Close Encounters of the Third Kind Page 13

  “Is that it?” Neary cried. “Is that all you’re going to ask me?” The frustration of these absurd weeks surged out of him. “Well … I got a couple of thousand goddamn questions! Are you the head man around here? I want to lodge a complaint. You have no right to make people crazy! You think I personally investigate every news story on Walter Cronkite? If this is just a cloud of gas … why is it I know this mountain in every detail, and I’ve never been here?”

  Neary had spoken the magic words and now it was Lacombe who “clicked.”

  The Frenchman stopped and studied this strange American. There was a knock on the door. Bad timing. Another golden man—without medical insignia—stepped inside.

  “Com-Sec says to take them to Evac-Reliance and a bus ride home,” the bubble-headed fellow said.

  The man backed out of the room.

  Lacombe returned to his seat and motioned to Neary and Laughlin to do the same. Now Lacombe was quite excited. “You tell me,” he said in slow, careful English, “you imagined this mountain before you had discovered its existence? It manifested itself to you in many ways. Shadows on the wall, ideas, geometric images that to you, Mr. Neary, seemed like progress toward the familiar but sadly and for so long without any meaning until, finally, it came to you. And it was right!!”

  Neary held back his tears with great effort. He nodded bleakly.

  “And you feel—” Lacombe paused, obviously searching for just the right word. He found it. “Compelled to be here?”

  “I guess you might say that,” Roy responded out of the depth of irony he had never known he possessed.

  Ignoring that, Lacombe took an envelope from David Laughlin, opened it and produced a dozen colored Polaroids which he handed to Neary.

  “These people? These are all people who were trying to get to the mountain. They are strangers to you?”

  Roy went through the stack. “Yes,” he said. “All except her.” He held up Jillian’s picture.

  Lacombe took all the pictures back, put them in the envelope and gave it back to Laughlin.

  “By being here,” the Frenchman asked quietly, “what do you expect to find?”

  Neary struggled to formulate a reply. What the hell was he doing here? “The answer,” he said, at last. “That’s not crazy, is it?”

  Lacombe got up to go. “No, Mr. Neary, it is not.” When he reached the door he turned back quickly, spoke simply. “I want to say to you that you are not alone. I wish you could know this. You have many friends and … I envy you.”

  The three men paused in the air lock to put their helmets on. On a long wall table lay five or six unused masks, some long rubber gloves and a cheap birdcage. In it were two canaries. They huddled together in a corner and watched Neary’s movements with too-bright eyes. Laughlin opened the outer door of the air lock and the three men walked into the early evening.

  The sky in the west still glowed red, but overhead the heavens had darkened to a deep velvety blue. Neary glanced up and saw stars coming out in clusters through the thin mountain air.

  Lacombe and his interpreter walked him to a Huey assault chopper, its engines purring but its rotor still.

  “No!” Neary exclaimed. “I’m not going back. I’m not going on any bus ride home!”

  A gloved hand slid open the starboard door. Neary could see seven or eight civilians, all wearing masks, seated inside. Jillian lifted her hand listlessly, as if she had no energy left. Neary climbed aboard. One of the copter pilots handed a packet to Laughlin, standing on the ground below.

  Laughlin leafed through the packet of paper and cardboard. He passed it along to Lacombe. “You see? Everyone drew his own version of the Tower before they came here.”

  The Frenchman studied the drawings, some no more than doodles, some carefully done in crayon or felt-tipped pen. After a long moment he looked up through the open door of the Huey and stared at the people inside. Then his sharp glance shifted to the pilot and he spoke quickly to Laughlin in French.

  “You are not to take off,” Laughlin relayed to the pilot.

  “Sir, I have my orders from Com-Sec.”

  “You have my orders now. No departure.”

  “Sorry, sir,” the pilot said in a mulish tone. There was something about the “sorry” that conveyed its opposite and something about the “sir” that downgraded it to an epithet.

  “Five minutes, then!” Lacombe snapped.

  The pilot relented and held up three fingers.

