Close Encounters of the Third Kind Read online

  The only problem was how to get there, now that he was within fifty miles of the place. Walking, he’d get lost or shot. Besides, he wasn’t all that sure he could successfully escape the G-M nerve gas. If that was fact. But at this late hour Neary couldn’t decide who to believe. He was on his way to something important and blindly pushed on.

  “Folks, I don’t wish to alarm you,” a man was saying as Neary parked his car.

  The man was skinny, bald, with a long upper lip and a wide mouth, a talker’s mouth. He had already collected a small crowd, but with the near-panic situation in Reliance, Wyoming, a crowd was the easiest thing in the world to collect.

  “Let me tell you what you already know,” the man went on. “G-M nerve gas is colorless and odorless. You won’t have no idea in the wide world when you’re breathing it or touching it. But then,” he went on, warming to his speech, “when your eyes begin to di-a-late and your nose starts running, you’re gonna ask yourself: ‘Dear God, why didn’t I buy myself one of them early warning systems the man told me about?’ You’re gonna wish you had.”

  About thirty people were clustered around him now. “And when that bloody discharge starts running from your nose and mouth,” the man continued, “and your muscles seize up so’s you embarrass yourself in your pants, you’ll regret not taking this simple precaution, guaranteed!”

  He held up a small cheap cage in which a dispirited yellow bird clung to a wooden dowel. “This here canary gives you precisely one hour of sure, safe, and certain early warning,” he said, “and it’s a godsend at fifty bucks.”

  Neary got out of his car and walked across the street to join the crowd around the bird peddler. People were starting to shove money at him, which his wife took as he handed out caged canaries.

  “Can’t afford a canary?” he was asking in a high voice, his mouth working smoothly, easily as the words flowed, “then I got you a special on doves. They give you a forty-five-minute headstart, not as much as a canary, but then, they don’t cost fifty bucks neither. Thirty dollars takes away a dove.”

  Neary pushed toward the stacks of cages. “Let me have two canaries,” he said.

  “Two’s better’n one. A dove’s better’n nothing. And in the bargain basement I got chickens, twenty bucks a piece and they give you a whole half hour warning.”

  Neary fished in his pocket for money while with the other hand he reached across to take the two caged birds. Carrying them back to his car he was about to get in.

  “Roy!”

  He whirled around. “Roy!” the woman’s voice called again. He stared at the crowd pushing aboard the rescue train. Surely the voice came from there, but—

  “Roy!”

  He saw her then, struggling against the flow of people, trying to make her way out of the crowd toward him. Jillian.

  All the nightmarishness of the place seemed to focus down on the two of them. They fought to close the gap between them, but swarms of people kept them apart.

  Soldiers yelled through bullhorns. Sheep shoved past. Cars kept trying to move down the crowded main street. The bird peddler’s spiel was a cry of anguish.

  The sun flooded the scene with painful intensity.

  “Over here!” Neary called. Jillian was in danger and didn’t realize it. The crowd had started to shove hard in its anxiety about getting into the train. Going against them, she risked being shoved to the ground, trampled.

  “Get off!” he shouted. “Jump off the ramp!”

  He waded through the crowd now, shoving people aside. Jillian fought her way sideways, then half jumped, half fell from the ramp.

  Neary caught her. They held each other tightly as people streamed by on both sides, children, cattle, people carrying bird cages, an old woman with a tortoise-shell cat, a boy with a transistor radio glued to his ear, a man carrying two infants, a woman with four pillowcases crammed with possessions. The noise was frightening.

  Jillian and Neary clung together, bodies pressed close. They were saying things they couldn’t hear, babbling and laughing into each others faces. Then Roy began to edge them sideways out of the crowd, through the line of steers moving along the sidewalk, and back to his car.

  Jillian slumped down in the front seat and covered her eyes with her hand. Neary got behind the wheel and started the car. “Hold on to the canaries,” he said as they moved off down the street. “What the hell, I don’t think there is poison gas out there. Do you?”

  “Roy,” she moaned. “I’m so happy it’s you.”

