The Grays

SEVENTEEN

CONNER HAD WAITED ON THE steps for Paulie to leave school. Usually, they would be carpooled home by Mom or Maggie, but that had obviously ended.

The thing was that Paulie, leader of the Connerbusters though he was, also remained the only real friend he’d ever had. He had to reach him somehow, and he thought that the way to do it was still through the idea of the aliens, despite what had happened. If they were real, then maybe he could contact them somehow and get them to come back, with Paulie as a witness.

It was an audacious, insane idea, but there were more than a few Web sites out there put up by folks who were doing just that, and posting video of the UFOs that had turned up. He’d communicated with one or two of them and gotten detailed instructions about how to do it using, as one of them had put it, “a flashlight, patience, and a serious interest in meeting them.”

All day at school, he had kept to himself. There was nothing else he could do, not without triggering some sort of additional humiliation. As it was, everybody had gotten up from the table and moved when he sat down for lunch. He had eaten alone, ostentatiously and purposely reading a book none of them could begin to understand, Physics from Fisher Information, a rather basic text, actually.

He had considered going the total eccentric route, perhaps refusing to speak anything except Latin and dying his hair purple or something. But that would just justify his isolation, and he did not really want to be isolated. Faint though it might be, there remained the possibility that some girl might some day do just slightly more than run screaming when he drew near. Amy, for example. After all, they had an embarrassing past in the woods, did they not? It had, when he was ten and she was eleven, involved the revelation of body parts, back where the little stream flowed and the bluebells nodded along its banks.

He had been thinking fairly carefully this past couple of days about what actually had happened the other night. What did the Keltons’ video really show? The answer to that question, he thought, might be far less obvious than it seemed.

It was possible that the legendary grays of Internet fame actually were involved, but only very remotely.

Although the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence people claimed that the chances of finding a signal from another world was vanishingly small, that was incorrect. They were actually pretty good—about 0.4 percent a year.

He thought that, if somebody actually had appeared here from another planet, they must be desperate. It would take vast resources to cross interstellar space, and huge amounts of time. Wormholes and such were science fiction. The reason was simple: it was theoretically possible to bend space until two distant points touched, but the amount of energy necessary was unimaginable. To bend the United States until, say, Phoenix and Buffalo touched, would be child’s play by comparison. Faster-than-light transmission of signals was indirectly possible using quantum-entangled particles, but the movement of structured physical objects at hyper speeds was out of the question.

So, if they were here, they had come at less than light speed, probably far less, and thus even a journey from Centauri A, the closest sun-like star, would have taken many years. Internet scuttlebut had the grays coming from Zeta Reticuli, a double star. Such a situation would make for planets with lots of seasons and some really eccentric orbits, but it wasn’t completely impossible.

All of these thoughts danced in his mind even while, at another level, he considered his father’s straightforward advice to confront the kids who were tormenting him. Dad was no genius, but his advice could be relied on, and Conner intended to take it.

“Paulie,” he said as he came down the steps, “hey.”

“Hey, Conner.”

“Would you like to come over?”

Paulie stopped. He stared at him like he was some kind of bizarre animal. He was flanked by two of his most unpleasant new friends, Kevin Sears and Will Heckle. “ ’Course not,” he said.

“The video’s real, Paulie. We all ought to respect what it means. The event happened.”

“I wasn’t there, Conner, I didn’t see it.”

Conner was pleased to hear the anger and disappointment in his voice. This was precisely what he had expected. He had taken Paulie exactly where he wanted him to go, and now he would win him back. “You know I can fix things,” he said. “Maybe I can fix that.”

“How? Build a time machine?”

“What if I could get them to come back?”

Will Heckle burst out laughing. A smiling Kevin shook his head.

“No, wait,” Paulie said. “I want to hear this.”

“I can call them,” Conner said, “with you as a witness.”

The boys were not laughing now.

“If I do it, then will you agree to cancel the Connerbusters?”

“Oh, sure. Sure, Conner.”

“Come over after supper and spend the night. You’ll meet the grays.”

“What about us? Can we meet the grays, too, little boy?”

“Not yet, Kev.”

Kevin grabbed his jacket, loomed over him. “Kevin to you.”

Conner stared right back. “Okay, Kev, I’ll make a note of that.” Finally, Kevin released him. Conner turned and went down the steps, looking for Mom’s car in the line out front.

On the way home, he wondered what the odds were of Paulie showing up. Actually, he thought, they were excellent. In fact, he would show. But the larger question was, how in the world would he get the grays to come to the party?

He also knew that he would get resistance from Mom, so he said nothing in the car. In fact, he waited until after dinner, until just before Paulie would appear.

“Incidentally, Paulie’s gonna sleep over tonight.”

