Close Encounters of the Third Kind Page 15

  The Big Dipper.

  Neary started laughing. He was no longer afraid at all. He was just very happy.

  Below them, the hundreds of scientists and technicians were reacting like ordinary mortals at a show of fireworks, oohhing and aahhing and finally bursting into applause when the Dipper was fully formed.

  “We’re the only ones who know. The only ones,” Roy said. “Did you see that?” he asked her, checking.

  “Yes,” Jillian reassured him and herself.

  “Good.”

  All of a sudden what appeared to be three shooting stars came out of the western sky. They shot right overhead and abruptly stopped, as if putting on brakes, in midspace, exploding in a moment every known law of physics. The stars executed—on a dime—a complete 180-degree turn and then each point of light broke off into four different points and shot back off into the night sky.

  Inside the stadium the audience went wild.

  Roy and Jill looked at each other.

  “Did you see that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good.”

  The show was not over. It was, in fact, just beginning.

  A cloud, what appeared to be a simple, lonely cloud, floated over the base, escorted by two very bright blue points of light within it. The two blue lights began to swirl faster and faster around the cloud, which started losing its form and reshaped itself into a nebula that resembled a spiral nebula.

  One of the lights penetrated the nebula and turned on even more brightly so that the whole cloud was lit up from within. No longer blue, but a deep amber. And then the other light took up a position in the outer arm of the spiral and began blinking on and off.

  It was an extraordinary sight, a vision that seemed to flash and swirl with meaning, if only they could apprehend it. It was a demonstration, there was no doubt of that. But a cosmic demonstration of what? Of the place in the cosmic galaxy where we live? Yes! Perhaps that was it. A scale model of our planet’s location. Incredible!

  Roy and Jillian did not speak. They were trying to catch their breaths, trying to assimilate these sights and perceptions. They were crouched on a small promontory. Behind them was nothing, just the night sky and distance. Suddenly, in that sky, were clouds moving on both sides behind them. And from the clouds a light—like heat lightning except when the light flashed stroboscopically it did not go off. The flash froze midsky.

  Then the light got brighter still in one part of the cloud, and bursting out of the cloud came an intensely bright pencil point of orange light, followed by two more brilliant pencil points of orange light. In a moment, as the lights approached an unbelievable speed in a sort of wing formation, Neary and Jillian just had time to cover their faces as the vehicles made a slow, screaming pass right over their heads.

  They were the same ones—the monster klieg light, the flashing, beautifully colored sunset, the enormous jack-o’-lantern with its leering, phantom face—that had appeared so spectacularly to them on the Indiana summit so many nights ago.

  As these enormous furnace lights—vehicles without wings or physics, brilliant, flashing, colored lights that blew away one’s security, the belief in your own existence and that of the “real” world—passed over them, a huge displacement of air and heat blew dust everywhere. Their hair went in all directions, the static electricity made all the hair on Neary’s arms and chest stand up on end.

  Again they felt buffeted and seared by the heat. Again the very breath was sucked out of their lungs. They had just enough time to inhale as each of the three vehicles, wailing mournfully like a million banshees, swept over. This time the sounds they made were frightening. A thousand voices wailing, sending chills up their backs right in the middle of the intense heat. Neary realized that the sounds were the noises of foreign machinery, but this realization did not make him feel any more secure.

  By the time Roy and Jill had cleared the dust and the tears from their eyes, the monstrous, flashing, brilliantly colored vehicles were swooping low over the stadium area, sending the scoreboard off into a riot of scuttling colors and the scientists and technicians scuttling for cover. The cameras followed the objects on their swivels and the radar dishes panned all the way round.

  The brilliant objects passed over the double-cross landing area that was flashing landing coordinates to them, swooped several hundred yards farther down the concrete strip where there was nobody around, abruptly stopped as if putting on brakes and then just … hovered.

