its only one small weapon,” Charles said. “It doesn’t have the potential to affect their plans.”

Mike continued. “The grays are doing something very inventive. What they’ve apparently done is to breed a child so intelligent that he can process and use the contents of their knowledge.”

Vorona shook his head.

“You have a problem, Henry?”

“They’ve been preparing this from the beginning, then?”

“I found out about it early this morning.”

“Mike, we’ve known about them for fifty damn years, and you found out today?”

“Look, let’s not argue about me.”

“I want to argue about you! This is not good enough!”

“Hold off!”

“You hold off! And you listen. Because this is urgent. Our whole damn program is in jeopardy. The freedom of the human species!”

“Because somebody didn’t do their job,” Alex murmured.

“Hold off, all of you,” Charles said softly. “Go on, Mike.”

“My expectation is that they’re going to install something in him that links him to their collective.”

“An implant does not a demon make.”

“In this case, it does. This child’s intelligence will enable him to use vastly more information than an average human being can.”

Silence fell. He watched each face as each man explored the implications of this.

“Gentlemen,” Mike said, “if this child survives, mankind survives. When the grays show up in 2012, dinner is served.”

“Now,” Tim Greenfield asked in his soft Georgia drawl, “we are absolutely sure that their coming is bad for us?”

“You cannot seriously entertain a question where we can’t know the answer until it’s too late. Good or bad, we can’t take the risk!”

“Why not approach the child, get him on our side?” Todd asked.

“When we approach him, we approach the grays,” Mike said acidly.

“So, do the child, Mike,” Charles said. “Shouldn’t be hard, not for a pro like you.”

“I might remind all of you that every life I took because of this damned thing, I took under orders.”

“I repeat, do the child.”

“Which is why I’m here.”

Charles slammed his hand down on the table. “You don’t need our permission! For God’s sake, Mike, this meeting is a waste of time. Do the damned child!”

“Charles, Goddamnit, will you please give me a chance to talk!”

Charles glared at him.

Mike continued. “My problem is that the grays are not alone in protecting this child. They have the help of some people within our own organization who appear to have come under mind control.” He took his iPod out of his briefcase, plugged in its tiny speaker, and played for them the conversation that had taken place on Lost Angel Road.

“It’s pitiful,” Henry said. “Those are good men, all of them.”

“The hard part is,” Mike said, “I can see where their choice is coming from. There’s a lot of life going to be lost doing it our way. A lot of life.”

“You’ve made no headway finding this child, I presume.”

“No, Henry, I have a description, obtained from Adam this morning. And I will undoubtedly find a child who fits it on Oak Road. And kill the wrong child.”

Todd said, “Unless they’ve given you a description of the right child in hope that you’ll assume that it must be the wrong one.”

“Kill all the children,” Henry said. “And what in the world are we going to do with Lewis and Rob and Dr. Simpson?”

“Tell you what,” Tim Greenfield said, “let’s suck them up in the terrorist thing and ship them to Saudi Arabia. That’ll do it.”

“It will also bring in the CIA, AFOSI, and the FBI, not to mention the Saudis. We need a plane crash, an auto accident, a fatal robbery attempt, a nice heart attack, stuff like that,” Charles said. “Take a year doing them. There’s no hurry.” He looked toward Mike. “The sort of thing you’re expert at.”

“The child is our urgent problem, and please let me repeat: the grays are protecting him—”

“—and so are our friends from Lost Angel Road, don’t forget that, Mike.”

Tim said, “Gentlemen—excuse me, Charles, but I think you’re panicking, here. We have years to deal with this child, and—”

“We do not have years,” Mike said. “Please get rid of that misconception.”

“I’m sorry, Mike, but we have until 2012.”

“WE DO NOT! GODDAMNIT! Let me tell you how this will work. The second they possess that kid or parasitize him or however you’d like to describe it, he is going to become invulnerable.”

“Oh, come on!”

“I have spent the last fifteen years of my career sparring with Bob and Adam, and I am warning you, if we let that kid go even a day, we’re done. They win. We will not be able to do a single thing to him. He will always outwit us. Good Christ, he’s going to be smarter than they are.”

Alex said, “Let’s put a nuke on the damn town. Pick up the phone and call the president.”

“I can’t imagine him agreeing to that,” Charles said. “In any case, we need to keep this in-house if at all possible.”

“Which gets me to my next question,” Henry Vorona said. “Mike, you have a big rep. Given that you’ve been sitting at the bottom of a hole for fifteen years, may I know why we should believe you’re qualified to go operational again?”

Charles said, “Henry, you surprise me. Mike is my choice and that ought to be enough. But if it’s not, let me lay things out. Mike didn’t always spend his days licking the heinies of those damn gray bastards down in that hole. He did a lot of hard, sad, wet work in the early days.”

“Okay, I get it.”

“No! You’re questioning my authority, Henry. You’ve done it before and you’ll do it again. That’s fine. You want to run the show. Very ambitious. Maybe, if they vote me out and vote you in, you’ll do okay.” He looked around the table. “Do we want a vote of confidence? Gentlemen?”

No hand was raised.

He went on. “Suffice to say that Mike here had the unfortunate need, back some years ago, to become a master of untraceable murder. He’s got quite a number of notches in his little cap pistol, am I right, Mike?”

“I’ve done a few,” he muttered.

“Using everything from a chemical that induces cancer to a mind-control technique that makes people kill themselves. And he’s never even come close to being caught.”

Vorona smiled at Mike. “Then I’m relieved,” the CIA representative said. “We can count on you.”

Todd spoke up. “Obviously, the nuclear option isn’t available to us, but I think Alex’s concept is a good one. We could do a training accident, say, compliments of Alfred AFB, which is out there in Kentucky, if I’m not mistaken. Blow away the neighborhood with a stray incendiary, say.”

“ ‘Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently inquired of the wise men.’ ” Wilkes paused. “But, of course,” he added, “Herod missed. If we just do that one little cluster of houses, we might miss, too.”

“However we do it, we have to do it now,” Vorona said.

“Gentlemen,” Charles said, “I think we’ve heard enough. Mike, we need to find this child. Would it help if you had a TR?”

“A triangle is essential. It enables me to enter the community with minimal risk. The grays will inevitably discover me, but at least it can get me to the scene undetected. Once I’m there, I figure I have a couple of days.” He stood up, signaling that the meeting was ended. Vorona was right about one thing: there must be no delay now.

“Wait just a minute,” Vorona said. “You’re not walking out of here without telling us how you’re going to proceed.”