She stopped clearing the kitchen table of dishes. “No, he isn’t.”

“Yes, he is, Mom. He’s been invited and he is.”

“No way, Jose.”

This did not surprise him, but he pretended that it did. “Mom, come on!”

“Conner, no! You’re groveling.”

“Mom, I have arranged a sleepover. Simple as that.”

“I don’t want any Warners in this house, not Paulie, not Amy, not the parents. Especially not Maggie and Harley. You find other friends.”

“Then let’s move into town! I’m twelve miles from the nearest other kids my age.”

“You’re so handsome when you’re mad,” she said.

“God, the condescension. All right, let’s come to a compromise. I invited Paulie. He didn’t say yes or no. If he comes, he comes.”

“Why did you invite him?”

“Because, Mother, if you diagram the social configuration of my class, you quickly discover that Paulie Warner is at the center of every major structural orbit, and, in fact, I am not going to make any headway with anybody until I have solved my relationship with him.”

She almost burst into tears, to hear him applying his genius to a problem as trivial as being accepted by some little bully with a room-temperature IQ. She went to him and hugged him. He came to her with raglike looseness, neither willing nor unwilling.

“You know something that’s going to happen in a couple of years, Conner? In a couple of years, Paulie, who looks like a little dump truck, is going to be running after girls and getting nowhere. They’re going to be all over you. You’re sweet, you’re smart, and you look like a movie star.”

“That’s then and this is now. What about my compromise? Fair?”

He’d won, of course. She couldn’t very well call the Warners and tell Paulie not to come, only to find that he hadn’t been planning to anyway.

Since last night, Conner had been using the same technique of meditation the Internet contact mavins used, and intended to make the same flashlight signals toward the sky that they did, and at the same time, 3:33 in the morning. One of them had craft showing up about 70 percent of the time. The other had never had a failure in two years, and had hundreds of hours of video, including a photo of the palm of a long, thin-fingered hand with claws pressed against a window. Conner had gotten the guy to upload a high-res file of this photo to his personal FTP site where he usually collected dissertations and things, and had analyzed it carefully.

Using a very conservative extrapolation algorithm, he had been able to bring out the fingerprints. They were absolutely remarkable in one respect: they had completely symmetrical whorls. He’d thought at once, if a machine had fingers, they’d look like this. The design wasn’t a digital trick, it was actually on the hand, and it was self-consistent, too. He’d measured it micrometer by micrometer. It was a real print, all right. Maybe the Keltons had gotten the first somewhat clear shot of a gray; this guy had definitely gotten the first fingerprint.

Mom and Dad were having all kinds of hush-hush conversations about the grays and about their friend Marcie Cotton, who Conner had understood from their transparently cryptic comments to one another, had been the person screaming in the craft the other night. No matter how well they hid it, even from themselves, Conner could see that the incident had terrified his parents. Therefore, he certainly had no intention of telling them that he planned to attempt to vector the grays in.

“Just one thing,” his mom said—and he instantly anticipated one of her little zingers. “I want you guys to sleep upstairs. We don’t want you sleeping alone in the basement anymore.”

“I don’t care for those beds,” Conner said smoothly, hoping to deflect this zinger. “Also, we’re going to be doing gaming until late.”

“Not downstairs you aren’t.”

There was a crash and Paulie came banging through the back door. “It’s snowing,” he yelled. “We’re gonna be sledding in the morning plus Gestapo Torture Fest came from Games Unlimited!” He brushed past Katelyn and went pounding downstairs, Conner hurrying along behind him.

She went into the living room, where Dan had been watching the Kelton boys’ video again and again. As she walked in, he froze the blurry image of the hydrocephalic with fly eyes on the screen.

“I don’t want the boys sleeping in the basement,” she said.

“God, no.”

“And turn that damned thing off, it’s hideous.” When she sat down, he got up from the far end of the couch and moved closer to her.

Before she realized it, she’d reestablished distance between them.

He did not try again. Instead, he gestured toward the TV. “I’ve had them with me all my life. I’ve never had a seizure. It’s been memory, traumatic memory of this. Which I need you to understand, Katelyn.”

She wished he hadn’t brought it up. She wished it didn’t hurt so very much. “Understand what?”

“About Marcie! Which is connected to this.”

“That again. Dan, you screwed the woman.”

“We were made to do what we did.” As, he thought, were you and I, my precious heart and fellow breed animal.

“Okay, I’ll bite. If the devil made you do it, why? Why does he give a damn about you and Marcie—and me, for that matter? He’s a busy devil, he’s surely got more important things on his mind.”

“I cannot even begin to answer that question. I don’t understand any more than you do. All I can say is, if they wanted me to get tenure, then whatever they did more than worked.”

