Close Encounters of the Third Kind Read online

  CLOSE ENCOUNTER OF

  THE FIRST KIND:

  Sighting of an unidentified flying object.

  CLOSE ENCOUNTER OF

  THE SECOND KIND:

  Physical evidence after a sighting.

  CLOSE ENCOUNTER OF

  THE THIRD KIND:

  Contact between human and alien beings.

  For Roy Neary, a young engineer who long ago felt the magic of wishing upon a star, it all starts the night of a strange local blackout—a blackout in which the power fails but the most vivid of colors emerge. It is a night that begins in doubt and wonder but leaves an impression strong enough to change the rest of his life.

  Here is a novel that makes that third kind of encounter an event so colorful, so full of sound and wonder that it dazzles the senses and enriches the imagination. For the dream behind the encounter is as old as man; its fruition as modern and intricate as today’s world can make it.

  In addition to writing the novel, STEVEN SPIELBERG wrote and directed the record-breaking movie of the same title. He also directed one of the most commercially successful movies ever made, Jaws, and the highly acclaimed The Sugarland Express.

  Lyrics from “When You Wish Upon a Star”

  by Leigh Harline and Ned Washington © Copyright 1940

  Bourne Co. Copyright renewed. Used by permission.

  Copyright © 1977 by Columbia Pictures,

  a division of Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in connection with reviews written specifically for inclusion in a magazine or newspaper.

  ISBN: 0-440-01373-9

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  C L O S E

  E N C O U N T E R S

  O F T H E

  T H I R D K I N D

  1

  Seven misshapen figures emerged from a blinding swirl of desert sand and sage. Their images hazing in and out of tons of gushing earth. Three somewhat stupefied Federates were waiting just outside the one-horse town of Sonoyita in Northern Mexico. Honking and tugging hysterically at their hitching place, the burros sensed another intrusion and kicked at everything in sight. The figures were almost upon them now and from shared views the first building in this haunted desert junction loomed ominously. Straight up, the sun said noon, but its color was blood, matching an antique neon Coca-Cola sign within the adobe frame of some Cantina oasis. The first figure out of the wind was just over six feet and greeted the three Mexican police with a curt nod and a barrage of Spanish. “Are we the first to arrive?” the khaki-clad man shouted in high school Spanish, his Rommel goggles and leather bandana hiding his nationality. “Are we first here?” he demanded.

  The stunned policeman answered him by nodding southward, where another group of explorers was materializing from thin air. And at the fringes of Sonoyita in a desert storm in 1973 the two teams came together, fourteen total, handshakes brief and voices discreet.

  “Is the French interpreter with you?” The hidden face had an American voice, slightly bucolic, maybe Ohio-Tennessee. “Yes, sir. I speak French but I’m not an interpreter by profession.” The voice belonged to the shortest member of the second-arriving group, and in it was the slightest suggestion of fear. Beefing up to compete with the wind howl, David Laughlin began to sound more important. “My occupation is cartography, topographies. I’m a map maker. A map maker.”

  “Can you speak French, sir? Can you translate English into French, French into English?”

  “If you go slow and understand this is not what they pay me for.” Interrupting, another figure came forward and extended a hand to the cartographer and spoke broken English with an accent that was native French.

  “You are Monsieur … uh … Loog-oh-line?”

  “Uh … Laughlin,” Laughlin gently corrected, and shook the hand. There was something about the Frenchman’s voice that invited soft, careful responses.

  “Ah, oui,” the Frenchman chuckled almost apologetically. “Oui, oui, pardon.” And then in French this time. “And, Mr. Laughlin, how long have you been a project member with us?”

  Laughlin was proud to answer that question and he chose his words carefully.

  “From the time of my country’s merger with the French in ’69 I attended the Montsoreau talks the week the French broke through, my congratulations, Mr. Lacombe.” Lacombe smiled, but the team was itching to move on in anticipation of what they had come all this way to see. Sensing this, Mr. Lacombe led the way and began to converse with Laughlin as quickly as he went. He waved to another team member and in several seconds Robert Watts, Lacombe’s personal bodyguard, was in sandy step.