“I think we have mind-control capabilities of our own that can be brought to bear on the situation. We can do this without revealing to the grays that we’re responsible. How is my business.”

“There’s one system that works,” Greenfield said, “the violence wire.”

“Duty calls, gentlemen,” Mike said as they started to filter into his living room for drinks. “There’s no time, not tonight. There is no time at all.”

He left, then, heading down to the garage in his basement. He needed to get to Wilton—which, of course, would turn out to be a trap. The larger question was how, exactly, did the trap work, and how could it be defeated?

If it could.

TWELVE

AS DAN ENTERED MARCIE’S OFFICE, he was enveloped in what he immediately perceived as an ominous silence. Behind her, the westering sun made a halo of her glowing russet hair. Her hands, holding what Dan presumed were his student evaluations, gleamed softly in the late light. Her skin was smooth and her features exotic, with large, frank eyes and lips that generally contained a hint of laughter—not the pleasantly sensual laughter that the face suggested, though. Marcie was first and foremost an administrator. She fired, gave bad news, and disciplined wayward professors for their crimes—drunkenness, sloth, and, of course, lechery.

He imagined her fingers touching him, and it was oddly thrilling. He blinked and shook the thought away.

She smiled, and he saw something unexpected: a sort of warmth.

“Given what I have here, it would have been useful to you,” she said, “if you could have gotten a little more support from faculty.”

“The student evaluations, ah—”

“I can’t give you details, Dan.”

“No, of course not.” Student evaluations at Bell were held secret from professors, so that they could be used as a tool and weapon of the administration. “But they’re bad, I assume.”

She laid the paper back in the file from which she’d taken it, aligned it with a long, deep red fingernail, and closed the manila folder.

From outside there came the distant strains of the Bell Ringers Band hammering away, improbably enough, at “Moon River,” the sound carried off on the stiff north wind that had come up around noon. Voices echoed along the hall, the comfortable laughter of some succulent coed making light, no doubt, of a flapping faculty admirer.

“Marcie,” he said. He stopped himself, astonished by a shocking and completely inappropriate sense of desire for her. She was doing nothing to seduce him. He looked at her right hand, lying there on the desk. If he reached across that two-foot space and laid his own hand on it, what would happen?

“Yes?” Her voice seemed almost to tremble. But why? Did she have to tell him no, and was she afraid to do that? But why should she be? He was no friend of hers and bad news was job one in this office. Poor student evaluations and no faculty support, open and shut case, toodle-oo.

“Marcie, look, we both know what’s going on here.”

She laughed a little, the nervous tinkle of a girl. “I think the problem is that your courses aren’t sexy.”

He had arrived at the edge of the cliff: poor evals, no support, now a negative on his courses. The next step would be, sorry, I cannot vote for tenure. “It’s physiological psychology,” he yammered. “Give me a couple of sections of abnorm, I’ll bring my comments way up.”

“That’s unlikely until you’re tenured.”

“But I can’t get tenured without good evals, and I can’t get those without good courses.”

“You’re Yossarianed, then. As we all are. Bell Yossarians us all.”

For a moment, he was at a loss. Then he remembered Catch-22. Yossarian was the character in the novel who was caught in a bureaucratic endless loop. Dan searched for something, anything, that might help him. He could drop a name. Pitiful, but it was what he had. “I knew a fellow when I was at Columbia—what was his name, Speed Vogel—who knew Heller.”

She made a note.

“What are you writing?”

“Knew friend of Heller.”

“Does it matter?”

“Not at all.”

He found himself watching her lips, the way she pressed them together, the slight and fascinating moisture at the corners of her mouth.

But why? Was he going mad? How could he feel this way for this woman who was about to wreck his life?

Did he want this so badly that he was willing to whore for it? Probably, but why would she want him? She had her pick of faculty masochists, eager to roll in the hay with their punisher. And yet, the only thing that was stopping him from leaping across that desk was the fear that any such action would backfire.

“Marcie,” he heard himself say, and he heard the roughness, the unmistakable sexuality in his tone. He almost slapped his hand over his mouth, but she looked up suddenly, blinking fast. Her eyebrows rose to the center of the forehead, her eyes filmed with tears that made them bright and awful.

“What’s the matter?” she asked in a horrible, low tone that made him think she feared him.

He remembered, suddenly, his seizure dream, going up into the dark womb of the sky, the cave in the silver moon. He shook it away, frightened for a moment that he was going into aura again. But no, it was only a memory.

She cleared her throat, lifted her hand, and brushed her lips with the back of it, smearing her lipstick a little. “Yes,” she whispered.

He said, “Is this the conference? My conference with my tenure advisor? We sit here staring helplessly at each other?”

“There’s nothing to discuss, Dan,” she said. She straightened herself, clasped her hands, and lifted her chin. She was beautiful, then, tragically beautiful. He could see her in the darkness, and she looked very afraid. But no, it wasn’t dark and she wasn’t scared. She looked across at him, her eyes steady. “It’s just—obviously, you know the student evaluations—well, you know, they’re often rather indifferent to the welfare of somebody they know has need.”

“They know I’m up for tenure?”

She nodded, her little mouth grave, her eyes flashing. “Oh, yes,” she said, and he knew, in that moment, that he must have her. He must do this, he could not help himself. He also knew that she was aware of the potential that existed between them. He went to his feet.

She looked down his body, then cleared her throat. Her cheeks had gone bright red. He stood before her like a little soldier at stiff attention. He said in his heart, Katelyn, I am so ashamed, but Marcie’s rising flush told him that there would be no escape for him.

She lifted her hand off the desk and reached toward him, her fingers extending.

They froze, then, remaining like that, him pressing his thighs against the edge of the desk, her reaching to the air six inches in front of his midriff.

Tears poured down her cheeks. She whispered, her voice an unsure murmur, “What happened last night?”

Something in him, some sort of inner door, fell open. He remembered the blaring confusions of his boyhood, the stars passing his face, the field of silver and the black opening, gaping.

“You heard about that?” He backed away from her desk.

Then he saw:

—A narrow steel cot, Marcie lying on it in heat, her face flushed and sweaty, her bush brown and touched as if by dew.

And he felt:

—His own nakedness delicious in the night air.

She gasped as if struck. “Dan,” she said, “Dan.” Her eyes widened, glistened, their green suddenly horrible to see, too glassy, too… hurt.

“Marcie, listen, uh—”

She stood up and came around the desk, entered his arms. She drew against him, drew close, and in the fur of his sweater he heard long and bitter sobs.