“I should say. It got you tenure and a mistress.” She heard Conner’s voice rise downstairs as they reached some sort of crisis in the shrieking video game that Paulie had brought.

Angrily, she shook away a tear. She didn’t want to feel like this, all tragic over her marriage. She wanted to feel angry and full of righteous self-justification. She wanted to be strong enough to march off to a lawyer, if that turned out to be what her heart wanted her to do.

Dan reached out across the distance. “Hey,” he said.

She turned away.

He sighed, got up, and went into the kitchen. As she came in behind him, he drank down a glass of wine in a couple of huge gulps.

He turned, looked at her. Dear heaven, she was as beautiful as an angel. What had happened, here? He was getting really scared, he was beginning to think that he’d ruined his life by being honest with her.

He touched the thing in his ear… and touched, also, his memory of seeing her as a child. He looked into her eyes, saw the sorrow there.

“Oh, God, Katelyn, you’ve got to accept something. The aliens—”

“No! Shut up!”

“You shut up! You listen!” He touched his ear again. “You know what this is? This is an implant. I got it right here in this kitchen. Right here, right in front of everybody and God only knows how they did that.”

“Dan, I can’t handle this. I warn you.”

He went to her. She turned away from him. “Katelyn, they brought us together when we were children, for God’s sake!” He touched her shoulder. She pulled away. “I remember you, Katelyn, in a blue nightgown. I remember—oh, my God, they’ve been with us all our lives.”

She shook her head, waved her hand in front of her face.

At that moment, Conner burst in. “Can we take the DVD down?”

“Be my guest,” Dan said.

“Be careful with that, the Keltons’ll kill you if you mess it up.”

“We will,” Conner said as he raced off. Then he returned. “Plus, we need a flashlight.”

“A flashlight?”

“Check the snow, see if it’s stickin’!”

Dan got a flashlight out of his toolkit and gave it to him.

“Okay, listen,” Conner said to Paulie when he returned to his basement lair. “I’m reasonably sure that they’ve been in here. In this room.”

Paulie’s eyes opened wide. “They have?”

“What’s interesting is I have a screen memory—”

“Which is? Remind me.”

“Paulie, you’ve gotta quit. Right now.”

“Quit what?”

“I can hear the laughter in your voice. You’ve seen the video, you know this is real. So trying to laugh me out of court is wrong. And that Connerbusters thing, Paulie, it’s incredibly corny. It’s the sort of thing that happens in third grade, not middle school.”

“It’s just a joke, Conner. If you didn’t take it so seriously, nobody else would, either. You gotta be more mature about these things. Kids are assholes. You get a few more years on you, you’ll learn to roll with it.”

Conner said, “You want me to crack that game?”

“Jesus, yes. Can you?”

“You know I can. But you have to promise me, Paulie. We’ve been friends a long time. All of our lives. You stop dumping on me.”

“Is that why I’m here? To get begged? Because I’m not the one you need to beg. You need to beg every guy in the class, Conner, because they all think you’re a complete schmedlock. The schmedlock of the century.”

“Paulie, if you quit, they will quit, which you know very well.”

“You got guts, I’ll say that. You crack the game for me and the Connerbusters are on hold for a week. You vector in the grays, and I’m your puppy dog.” He pulled a Nikon digital camera out of his backpack. “Six megapixels. Detailed pictures should be worth a fortune. So, when do they show up?” He looked at his watch.

“The exact time will be three-thirty-three,” Conner said. He realized that he was setting himself up for something. The odds against him felt huge.

“Okay, then, let’s synchronize watches.”

“My watch—”

“Conner, everybody on planet Bell Attached knows that your Christmas watch automatically sets itself to the Naval Observatory time signal once every twelve hours. So let me rephrase that, let me synchronize my ordinary watch to your awesome one.”

“Paulie, you want this watch?” He started to take it off.

“Conner, you just do not get it. I don’t want your watch. If you’re gonna get people off your back, you need to stop bragging and showing off. Everybody knows you’re a genius. Half the school are geniuses. Maybe you’re our major genius, I don’t know, but kids don’t like having their faces rubbed in the kind of shit you dish out.”

“I’m not understanding you.”

“Like night before last. You actually tried to communicate with the aliens you thought were out there in English and French. That was so lame, Conner.”

“I hadn’t realized that.”

“Well, try K-Paxian next time. I’m sure you’re fluent in that, too. Now, little boy, if you’re gonna crack Gestapo, crack it and I’ll suck your toes.”

“Conner!” Katelyn called.

“Okay! Okay! In a while.”

“It’s after ten.”

“So, little boy, we gonna get tucked in by mommy?”

“No, we’re not at your house, little boy. Come on.” Conner went across the room and out under the deck. He was outside before he asked himself why he’d done this. He’d just suddenly felt like coming out.

