Close Encounters of the Third Kind Page 14

  “Three. Three of them, sir. We got the rest.”

  Wild Bill grabbed a pair of binoculars off the table, glared darkly at Lacombe and Laughlin and strode fast out of the trailer. The others followed.

  In the background, three helicopters were already rising vertically, testing their powerful quartz-iodide searchlights. About a dozen Special Forces soldiers in regular gear, including gas masks strapped to their belts, were loading their rifles. They were carrying semiautomatic M-14s with infrared sniper sights.

  Wild Bill swept the tree line with his binoculars. They had set up an improvised field headquarters near the helicopter pads. The Major and Lacombe were on two field phones.

  “I’ll have them off the mountain in one hour,” Wild Bill shouted into his phone.

  A voice responded on their phones. “Do a photometric analysis of the northern face. Use infrared.”

  “It’s already ordered.”

  “If they are not off the mountain by 0800 hours, dust the northern face with E-Z Four. Get back to me.”

  “What is … E-Z Four?” Lacombe asked, alarmed.

  “A sleep aerosol,” Wild Bill told him on the telephone, although they were standing two feet apart. “Same stuff we’ve been using on the livestock decoys. It’s fast-acting, extremely local, and should detoxify in several hours. They’ll be out cold for six hours and wake up with one hell of a headache.”

  In careful English, the Frenchman spoke into his phone. “We do not choose this place. We do not choose this time. We do not choose these people. To stop them is not for us to choose.”

  “This was a perfect strategic vacuum until he siphoned air into it,” Wild Bill told the phone.

  “They belong here more than we,” Lacombe said sadly.

  Through the fir trees, the top of Devil’s Tower stood out against the evening sky. It appeared insurmountable to the three escapees as they trudged wearily up a steep incline, slipping in the loose topsoil and pine needles.

  Jillian stumbled and fell, sliding backward, downward, before catching hold of some undergrowth. Larry Butler also fell, but was up in a moment. Roy stopped, waiting for them to catch up to him. Then he heard the by-now-familiar noise above him.

  Suddenly three helicopters lit up the uppermost region of the mountaintop way ahead of them and started maneuvering around the partially hidden areas, stabbing away at them with their brilliant searchlights.

  “They’ve given us a lot of credit,” Larry said, breathing heavily. “That’s a good two hours on foot.”

  “Do you see that notch in the mountain?” Neary asked, pointing through the darkness.

  There was, in fact, a narrow passage through to the other side.

  “We can probably make that in no time,” he said, trying to cheer himself up, as well as Jillian and Larry.

  Butler got set to make the dash. “I should’ve never given up jogging,” he said, grinning.

  A formation of red and green helicopter lights hovered above the plateau and then disappeared as the choppers started to sweep the far side of the mountain.

  “There go four more,” Jillian counted. “There’s another ravine that leads up the hill,” she said hesitantly. “I remember it from my painting … It’s an easier climb. It starts on the northeast face and—”

  “That’s no good,” Neary said definitively. “It falls off at the top three hundred feet straight down. We’d have to be experienced climbers. This way, it’s a gradual roll to the other side.”

  “What do you think is on the other side?” Butler asked.

  “There’s a box canyon. It’s rimmed with trees and hiking trails.”

  Jillian looked at Neary. “I never imagined that,” she said. “I just colored the one side.”

  “There was no canyon in my doodles,” Larry agreed.

  “Next time,” Neary said, “try sculpture.”

  Back at the bivouac area, near the helicopter pad, a group of army engineers was relaying ten gallon stainless-steel canisters of E-Z Four to the waiting helicopters. The men worked in silence beneath the howling rotors and handled the stuff as though it might spill out at any moment and fell them all.

  Wild Bill stood off to the side, watching the operation. He checked his watch and looked up the mountain. He knew the platoon of Special Forces troops had fanned out and were moving steadily up the mountain.

  An aide handed Wild Bill a field phone.

  “Pyramid to Bahama.”

  “Bahama,” Wild Bill answered. “Go ahead.”