“I’m sorry,” he said, “I’m so damn sorry.”

She pressed herself against him harder. Then their lips were touching, asking one another if there should be more. If she—of all creatures, she—could be admitted to his sanctum?

He laid his hand on her back and pressed her closer to him, and delivered himself to her kiss.

THIRTEEN

LAUREN DID NOT HAVE SEXUAL feelings about Adam, of course, and the idea of him having such feelings for her was repellent. But there was something else there. He liked to explore her intensities—sexuality, anger, passion, loss, triumph, her slight kinks… those little fantasies that she sometimes relaxed with, of helplessness and ardor. And her childhood. Adam moved through her childhood memories like a tiger prowling the tall grass.

Normally, he was curiously empty of emotion himself. You’d almost be willing to believe he was a machine, he was so—not cold, that’s an emotion. Adam’s heart was empty. But earlier this morning, when he had been showing her the images of the dying cruise ship and the supermarket full of the starving, she had felt such a powerful sense of disquiet that she’d gotten the idea that they represented a great fear of his, and therefore of his whole species. They were a collective, connected in some esoteric way across the whole universe. She thought it had to do with quantum interconnected-ness. A gray could communicate instantly with a gray in another galaxy, but hardly at all with a human being.

She had come to feel that Adam’s ceaseless quest to share her heart was central to his meaning, and probably the meaning of them all.

They weren’t predators, like Mike thought, but people who had somehow become machines. They were smart enough to know that they were the most profound possible outsiders: they were functional, very much so, but had no access to the emotional universe that seemed to her to be the essence of being alive.

She lay staring at the living room ceiling, vaguely listening to Ted’s golf tournament on the TV. What was it? The Masters? She enjoyed golf, the precision of it, the struggle, the inner calm that was essential, as well as beating her dear Ted at a game… which she managed occasionally.

He was her shelter in the storm of desperation that defined Adam. She wondered if the grays had lost their souls. Was that their problem—they’d once been more fully alive than they were now, and they were searching the universe for some way to regain themselves?

Adam rejected every effort she made to find out about his people, his world, any of it. If she tried to penetrate his mind the way he did hers, by latching onto the pictures stored there, all she’d ever get was white light. Static. He blocked her.

It was a little sinister feeling, truth to tell. What did he have to hide?

She became aware of a siren outside, which was certainly unusual for University Park. This was not a siren-oriented neighborhood, no way. The deep, booming horn that accompanied it announced that it was a fire truck.

Well, that was more believable. There were dorm fires over on the two campuses every so often, usually involving mattresses or common-room couches. Once in a blue moon one of the beautiful old U. Park houses burned. Still, it would be extremely serious if the facility was threatened in any way, so she got up from the couch, went to the front hall, and put on her jacket.

“Hello,” Ted said as she passed through the living room.

“I’m going out. Back in a few.”

He knew not to ask, of course.

When she reached the street, she smelled a faint tang of smoke. Okay, that was to be expected if there was a fire in the area. She got in her car and drove to the facility. She was appalled, as she turned the corner, to see three big fire trucks in the street.

Her mouth went dry, she began mentally reviewing the steps that had to be taken to protect the secure areas. Nobody, no fireman, no fire inspector, must go down that elevator.

As she pulled into the driveway, she saw that the house itself was not burning, but there were firemen in the drive. She fumbled frantically through her purse looking for her credentials. Mike was in Washington and Andy was off. They often left Adam alone. He was safe down there, and when he wasn’t being interacted with, he lay as inert as an abandoned toy. If he began to move around, sensors would alert her and Andy, and they could watch him from their laptops. It had never happened, though.

She stepped out of the car and walked over to the firemen. Just the other side of their garden wall there was smoke.

“What’s going on?” she asked.

“Grass fire, probably started by kids.”

“It’s not going to come over this far, is it?”

“No, ma’am. That’s why we’re here.”

“Okay, thank you. Listen, I’m going to be in the house. If there’s any change, please let me know.”

She entered by the front door. Before going down, she went first into her office and turned on her computer. After it had voice identified her, she pulled up the feed from Adam’s chamber.

Unlike the human eye, the camera simply saw what was in front of it. On camera, you could sometimes glimpse Adam. He could feel you watching, though, and would usually disappear in under a second.

She was shocked to find him pacing, the slim gray form speeding in a blur from wall to wall. At least he wasn’t flying around like some kind of gigantic berserk blowfly.

Immediately, she went to the elevator, pressed her thumb against the print reader, and stepped inside. She dropped down into the pit. Quickly, she prepped, just covering her face and hands with emollient and leaving it at that. Her skin was as stiff as leather anyway. She didn’t bother with an antihistamine shot, but she did stuff an epinephrine injector into the pocket of her slacks. Then she stepped into the lock, waited for the outer door to close, and entered the cage.

“Hi,” she said aloud. She went to her chair, sat down, closed her eyes, and directed her attention to the physical sensation of her body. By thus removing her attention from her thoughts, she signaled to Adam that he could enter her.

He rushed in with all the eagerness of a dog leaping to its master’s breast after a long absence… or a lion pouncing. It felt like both things when Adam came into her. This time, he didn’t go to her sexual memories, but rather to earliest childhood.

She found herself back home in Philly, in Mom’s study, and all the furniture was incredibly tall. She was gliding from chair to chair, and her heart was soaring. It was a place he’d gone to frequently, the moment she had taken her first steps.

She loved these memories Adam would bring up out of childhood’s amnesia. Because of him, she had remembered her birth and even before, a sort of secret communion with her mother in the womb.

Then he went to a moment in the living room when she was about two, when she had stood watching the sunlight slanting in through the window, and listened to the voice of the sun singing a song whose words were deeper in her than even Adam could reach.

The message of these excursions into her earliest life was clear: see what I am about to show you with the open eyes of a child. She emptied her mind even more and waited.

Drifting in like a dream, she saw the Earth from above. North America was wheeling slowly toward the sunset. But the coastlines were changed. Florida was just a narrow spike, half its usual size. The Caribbean was mostly featureless blue. The whole East Coast was submerged beneath a brown scar of filthy water. Then she saw numbers, and she realized that these were a series of dates, ranging from 2012 to 2077.

She sucked in breath. She now understood the cruise ship, the starving supermarket: Adam was warning her about a great catastrophe.

“Oh, Adam,” she said, “I’ll tell the colonel. I’ll be sure to tell him.”

