Close Encounters of the Third Kind Page 16

  Suddenly it turned on. A surgical sliver of light circumscribed the underside of the thing, and then something opened—some round circle of light exploded.

  It was the size of a city, Neary thought. The top of it looked like an oil refinery, with huge tanks and pipes and working lights everywhere. The phantom mass, sliding across the canyon, seemed somehow old and dirty. It looked junky, like an old city or an immense old ship that had been sailing the skies for thousands of years. Neither Roy nor any of the scientists or technicians—nor anyone else on earth, for that matter—had ever seen or even imagined anything like it.

  As it came over the base, a huge explosion of light arced out behind it and separated into what looked like a thousand brilliant fireflies, except that each “firefly” was a small (by comparison) vehicle acting like a tugboat. Each “tugboat” flashed different colors and the thousand of them together formed a scaffold of many-colored lights onto which the phantom mass—two miles long and a mile wide—seemed to settle. The mass made a slight list as the scaffold—crossbeams blinking colors—escorted it to a landing area of its own far downfield.

  Neary had vaulted over the six-foot retaining wall and was now wedged in among the technicians and scientists, all of whom were simply stunned by what they were seeing.

  The scaffolding guided the mass down, shattering about a mile of the landing coordinate lights. It was so big that when it settled the leading edge of the mass formed a roof over the top of the entire camp.

  The mass had created its own negative gravity field, and within moments everyone and everything became 40 percent weightless. This cheered everyone. They started bouncing and cavorting buoyantly in the air, some of the more athletic doing cartwheels and somersaults, hanging in the air like Dr. J., their colleagues in jumpsuits sliding and bouncing beneath them with their cameras, snapping pictures of the whole incredible thing.

  Lacombe and the team leader were the first to recover partially. They decided to move the synthesizer, which was mounted on casters, closer to the mass. After they had rolled it about seventy-five feet downfield, the members of the team, still feeling otherworldly and unglued, plugged themselves in again.

  The master of ceremonies spoke as dispassionately as he could into his pencil microphone. “All departments at operational during this phase signify by beeping twice.”

  Two tones rang across the canyon, startling the utter silence.

  The booth technician asked, “Is audio analyzer ready? On a standby?”

  The master of ceremonies, regaining some equilibrium now that he was doing something, said, “If everything is ready here on the dark side of the moon, play the five tones.”

  Shakespeare played the five notes very slowly.

  There was no response from the phantom mass.

  “Encore,” Lacombe ordered.

  The five notes sounded through the night.

  The great ship made a sound. It sounded like a pig grunting.

  “Must have been something she et,” the team leader said nervously.

  The musician/engineer started playing the five notes again.

  No response at all this time.

  “Again,” the team leader said.

  Shakespeare started playing.

  Suddenly the last two notes were completed by the great mother ship. The noise was incredible. It blew the men back on their heels and shattered all the windows in all the cubicles. The booth technicians ducked the flying glass, and some were cut, but too involved even to notice.

  “Okay,” the team leader said, after a moment. “Play it again.”

  The synthesizer sounded and the ship responded. This time lights—matching the scoreboard’s—flashed brilliantly across its surface.

  Jillian Guiler knew she could not take any more of this alone. Frightened as she was, she felt it better to try to come down and find Neary. Jill picked up her little satchel and her Instamatic camera and started climbing down, following the path that Roy had taken.

  The master of ceremonies said to Shakespeare and the booth technician, “Give her six quavers, then pause.”

  The musician played the notes.

  The ship echoed these notes and then played a group of new notes that none of them had ever heard before.

  The booth technician said, “She gave us four quavers. A group of five quavers. A group of four semiquavers.”

  Shakespeare imitated the ship’s notes.

  The ship added five new notes and five different colors.

  Inside the computer cubicles, the technicians were in a state of Nirvana. The ship was teaching them their musical and chromal vocabulary.

  As the exchanges increased in complexity and speed, the computers took over from Shakespeare. He took his hands away from the keys and the Moog was played by the computers, like a player piano.

  “Take everything from the lady,” the M.C. instructed the booth technician. “Follow her pattern note for note.”

  The mother ship exploded with sound and color and the Moog, in interlock with the computer and the color scoreboard, was playing right back. For several ecstatic minutes the great ship, the Moog, and the scoreboard were actually jamming, like some sort of cosmic rock and light show.

  It was very strange music—at one moment melodic and the next atonal, sometime jazzy, then a little country western, and the next moment something so grotesque and unmusical to their ears that they had to turn away.

  Neary was smiling. He did not notice that Jill was now working her way through the crowd. Some of the technicians were clapping; some holding their heads. Lacombe had a dazed, glazed expression.

  Suddenly, the ship stopped. It gave a few grunts, and then went silent. All its lights went out.

  The base was deadly still and dark for a few moments.

  And then the ship started opening.

  The whole bottom end of it, beginning with a circumscribed sliver of surgical light, opened into a furnace of light.

  Everyone turned away. They put on their dark glasses and turned back. But even through their sunglasses it was hard to look directly into that burning light.

  The thing opened more.