  “Me, too.” He laughed.

  “And your children? Your wife?”

  This time Neary was silent. He had driven out of Reliance by now, part of a long line of eastbound cars. He pulled over to the side of the road at an intersection blocked by a jeep and two National Guardsmen.

  “No turns here,” one of them called. “Keep moving.”

  “Just taking a rest.” Neary turned to Jillian. “They left me,” he said then. “Ronnie and the kids took off. I was getting too flaky for them.”

  Jillian’s mouth twisted sideways. “Flaky. That’s what the FBI man told me. I could see he didn’t believe what I was telling him.”

  Neary nodded. “Listen, Jillian, we didn’t both come out to Wyoming just to turn around and go back.”

  “But they have the roads blocked.”

  “There’s a way. This is a big country. This is beer commercial country.”

  She said nothing for a moment. Then she took his hand and brought it to her cheek. “I’m glad we met again.”

  Then Neary spotted what he was searching for all along. A stretch of countryside protected by barbed wire and not much else. The barbed wire had begun to rust in places. Neary backed up the Vega for a running start. He downshifted into hill-climbing gear for more torque. He rammed the gas pedal down to the floor. Under the hood the engine roared. Rear wheels spouted Wyoming dust.

  The grille slammed head on into the fence. With a “bwoinng!” like a guitar string, the barbed wire snapped.

  22

  Now the Vega was careening across empty brushland. Tires popped up and down in potholes, woodchuck burrows, tiny valleys of erosion. Jillian had strapped herself in and was holding the canaries on her lap. Even so, she and the birds jounced up and down sickeningly.

  “The police dragged the river for him,” Jill started again to get her mind off the air pockets. “I told them he wasn’t in the river. He wasn’t in the river! They went around to every house for five miles looking inside back yard refrigerators. Then they asked me if I had seen any strangers in the neighborhood. Oh, brother!”

  Neary steered like a madman, whipping the wheel left and right to avoid the bigger chuckholes, half standing off the seat to see far enough ahead in this wasteland so that he could anticipate what was coming next.

  There were no roads, not even cattle trails. All he could hope was that his tires and shock absorbers would hold out long enough for them to reach the base of Devil’s Tower.

  He could see it behind some intervening hills. He could see everything. As he glanced around, he could still see very faintly in the distance the long highway of cars heading east. He wondered if anyone who had seen him swerve out of line and ram the fence would take the trouble to report him to one of the many National Guardsmen along the route. He kind of doubted it.

  In any event, here came something that seemed better than brushland. Neary tramped on the brakes, downshifted into low again, and rammed through another wire fence. The Vega shook its nose and dropped with a “thunk” onto a gravel road heading directly for Devil’s Tower.

  Neary slowed under the shade of a stunted scrub pine and inspected the birds. They appeared dazed, but Neary couldn’t determine whether it was cross-country nerves or something worse.

  He drove off along the gravel stage trail at a slower pace. It began to lead to higher ground now, skirting the base of foothills, rising constantly. As the Vega rounded another corner—

  They both saw it at the same
time. The Vega seemed to roll to a stop, all by itself.

  They got out of the car and walked to the edge of the embankment to stare at it—Devil’s Tower, looking a mile high.

  “Good God,” Jillian said.

  “It’s just I—” Neary stopped, moistened his lips. “Just like I imagined it would—” He stopped again, feeling that words could never express what he was feeling, the sense of having got it right at last, of having brought everything together so that, finally, it had begun to mean something.

  The two of them stood silently before the awesome sight. Nothing nearby resembled this vision out of their dreams. The Tower stood alone, unique, something so one-of-a-kind that Neary felt a chill across his shoulders at the thought he had been able to reproduce it in sculpture without even knowing it existed.

  He cleared his throat. “I guess we’d better move on,” he said then, “or they’ll spot us.”

  Jillian’s glance seemed to click downward for an instant. “There,” she said, pointing to a place ahead on the gravel road. “Isn’t that a gas station?”