Paulie joined him. “Wow, is it ever snowing! Look at this!” He danced around, then went down on his back and made an angel. He leaped up. “It’s butt cold, we need our coats.”

As he ran back inside, Conner pointed the flashlight upward and flicked it on and off. As he’d learned, he varied the signal, three long, three short, two long, two short. The beam revealed a whirling maelstrom of snowflakes, dancing, racing before the wind. The air was sharp with smoke and the tang of ice. Off to the west, thunder rumbled. Conner went on signaling, even though it was nowhere near 3:33, even though it felt hopeless, even though Paulie was probably right and he’d dreamed up the whole thing.

“Lame-o, Connner! I mean, you really are trying. You believe this.”

“Shut up.”

Paulie brushed Conner’s head with his hand. “Ah, little boy’s getting all covered with snow, isn’t he?”

Conner stopped signaling. A light glowed around them just then. It didn’t last long, but it came from above. “Oh, Jesus,” Conner said. He started signaling again.

“It was lightning.”

“They’re here.” He looked up, letting the snow pummel his face. “You guys,” he whispered, “come on down.”

Suddenly and without a word, Paulie took off toward the house. Then, in the distance, Conner heard the Keltons’ dog Manrico set up a howl. He looked in the direction of the Keltons’ place… and saw, standing at the edge of the yard as if they’d just come up out of the woods, three kids. They had really big heads and their eyes were terrible in the reflected light from the house. “Paulie!” Conner whispered. But Paulie was standing under the deck, as still as death “Paulie…”

Then he saw that they had a lantern. He looked at it, glowing in the snow, the interior flickering orange.

“Mom,” he called, but it came out as a whisper. He fought to form the word. “M-o-o-mm.” It stayed in his throat.

They came across the snowy lawn, sort of floating just above the ground, floating and flickering.

Conner was terrified beyond anything he’d ever thought possible. It was freezing-cold fear, a fear so deep he had not known that it could exist.

Had he been insane? Why had he done this?

The thought crossed his mind that this was yet another joke, but then he heard them, a buzzing sound like huge flies, a sound that was really, really strange, that was not of this world. They remained out in the gushing, swirling snow.

The lantern wasn’t a lantern at all, it was a very black metal thing with glowing holes in it that sort of looked like eyes, and it seemed to Conner as if it was sort of alive, too. The three aliens came closer, moving swiftly and accurately now, no longer floating and flickering. They were like wolves in the snow, now, and they were clearly interested in him.

And then there was something on his shoulder, as light as if a bird had landed there. Almost too scared to move, he looked down. A hand was there, with fingers like long, thin snakes, and black claws.

EIGHTEEN

CONNER HAD TO RUN, HE had to get out of here, but then the world distorted, seeming almost to bend, and the glowing thing was right in front of his face and he was staring into the orange light inside where there were millions of glowing threads. They were just threads of light, but he couldn’t look away from them, he had to keep staring.

One of the creatures pulled his shirt front up, and he felt something pushing against his chest and getting hotter and hotter and he couldn’t stop it and he had to because it was burning him.

The snow swirled and lightning flashed and there was a loud snap like a wire had come down and was spitting in the yard.

Suddenly Conner realized that he was alone. He was standing in the snow and he had to get back inside because somebody was out here who should not be, and he was in danger.

He’d seen black eyes and orange light, terrible light, but the rest of it was all confused. Had he met the aliens? He wasn’t sure. Or no, he was sure. He hadn’t. He’d pointed the light at the sky and everything, but they hadn’t shown up.

He opened the door. He walked past Paulie who, without a word, went into the bathroom and drank glass after glass of water. When he came out, he was transformed from a posturing preteen into the little boy he had been as recently as last summer. “I want to go home,” he said quietly. Then he ran upstairs.

Conner ran after him.

Paulie burst into the living room. “I want to go home,” he yelled.

“Paulie?” Katelyn asked.

Paulie looked toward Conner, his face soaked with tears. Conner went closer to him. “Hey, man?”

“Don’t let him near me!”

Katelyn got to her feet “What in the world did you do to him, Conner?”

Conner shook his head.

“Here, come here to me, Paulie, honey. I’ve dealt with a lot of scared guys in my time, honey.” Katelyn took him by the hand. “Now, we are going into the kitchen, fellas, and guess what we’re gonna do? We are going to make a big, old-fashioned pot of hot chocolate flavored with brandy. Would you like that?”

“We have brandy?” Dan asked.

“I’m not allowed to drink.”

“This is a very tiny bit, Paulie,” Katelyn said as she drew him toward the kitchen.

“Hey, guy,” Dan said to Conner.

“Yes, Dad?”

Dan patted the couch cushion. Conner sat down beside him. “Conner, did you—no. Better way to do this. What did that to him?”