  That was too much. Everyone moved back fast. They moved away from the unnerving light, which was about one hundred and fifty yards wide.

  The opening kept expanding.

  First Lacombe, then Neary, and then the others stepped forward again. The white light gave off an intense heat, and then stopped.

  Inside the bright heat they could see some movement.

  The light was so bright that it flared out in all directions. Now there seemed to be eight different figures materializing out of the light. The white light devoured their forms into pipe cleaner shapes.

  Then they were out of the ship and out of the light.

  Lacombe walked toward them.

  He—and the others—now saw that they were … men.

  “I am Claude Lacombe,” the Frenchman said to the group.

  The men appeared utterly dazed. They were dressed in naval flak jackets of the forties. They were all very young and several of them were holding leather helmets and flight goggles in their hands.

  They continued to walk forward numbly, in complete shock.

  The first man stopped, half saluted, and said, “Frank Taylor. Lieutenant J.G. United States Navy Reserve. 064199.”

  The M.C. stepped forward and shook his hand. “Lieutenant, welcome home. This way to debriefing.”

  Two men led the lieutenant away.

  Neary was having difficulty taking all this in. He noticed for the first time a large lightboard with perhaps a hundred black-and-white photographs fixed to it.

  “Harry Ward Craig. Captain, United States Navy, 043431.”

  “Captain, would you come right this way?”

  “Welcome back, Navy,” the team leader said. “Welcome back.”

  “Craig, Harry Ward,” a man in a civilian suit said. “Captain, United States Navy, 043431,” another said, consulting a clipboard.
“Disappeared off Chicken Shoals. Flight Number 19.”

  The first civilian went over to the lightboard and put a piece of tape over Craig’s picture.

  “Matthew McMichael. Lieutenant, United States Naval Reserve, 0909411.”

  “Lieutenant. Good to have you back.”

  Now more and more figures were emerging out of the intense light.

  One of the civilians, staggered by it all, said to the team leader, “They haven’t even aged! Einstein was right.”

  “Einstein was probably one of them.”

  There were now more than two hundred dazed returnees coming out of the great carrier. Immediately corralled by technicians, medical personnel, and some civilian officials, they were taken to the windowless cubicles. On top of each cubicle, Neary noticed, was a sling and hook. He guessed that the people, cubicles and all, would be airlifted away by the big army helicopters when all this was over.

  As Roy turned back, he saw Jillian Guiler rushing forward. A tiny figure about three feet tall was running out of the light. It was Barry.

  Jillian was laughing and crying as she charged forward. She embraced the boy, crying, “Yes! Yes!”

  Barry hugged back. Neary, standing away from them, was shaking from excitement.

  Jillian carried the little boy off to the side. They sat together on a little table, and Barry said, “I went up in the air and I saw our house.”

  “I saw you going up in the air,” Jill told him. “Did you see me running after you?”

  “Yeah.”

  Roy Neary walked over to Lacombe, who had not noticed him until now. The Frenchman was delighted that Neary had made it this far.

  “Monsieur Neary,” he said, “what do you want?”

  “I just want to know it’s really happening.”

  Lacombe thought that just the right answer, because the Frenchman was convinced that Neary was a critical factor in this historic event. He left Neary standing there, looking at the great ship, and went over to where David Laughlin and several of the Mayflower Project officials were gathered.

  “We have to speak about Mr. Neary’s case,” Lacombe began in French.

  As Laughlin translated, they all noticed that the ship’s huge opening was starting to close.

  Barry saw it too. “Are they going away?” he asked his mother.

  “Yes, they’re going away, Barry. Are you going to stay with me?” Jillian asked him.

  “Yes.”

  “Forever and ever till you grow up.”

  The little boy just laughed delightedly.

  Lacombe, Laughlin, and the Mayflower officials were having a heated argument, all talking simultaneously.

  Laughlin put up his hand for quiet, and said, “He says these are ordinary people under extraordinary circumstances. They are not special cases.”

  Lacombe spoke rapidly again in French.

  Translating, Laughlin said, “These people have given up their lives, their families to come all the way to this meeting. They have been implanted with the knowledge of this place. Their initiative and confidence brought them here. Now it is very important that Mr. Neary, as quickly as possible and voluntarily, be made a part of this project.”

  The ship’s opening had closed completely.

  Barry started to cry. “Good-bye,” he called. “Good-bye.” He waved, and Jillian started to cry, too.

  Apparently, Lacombe had made his case successfully, because the Frenchman left the group and approached Roy again. He shook the bewildered American’s hand, and said, “Monsieur Neary, I envy you.”

  At that moment, the great ship opened up again with an explosion of light and sound. BING-BONG it went. BING-BONG, as if calling for attention. All the metal in the base rattled at those brutal tones.

  Something was coalescing again in the fiery interior of the star ship. Swirling bursts of energy were coming together, twining in helix forms until they seemed to … jell.

  A figure stood there. Then another. Then a third.

  They took a step forward. A single note of sound shot out of the carrier ship like the blare of a thousand trumpets. The three figures took another step forward.

  They were immense, eight or nine feet tall. Terribly thin. Too thin for the inner mechanics of the human body, except they resembled humans because they moved on things like legs and waved things like arms.