  “Nothing to report from midstation. Once they reach the shoulder there’s a thousand places for concealment. I’d need three times the ground force to cover this whole mountain in one hour.”

  Wild Bill held the phone away from his ear, cogitating. Then he spoke quickly into it. “Return to baseline.”

  The Major handed the instrument back to an aide, thought for another moment, and said, “Get everybody off the northern face. Call the dark side of the moon and tell them we’re going to dust.”

  Lacombe emerged from the communications trailer and was holding a sports jacket on a cellophane-covered wire hanger. He walked across the pad toward a waiting transport helicopter, Laughlin trailing him. The Frenchman stopped to watch Wild Bill give the order to the E-Z-Four-loaded helicopters. They revved up to a screaming level, then one at a time the three choppers lifted off vertically and in follow-the-leader style headed up and off into the night, their red and green lights blinking.

  The Frenchman gazed hard at Wild Bill, more in sorrow than in anger. Then he followed Laughlin and five button-down civilian operators onto the Huey. The door was immediately slid shut and in a second the big cargo helicopter rose vertically and headed off into the night.

  On the mountain, Roy, Jillian, and Larry were on the far side of exhaustion. They had worked their way nearly around to the back side of the mountain. From what Neary remembered of the model he had made, the box canyon couldn’t be too far away. And he’d been right about the helicopters. They weren’t dusting this section. So far.

  A clearing lay ahead.

  “Let’s make a run for it,” he said to Jillian and Larry.

  Jillian simply nodded, saving her breath, but Larry, who was really shot, gasped, “Go ahead. I’ll catch up.”

  “All right,” Roy said. “We’ll wait for you on the other side.”

  He took off running, crouched low to the ground, Jillian right behind him. In less than a minute, they had made it across the open space and thrown themselves down on the pine needles, panting and gasping. They were very thirsty, dripping with perspiration, and their hands and faces stung from numberless bramble and branch slaps. Somewhere along the line, perhaps in the helicopter door, Neary had damaged his left arm and shoulder. When he stopped to think about it, he was in considerable pain, and he was starting to lose the use of the arm.

  They lay on their stomachs, looking for Larry.

  “There!” Jillian whispered, pointing off to the left.

  They watched Butler emerge from the tree cover a good hundred yards downwind of them.

  “Larry!” Roy called. “Over here!”

  A perfectly terrible explosion of noise and light overwhelmed his call as an assault chopper trimmed the treetops, its powerful belly-light sweeping across the clearing.

  Roy and Jillian stood up now, waving Larry toward them. The noise grew louder, but Neary shouted anyway, “You’re in the clear … he’ll spot you.”

  The helicopter swooped over, making a sharp bank above them. It must have seen the man in the clearing.

  Larry had heard both the chopper and Neary, because he shouted up to them, using valuable lung power, “So what’s he gonna do? Land on me?”

  The helicopter came down over them and then headed for the clearing below. Small birds started dropping out of treetops off to the side. Neary and Jillian realized that they had to get upwind of the stuff. And fast. They were only fifty yards from the notch. Too exhausted to do anything more, they be
gan crawling.

  Behind them, the helicopter hovered, screaming, right over Larry. He seemed totally unconcerned in the middle of the noise, the little cyclone of needles, brush, and leaves, and the invisible E-Z Four. He stuck up his thumb, like a hitchhiker, and yelled, “Look, they’re only cropdusting!”

  By the time Roy and Jillian had painfully crawled their way to the summit of the notch and looked back down, Larry Butler, still walking, was starting to twitch spasmodically. First his head, then his arms. He started to stagger.

  Jillian started to get up. She was going to run down to him. Neary grabbed her. “No, no!” he shouted in her ear. “Don’t look down.” Jillian sank back.

  They watched Larry fall, try to get up, twitch horribly on the open ground and then lie still.

  They stood there, gazing out into the clearing. The tall grass was down in one place where Larry’s body lay. “We shouldn’t just leave him out there,” Jillian said at last.