He began shooting around like a rocket, slamming into the walls with hideous, crunching thuds.

“Adam!” She leaped up out of the chair, but he was whizzing now, racing so fast she could hear the bzzt of his passing but not see so much as a glimpse of gray skin or the gleam of one of his huge black eyes.

At that moment, without the slightest warning, thick smoke came pouring through every air-conditioning vent in the room.

For an instant, she was frozen, her mind unable to take in what she was seeing.

The smoke roiled along the ceiling, and she saw that it was filled with glowing red streaks. The lights began flickering, grew dim.

“Adam,” she screamed, “we’ve got to get out!” In two strides she was across the room. She fumbled open the cover on the bail-out switch and hit it with the heel of her hand.

Sirens erupted, the facility went to emergency lighting, and the door to the lock slid open. “Adam,” she screamed, “Adam!”

The smoke came down like a curtain, turning everything inky dark. An instant later, the fire struck her head and neck with ferocious, terrifying heat. Covering her head, she dropped to the floor. “Adam! Come toward me, Adam, stay low!”

Nothing happened. There was bare visibility here, and it was hot and getting hotter. She could smell in the stink of the smoke the additional stench of her own singed hair. The next breath she took caused a reflex of a kind she didn’t know existed. The choking was a fearsome weight slammed down on her back, the gagging like some sort of spring unraveling in her throat.

She backed out through the airlock and into the control room. Here, meteors of plastic were dripping down from the ceiling.

She was sick with dread, she knew that she had lost Adam, but she also knew that she had to get out of this place fast or she would be burned to death. The elevator doors were open, but she would not dare to enter it. Feeling her way along, she came to the door of the emergency stair. She reached up into the heat and opened it. As she went through, smoke gushed in behind her, and she only just managed to get the door closed.

Crying and screaming, she opened it a crack, but there was nothing but smoke and now also flames licking into the shaft. “Adam! Adam! Adam!”

The door began to crackle, and heat hit her in the face even though she was low, and she had no choice but to slam it again.

Crying and coughing, she began the long trek upward on the narrow circular escape stair. As she trudged along, pacing herself to avoid exhaustion, she wracked her brain to understand how a grass fire next door had spread to the facility. Sparks must have somehow entered the ground-level air intake and started a conflagration in the air-conditioning system.

Three-quarters of the way to the top, she dragged her cell phone out of her pocket, but it was still out of range. She continued on, reaching the surface so winded that she had to stop and catch her breath before she could even manage to open the door that led into the foyer.

She felt it, noted that it wasn’t hot. She cracked it, looked out into the foyer. There were two firemen standing there. Above her head, thuds indicated that another man was on the stairs to the offices.

There was a rumbling from below and smoke came bursting up the stairwell. In an instant, it was fiercely hot, her eyes were burning, and she was choking again, even worse than before.

She had no choice but to act. She could not stay here. Again she opened the door. The intensity of the smoke increased at once. Behind her, the heat rose. Opening the door turned the stairwell into a flue.

The next instant, the door flew out of her hand and the firemen dragged her out, slamming it shut as soon as she was safe.

“Are you conscious?”

“Yes!”

“Okay, dizzy?”

“No, sir. My chest is burning.”

“Is there anybody else down there?”

She wanted to say yes, she wanted them to try to rescue Adam. That could not be allowed, though. These men had no clearances. These men could not enter the facility.

She fumbled in her jeans, drew out her credentials. “That facility is classified,” she gasped. “There’s nobody else in it and it cannot be entered without authorization.”

“This is a fire situation, lady. We’re gonna go in there.”

“No! It’s illegal!” She struggled to her feet, went for her cell phone again. “I’m calling my supervisor.” She punched in the colonel’s speed dial… and got his message. “Colonel, there’s a fire here, we’re dealing with a lot of unauthorized personnel and I need somebody here to control this situation!” She hung up.

At that moment, Andy appeared. He came hurrying in and threw his arms around her. Then he held her at arm’s length. “My God, you’re burned, you have no eyebrows.”

The foyer door burst open and fire gushed out with the ferocity of water from a burst main. They got out of there, and the firemen began deploying hose.

“It’s totally out of control,” she said to Andy.

“Where is he?”

“I couldn’t manage to save him.”

“Dear God.”

“They mustn’t find remains. We can’t let them find remains.”

“I know it.”

Her cell rang. “It’s him,” she said. “Colonel, there’s a fire in progress here.”

Silence. Then, very calmly, “What happened?”

“There was a grass fire next door. When I heard sirens, I came over here from my place. The fire didn’t appear to be serious, but I felt that I should be with Adam, so I went down. A few minutes later, the whole facility filled with smoke and fire. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“What’s Adam’s status?”

“He’s still down there!”

“Is he dead, then?”

“I would assume so.”

More silence. Then a sound that Lauren thought might be a cry, but it was so loud and so close to the phone that it broke up into a series of shattering electronic noises. Then she could hear him taking breaths. He said, finally, “Okay. You cannot let those people down there. Anything could be going on, this is outside the envelope.”

“Sir, I can’t stop them, they’re ignoring my credentials.”

“I’m gonna blow somebody’s brains out if this doesn’t get handled,” he said, but so mildly that it didn’t seem like the threat she knew that it was.

“Sir, where are you? Can you get here soon?”

“I’m an hour out in my plane, damnit! YOU handle it, Colonel.” He sneered the word. Then he disconnected.

“He is one pissed-off guy,” she muttered.

“Oh, yeah, he would be. You know what we lost here? We lost the most important thing this country possesses, that’s what we lost. And that man is the person who has to take the heat for it. So he is gonna be pissed.”

Mike couldn’t pace in the plane, the cabin was too confined, so he sat rubbing the arms of his seat. He had to report this, he had to do it immediately. He said into the intercom, “I need the code box.” This small, highly sophisticated device transmitted and received in quantum-encoded bursts that could not be decrypted by intruders.

The first officer brought it back from the equipment bay behind his station, then returned to the flight deck. Mike turned off the intercom, then glanced at the flight-deck door to make certain that it was closed.

He pulled out the red handset and punched in Charles Gunn’s secure number. It rang once, part of a second time.

“Gunn.”

“Charles, I’m in condition two-one-zero-one. Do you understand?”

“GODDAMN YOU!”

“I’m in the plane, for God’s sake. It was Glass. Glass let a situation get away from her.”

“Glass. Glass doesn’t matter anymore. Glass is a liability and so are any other support personnel.”

“I realize that, Charles.”