  “Robert, écoute Monsieur Laugh-o-line.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Say to Robert in English, Mr. Laugh-o-line, this what I say to you now, en français. Alors.” Lacombe rattled off a statement in French and Laughlin said it in English to Robert only a beat or so behind the spoken word.

  “You are going to translate not only what I will say,” Laughlin enunciated, “but also my feelings and my emotions. I must be understood perfectly.”

  Up ahead the Mexican Federales were shouting and pointing at things in an area being pummeled now by forty-five-mile-an-hour winds. So much dirt blew across everyone’s eyes that the first object intermittently resembled a dragonfly with a fifty-foot wingspan. The men approached cautiously, and the phantom shape began to tell them what had only been hearsay twenty-four hours earlier.

  Something was sitting in the road, on what looked like wheels with wings, tail and propeller. There were markings on the sides and numbers on the wing. Behind it when the red wind gave pause were six others just like it. They were navy Grumman TBM Avenger torpedo bombers circa World War II.

  The expedition came to a halt. Lacombe took several steps and lifted his smudged bubble goggles. There was a curious peace about him now. He seemed neither anxious nor passive as he gathered in the view. The Frenchman’s face was incongruously youthful despite his gray weedy hair. Deep-cut lines started at his nostrils and ended to each side of his mouth. And as he made up his mind about what was to be done, the lines seemed to deepen. Lacombe took a breath, wiped dust from his tongue with the back of his hand, put on a sterile polyethylene glove and gave Laughlin his first order to relay. Laughlin nodded quickly after the spurt of words and shouted to everyone standing there.

  “I want the numbers off the engine blocks.” Laughlin wondered if he hadn’t made a mistake by not editorially attributing the command with the understood “he.” No one seemed to care. In seconds fourteen project personnel were crawling across the wings and tail opening hatches and unscrewing caps. Everyone wore Playtex Living Gloves. One technician rolled back the canopy. It slid open without a hitch. The grooves and ball bearings good as new. With his polyethylene glove, one of the technicians used surgical tweezers to extract a calendar stuck under the instrument panel. The calendar was a promotional item: “Trade Winds Bar, Pensacola, Florida.” But the date was the best part.

  “Mr. Lacombe,” the gloved technician shouted breathlessly on the brink of discovery. “It’s dated May!”

  “Quoi?” Lacombe went right to Laughlin for the translation, but the technician was quicker. “May through December 1945.”

  Lacombe understood this only too well. He beamed and raised his voice to Laughlin. Laughlin blanched and hollered to everyone in English.

  “See if there is petrol … gasoline, in the tanks. See if the gasoline will support combustion.”

  Standing next to Laughlin was the bodyguard, his
arms sagging in wonderment.

  “Jesus. These babies are in perfect shape.” A voice ripped the day apart in triumph. The voice sounded Southern.

  “AE 3034567. Goddamn! AE 29930404. Christ! AE 335444536. Holy shit!” Laughlin left out the expletives and someone else checked the numbers against a sheet of paper.

  “Numbers on the engine blocks match. So do the wing numerals.” The bandana that kept the sand from Lacombe’s nostrils and throat rose high around his face, his eyes were on fire as someone tested one of the Grumman’s landing lights. They cut a twin pattern in the thick air.

  “C’est possible?” Lacombe was slapping his sides, and Laughlin, befuddled now beyond reason, nudged Robert, the bodyguard.

  “Would you bring me up to date?” Robert bent forward confidentially. “It’s Flight 19.”

  Go on.

  “Flight 19. Don’t you know? This was the squadron of aircraft departed Pensacola on training maneuvers in May ’45. That was the last anyone ever saw of them. Until today. You figure it out.”

  “But where are the pilots? Where’s the crew?” Robert didn’t have the answer, he just shrugged when unintelligible hollering commenced a few feet beyond this activity. Lacombe rushed over, Laughlin on his heels. The three Federales had a collar. A tiny form huddled in the threshold of the Cantina. The Mexican police wouldn’t shut up, and all of their noise sounded like panic. Lacombe looked in Laughlin’s direction for a little help and David had to smile.