  Lacombe and Laughlin were off and running toward an OD trailer a hundred yards closer to the Devil’s Tower.

  23

  The communications trailer was darkened at one end to allow the radar officers to watch their scopes. At the other end, where a window looked out at the waiting helicopter in the distance, two civilians—Lacombe and his translator—squared off with a project security officer known to them as Wild Bill.

  Wild Bill was about Lacombe’s age, Dave Laughlin estimated, somewhere near fifty—or at least looking that age, regardless of how old he really was. Wild Bill was short, squat, and loud. He had a flat, monotonous drawl, as if face-to-face conversation between human beings was of the same order of verbal traffic. Similar to control tower and approaching aircraft, or NASA Mission Control and project astronauts.

  “You cannot send them away!” Lacombe burst out, more agitated than his interpreter had ever seen him. “I will take responsibility for keeping them here.”

  “You have no responsibility this side of ‘Mayflower,’ ” Wild Bill responded almost mechanically. “As Com-Sec, I have all the base camp responsibility.”

  “Major Walsh,” the Frenchman began.

  Wild Bill interrupted. “Three miles from right here, you are the boss. Christ, we’ve spent enough setting up the D.S.M. It’s taken us ten zillion dollars. That’s your bailiwick. This down here is mine.”

  “You don’t understand,” Laughlin said, trying to break up the irreversible conflict shaping between the two men. “Whatever you’re doing down here at the base camp is for only one reason, so Mr. Lacombe’s project can proceed on schedule upstairs.”

  “I appreciate that.” Wild Bill’s eyes, each neatly imbedded in a tight half-moon of suety flesh, almost closed shut as he grimaced. “But you people have to understand how military discipline works.”

  “I don’t want those people removed,” the Frenchman repeated.

  Wild Bill took a long, steadying breath. “We have a chain of command three weeks long,” the major went on. “This incursion into base camp … How do we know these aren’t saboteurs, fanatics or cultists on a negative errand. That’s the only way our chain of command is set up to handle an incursion. It’s too late to handle it any other way.”

  “This is a small group of people,” Lacombe said, speaking very slowly and turning now and then for a helping word from Laughlin, who was magnificent, supplying the emotional and linguistic equivalents when Lacombe’s excitement forced him to shift to his native tongue. He gestured out the window at the waiting helicopter. “They share a common vision. It is a mystery to them and to me why they felt compelled to come here.”

  Wild Bill hunched his meaty shoulders in a bull-like shrug. “You want to go over my head for clearance, you’ll have to copter out the message because we’ve got communications blacked out down here to the point where even I don’t know what’s going on.”

  The Frenchman shoved a handful of drawings at the major. “Why were these not shown to me until the last moment?”

  Wild Bill took the bits of paper and spread them out on the table. “Interesting,” he mused.

  “We know very little about these people,” Lacombe told him. “Just the answers to our questionnaire. But who are they? Why did they all draw these pictures? Why were they compelled to come here when they saw Devil’s Tower on television?”

  The tubby man shrugged. “Got to be coincidence.” Obviously unhappy with the idea, he continued pushing around the drawings with one pudgy finger. “These are just
a random assortment of people,” he said then. “Nothing special about them. This guy Neary you talked to. He’s Mr. Joe College. The woman with him says she’s looking for her little boy. Who knows?”

  “What about this one?” Lacombe demanded, pointing to a larger drawing in some detail.

  The major turned it over and read the name of the artist on the back. “Larry Fownen. We checked him out. He’s from Los Angeles. Sells real estate. Used to be a bit player in Western flicks. He’s another nobody.”

  “This one?” the Frenchman wanted to know.

  Wild Bill stared at the scrawled crayon sketch. “A Mrs. Rosen from Kansas City. She’s a grandmother. Her husband is with her. Retired. On vacation. We ran checks on all these people, direct to Washington. They’re nobodies. A few traffic violations. No criminal records.”

  “And this one?”