“Well, act accordingly.”

Mike replaced the phone. He stared, thinking. The grays were not sitting still, they understood that there was a threat, and the direction it was coming from.

Okay, first things first. Do the support personnel. Andy was a good man and that would be hard, but Lauren—pretty as she was, he was going to enjoy putting her down.

The Goddamn bitch had lost ADAM!

FOURTEEN

DAN HAD COME HOME REEKING of booze, of all the incredible things, and gone in the living room and begun playing the “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth over and over again at blasting volume. He lay there now in front of the stereo in the dark, splayed out on the floor like a great, gangling rag doll. She’d wanted to put her arms around him and mother him a little. His mother had been mostly indifferent to her little boy, and she felt that he needed the reassuring support of his woman right now.

She knew, of course, what had happened: Marcie Cotton had ditched his tenure. She was scared, too, she had to admit, because they could not remain here on just her salary. So what was going to happen to them was that they were going to fall off the academic cliff into the stew of little, tiny colleges and junior colleges and spend the rest of their lives scrimping and scraping.

She looked at the clock. Eight-twenty. She went into the living room, turned on a lamp.

“Please.”

“Dan, you’ve been in here for hours.”

“Please leave me be!”

“Dan, no.”

He did not respond.

She went on. “It’s about time for Conner to get home and I want you to come down out of the tree and face this together.” She had to bellow over the music. “Let’s turn that off, now.” She went to the stereo, flipped the switch. “Enough is enough.”

He rose off the floor, then went to the bar. “What’s in here? God.” He came up with an ancient bottle of crème de menthe, left over from some distant summer party when they’d poured it over ice cream. Earlier, she’d removed the rest of the booze to the garage.

“You already stink of bourbon. I hope you didn’t do this at the Peep?” The Peep Inn was the campus dive, where a professor most certainly did not need to get drunk.

“I did indeed. I consumed alcohol there, in the absurd hope that I could drink myself unconscious before the fall of night.”

“Dan, we’ll get by. Something good will happen.”

Staring at her as if she was insane, he slowly shook his head. Then he bared his teeth and rocked back in silent, agonized laughter.

“I got promised tenure by Marcie Cotton.”

She thrust her hands at him, connected with his chest. “Go on! You did not!”

He nodded.

“And you won’t be getting drunk again, so it’s forgiven. Now, Marcie told you? She actually told you this?”

He nodded.

“You’re going to get a yes on tenure! Oh. My. God.”

He stared at her, his eyes hollow, his lips hanging slightly open—an expression that said that this wasn’t the whole story.

“If I needed punishment, how would you go about it?”

What an extremely strange question. “Excuse me?”

“If I’d… done something wrong?”

“What have you done? You’ve gotten tenure, that’s hardly a matter for punishment. Is she sure?”

“Oh, yes.” He closed his eyes, shook his head.

She realized, then, that he was trying to say that he had done something with Marcie Cotton. Or no, it couldn’t be possible. You didn’t go to bed for tenure, not even in this sinkhole.

“Dan, are you telling me—what? I’m not getting it.”

“You’re getting it.”

“Damn you!”

The front door opened and Conner called, “I’m home, people,” and Dan said, “I’m so damn sorry, baby. I’m so damn sorry!”

Conner breezed in. “Hi, Mom, hi, Dad. I have just been at an amazing editing session. The Keltons have an awesome video and they’re bringing it over, and Paulie and his parents are coming, and there’s a chance that—” He stopped, looked from one of them to the other. “Hello?”

Katelyn drew breath, drew it hard, trying mightily to contain the rage, the hurt that shuddered through her.

“Mom?”

She went to him. “I want you to go downstairs for just a little while.”

“They got video of the UFO. Everybody’s coming over to watch it on the big-screen TV.”

She did not exactly want a convention just now, but obviously she couldn’t prevent it. “You go down, and we’ll make popcorn when they come.”

“You sound strange.”

She took him to the stairs and closed the door behind him. Then she went back to Dan, who was now slumped on the couch with his face in his hands. “You asshole,” she said quietly.

“Hit me.”

“Dan, I’m not physical. But what I would very much like is for you to go upstairs and gather your belongings and take them with you, and get the hell out of my house.” She curtsied. “If you would be so kind.”

“I don’t know what happened! I don’t know how to explain it.”

“You screwed her for your tenure.”

“I did no such thing!”

“And I find that grotesque. And equally grotesque that you confessed it. What happened to you, you’re not this drunk blubbering jerk I see here! I sure as hell didn’t marry him.”

“Look, I want to ask forgiveness.”

“It’s that easy, you get drunk and you cry and what happens, I kick you around and yell a little and this violation of your sacred trust is forgotten? And if you go to go creeping off to sleep with her in the forenoon from now on, then what do I do? Just bear everyone in this miserable fishbowl knowing my—what’s the word—shame, I suppose. My shame.”

“It left me… vulnerable. Somehow, it affected me.”

“What did?”

“That incident!”

“Something weird happens and therefore you go make love to Marcie Cotton?”

He shook his head, waved his hand at her. “I—it made me… want her. I don’t know why, but it did. I relate the two things.”

“What in hell are you saying?”

“I don’t know!”

“Dan, I’m an orphan to the violence in my family, and you to the neglect in yours and, Dan, nobody but another orphan can heal either of us, this is why we’re together. But you—you’ve taken something from us, and it is profound, Dan, because trust has a different meaning for people who suffered from betrayed childhoods.”

“It wasn’t over the tenure. It was—” He shook his head. “Oh, my love, it was like some demon flew in and sweated us with his fire. I think, being so tired, so surprised and relieved—I just suddenly found myself in her arms.”

“Don’t tell me about it! For God’s sake, Danny, have some mercy!”

He slumped yet deeper into the couch. He looked so tired, so sunken, nothing at all like the rippling, robust husband she adored. Had adored. He looked like somebody who’d fallen victim to a vampire, shadowy about the eyes, gray of skin.

Her stomach had grown tight and sour with fear, her own skin was so cold she shuddered. This had been her rock, this marriage, in its honesty and the richly sensual capsule of its love. But how could she let him touch her now? How could she bear it?

“Momma, what, exactly, is wrong?”

“Conner!”

“Because something is and I need to know.”

“Conner, please.”

He came into the room. “You two are fighting and I want to know why.”

Figures appeared on the deck, looming up out of the dark, flashlights bobbing.

Conner went to the door. “This is a chance for me. Don’t wreck this.”