  “Je ne parle pas espagnol. Français et anglais settlement.”

  Mr. Tennessee-Ohio spoke up. “They say this man was here. They say he was here two days. They say he saw it happen.”

  This was more than Lacombe or anyone had hoped for. The Frenchman dropped to one knee and with the gentlest touch cupped the humbled chin in his sterile glove. The Mexican raised his head the rest of the way. He was crying but that wasn’t what riveted Lacombe. Half of the man’s face was cherry red and blistering from forehead to collarbone. It was the worst sunburn Laughlin had ever seen on a leathery face so accustomed to Mexico’s furnace summers. The man’s hands were buzzing and a certain stench drifted up that brought Lacombe’s gaze to the Mexican’s starched pants. He had urinated in them some time ago and as he lifted his face to speak, he was involuntarily wetting them again. The sad, desolate man worked his lips together, forcing air through his vocal cords, trying so hard to say it. And when the words broke in Spanish, the man broke down in real tears.

  “Qu’est-ce quil dit?” Lacombe breathed. Laughlin turned to the American who knew the language. But the man shrugged and questioned the humbled wreck at his feet. Again the same words croaked forward and the smell of urine was unbearable. Lacombe was a patient man but the American was keeping the words to himself for too long a time. Laughlin intervened. “What was he saying?” The American raised his eyebrows and let out a sigh along with the translation. “He said the sun came out last night. He says it sang to him.”

  2

  Four-year-old Barry Guiler was having a restless night. A gentle Indiana breeze floating through the half-open bedroom window ruffled his bangs. There was a soft but persistent whirring noise coming from somewhere in Barry’s room, and it troubled his sleep. Suddenly a soft red glow played over his face and Barry’s eyes opened.

  On the night stand next to his bed, one of Barry’s battered toys had somehow come on. It was a Frankenstein monster; when it raised its hands, as if to strike out, its pants fell down and it blushed.

  Barry sat up in bed, staring at Frankenstein, and then looked around the room. He had a lot of battery-operated toys scattered about—a Sherman tank, a rocket ship, a police car with red dome light and siren, a model 747, a drunk hanging on to a lamppost and chugging from a bottle—and all of them were moving, flashing, whirring. All by themselves.

  Barry was delighted. His phonograph came to life all of a sudden, scratching out a tinny version of the Sesame Street theme song.

  Barry laughed and clapped his hands. Then he jumped out of bed and ran over to the open window. Outside, in the distance, he heard a dog barking, but his back yard was dark and utterly still.

  Barry’s bedroom was at the end of a hallway. Very curious now, he trotted down the hall to the living room. The room was dark except for a small blue night light. Barry sensed, though, that something was different, something was out of place. All the living-room windows were wide open and the night air was breathing through the lacy curtains, stirring them in a very odd way. The front door was wide open as well, and the porch light was shining brightly against the black night.

  Despite all these strange things, the little boy was not frightened. He was ready for fun. There was a funny smell coming in the open windows and door—a little like the way the air smelled after there had been a lot of thunder and lightning. But Barry didn’t think a summer storm had just come through. He hadn’t heard anything; he didn’t hear any water dripping. Besides, this was different.

  He decided to go see what was happening in the kitchen. All the windows in there were wide open, too, and the breeze was really blowing. The back door was ajar and rattling against the safety chain. But that was nothing! Bingo’s dog door had got knocked off its hinges and was lying on the floor, and Bingo wasn’t in his bed next to the refrigerator.