  After a few minutes Neary steered the car into the abandoned station, really nothing more than a cabin that sold souvenirs and snacks, with a single gas pump out front. He lifted out the hose and shunted the cutoff lever. The pump growled. “Still got electricity,” Neary muttered. He filled the Vega’s tank and replaced the hose. “Nine bucks,” he said under his breath.

  “Roy.” He heard what Jillian was warning him about, the faraway beat of helicopter rotors, moving closer. Neary pulled her out of the car and they stood in the doorway of the cabin, hoping the choppers would pass by without noticing them.

  A squadron of transport Hueys cruising hazardously low zoomed over them. Flying somewhat higher than the rest were two flanking helicopters carrying clusters of chemical toilets from their undercarriage supports. Behind them a single Air Force Cheyenne hung protectively in the sky.

  Abruptly, the Cheyenne shifted sideways and dropped like a plummet until it was just over the roof of the cabin. Before Neary could open the door and drag Jillian inside, one of the men in the copter, wearing goggles and some kind of breathing mask, picked up a Polaroid camera and aimed it at Neary and Jillian.

  Neary shrugged and produced a grin. The photographer seemed to be racking his special lens for a zoom close-up. Neary stepped out of the doorway and into the sunlight. He dug in his pocket and produced a ten-dollar bill. Waving it at the helicopter, he walked over to the gas pump and laid the bill on top, weighing it down with a rock.

  “Okay?” he called.

  The only response was the pilot tapping the photographer on the arm. Then he sent the chopper ballooning into the sky. It headed off in the direction of Devil’s Tower, where the other copters had already disappeared from view.

  “That does it,” Neary said. “Hop in.”

  He gunned the Vega up to seventy on the gravel road, taking the turns and twists on two wheels, ducking under tree cover whenever a helicopter appeared in the sky. At one point, waiting for a chopper to fly away, Neary saw a bird lying in the road, on its back, claws in the air. Silently, he pointed it out to Jillian.

  “You want me to turn back?”

  “What killed it, Roy?”

  “Our canaries are still okay. I tell you, this whole G-M nerve gas thing is a put-on.”

  “Then let’s keep going.”

  They sat in silence for a moment. Then both of them found handkerchiefs and tied them across the lower halves of their faces. Neary put the car in motion and they continued at a more prudent speed now that they were getting closer to the base of Devil’s Tower.

  He braked hard around a sharp bend, then had to stand on the pedal. Four olive-drab vans stood in a row, blocking the gravel trail. Neary shifted into reverse and craned his neck around to look out the rear window. As he started to back up, four more vans pulled in behind him.

  Jillian and Neary rolled up their windows and locked the car doors without consulting each other. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the van doors opened and figures started coming out into the open sunlight. They looked like golden people.

  It was impossible to tell whether they were military or not, but they were all dressed alike in sealed astronaut-type one-piece golden plastic suits with Plexiglas-bubble helmets and tanks strapped to their backs. They seemed to be hermetically sealed by the shiny metallic plastic. Neary thought they looked like a cooking-foil commercial.

  One of them advanced cautiously until he was standing in front of the Vega. He then held up a small blackboard on which a message had been chalked:

  “HOW DO YOU FEEL?”

  The inanity of the question broke Neary’s tension. He rolled down the window on his side. “Fine!” he yelled. “How do you clowns feel?”

  The man in the gold suit put away the blackboard and gestured to them to get out of the car.

  “The hell with that,” Neary snapped. “The only gas in this area is from you guys farting around.”

  Another golden man with a Red Cross insignia on his right arm reached in and took the birdcage out of Jillian’s hand. He walked to the front of the Vega and held it up for Neary to see. Both birds were lying on their backs, motionless.

  Neary surrendered.

  As soon as he and Jillian got out of the Vega, each was given a face mask and taken to a different van. “Hey!” Neary yelled as the van with Jillian moved off. But his followed an instant later.

  Inside, the vans had been equipped as mobile medical centers. The men in the golden suits, Neary supposed, were in fact some sort of medics. It seemed to him, however, that they were functioning more as guards than doctors. He had no way of looking outside as the van jolted along rough terrain for some time.