Dan got up, started to kiss Katelyn on the cheek, wisely thought better of it, and greeted the Keltons.

“You need to see this, folks,” affable John said. “It really is genuinely odd.”

“It’s not what it seems,” Dan said. “It’s explainable, trust me.”

“Dad, it’s not,” Conner said. “That’s the whole point!”

Dan went into the kitchen and picked up the phone. Chris answered on the third ring. “Have I woken you up at nine-fifteen, old man?”

“We were out with the ’scope. It’s a good night for the Crab Nebula.”

“Speaking of nebulas, the Kelton clan has arrived with what’s probably a pretty nebulous video of that prank.”

“Prank?”

“The affair of the fiery balloon.”

“That could be historic footage.”

“How so?”

“You saw somebody in the field, buddy. And then you didn’t. I think that somebody was an alien.”

He had indeed seen somebody. It was also further support for the prank theory, but they could get to that later. “When you come, you might think about bringing some spirits. Mon femme has stripped our bar.” He hung up the phone, then returned to the living room where the crowd had surrounded the gigantic TV. “We gather round the campfire,” he said, “and see shapes in the sparks. And thus the mythologizing begins.” He sat down. “The Jeffers will be here directly.”

Paulie Warner burst in from the kitchen, followed by his parents and then Chris and Nancy. The energy in the room exploded as the two boys excitedly traded speculations. “It’s the grays,” Conner yelled, “they’re doing an operation right here at Bell!”

“Okay, Conner, sure,” Paulie said.

Terry said, “What we actually have is some unexplained video.”

“Edited,” Dan added. “Most carefully, I’m sure.”

“Not really,” John Kelton said, his voice sharp with annoyance. “It’s actually just pulled out of the camera. Not edited at all. There’s no reason to edit it.”

“We copied it onto a DVD,” Terry said as he dropped the gleaming disk into the player’s open tray. “Beyond that, you’re seeing what the camera saw.”

The player absorbed the disk. This was followed by blackness, then a couple of flashes.

“Fascinating,” Dan said.

“Just wait,” John snapped.

There was a sound of gasping, then crunching. “That’s us running,” Conner said.

“You were really there?”

“Conner was there,” Dan told Paulie.

Another flash, then a blur. Dan was beginning to think that this might be pretty minimal when suddenly the screen filled with light. And with screaming—as terrible, as powerful, as it had been the moment it happened. Silence fell. Paulie sat close to Conner, Dan was pleased to notice. He heard his own voice shouting, then saw himself and Conner in the light of the thing.

“Conner, you were right there!” Paulie whispered.

It was the eeriest thing that Dan had ever seen. Two faint seams were present, one running the length of the object, the other around its center. Behind the thing, something seemed to be moving in the light, almost as if it was climbing out of an opening that was concealed by the object’s bulk.

“There’s your culprit,” Dan said. “Nancy, be prepared to ID a student who needs disciplining.”

The object rose a bit and seemed to shimmer.

The woman’s voice, which had been screaming and then silent, now cried out more clearly and a cold horror shot through Dan as powerfully and unexpectedly as a lightning bolt from a silent sky. “My God,” he said—whispered.

“What? What, Dan?” Conner was pulling at him.

“Don’t miss this,” Jimbo said.

In the flash of a single frame, the object disappeared leaving behind it the fleeting shot of a figure, barely visible in the dark. The figure seemed to turn, but it all happened so quickly that you could see little. There was silence, blackness. Dan heard his own voice say that he didn’t think they were alone.

“It is the grays,” Conner shouted, jumping to his feet. “I told you, Paulie, it’s the grays!”

“Yeah, you’re right,” Paulie said. “I gotta go to the john.” He headed out of the room.

Dan hardly heard them. His mind was reeling. Because Marcie had been involved, he had recognized her voice in that last scream. But what could it mean? Had she pulled the prank? Maybe she’d gone insane. It would fit with the bizarre seduction, maybe even vindicate him in Katelyn’s eyes… eventually. That was going to be one hell of a siege.

But then he thought, what if it wasn’t a prank? What if Chris and Conner were right, and some sort of genuine anomaly was unfolding? Perhaps he and Marcie had both been traumatized by it. Psychological trauma was well known to drive people to sexual activity. It even had a popular name: battlefield syndrome. He was confused and, frankly, afraid. He wished he hadn’t drunk all that booze at the Peep. He felt lousy, his head was pounding, and now he had this bizarre, impossible thing to consider.

“Boys, can you slo-mo the last little part?” Chris asked. “The figure?”

Terry stabbed a couple of times at the remote, and the figure appeared again, frozen, its back to the camera.

“Let me juice the contrast,” Terry muttered.

The scene became lighter, the figure more clear.

“Is that a balloon?” Katelyn asked.

“It’s the head, Mom.”

As Terry shuttled the image forward frame by frame, the figure turned in short jerks, until its face was visible in a blurred three-quarters view.

Total silence fell as every person there reacted to the image. It was not clear, far from it, but anybody could tell that this was no disguise and no inflated toy. The one fully visible eye was black and slanted, gleaming. It gave the creature a breathtaking look of menace. The lower part of the face was complex with wrinkles, like a very, very old human face might be, the face of a man deeply etched by the trials of his time. There was the tiniest suggestion of a mouth, little more than a line.

With another flick of the shuttle control, another frame appeared. Now the mouth had opened slightly, and the sense of surprise it communicated was so vivid that it was eerie.

Another flick of the shuttle and the figure was gone.

Dan found himself feeling his ear and remembering what Conner had said. Dear heaven, what if this was real?

His mind rebelled. It just could not be true, because if it was, then he was involved and so was Marcie. But why? In the name of God, why?

“Look at that,” Paulie said as he returned. He went to the glass doors and stepped out on the deck.

Conner followed him. “It’s them,” he said softly, his voice trembling.

“Jesus, it might be,” Jimbo said.

A glow rose behind the stand of pines that separated the house from the field beyond.

Dan went onto the deck. The glow was smaller, but it was still very damn bright, and was indeed out in the field.

Were they in contact? Aliens had chosen to land in a little college town?

It just did not seem possible. No matter what was happening, that was not the whole story.

Then he saw stars slowly wheeling around him—an aura, another one, the third in two days. Maybe if he could get to the couch, they wouldn’t notice the staring emptiness of petit mal. Hardly able to navigate through the sea of stars that now surrounded him, he somehow found the couch, nearly sitting on Maggie’s lap.

“Slow down, buster,” Katelyn snapped.

“Sorry! Sorry!”