  The refrigerator was open, too, and there was a lot of food—a milk carton, some Cokes, butter, a cottage-cheese container, bologna, leftover dinner—in messy piles on the floor in front of the ice box, leaving a sloppy trail all the way to the open dog door. Barry picked up a half-melted Heath Bar. Then something else in the kitchen caught Barry’s attention. Several somethings. Barry spun. The Heath Bar dropped from his open hand, splattering across the linoleum. The little boy backed away so quickly he slammed shut the big Amana with his tiny body. He carefully waited, his soft eyes unmoving. And then Barry Guiler smiled—a shy playful look that seemed to invite … a response. Barry looked some more—and giggled and looked away—peek-a-boo—more laughter—peek-a-boo. New game. Barry looked hard; then, rocking back and forth on his heels like a chimpanzee, he spun full around, cocking his head to one side before rotating it slowly—“Like this? Like this?” He was brave. “Boo!” he shouted. And made his scariest face. “Grrrrr-boo!”—his scariest.

  Jillian Guiler had been asleep in her bedroom. Jillian had had the flu all week, and her head, her bed, and the room were all in a state of general disarray. The house that Jillian and Barry lived in was small and stood by itself atop a low, rolling hill in this rural area of Indiana. It was really an easy house to take care of, but Jillian had felt pretty rotten all week and had let the housework slide.

  In her bedroom, everything was everywhere but where it should have been. The same wind that had been playing through the rest of the house suddenly swept into Jillian’s bedroom, picking up and dropping Kleenexes and a couple of half-finished charcoal sketches of Barry. The bedside table was a clutter of pills, nasal sprays, half a sandwich, and a can of Coke.

  Jillian started coming half awake in that peculiar frame of mind that flu produces: tired but not sleepy, thinking but not very clearly, able to do something but not about to. She was under the covers but was still wearing a bathrobe. The TV set was on, and the laughter Jillian at first heard she thought was coming from the stupid sitcom that she saw flickering on the screen. But during a commercial Jillian heard the laughter again and finally recognized its source.

  Barry began to imitate the thing outside, mimicking what he saw. First he covered and uncovered his eyes, as if playing peek-a-boo. Then he spun around several times like a top. He cocked his head left and right and left and right again.

  He began to laugh out loud with the joy of it, moving into the night as he did so. A pale, burnt-orange light illuminated his face as he walked into the night, laughing.

  It was the laughter, growing fainter, that wakened Jillian at last.

  Well, that and the parade of toys. The laughter brought her half awake, wondering what
had disturbed her slumber. Then, as she sat forward, eyes slowly opening, the police car came through the door of her bedroom, its dome light flashing.

  Behind it rumbled the tank, fire flashing in its gun muzzle. Next the giant jumbo jet trundled forward to the accompanying whine of the police siren. And, finally, his pants dropping down, rising and falling again, Frankenstein’s monster lurched in, arms outstretched.

  Jillian jumped wide awake, flipped off her covers and got out of bed. The police car narrowly missed her toes as it headed for a wall and shoved its grille into the plaster. Behind it the other toys began piling up in a confused, multivehicle collision.

  “Barry?” Jillian called.

  Then she remembered his laughter. It had all but faded away, only the memory of it still hanging in the night air.

  The bedside clock read 10:40. What in the world was Barry up to now? He’d only been in bed two hours.

  Jillian staggered out of bed and went down the hall to her son’s room. Barry’s bed was empty. The windows were open. She ran out of the room, back down the hall to the living room. There she stared about her wildly at the open windows, the open front door, the shining porch light.

  Unmistakably now, the sound of Barry’s laughter was outside the house, out in the night somewhere. Jillian gave a little cry and then sneezed.

  The laughter again. Fainter this time.

  Oh, God! Jillian thought wildly. She rushed out the front door into the yard. Trying unsuccessfully to adjust her eyes to the darkness beyond the porch light, Jillian found herself whimpering. Catching hold of herself as best she could, she cried, “Barry! Barry!” and ran into the darkness in the general direction of her son’s disappearing laughter.

  3

  The world inside all air traffic control centers is unreal. There are dozens of them scattered across the United States; the one half-buried in the earth near Indianapolis is as typical as any.

  The artificial world created within these great concrete bunkers is only dimly perceived. The place is dark. The only light comes from small, shaded bulbs of low wattage that barely show where the doors are.