  “George Fender. Garage mechanic, Fort Worth, Texas. World War Two veteran. Wounded on Guadalcanal.”

  “This one?”

  “We don’t have this kind of time,” the major said. “Take my word for it. These folks are nothing.”

  “This one?” Lacombe insisted.

  “Elaine Connelly. Schoolteacher. Bethesda, Maryland. Widow. Married son, three grandchildren.” Wild Bill gave a snort of exasperation. “I suppose you want a rundown on the other two?”

  “Of course!” Lacombe responded.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Penderecki, Hampramck, Michigan. He’s a meat cutter. She’s a secretary. They’re on their honeymoon. She teaches Sunday School.” He took a sharp breath. “Enough!” he snapped then.

  “But there is no connection,” the Frenchman said.

  “I don’t care whether there is or there isn’t. My responsibility is to ship the lot of them off the premises. Now!”

  “But you have said it yourself. They are not harmful people. They are nobody in particular.”

  “That’s how they seem,” the major reminded him. “On a quick five-minute check, that’s all we’ve uncovered.”

  “Nine people who had the same vision.”

  “So you say.”

  “Who have the same compulsion to come here.”

  “We’re wasting time,” Wild Bill said in a controlled yelp. “It’s not my time. It’s your time. You’re the man with the deadline. But once you make it my deadline, that’s it. We move. Now!”

  Lacombe said nothing for a long moment. His gray-haired head had reared back on his neck during this confrontation.

  Now it relaxed slightly. “I must find out what is the meaning of these people’s compulsion. Why they had to come here. Maybe—”

  “No way,” Wild Bill snapped.

  “Écoutez-moi!” Lacombe snarled angrily. “For every one of these people there must be thousands out there also touched by this implanted vision.”

  “It’s just a coincidence,” the major suggested.

  “It is a sociological event,” the Frenchman corrected him, “of surprising importance. The answer to why they’ve come is perhaps the most important information we will have developed in the project’s entire existence.”

  “I’m terminating this conversation.”

  Lacombe’s arm reached out. His fingers grabbed the front of Wild Bill’s combat jacket. “You will listen to me, Major Walsh.”

  Wild Bill’s tiny eyes widened. Nobody had grabbed the front of his jacket since he’d been a lieutenant fresh from the Point.

  “You’re gonna be late upstairs at the D.S.M.,” he told the Frenchman.

  “Écoutez-moi, tête-de-merde.”

  Wild Bill turned to Laughlin. “Wha’d he say?”

  24

  Inside the big Huey helicopter, Neary, Jillian and the other civilians who had “incursed” the base camp sat quietly, almost numbly, gas masks fastened, only their eyes moving this way and that as they tried to understand what had happened to them.

  What was going to happen now, Neary told himself, was obvious. They’d be lifted out in another few minutes and that would be the end of the whole wild thing. He’d never learn what the mountain meant. Jillian would never find Barry. None of these people would ever know anything.

  And all because the base camp’s strategy for keeping out visitors was hard to beat. The advertised nerve gas danger could be real. It would be like the military, he mused, to actually let a few whiffs of it into the area and knock off enough wildlife to convince the skeptics, or were the wildlife only stunned? Neary remembered the two canaries in the cheap metal cage sitting inside the air lock of one of the trailers. Whose canaries? His? But he’d been shown his canaries were dead. If not dead—

  He was sitting next to Jillian, their thighs pressed against each other, her eyes closed. She’d come a long, long way, Neary thought, and for nothing. They had all killed themselves to get here. And now it was going to be over before it even began.

  He got to his feet. The seven other civilians glanced at him. Jillian’s eyes opened and she looked up at him.

  Slowly, moving with great precision, Neary unfastened his gas mask. The snaps made noises like rifle shots. He ripped off the mask and threw it to the ground. If this was the bravest thing he’d done, it was also, all of a sudden, the easiest. It made the most sense, too.

  He took in a long deep breath.

  The others looked horrified. Then, so fast he almost missed the movement, Jillian tore the mask from her face. She stood up beside Neary and took a full breath.