  They hovered in a sort of triangle formation, their brilliant, almost-impossible-to-look-at colors holding steady. The objects seemed to settle close to the tarmac, perhaps as close as five feet above it, then they would pop back up to about twenty-five feet. They seemed to be almost flirting with the ground, playing, tasting it, licking up some dirt and debris, but then popping up as if actually frightened.

  Neary was bug-eyed. He wanted to climb down closer to it all but realized that Jillian was too freaked out to move.

  Meanwhile, something that Roy realized had been planned and rehearsed and rehearsed a hundred, a thousand times for just this historical moment, began to unfold. The synthesizer was surrounded and boarded by a group of technicians wearing headsets and pencil microphones that they plugged into the console. Trailing their twenty-foot cords, they gathered around with their clipboards and penlights in hand.

  One man, obviously the team leader, said into the almost-reverent hush, “All right, gentlemen. Shall we begin?”

  In the communications booth, a technician spoke into his pencil mike. “TC stereo. Time and resistance … Auto ready. Tone interpolation on interlock.”

  Another technician said, “ARP interlock now! Speed set at seven and a half. All positive functions standing by. Sunset!”

  “Go.”

  Lacombe and David Laughlin, clad in white jumpsuits, also stood by the console of the synthesizer. Sitting now before the double keyboard was a young man who resembled William Shakespeare. He was obviously very nervous, perspiring heavily, wiping his face and hands on a handkerchief, clearly aware of the tremendous responsibility that lay upon him.

  The master of ceremonies said softly to him, “Okay. Start with the tone.”

  Shakespeare played the first note.

  The booth technician spoke into his pencil microphone. “Tang … go!”

  An amber light appeared on the giant scoreboard, fading and disappearing as the note floated away across the canyon.

  “Up a full tone,” the M.C. ordered, and Shakespeare sounded the second note.

  The scoreboard lit up a deep pink.

  “Down a major third.”

  A new note and a new color. Violet, this time.

  “Now drop an octave.”

  The fourth note echoed and a beautiful, deep blue played across the scoreboard.

  “Cool blue … Go,” the booth technician ordered.

  “Up a perfect fifth,” the M.C. said.

  The last note sounded and faded away. The scoreboard flashed a brilliant red and faded.

  “Nothing. Nothing at all,” the team leader said.

  The M.C. said to Shakespeare, “Give me a tone.”

  A note sounded, a color flashed, and the five-note-five-color sequence was repeated, according to the M.C.’s instructions.

  In the booth, the technician ordered, “Re to the second. Me to the third. Do the first. Do one-half one. Sol to the fifth.”

  The notes and the colors faded away across the arena, and there was still no response from the three objects. They just hovered downfield, flashing and blinking inscrutably.

  Lacombe stepped up to the console and said, “Encore une fois. Again. One more time.”

  The five-note sequence sounded and echoed through the night and the five colors played and danced across the scoreboard.

  “Speak to me, speak to me,” the team leader pleaded.

  “Plus vite,” Lacombe commanded. “Plus vite.”

  Shakespeare did as he was ordered. This time the notes and t
he colors cascaded around the arena.

  High above on their ledge, Jillian Guiler hummed the five-note sequence through twice. “I know that,” she told Neary. Oh, my God, she thought. It’s Barry’s song. Jill was almost in shock, tears in her eyes, but Roy didn’t notice.

  Below, Lacombe was saying, “Faster, Jean Claude. Faster. Plus vite. Faster.” He started walking down the landing strip toward the hovering vehicles. “Plus vite. Plus vite.”

  The sweat was really pouring off Shakespeare now, dripping onto the keys of the synthesizer. He was playing the notes very fast and loud now, and the scoreboard was zooming from amber to pink to purple to blue to red.

  Lacombe walked up the strip to within one hundred and fifty yards of the hovering, nonresponding vehicles. The booth technician dialed the synthesizer all the way up and the notes reverberated hugely off the walls of the canyon.