“Dunno. He was okay, then he wasn’t.”

“Did you, perhaps, have a fight? It was awfully noisy down there at one point.”

“No. No fight.”

“No, that wouldn’t make him cry. What made him cry, Conner?”

“Homesick, maybe?”

“No.”

Conner’s chest hurt. He tried to sort of move his shirt away from it to not have anything touch it.

Dan saw, and lifted it. “What’s going on here?”

“Nothing.”

“Yeah, there is. Katelyn, could you come back, please?”

Conner heard a voice, Hello, Conner.

“Hi.”

Dan said, “Hi what?”

Be quiet!

He started to talk, but it was like somebody had grabbed his throat from the inside.

This is real, Conner.

A coldness raced in Conner’s veins. This was somebody that was inside him, somebody else alive, in him!

“Katelyn, something’s not right here.”

Don’t tell them, Conner.

She came in.

“Look at his chest.”

“Conner, what have you boys been doing?”

Paulie had followed her. She turned to him. “Paulie, you tell me. Have you boys been playing too rough?”

“No, Mrs. Callaghan.”

“Mom?”

“Son, you’re all skinned up! You look like you’ve been sandpapered, so I want to know what you were doing.”

Conner had no way to respond. He wasn’t sure why he was hearing this voice, only that it was not being heard by anybody else.

That’s right, Conner.

Mom and Paulie returned to the kitchen, followed by Dan. Conner hesitated a moment, then hurried after them. He was trying not to be scared, because this was the real thing, this was contact. But he was not just somewhat scared, he was so scared that he was actually dizzy.

He knew what had been done to him: they had put a communications device in his chest.

Right again.

The kitchen was filling with the smell of cocoa and it seemed so wonderfully comfortable it almost made him burst into tears. He ran over and threw his arms around his mother’s waist and tried not to let Paulie hear him crying.

“What is the matter with these boys?” Katelyn asked.

“I think it’s called nervous energy. Running on fumes. When’s your bedtime, Paulie?”

“Whenever.”

“I repeat the question, Paul Warner. When is your bedtime?”

“Nine-thirty.”

“It’s already ten forty-five,” Dan said. “You must be tuckered out.”

“Conner’s an eleven o’clock guy,” Katelyn said. “But you’re tired, too, right?”

“I’m tired.”

Paulie nodded into the mug of hot chocolate that Katelyn had just poured him.

They drank their cocoa in silence, and the voice did not recur. Conner began to hope that it had been an auditory hallucination, because if contact was going to mean you had a voice inside you, that was going to take a whole lot of getting used to.

He’d read most of his father’s abnormal-psych texts, so he hoped it wasn’t an early symptom of schizophrenia, the curse of the excessively intelligent. Even though that might actually be better than having an alien communications device buried in his damn chest.

He and Paulie did not argue about going to bed upstairs. There was no way that either of them were going anywhere near that basement again tonight. In fact, Conner considered proposing to Dan that they brick the thing up tomorrow and just forget about it.

After they were both in pajamas and had their teeth brushed, Paulie said, “I’m sorry about not believing you.”

“About what?”

He put his arms on Conner’s shoulders and pushed his lips close to his ear. “The aliens! I saw them. I saw the whole thing!”

“Forget it, Paulie.”

“Forget it? Are you nuts! I saw aliens in your yard, man, three of them!”

“We don’t know what we saw.”

“Hello? You were the big believer. You were the guy who was vectoring them in.”

“Maybe I made a mistake.”

“Maybe you didn’t.”

They left it there, and soon Paulie was asleep. Conner watched the night, listened to the snow whispering on the windowpanes, and wondered how the world really worked.

There came that voice again, very quick, trembling with something like fear and something that, oddly enough, sounded to Conner like a sort of awe: Soon you will know.

NINETEEN

CHARLES GUNN PULLED UP TO the presidential safe house on Embassy Row. The mansion had been acquired during World War II when the Roosevelt Administration was concerned that Hitler might develop a long-range bomber and attack the White House. Successive administrations had continued to use it, and during the cold war, tunnel access had been added across the mile that separates it from the White House. Now it functioned as a very private presidential enclave, at present ostensibly owned by Washington insider Larry Prince, but actually under the control of the Secret Service.

He walked quickly to the door, which was opened as he approached. A young man in a dark suit, with an earbud in his ear and the bulge of a small machine gun under his jacket, stepped aside and let him through the metal detector. Another young man fell in ahead of them, and the three of them proceeded silently down the hall, then turned right into the president’s ornate office.

The president didn’t know it yet, but he was going to provide a diversion that would, hopefully, deceive the grays into looking in the wrong direction for the source of danger to their evil little child. It might well mean that the president would himself be killed, but to Charles this was of little consequence.