  “If he’s sleeping, he can do it there as well as here.”

  “And if he’s dying?” Jillian asked.

  “If he’s dying”—Neary took another breath, then expelled it with a puffing sound—“then so are we.”

  Jillian’s arm gave him a squeeze.

  They moved off through the tall pines, heading toward the ridge. The way Neary remembered it, sculptured in mud and newspaper and chicken wire, the ridge provided a kind of gallery that ran around the canyon, a place shrouded by trees.

  Even before they reached the ridge, a strong light seemed to be coming from just below it, a steady glow reflecting back in the dark night from tiny droplets of water vapor in the high, clear air. As they neared the edge, they dropped to their bellies and snaked forward for a cautious peek.

  It was an uphill crawl along a thirty-foot stretch of slope. Neary could hear the helicopter coming back around the mountain. He reached for a scrawny bush to get a handhold, missed.

  He slid back down the slope. “Roy!” Jillian called from her position at the top of the ridge. “Come on, Roy! You can make it!”

  He was sweating. His legs ached. His fingers couldn’t seem to grip. “Please, Royl The helicopters coming.”

  Neary squinted up at her. Jillian was reaching down the slope for his hand. He began to crawl. The agony of it took his breath away. Inches at a move through loose-packed, sandy dirt. Inches.

  “Roy, just a few feet more and we can slide down the other side.”

  The chopper’s rat-a-tat was louder. Sweat poured down Neary’s forehead and into his eyes. He was only a yard from Jillian’s outstretched hand. Half a yard.

  The beat of the rotors filled the air overhead. At any moment the hissing sound of gas would come. Neary’s whole body buckled convulsively. He threw himself forward. Jillian caught his hand.

  She helped pull him up over the rim of the slope. They tumbled head over heels down a reverse incline and came to rest at the very rim of the canyon below.

  The helicopter yammered past. Neary stared up at it through sweat-smeared eyes. No spray. They were too close to the canyon. They were safe.

  He let out a great, shuddering sigh and took in a big lungful of fresh air. Then he and Jillian moved forward to stare over the brink of the canyon. Together they reached the edge of the outcropped plateau and peered over. Below was a sight they could not absorb.

  “Christ!” Neary breathed.

  “Oh, God!” Jillian cried “Oh, my God!”

  25

  Nature had ended and Man had taken over.

  It looked like an airport, a sort of cosmic port of call, manufactured by humans. There were landing lights stretching out to the horizon, perhaps five miles away, Neary estimated. Right in the center of the whole incredible base, the runway lights led up to a huge lighted double cross that was ringed by small strobe lights. It looked to Neary like a place where something was supposed to set down.

  The entire area, which had been dynamited and bulldozed flat, was ringed by big stadium lights perched on metal standards. Under the brilliant lights, Roy and Jillian could see that the whole base was circumscribed by a six-foot-high steel retaining wall. Inside there were three levels and on each level there were many self-contained modular cubicles, all with two doors, some with big picture windows and some without windows. The cubicles were of different sizes and heights, perched on metal scaffolds and reached by ladders.

  Upfield and in the center of the huge arena was a color-sound scoreboard that must have been forty feet long and six feet high, standing on a sixteen-foot scaffold and connected by many cables and conduits to a big Moog synthesizer on the ground downfield.

  Without turning, Neary said, “Do you see that?”

  “Oh, yes!” Jillian whispered.

  “Good,” Roy said, relieved to have received confirmation that he was not hallucinating or at least that he was not hallucinating alone.

  They were two hundred, perhaps three hundred feet above the great open-ended stadium that had been blasted and carved out of the box canyon, and as their eyes and minds adjusted to the fantastic scene below, Roy and Jillian, without saying anything more, decided to scramble down lower and closer. They moved cautiously down the granite edges to a perch some fifty feet below where the brush provided excellent cover.