He slumped back. Before him was not the gleaming sliver he usually saw, but a room. There was a person there—a child. She was exquisitely beautiful… and recognizable.

He cried out and the seizure was over.

“Dan!”

“Sorry!”

“Dan, aren’t you hearing me? Stop the boys!”

Then he realized that Paulie and Conner were outside and running like two mad things toward the field, flashlights bobbing.

The world seemed to stop. Harley and Maggie looked up at him, their expressions identical, eyebrows raised, slight smiles playing on their faces.

Chris said, “This could be it.”

Katelyn burst out the door and went running down the stairs. Dan followed.

“Come on, Conner,” Paulie yelled.

“Calm down,” Conner yelled back. “Stay together!”

Dan was aware that the Warners had come out onto the deck, and were quietly standing and watching. Then he saw Chris beside them. “You better come down here,” he shouted.

It all seemed to be happening in slow motion, as Chris came across the deck and down the stairs.

Dan ran after Conner and Katelyn, moving more slowly through the woods because he had only the light of the object to guide him.

When he broke out into the field, he saw an extremely bright light, but it appeared to be more of a pinpoint. He could see the silhouettes of the two boys close to it, and Katelyn coming up behind them.

“We mean you no harm,” Conner yelled. Then, “Nous vous voulons dire aucun mal.”

“Conner get back,” Katelyn shouted.

“Come to meet us,” Paulie cried. His voice almost bubbled.

Dan ran harder. The children should be very damn afraid.

“Wait! I’m getting a mental communication,” Conner said. “They want us to come closer.”

“Hold hands, buddy!”

The two boys went forward—and suddenly the light went out. “Run, boys,” Dan shouted.

Then he heard laughter, a lot of young laughter. There was more laughter behind him, and he turned to see the Warners breaking out of the woods. They were laughing, too.

“Aw, shit,” Chris said from the dark. “I never win.”

There were flashlights up ahead, and as Dan arrived, he realized that he was surrounded by kids, and they were laughing and jeering and shining flashlights on Conner, who was trapped in the center of a circle of derision.

It had been a prank, and it looked as if most of Conner’s classmates were here.

Conner put his hands over his head as if he was being stoned by the voices. Katelyn ran around the outside of the circle, trying to part it, to get to her boy.

Harley and Maggie Warner came up chuckling amiably. “That’s our gasoline lantern,” Harley said. “It came back from Neptune just in time.”

Dan closed his fist, pulled back—and just barely managed to stop himself from decking Harley.

“He-ey,” Harley said. “It’s a joke. An innocent practical joke. They’ve been planning it all day. We need something to cut the tension, man!”

“At my son’s expense!” He was not as careful as Katelyn, who was still trying to gently push kids aside. He grabbed a fistful of somebody’s jacket and hurled what turned out to be a girl to the ground. As she screamed and cursed at him, he waded in and reached his son.

“Get out of here,” Conner shrilled, “please just get out of here!”

“Conner, come home,” Katelyn said, joining them. She looked around them. “You’re pitiful, all of you!”

“Asshole!” came a muffled yell from the dark. “Bitch!”

Their arms around their boy, Katelyn and Dan headed for home. As they passed the Warners, Dan said, “You stay away from our place and keep that fat troll of yours away from our son.”

“Dan?” Harley called after him. “Hey, man, stay loose.”

When they returned to the house, Chris was already back. He and Nancy were replaying the video.

“It’s real, you know,” Chris said.

Conner started to run downstairs.

“Hey, wait.” Chris caught up to him. “Hold on. We have historic footage here. Come on back, take another look.”

“Dr. Jeffers, I really can’t right now.”

“Forget those kids, Conner. The Warners are idiots, and the Keltons haven’t got the faintest idea what this actually is. This video is one of the most precious records ever created by the human hand.”

Conner was silent. Dan saw why. Tears were pouring from his eyes. But he raised his head. He said, “Could I possibly be homeschooled?”

Dan’s heart almost broke, but he said, “You have to learn to face it, Conner. To gain control.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Katelyn said. “He does not! And the fact that Harley and Maggie keep letting these things happen is a big part of what’s wrong with child-rearing these days. They’re passive, they believe in the mythical wisdom of the child, but children are savages and they need boundaries or they turn mean.” She threw her arms around Conner. “You’re the exception, love. You are a miracle, and if they can’t handle that, then they’re scum. That’s all.”

Conner sighed. “Mom, they happen to be people I have to spend every day of my life with.” He moved away from her. “So, Dr. Jeffers, what have we got?”

“Come on. We’ll go frame by frame, from the top, making a note whenever a new point of proof is present in a frame. Hey, you could count the rivets in this thing if it had rivets. There’s a lot here. This is wonderful, convincing footage.”

Dan hardly listened. He was in a state of complete turmoil. He had to understand about Marcie, and he did not. He just did not get it.

Then he did. “I remember,” he said.

“What?” Katelyn snapped.

Dan got out of there. His stomach felt as if it had just filled with a foamy storm of acid. He dashed upstairs and into the bathroom.

“Dan,” Katelyn called, following him.

She found him on his hands and knees over the toilet, barfing like a sick dog. He rose to his feet and started yanking paper off the roll to clean up the considerable quantity of yellow froth that had missed. He worked furiously, perhaps not yet aware of her presence.

“Dan,” she said as she went down to him. She took the paper from him and flushed it away. They knelt there awkwardly, face to face.

“It’s impossible,” he said. “It has to be impossible.” How could he tell her what he thought he was remembering? He had not only been in some way connected with Marcie two nights ago, it was worse than that. His childhood seizures hadn’t been seizures at all, they had been memories so extremely strange that it hadn’t been possible to recognize them for what they were. “We’re lab rats,” he said, then got sick again.

As she nursed him through it—rather bravely, she thought—he gasped, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and it meant a whole lot of things, and she wasn’t real sure what all of them were. He got up, shook his head.

“Are you okay?”

“We’re in some sort of trouble.”

“Oh, yes.”

He took her in his arms and held her. “This goes deep,” he whispered, “real deep.”

She wasn’t sure she should, but she remained in his embrace.

“No matter how bizarre and how impossible it may seem, it had something to do with them.”

“Something to do with whom?”

“Them! It was Marcie screaming in that thing.”

She leaned back, looked at him.

“I recognized her voice—it was all crazy with fear, but it was her yelling, it was certainly her.”