  The Frenchman had become very impatient. “Qu’est-ce que ce passe?” he asked the objects. “Allez, allez, allez. Allons-y. Lets go.” Lacombe was shouting over the Moog, making the five-note hand movements.

  Lacombe waved his hands at the hovering vehicles and called to the musician, “Plus vite, plus vite,” then headed back toward the console.

  Shakespeare was playing his brains out and the scoreboard was flashing through the colors of the spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared and everything in between.

  All of a sudden the vehicles responded. Not in sounds but in colors. They began to repeat the colors on the scoreboard. Each object was repeating separately the colors flashing across the board. Shakespeare stopped playing. As the notes faded away across the canyon, there was utter silence. For a long moment, all they could hear was the wind blowing down the canyon.

  Then Lacombe pointed to Shakespeare and said, “Come on. Keep going, keep going.”

  The team leader exhorted his man on. “Kick that mule, boy!”

  The musician/engineer began playing very, very quickly and the scoreboard and the three vehicles picked up the action, changing colors in the same variation in total synchrony. The men around him were all sweating profusely, too, concentrating fiercely as the objects flashed their colors. They were filled with joy. In fact, they were beyond joy. In a state that no humans had previously experienced or described. For this was the first contact, the first contact in recorded history.

  And suddenly the three objects stopped responding. They just flew off. In three different directions. One shot straight up and disappeared, lights off, apparently, into a large cloud. The other two swooped over the edge of the canyon and out of sight.

  The music stopped. The scoreboard went to black. Silence. The wind.

  And then the arena went crazy. Everyone began applauding and screaming. These restrained, laid-back scientists and technicians were jumping up and down, hugging each other, shaking hands, pounding each other on the backs. The stadium lights came back on full, and the men in their jumpsuits and civilian clothes started coming out of their cubicles. Everything, it seemed, was over.

  The booth technicians came down and sought out Lacombe and the team leader.

  “Beautiful,” he said. “Beautiful.”

  Lacombe spoke to David Laughlin in English. “I am very happy tonight.”

  The team leader shook all their hands, including Shakespeare’s. “Congratulations. Not Merle Haggard, but it was great!”

  Above this scene of jubilation, on their rocky ledge, Roy was completely elated and Jillian in tears. “I know that sound,” she kept on saying. “I just know it. I’ve heard it, I know that sound.”

  Below, in one of the radar communications cubicles, the instruments started showing targets. The deep dish radar scoops had stopped sweeping again, focusing on the mountain above Neary and Jillian. Something was happening in the sky beyond Devil’s Tower.

  On the floor of the stadium, one of the technicians approached the Frenchman, saying, “Mr. Lacombe,” and pointed up.

  Lacombe and Laughlin walked away looking up at the sky.

  “What is it?” David Laughlin asked. “What’s happening?”

  “Je ne sais pas.”

  Roy and Jill turned, looking back and up toward where the men below were now all looking and pointing. Then they saw it, too.

  A number of large cumulus clouds had formed in the sky over the mountain. Within the clouds was an extraordinary display of flashing pyrotechnics—an electrical storm different from anything that they had seen before and frightening in its scale and turbulence.

  Simultaneously, and without words, Neary and Jillian felt that they must get away from the sky, so together they started the perilous scramble down. Jillian was terrified. The flashing clouds suddenly reminded her of the awful day that Barry was taken.

  The clouds had come down very close to the top of the mountain. There seemed to be more of them now. Suddenly zooming out of the clouds, one of the brilliantly lighted objects swept down across the arena, stopping just where it had hovered before. It hovered again and then suddenly flashed all its lights. Red. Three times.

  It was, evidently, a signal of some kind.

  The largest part of the cloud formation flashed red three times. Then it flashed white and blue three times.

  There was a brief pause during which all the technicians looked at each other uneasily. What the hell next?

  Then the invasion began.

  Out of the clouds burst a formation of fifty pinpoints of light that swiftly materialized into flaming convex planar shapes and dazzling colors. And tricks. These ultra-performance vehicles were performing low-level stunts for their audience.