He was watching the news and paging through a speech. “Hey there, Chester,” he said without looking up, “just give me a second, here.” Then, a moment later, “Pull up a chair.”

“It’s Charles, sir,” Charles said as he sat down.

On the wall of this office there were paintings chosen by FDR, the most spectacular being a Nicholas Poussin, Landscape with St. John on Patmos. As Charles knew, and as FDR had certainly known, the geometry of the painting resolved into a date: 2012. That this was the year of tribulation had been known by the secret societies that had created western civilization literally from the very beginning. The date had been handed down through the Masonic community from the ancient Egyptian priesthood who had divined it by looking through the last, clear glass of man’s old, lost science: a window into the future. This had been at Abydos in Egypt, and some of the other things they had seen had been commemorated on beams that held up the temple’s roof to this day.

“So,” the president finally said, “how are you gonna make me miserable today, Charles?”

“Mr. President—”

“You never come here with good news. All your good news is secret. So, hit me.”

“The grays are acting against us in a major and very bizarre way.”

“The grays are acting bizarre? You’re kidding. I sit here astonished.”

Charles had constructed his lie carefully. “Sir, they’re going to do something that will reveal to the public the fact that the government’s been concealing their presence for sixty years. They’re going to destroy our credibility.”

The president pointed a finger at his own temple.

“Exactly. They’re trying to undermine the government. First, the public becomes aware that they’re real. Second, people tell about their abductions. Third, it’s discovered that we’re helpless. Chaos follows.”

The president was silent for a moment. “And, for some reason, you can’t get control of this situation, which is why you’re here. First, tell me why it’s out of control. Second, tell me what you need.”

“It’s not out of control.”

“Then why are you here?”

“Sir, I need a TR-A. I need to surveil in the area where this disclosure event took place.”

“You have TR-A1.”

“Mike Wilkes is using it. He’s on detail out there now, but he needs backup.”

“Okay, you’ve got another TR. I’ll cut orders for you to have access to one. What else?”

“I need some people killed, toute suite.”

“Just do what you gotta do.”

“You need to be aware that one of them is Mr. Crew.”

“Oh, fuck.”

“Exactly. Our friend from the beyond is not our friend.”

“He’s—what’s he done?”

“He’s giving the grays support.”

“Next.”

“I need one other thing.”

“Hit me.”

Charles smiled. “I don’t want to hit you. I want you to hit Wilton, Kentucky, with an earthquake. Enough to disrupt the place and reduce the college that’s there to rubble.”

The president stared at him for some little time. “Why?” he asked at last.

“We need a diversion so that we can clean up all the principles. We need it to look accidental. All the folks who were present during the disclosure event.”

“I see.” He looked down at the top of his desk. This time, his silence extended even longer. When he spoke, his voice was soft with what Charles knew must be pain. “You know, it feels like the best day in your life when you walk for the first time into the White House as president. President of the United States—wow, and wow again. Then you find out the secrets, and you spend the rest of your life in mourning.”

“Mr. President, this will be a very localized hit. It’s not going to activate any fault lines, nothing like that. We’ll see significant disruption and a few deaths, obviously. It will be a cover for us to sterilize the area. We’ll confiscate all original video, and deal with the people who were firsthand witnesses. We have assets already at work who will get a local physics professor who saw the thing to debunk it. Our media people will see to it that his message gets spread far and wide. But the damage and the deaths will be the minimum necessary, let me assure you of that. I feel the same way you do about the American people, of course.”

“You’re assuring me that this will not do any more than the minimum damage necessary?”

“Absolutely. It will be very precisely contained. We’ll have a TR directing the pulses from the immediate vicinity of the target.”

“And the grays are not going to react adversely? That is one limb I sure as hell don’t want to go out on.”

“Sir, again, there is no way. They are not going to be able to connect the dots, as it were.”

“I’ll redeploy the scalar weapon.”

“Thank you, sir. I’ll call you when I need it fired.”

God only knew what the grays would do to the president after he unleashed a scalar pulse that devastated the whole center of the United States and threw all of their plans awry. One thing was certain, Charles planned to stay far, far away from this particular moron after he pulled that particular trigger.

“I have a state dinner in an hour. I gotta go over to the rathole and put on my monkey suit, and spend the evening with the prime minister of Thailand—whose name I will never, ever learn to pronounce—who is here to whine at me about some damn thing or other.”

He stood up. The interview was at an end.

MIKE WILKES LAY IN HIS motel room trying to do anything except worry about the next few days. He had a difficult, complex task, and if the grays detected him, he was going to be something worse than dead meat. Over the years, they’d found bodies of people who had been attacked by the grays, mostly airmen who’d gone too close in the early days, when Truman was still trying to shoot them out of the sky.

