Close Encounters of the Third Kind Read online

  Most of the light comes from radar screens that sweep the sky over Indiana’s airspace. Here there is no day, no night, only an artificial gloom and the bright radar glowing its electronic picture of what is happening in the real world overhead.

  The nation’s air traffic passes in review, noted on radar, interrogated by radio, announcing itself, making proper identification, receiving approval and advice, and either landing in Indiana or, more often, passing above at speeds nearing 600 miles per hour to its destination elsewhere.

  False as this dim world is, it presents what every air traffic controller hopes is an accurate picture of real events. He hopes that every jumbo jet, every low-flying Piper Cub, is duly noted and neatly notched into an arrangement that assures everyone safe passage through the state.

  That is the controllers hope. That is not what always happens.

  Harry Crain was working midwatch that week. On midwatch there were only five or six men at the radar scopes. Harry usually moved behind them, pacing back and forth or resting occasionally on a tall stool, his headset connected by a long coiled wire to the radio bands in use, a small curving plastic tube that picked up his voice and conveyed it by microphone to the real world high above his head.

  This night, four controllers made up the front-line team. They sat side by side, in pairs, all in open-necked white shirts, the sleeves rolled up one fold, each pair watching their scope. Above their heads, loudspeakers squawked and rasped the usual radio air traffic drone, sparse now because in the airspace over Indianapolis it was as black a night as it was in the air traffic control center below.

  “Air Traffic Control,” a pilot’s voice came in. “You have any traffic for Aireast 31?”

  Harry Crain looked intently at one of the scopes. There were only three full data blocks and one partial data block. The two going in the same direction were fifteen miles apart; the third going in the other direction was a great distance away from Aireast. The rest of the scope was clean.

  Harry cut his mike into the circuit. “Aireast 31, negative. Only traffic I have is a TWA L-1011 your six o’clock position, fifteen miles and an Allegheny DC-9 your twelve o’clock fifty miles. Stand by one. Let me take a look at the broadband.”

  Harry reached up and pushed a button. The radar scope changed from narrow band computer radar to broadband normal radar. Harry took a quick look, pushed the button again, then another button. He looked at the primary picture in computerized form. There was a non-beacon target in Aireast’s vicinity. Harry peered at the scope more intently just as the pilot broadcast again: “Aireast 31 has traffic two o’clock three to five miles, slightly above and descending.”

  One of the controllers leaned over to look and grunted surprised confirmation.

  “Aireast 31, roger,” Harry said. “I have a primary target about that position now. We have no known high altitude traffic. Let me check with low.”

  Harry turned to his interphone man and said, “Call low and see if they know who this—”

  “Center, Aireast 31,” the pilot came back on, cutting through Harry. “Traffic’s not in low. He’s one o’clock now, still above me and descending.”

  “Can you tell aircraft type?”

  The pilot’s voice was matter-of-fact, considering the information he was about to report. “Negative. No distant outline. The target is brilliant. Has the brightest anticollision lights I’ve ever seen—alternating white to red and the colors are striking.”

  The other sector controllers were now looking and listening. The coordinator reached up, pushed a button, called someone and mumbled indistinctly.

  Harry sat back on his high stool for a moment and eyed the radar scopes. “TWA 517,” he called to the other aircraft. “Can you confirm?”

  A different voice came over the loudspeaker. “Center, this is TWA 517. Traffic now looks like extra bright landing lights. I thought Aireast had his landing lights on.”

  The coordinator said, “What do we have here, Harry?”

  “Say again, TWA 517,” Aireast asked.

  The TWA pilot enunciated slowly and clearly. “Do you have your landing lights on?”

  “Negative.”

  Harry broke in. “TWA 517, Indianapolis Center. Aireast is your twelve o’clock position, fifteen miles same direction and altitude. Ident, please.” He turned to his coordinator, saying, “Aireast claims he has unusual traffic almost at his altitude. I don’t know who it is.”

  The TWA identification appeared on the screen and Harry asked the pilot if he had the Aireast jet in sight.

  “Affirmative.”

  “TWA 517, do you have Aireast’s traffic in sight?”

  “Yes,” the pilot said cautiously. “We have it now and have been watching it.”

  “What does traffic appear to be doing?”

  “Just what Aireast 31 said.”

  Aireast 31 cut in. “He’s in a descent about fifteen hundred feet below me. Wait a second … Stand by one … Okay, Center. Aireast 31 traffic has turned and is coming right for our windshield. We’re turning right and leaving flight level three fifty.”

  Harry Crain jumped off his stool and everyone in the dim room tensed.

  The coordinator turned and said, “Get on the phone to Wright-Patterson and see what the hell they could be testing up there.”

  “Aireast 31, roger,” Harry said at the same time. “Descend and maintain flight level three one zero … Allegheny DC-9, turn thirty degrees right immediately … traffic twelve o’clock, two zero miles, Aireast jet descending to FL-310.”

  The Aireast pilot, still remarkably low key, said, “Luminous traffic now in angular descent and exhibiting some nonballistic motions.”

  Harry and his coordinator just looked at each other and said nothing.

  “Okay, Center,” Aireast said conversationally. “Traffic is coming on strong. Ultra bright and really moving.”

  “This is TWA 517,” the other pilot said. “We’re going to go a little right to keep away from traffic also.”

  “TWA 517, roger,” Harry Crain said. “Deviations to right of course approved.”

  “Center, Aireast 31 is out of three one zero and traffic has passed off our ten o’clock, five hundred yards and really moving.”