  Jillian picked up a protesting Barry and started moving swiftly away toward the rear of the base. She wasn’t taking any chances again. She’d thought she could face anything now that she had Barry, but these creatures were too much.

  They took another step forward and then stopped and touched each other. When they touched, they started to glow all over, light was shooting out from their figures. They stood there, touching, swaying, glowing, and then one of them seemed to reach out an incredible long armlike thing and pointed it at Roy.

  Neary seemed confused and moved several steps away from the armlike thing. But it followed, seeming to hone in on him. It was definitely pointing at him.

  Now Lacombe was also pointing at Roy, nodding at him encouragingly.

  The M.C. said, “Mr. Neary, I am told we can count on your complete cooperation. What type of blood do you have?”

  “I don’t have the slightest idea,” Neary said.

  The M.C. led Roy over to one of the cubicles. They entered it.

  “What is your date of birth?”

  “December 4, 1945.”

  “Have you ever been inoculated against smallpox, diphtheria … ? Is there any history of liver disease in your family?”

  Jill, carrying Barry in her arms and her small satchel over one shoulder, had left the base camp and was climbing back to the mountain when she heard a new sound below her and turned to look back down.

  From within the huge space vehicle a great twittering sound emerged. The space within seemed to convulse, writhing with energy. Small forms began to emerge and make their way through the fiery opening.

  They seemed about three feet high, humanoid in that they had arms and legs and a kind of bulbous head. But each figure was hard to distinguish because it was silhouetted against the fiery yellow-white furnace of the mother craft. Their arms and legs were incredibly flexible in a way no human could imitate.

  They were infinitely extensible, too, as Lacombe soon discovered. One of the tiny visitors wrapped an arm around him and the arm kept growing longer until it completely encircled the Frenchmans waist.

  At first, there was a certain tentativeness about the visitors. They seemed to be testing their shapes against those of the humans, but they also seemed to be testing the reception the humans would give them.

  Touch was the key. They touched everywhere, everything. And since touch is something humans react to differently, some of the jumpsuited technicians recoiled and some responded in friendlier fashion.

  Inside one of the larger cubicles, which had been designed to resemble a small chapel, a strange service was taking place. Twelve men, in red jumpsuits, holding helmets, with life-support packs on their backs, were kneeling in front of another man dressed in a white jumpsuit.

  “May the Lord be praised at all times,” the priest intoned.

  “May God grant us a happy journey,” the astronauts responded.

  “Lord, show us your ways.”

  “And lead us along your path.”

  “Oh, that our lives be bent.”

  “And keeping our precepts.”

  In another cubicle, Neary was now dressing in a red jumpsuit similar to the astronauts’.

  “Mr. Neary,” the M.C. was saying, “our staff has prepared a few basic documents that need your signature. This first just states that you have requested special status within the Mayflower Project of your own volition and have not been coerced into participating.”

  Outside, the touching was not only general now, but specific. The visitors were feeling human groins, human faces, human backsides. If the human didn’t like it, they moved on to someone who did. And if the hu
man responded by touching them back, the humanoid visitors seemed to swoon for an instant, blinking through a dozen colors and vibrating from dark to bright.

  Once they realized they were among “friends,” the humanoids turned loose in an orgy of touching, palpating, feeling, stroking.

  On a ledge above this extraordinary happening, Jillian and Barry watched. Jillian dug into her satchel and took out her little camera. She started snapping away. Barry was giggling again, telling his mother about his little friends below.

  Lacombe seemed to be a center of general humanoid affection, probably because he was responding tactilely, stroking when stroked, touching when touched. He was laughing. David Laughlin, beside him, was also similarly engaged.

  Inside the chapel, the priest was still intoning, “God has given you his angels’ charge over you. Grant these pilgrims, we pray, a happy journey.” But the twelve astronauts’ attention had wandered to the large window. They could see and hear snatches of the extraordinary goings-on outside. Not even their years of training had prepared them for all this. To a man, they were all very frightened.

  Inside Neary’s cubicle, the M.C. was still going on. “This last document is merely a formality. You see, we have a possible problem in the area of canon and common jurisprudence outside of the parameters of our astronomy. The case could be made that you are, in effect, technically speaking … dead. This paper just certifies that should such a judgment be rendered, that you will accept it. It’s merely a formality.”

  Roy didn’t know what the hell the guy was talking about or what papers he found himself signing.

  He caught sight of the twelve astronauts filing out of the chapel, and then he and the master of ceremonies left their cubicle and joined the procession. The M.C. kept on briefing him feverishly, giving him a cassette player and a satchel full of tapes. A medical technician was listening to his heart through a stethoscope while they walked, and someone else was checking the electrodes in his suit and testing the portable transmitter that was hooked up through a battery pack to the computers in the medical cubicle.

  Now the priest was chanting again. “By the guidance of a star, grant these pilgrims, we pray, a happy journey and peaceful days so that with Your divine angel as their guide they may reach their destination and finally come to the haven of everlasting salvation. God, who led Your servant Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldeans and kept him safe in all his wanderings, may it please You, we pray, also to watch over these servants of Yours.”