They would have their lips cut off, their eyes and tongues gouged out, and their genitals removed. There would generally be seawater in their lungs, no matter where the bodies were found. The grays would cut them up, drown them, then leave them as warnings. The grays could very definitely be crossed, and this particular action was certain to qualify.

He really did not feel so comfortable right now, sitting in this dismal little hole of a room and, frankly, waiting to start getting cut to pieces by somebody he couldn’t even see. He’d long held that the grays couldn’t read minds beyond a few feet, and that they had trouble even understanding what was going on in the human mind. But lying here on this bug-ridden bed watching Jay Leno wish he could suck any part of his guest, Drew Barrymore, he feared that the opposite might be true.

His only chance was speed. If he could get this done by tomorrow night, he could be back in D.C. by noon on Wednesday, and maybe he would be okay. Maybe.

AT ALFRED AFB, THE FLIGHT line was being used for foul-weather training runs, and the sound of engines being fired up and jets screaming off into the night could be heard clearly in the disused office block where Lauren Glass and Rob Langford had been together for hours. Since he had caught up with her last night, he had not let her out of his sight.

And now that she’d understood that there were two opposing groups within the Air Force, she was glad that she had ended up with Rob. She had never liked Colonel Wilkes, and had not been surprised to discover the danger he posed to her.

She sat across from Rob in the office, watching the snow sift past the windows. She was exhausted, and she was hoping that he would soon let her rest.

He remained formal and distant, though, and showed no sign of either becoming more at ease or of offering her a place to sleep.

She wished it was not so. He was a lovely man, handsome in a way that made her want him, simply and frankly. His eyes were gray and intense, but also had a sort of wide-open look to them, as if he was as friendly as he was dedicated. They were the eyes of somebody who worked hard, but, she thought, also liked to have fun.

He did not trust her. There was a secret he wanted to tell her, but he was wary. If he decided that she was the enemy, what then?

She knew what then. She just didn’t want to think about it.

“Tell me again about your relationship with Adam,” he asked. In all these hours, she had not refused to answer a question, no matter how often he had repeated it. She knew this interrogation technique. She would let him use it. She would cooperate fully.

“I’ve been with somebody who shared the life of my soul,” she said. “I don’t think he was a predator like Mike said. Losing him has left a hole in my life, almost as bad as when my dad died.”

“That’s not what you said the last time.”

“I’m being creative.”

What you said was, “They aren’t predators, but I think they’re missing something they know we have, and they’re trying to get it.”

Rob could not take his eyes of Lauren Glass. It wasn’t just her beauty, it was the trembling, delicate play of emotions in her eyes as she spoke about Adam. He could see that the love was genuine, entirely so. But there was also something furtive about Lauren, as if, on some level, she might be lying to herself, and might at least sense that.

This long, repetitive interrogation was leading to a judgement. When he was finished with it, he would draw his conclusions and her life would either continue or it would not. He wondered if she knew, decided to assume that she did. “So tell me, are the grays a danger to us? How do you feel about that?”

“I guess I miss Adam more because I know he’s somewhere. If he’d died in the fire, that would have been cloture, you know.” She fell silent.

“That didn’t answer my question.”

“It did, indirectly. If you want a precise answer, I have never been able to figure out exactly what the grays are here for, so it’s pretty hard for me to tell if they’re a danger. I mean, they look like aliens. God knows, they act like it. But I’ve seen the Bob autopsies. They’re partly biological and partly manufactured, and they have no brain as we know it. Just all those threads of glass in the head. But far, far fewer neurons than we have. So why do they think so well? We don’t know. And since we can’t say what they are, we also can’t assign motive. Those are my thoughts, anyway.”

He watched her. He didn’t know exactly what he was waiting for—perhaps for some mistake, the nature of which would only reveal itself when she made it. Potentially at least, this woman could play an important role. He had no doubt that the grays had maneuvered her very neatly out of Wilkes’s hands and into his, and he had understood that it was so that she could perform a function with the child. Teaching, he thought.

She asked him, “Listen, do you know anything about them? Like, where they’re from? I’ve always asked Adam about that but, you know, he doesn’t tell you much.”

She wasn’t afraid of him, and that was good. “We don’t know anything about where they’re from. We do know that there are a lot of them out there, and they’re on their way here.”

“So the DNA thing is true?”

“You know about that?”

She nodded. “Mike told me that they’ve used up their DNA and they want ours.”

“That’s part of it.”

“So this is the reconnaissance element of an invasion force and we should fear them.”

“I didn’t say that. I think they may also be our only chance of avoiding extinction.”

Her lovely mouth opened. The tip of her tongue, a soft, pink pearl, ran along her lips and withdrew. “Are you—uh… no.” She shook her head. “Wow. That’s big.”