  Three of them stopped in midair and fell toward the ground. Just when it seemed that there must be a tremendous impact, they came to a complete stop and hovered, causing a huge displacement of air that thundered and roared and rumbled across the canyon.

  The objects were making no sounds by themselves now, but their gravity-defying maneuvers were creating thunder that rattled the cubicles, the instruments within, short-circuiting several of the computers, and everyone’s brains. The lights! The heat! So hot that some of the paper debris caught fire as the vehicles carried out their low, swooshing passes over the field.

  They played games. Two formations headed breakneck straight ahead toward each other. Just as a massive head-on collision seemed inevitable, the objects somehow filtered through each other, sweeping up, barrel-rolling and swooping back down again.

  Gradually, a new thing—resembling the bottom of an electric griddle, bright red and blinking—moved out over the base at an agonizingly slow five miles per hour. It was traveling very low and sucking up—apparently magnetically—everything loose that was metal: clipboards, pens, spectacles, and headsets right off the technicians’ heads, cigarette lighters out of their pockets, soda pop cans. One fellow grabbed his mouth as a loose filling flew out of his dental work and stuck to the bottom of the griddle fryer.

  Suddenly, the vehicle flashed a blue color, and everything it had sucked up was let go and fell in a pile onto the ground.

  Lacombe walked casually over after it had released its booty and stuck his hand up. The Frenchman walked directly under the strange thing, reached up and actually touched its bottom. It was not hot, but it must have been ticklish, for as soon as Lacombe touched it, it jumped up, scattering the technicians with their cameras and heat-sensory devices and other instruments who had followed Lacombe, and flew off toward the heavens so suddenly that it left behind an enormous thunderclap, which smashed several cubicle windows and scared the hell out of everyone.

  Neary was more thrilled than scared. “I’ve got to get closer,” he told her.

  “I know you do,” she said. “This is close enough for me.”

  “I’ve got to get down there. Won’t you come just a little bit further?”

  “No, Roy. I’ll wait here.”

  “I gotta get down there,” he said almost apologetically.

  “I know,” Jill said. “I really know. I really know what you wa
nt to do.”

  They looked at each other closely, sadly. And for the first time since they had known each other they kissed.

  Then they parted.

  Jillian climbed thirty feet back up the cliff to a small wooded area where she felt she might be more protected and would not be seen by the figures below.

  Neary started the long, dangerous scramble down.

  26

  As Roy clambered down the edge of the mountain, he noticed that the display was over. As though some signal had been given, all the objects receded into the night.

  Now in the background, coming out of the low clouds, a hundred points of light flared up around the entire twenty-mile perimeter of the box canyon. Although these light points were hovering at least ten miles away, Neary could tell they were large nuts and bolts vehicles, just hanging there, seeming to guard the perimeter of the base. Now they rose up higher in the sky and dimmed their lights. Roy could barely make out the black shapes behind the glow.

  Things got stranger still.

  Down in the stadium, everyone was exhausted now, picking themselves up stunned silly. They had all been going through total culture shock, and each man was trying to deal with it in his own way.

  There was no conversation. The wind had dropped off completely now, and the silence was total.

  Neary had kept coming all this time and was now on the floor of the mountain, edging his way toward the perimeter of the base when something made him stop and look up.

  From behind the mountain and from inside a cloud, something began coming out of the cloud that was completely black. It was not only black but it was huge. So huge that Roy could not comprehend its size. As the huge black shape came over the top of the mountain, blotting out the moon and casting a shadow that crawled over everybody in the canyon, Neary thought he was going to pass out.

  Inside the base, the master of ceremonies murmured, “Oh, my God!”

  “Holy shit!” Laughlin exclaimed, not hearing himself.

  Lacombe stared, transfixed. “Mon Dieu!” he said, realizing that if they could measure this shape, this thing, that it would be over a mile wide and the length of it, covering the entire sky, was still unknown because the end of it was not in sight.