  When at last the trip was over and the medic-guard opened the van’s rear door, Neary saw that the sun was starting to set. Its rays slanted sideways through a small campground of trailer offices, green tents, and vans like the one in which he’d been brought here.

  In the distance, hard to make out in the gathering darkness, technicians were busy unloading the trailers of a great number of heavy semi-rigs. No time to witness more.

  A golden medic helped him into one of the sealed coffin-sized trailers. Since the man was still wearing his bubble, he said nothing, nor did Neary. Time passed. Neary glanced at his watch. Seven P.M.

  Suddenly the trailer doors swung open. Two masked men came in through the air lock. The man in the golden plastic suit immediately left. Neary had been sitting on the edge of an examining table. He stared at the tall, thin, gray-haired man, then at the younger man beside him as they removed their face masks.

  “Well?” he asked. “You the boss cow?”

  The white-haired man frowned and turned to the other. “Comment? Qu’est-ce que c’est un honcho?”

  The other man grinned. “Le grand fromage,” he responded. He turned back to Neary.

  “We have very little time, Mr. Neary,” he snapped. “This is Mr. Lacombe. We need answers from you that are expressly honest, direct, and to the point.”

  “So do I,” Neary countered. “Where’s Jillian?”

  “Your friend is in no danger,” Laughlin said.

  Lacombe sat down across from Neary. His blue-green eyes seemed to crackle slightly with—Neary couldn’t be sure—annoyance, amazement? Lacombe delivered a barrage of French with Laughlin translating merely syllables behind him. “Are you aware,” he said, “of the danger you and your companion risked?”

  Neary was confused by the French and the English. Whom should he speak to, the man with the authority or the man who was speaking English? “What danger?”

  “There are toxins in the area,” the two men told him.

  “We’re alive. I’m alive. I’m talking.”

  Laughlin continued translating rapidly. “If the wind had shifted to the south, we would not be having this conversation.”

  “There’s nothing wrong with the air,” Neary insisted doggedly.

 
; The Frenchman ran his fingers through unruly gray hair. He pulled a pencil from inside his jacket and propped up a clipboard on the edge of a desk. “Some questions, Mr. Neary. Do you have any objections?”

  “What kind of questions?”

  Lacombe scanned the xeroxed sheet. Laughlin translated. “For example: Do you suffer from insomnia?”

  “No.”

  “Headaches?”

  “No.”

  “Have you ever been treated for a mental illness?”

  “Not yet.” Neary’s weak laugh produced no response. “No.”

  “Anyone in your family so treated?”

  “No.”

  Lacombe’s pencil raced down the sheet of paper, making marks. “Bad dreams?”

  “No.”

  “Have you recently had a skin disorder?”

  “No. Not unless—”

  “Yes?” the Frenchman prompted.

  “Sort of a one-sided sunburn. But I wasn’t out in the sun.”

  The piercing blue-green eyes stared thoughtfully at him for a moment. Laughlin translated. “About the bad dreams. Do you wish to reconsider your answer?”

  “No. Well—” Neary paused. “I had this thing. This, uh, thing in mind.”

  Lacombe waited, pencil poised. “More specific, please.”

  Neary shrugged. “It wasn’t really much … just an idea.”

  The Frenchman frowned and checked his wristwatch. He ran his pencil down the list and picked up the next question. “Have you ever heard voices?”

  “No voices. No little green men.”

  “Mr. Neary,” Lacombe began carefully, slowly, “have you ever had a close encounter? A close encounter with something very unusual?”

  That one clicked and Neary started a sloppy smile, “Who are you guys?” He searched them for a few specific truths. They had his candy. But this wasn’t fair play, only one piece at a time.

  Lacombe looked up and offered another piece. “Ever hear a ringing in the ears?” Laughlin interpreted. “An almost agreeable, sometimes pleasant, ringing. A particularly melodic tone or series of tones?”

  “Who are you people?” Neary insisted.

  Lacombe spoke in whispers to Laughlin. They were exchanging notes in French, and Neary just sat there on his stool, feeling complete isolation.