  Now they could make out men, technicians apparently, working in and around the cubicles. They were dressed in jumpsuits—the white ones had McDonnell-Douglas written on the backs, the blue, Rockwell, and the red, Lockheed. The cubicles seemed to be set up as small laboratories. Roy and Jill could not make out what all the equipment was for, but they did recognize some laser apparatus, biochemical instruments, devices for thermal and electromagnetic measurements, looking like bazookas on their tripods, a couple of spectrographic analyzers, and a lot of complicated-looking instruments intended to monitor and measure God only knew what.

  Inside three of the cubicles sat black-suited men, all wearing dark glasses, guarded by military personnel, the only military that Neary could spot. Around the base were great radar dishes, constantly panning around and occasionally stopping for a moment and then moving on again. There were television monitors everywhere and at least a hundred film cameras, fifty still cameras and twenty-five videotape TV cameras set in banks on swivels. There were perhaps thirty operators and loaders for all cameras; the rest evidently were operated by remote control and connected to the tracking radar.

  Despite its size, the area was both cluttered and a mess. There were Coca-Cola and snack food machines scattered about indiscriminately, portable outhouses around the perimeter, and a small catering area that reminded Roy of an army soup kitchen under a canvas overhang. There were a lot of unopened crates that had McDonnell-Douglas, Rockwell, and Lockheed markings on the sides, and there was debris—paper cups, napkins, plates, empty soda cans everywhere. In fact, some guys in jumpsuits were sweeping up the stuff just as an apparent tour of executives in sunglasses, led by a white-haired man in a jumpsuit, strolled by.

  A bunch of technicians were clustered around the synthesizer, and one character, at the urging of the others, sat down at the large console and began picking out “Moon River” with one finger. The squeals and wows echoed across the canyon and vague forms of light and color shifted and faded across the giant scoreboard. The “musician” was shouted down by other technicians across the gridiron.

  “I know what this is!” Neary said, more to himself than to Jill. “I know what this is! This is unbelievable!”

  A gentle chime sounded below them.

  “Gentlemen, ladies—”

  A voice came over the loudspeaker system. He must have been in one of the cubicles, perhaps the communications cubicle, the one with all the computers. No, now they saw him.

  A fellow in a white jumpsuit, holding a small microphone, the cord trailing out behind him, was walking out to the center of the arena. “Gentlemen, ladies. Take your positions, please. This is not a drill. I repeat: This is not a drill. Could we have the lights in the arena do
wn sixty percent? Sixty percent, please.”

  Gradually the stadium lights started dimming, and the landing lights were dialed up. For five miles down the strip—all the way to the horizon—Roy and Jillian watched the lights come up. Suddenly they noticed that inside the modules the computer and instrument lights were going from white to red. Red working lights were now glowing from almost all the cubicles.

  “Good, good, good,” the man who was acting like a master of ceremonies enthused. “I don’t think we could ask for a more beautiful evening. Do you? Well, if everyone is ready—”

  Neary understood that these several hundred scientists and technicians had been holding a vigil every night for some time, and every night had been a false alarm. Nothing had happened. No one had come. Now he noticed that all the radar dishes had stopped sweeping and were focused in one direction, directly at them.

  “They’re staring at us,” Jillian gasped, scrunching down even flatter on the rock.

  “Not at us. At the sky. Look.”

  Roy and Jill turned their faces to the stars.

  Something was beginning.

  At first, Neary and Jillian had no idea what it was. Their eyes slowly adjusted from the glare of the stadium lights to the almost total darkness above them. The first thing they picked out was the Milky Way, then in the northern sky they saw the constellation of Orion. They stared hard at the cluster of stars they had seen so often before.

  They were moving. The stars were moving.

  The stars that made up the constellation shifted slowly at first, then more rapidly, some edging away, leaving the constellation.

  Neary turned to search the sky. He found another Orion at the opposite horizon.

  “There’s the real one,” he said, pointing it out to Jillian.

  When they looked back at the changing Orion, it had already become something different, its “stars,” which clearly were not stars, shifting constantly. A number of them had moved until they had formed an almost evenly spaced curved line. Then from the end “star,” as if attracted by it, three more moved in with majestic speed to form an oblong shape.