Katelyn could not think of how to react. She wasn’t even sure exactly what he was trying to say. And yet the screaming had sounded vaguely familiar to her, too. She knew that he was right. It had indeed been Marcie—in the thing, with the alien, and absolutely terrified.

“How did she… seem?

“‘How did she seem?’ My God, that’s too small a question! ‘What in the name of all that’s holy is going on here’ just begins to approach it. When I walked into her office, that sour, rigid woman was—oh, Lord, totally changed, love. All soft and steamy and really, really sold on me. That cold fish. As if her personality had been totally revised overnight.” He paused. “Which is exactly what did happen, in my opinion.”

“Aliens did something to Marcie because—why? What does this have to do with the price of beans, Dan? Because you are an Irishman to your core and you might be a dull lecturer, but you can sing a song to a lady, and I think I’m hearing a damn clever one now.”

“I’m telling you the truth!”

She backed away from him, looked at him out of the corners of her eyes. “You’re telling me aliens—which you have always until ten minutes ago thought were utter bullshit—made you do it. I don’t think I’m going to buy it, Danny-O. Nice try though. On the fly like that, very impressive.”

Inside herself, though, she was much less sure. It seemed to her that she’d had more than a glimpse of an alien down there on that video. She’d seen, ever so vaguely, into an aspect of life that she had never even dreamed existed. There was somebody behind the scenes, it appeared, stitching things together, and they were taking an interest in this neighborhood and most specifically, she thought, in this family.

“Katelyn, I have to tell you something. I believe that I was brought into that thing. That I was with Marcie in there. Because I have memories of that.”

“Oh, come on.”

“I have memories!”

“Okay, don’t have a cat. So, when did this happen? While I blinked my eyes, maybe? Remember, I was there most of the time. And you did not go into that thing. In fact, if you had, it’d be on the video.”

“Do you remember that you went to sleep with Conner afterward?”

“I was scared and so was he. I didn’t want him left alone down there.”

“And when you woke up, you were up here. In bed up here… and we saw those marks, that strange water. What if they were tracks, Katelyn?”

“Holes in the ground?”

“After we came back and went to sleep, that thing returned. It brought her back after they’d knocked her out or whatever they did to her. And for whatever reason…”

“No, Dan, the aliens did not make you do it. That will not fly.”

“OKAY!”

“Keep your voice down!”

He pushed on, because a lot rode on this, his whole life with her rode on this. “The thing is—”

“Dan—”

“Listen to me! You listen, because this is bizarre and impossible but it is real, and you need to wrap your mind around it.”

“I need to wrap my mind around your infidelity and I will not be talked out of it! Come on, Dan, at least respect my dignity as a human being.”

“Katelyn, that’s your melodrama showing and I accept that. Self-dramatization is a characteristic of people scarred by traumatic childhoods.”

“Analyze yourself why don’t you, my self-obsessed little boy.”

“I take that. And I accept that what I did was wrong no matter what the explanation.”

“Okay, now we’re getting somewhere.”

“Now will you listen?”

“All right. The star people made you do it. I’m fascinated.”

“I remember seeing her on a sort of black frame cot, and we were—something was happening.” He shuddered, then went to the sink and slugged water.

“What would that have been? Alien foreplay?”

“It was horrible! Katelyn, horrible! They—I remember some kind of sparks, and we were—oh, God—some sort of arcane thing where I kept seeing these sparks and hearing, like, her inner voice, her memories, her—like some kind of inner scent… the smell of her soul.”

“Was there a rectal probe involved, or is this even kinkier?”

“I deserve that. Sure I do, but—”

“What, Dan? Don’t talk in riddles, please.”

“When we were kids… I saw another girl under the same circumstances… with them. A girl that was you.”

“We didn’t even know each other.” And yet, she did have certain disjointed memories that were really strange, that she had always thought involved child abuse by one of her mother’s many boyfriends. She did not mention these memories to him, though, not just now.

“We knew each other, but not in normal life. We knew each other very well… because they made sure we did. They made this family, Katelyn. We’re damn lab rats is what we are.”

“Oh, come on! Look, we have guests, I’m going downstairs, plus the ever-alert Conner is going to figure out that we’re fighting again and do you really want him involved?”

“He is involved! He’s heavily involved. Katelyn, don’t you get it—why he’s so brilliant, so off the charts—he’s theirs, Katelyn.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. I really don’t think so at all, because I seem to remember something about an epidural and a hell of a birthing struggle and he is mine! MY DAMN SON!”

“Shh!”

“Don’t you shush me! First the aliens made you fuck that slut for your tenure, professor prostitute, then you dare to tell me my son is some kind of pod person? You’re fucking certifiable, is what you are.”

“I didn’t say that. Of course he’s our son. Our flesh and blood. Who sweated through that labor with you, who spent seventeen hours, breathe, breathe, who kissed your sweat and prayed with you? Who was there, Katie Katelyn, and is still here and will always be here, if you let me—and if you don’t, will live still, yes, but will also be dead?”

She looked at him. He looked at her. In that moment, something, perhaps about the vow of marriage itself that is sacred reasserted itself, and the union decided to continue on… at least for the while. “Was that a question?” she asked.

He raised his eyebrows. She raised hers. He opened his arms. She went in.

“Something so complex has happened—it’s like I’ve glimpsed a level of life that’s normally hidden, where there are other motives and meanings, that never normally come to light. And somehow, Marcie and I—and you and I, Katelyn—are connected on that level… and it’s all to do with our boy, somehow, I know that. I know it and I love him and I love us, Katelyn, oh my God, so much.”

“We’ve got to be with him,” she said.

They walked together from their dark bedroom. Out the east window, which overlooked the field where the thing had appeared, an enormous moon was rising. By its light, silver with frost, she could see the whole field, wrapped now in the familiar mystery of an ordinary night. She looked up toward higher space, the glowing dark of the deep sky. There were stars, a few, battling the flooding moonlight.

Perhaps he was right. Maybe his struggle was, in some way, true. Maybe a shadow was there, one that you couldn’t see, but that was nevertheless very real, the shadow of an unknown mind from a far place.

He came beside her, put his arm around her. “They’re watching,” he whispered.

She leaned against him, wondering what the future would bring. He might be going mad. It happened to people in middle age, and for a psychology professor to become psychologically abnormal had a certain irresistible irony to it, did it not?

Then again, maybe aliens were the answer. Certainly, the video was odd and disturbing. It had provided him an inventive excuse, she had to give him that.

“Come on,” she said. She pushed away from him, and went back downstairs to rejoin the tormented odyssey of her son.