“The calculations are correct. There’s going to be a tremendous environmental breakdown. In fact, it’s been building for eons. We’re at the climax.”

She sat there, staring at him.

“Lauren?”

“What about babies?”

He shook his head. “Nobody makes it… except your friend Mike and his outfit. Have you ever heard of the Trust?”

“No.”

“The way they’ve got it set up, about a million people will survive, chosen by the Trust—Mike and his group.”

“But then the grays will get them. They’ll have gained nothing.”

“That’s not how it works. We have reason to believe—to know—that the grays will give up on us unless there are billions of us alive. Smaller numbers will be of no use to them. The reason that Adam left when he did is that something has come to crisis, and Adam is apparently involved. Man and the grays are both in danger of extinction, and they’re trying to save us all. Your boss and his friends are trying to prevent that so the grays will go away and leave the Earth to their million elite.”

He watched her thinking, saw the pain in her eyes, the shock… saw a young woman’s face reflect fear for children who had not yet been born. “What happens… if the grays get their way?”

“Lauren, a very long time ago, there was a war on this Earth. A great civilization fell. When it did, we lost our knowledge of how physics really works. We set off down a road of ignorance that’s led to where we are now: all six billion of us trapped on an overburdened and dying planet. Meantime, the grays are so ancient that they’ve used up their DNA. Without each other, both species go extinct. They’re looking for a sort of marriage: they get access to our youthful DNA, we get access to their brilliant minds. Everybody survives.”

“But how? What happens?”

“Lauren, it’s my growing belief that you are one of the most critical human beings now alive on this planet, because you are a big part of the answer to that question.”

Suddenly, she looked every inch the soldier. Her eyes flashed. Rob thought, as always, that the grays had chosen well. She would be able to do this. He made his decision about her, after all these hours, in that split second. The grays had given her to him so she could be the child’s empath, it was the only explanation that made any sense. “You’ll be a sort of teacher, Lauren. An interpreter, if you will.”

“Of who? Of what?”

“I don’t want to be mysterious, but it’s best that we let this unfold in its own time.”

“That’s hard.”

“So be it, duty is duty. I have one further question. Do you know how to hide? I mean, on a trained, professional level?”

“Why in the world should I hide? Colonel Wilkes had no right to do what he did, you said that yourself. He’s up on charges.”

“He’s also very powerful. More powerful by far than we are. He’s dangerous, Lauren. I hope you understand that.”

“He’s trying to kill me, of course I understand it! But I have no idea how to hide.”

“You got this far. That’s saying something. A hell of a lot, in fact.”

“If I’m a KIA, then I have no Air Force standing. If I’m already dead, he can kill me without fear of penalty.”

“We’re going to hide you, Lauren.”

“I wish the grays were here.”

“Keep trying to contact them.”

When they went outside, the snow of earlier had stopped. The base was very quiet, the flight line now shut down.

She noticed that he moved very quickly, striding across the base to the carpool. He had a car of his own, but he requisitioned a staff vehicle instead. “This is part of staying hidden,” he said. “I’ll exchange this for another staff vehicle after I drop you off.”

He took her to a Days Inn, which appeared to be about the only motel in this small town.

Thus it was that Lauren ended up in the room next door to Mike Wilkes, an event that had not been orchestrated by the grays, but was not entirely chance, either. Rather it emerged out of the fates of both species, human and gray, as they rode the dark rails of their destinies.

Mike heard voices next door, a man and a woman. He took no notice.

Rob wanted to stay with Lauren—he told himself, to protect her. But he had work to do, because if he didn’t find Wilkes, not only was Lauren going to be in trouble, the rest of this thing was going to come apart. He could not imagine the consequences if the grays were thwarted, dared not even think about what might happen.

As he drove back to his office, Mike Wilkes and Lauren Glass both lay on their beds unable to even think of sleeping, their heads separated by just six inches of drywall. Lauren’s mind whirled with the astonishing secrets she had learned, and, as she sank into exhaustion, also with the image of Colonel Rob Langford, who appeared to her as a sort of angel, powerful and good and strong enough to take her the way she loved to be taken, and give her the babies her whole heart and soul told her that the future needed.

Mike would doze for a moment, then see Adam looming up, his insect eyes glaring. Then he would start awake and toss and turn, and nuzzle his gun close to his side.

Far overhead, in a sky that had cleared magnificently, strange stars hung over the town. The Three Thieves had been joined by Adam, and the first phase had been accomplished. They were counting the hours, now, the minutes, the seconds, the nanoseconds until they acted again, and Adam entered Conner, and became part of him, and either it worked or it did not.

It was an amazing time, truly, with six billion human lives and six billion gray lives hanging in the balance, in the quiet of a little town, in a dark corner of a small state, in a strange and faraway place called Earth.