  “You’ll be poisoned,” a little seventy-year-old man told him.

  “Mister,” Neary told him, “there is nothing wrong with this air. The military just doesn’t want any witnesses here.”

  A little old lady, perhaps the little old man’s wife, said quiveringly, “But if the army doesn’t want us here, this isn’t our business.”

  “We only wanted to see the mountain,” the old man said apologetically to Neary. “It was such a coincidence when I painted it. No one bothered to tell us about the air.”

  “How did you locate this spot?” Jillian asked him.

  “No problem. I looked it up in Famous Mountains of the Western Hemisphere. Did you know that President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed this our country’s first national monument on September 24, 19 …”

  A fellow in his forties stood up and ripped off his helmet. He had a suntan, longish hair and acted like a guy with a lot of money. He took a deep breath, exhaled and then said, “Oh, Christ! It’s better than the air in Los Angeles.”

  Two others—a man and a woman—stood up and with nervous, trembling fingers, took off their helmets. Their faces were drawn and thin, and they had the look of people on the downside of physical exhaustion, people who had probably been socially criticized for months. They looked scooped out from the inside, and they were unable to face Neary or the others.

  But Roy turned to face all his companions. He spoke loudly above the idling rotors. “Who’s for staying?” he asked.

  Jillian raised her hand. Then the fellow from Los Angeles. Finally, the old couple. Everyone else looked away.

  “Okay,” Neary said. “You’ll have to keep up with me and run very fast.”

  At that moment, the helicopter door started sliding shut behind him. Roy desperately used his arm as a door jamb. The guard outside opened the door to see what was going on and saw a bunch of the detainees with their helmets off. As he was registering this, the fellow from Los Angeles rushed to Neary’s side.

  “Now!” Roy shouted. “Run for the mountain!”

  They pushed the door halfway open and Neary struck out and hit the guard in the neck, just under the helmet, with his foot. Roy, Jillian, and the Los Angeles man vaulted awkwardly over the fallen soldier and headed for the tree line.

  To each side of them were Piggly-Wiggly and Baskin-Robbins trucks where technicians—without helmets and body protection—were unloading electronic equipment and a lot of crates labeled Lockheed and Rockwell—Special Handling flashed by their eyes as they raced away.

  The other
detainees, including the old couple, who decided to run for it were stopped by the other guards within two steps of the helicopter door. Neary was running with every fiber of strength and glanced up at the mountain that had haunted their dreams. Now they would get the chance to unravel the nightmare.

  Back in the communications trailer, Lacombe, utterly frustrated by Wild Bills ignorance and intransigence, said in failing English, “You do not understand!” Then, in rapid-fire French: “The mountain was the key. And the gift in the Mexican desert was a clue. For us, to open our minds and let them in.”

  Laughlin finished translating, and then Lacombe had a new thought. He translated it himself from the French. “They were invited!” he shouted. “They were invited!”

  None of this sank in. Laughlin could see that.

  But something outside the window caught Lacombe’s eye. He drifted over and watched the three detainees heading for the trees. He didn’t say anything, but a slow smile spread over his face.

  Moving in the shadows of dusk, Neary led his two companions around a helicopter pad and into the brushlands at the base of the mountain. He fell to the ground to catch his breath and to give the others a chance to catch up with him. When they did, Roy started taking off his space suit and motioned to them to do the same.

  He stuck out his ungloved hand. “Hiya. Name’s Roy.”

  “Larry Butler.”

  Still puffing hard, Neary said, “We can’t stay here. Go on to the tree line and wait for me there.”

  Larry and Jillian took off immediately. Roy took another moment to catch his breath, looking down at the activities at the base camp and then he, too, started running hard up the mountain toward the tree line, two hundred yards away.

  A moaning siren howled in the darkness. Searchlights began to crisscross the landing pad. The door to the communications trailer burst open, and a guard, gasping for breath inside his helmet, stumbled in.

  “Overpowered me, sir!”

  “How many?” Wild Bill barked.