  The team supervisor, who had moved in the dim room to a point just behind Harry, spoke for the first time. “Ask them if they want to report officially.”

  “Aireast 31, roger,” Harry said. “Report flight level three one zero. TWA 517, do you want to report a UFO?”

  There was only static for several moments. Then: “Negative … We don’t want to report.”

  “Aireast 31, do you wish to report a UFO?”

  More static.

  “Negative. We don’t want to report one of those either.”

  “Aireast 31,” Harry Crain persisted. “Do you wish to file a report of any kind?”

  “I wouldn’t know what kind of report to file, Center.”

  Harry smiled and started to relax. “Me neither,” he said. “I’ll try to track traffic to destination.”

  “And show us at level three one zero now,” the pilot said, and then added, almost as an afterthought, “The stews in the back tell me that passengers were snapping pictures of traffic during that close pass.”

  Harry Crain turned to his team supervisor and said softly, “Those I’d like to see.” Then, speaking again into the microphone, he said, “Allegheny Triple four turn right to intercept J-8. Resume normal navigation. TWA is level at three one.”

  The team supervisor left Harry, disappearing again into the dimness. The tension sifted out of the center.

  Harry’s coordinator asked, “What’s in the book about this kind of thing?”

  “Hell if I know,” Harry Crain said. “The Air Force started writing it thirty years ago. Let them finish it.”

  4

  Aireast 31 passed over Roy Neary’s home about nine o’clock that night. Its jet engines sounded only faintly inside the house, and none of the occu
pants seemed to notice.

  Roy had confiscated the family room of the suburban house and made it into a workroom that looked like a hobby room run by the Salvation Army. Mechanized and electrical inventions hung and lay abandoned along the walls and in the corners, and there were enough adult toys lying around to rob the children of their childhood.

  The most prominent object in the room was an HO gauge railroad laid out on the family ping pong table. The tracks ran through elaborate Tyrolean terrain, complete with mountains and lakes.

  That night Roy Neary and his eight-year-old son, Brad, were alone in the room, sitting side by side. Roy was trying to help Brad with his math. Brad, a pile of arithmetic books at his feet, was considerably less interested in addition than in electric trains.

  Neary had carefully explained to Ronnie, his wife, who enjoyed a game of ping pong now and then, that a model railroad was a necessity when there were growing boys in the family.

  “A necessity for the father,” she had pointed out. “Like ping pong is for the mother.”

  Roy had finessed the potential confrontation by promising to dismantle the railroads on weekends, but somehow, over the months, instead of being dismantled, it had grown in complexity, until it now took most of Neary’s leisure time simply to keep it running.

  “How about a drawbridge over that underpass?” Brad asked.

  Neary frowned at his son. “I thought you were supposed to be doing your homework.”

  “I hate arithmetic.” The eight year old threw down his pencil and stared challengingly at his father.

  “You’re not trying.”

  “Train engineers don’t need arithmetic.”

  Neary picked up the pencil and put it back in the boy’s hand. “Suppose,” he said, “the stationmaster assigns you eighteen cars. Then he says, ‘Make up two trains with the same number of cars in each.’ What do you do?”

  Brad threw the pencil down again and reached into his rear pocket. Out came a Texas Instruments pocket calculator. “It won’t matter,” the boy said. “ ’Cause I’ll have one of these.”

  Roy sighed and looked heavenward. The long moment of silence between them was fractured by Toby Neary, six years old and a tornado, who carved a path of destruction into the room and yanked to a halt in front of his father. Toby was very angry. His blue eyes blazed, and he stuck a not-very-clean finger in Roy’s face.

  “You stole my luminous paint,” Toby shouted.

  “I didn’t steal anything.”

  “I don’t steal stuff of yours,” Toby went on relentlessly.

  Roy was distracted from this argument when he noticed Ronnie moving slowly into the room, eyes shut, hands out before her, groping the air like a sleepwalker.

  She was, normally, a whimsical woman, with long blond hair and an oval face that came to a soft, pointed chin. Her eyes were usually wide open, often under brows raised at one of her husband’s weird ideas. Now she was moving like a blind person, and a miniature replica of her seemed to be tagging along as a caboose. Three-year-old Sylvia had hold of Ronnie’s long skirt and was lifting her feet up high and putting them down ever so slowly, her eyes shut tight, too.

  “Ronnie,” Neary started to say.

  “Brad,” Ronnie said, ignoring her husband, her eyes still shut, her face expressionless. “Brad, here’s an arithmetic problem for you. If there are seven days in a week and your mother is home all seven of them, how many days are left to your mother?”

  He didn’t need the calculator. “Zero!”

  “Ronnie,” Neary said again. He didn’t like where this was going. “Open your eyes.”

  “Why?” she asked. “I can walk through the whole house like this. Make the beds, put on the coffee, feed the kids. All without opening my eyes. I’m like Toby’s hamster in his cage.”

  “No, really,” Roy said. “Open your eyes. Watch this.”

  Ronnie’s eyes opened slowly. Humming tunelessly—an indication he was pleased with himself—Neary pushed a button on the model railroad’s control panel. The children and their mother watched a tiny sailboat stir into motion, gliding across a mirrorlike lake. It sailed closer to a railroad bridge, over which a train was about to roar. But as the train reached the bridge, it stopped.

  The drawbridge swiveled sideways on a center pivot. With tiny tacking movements, the sailboat whirred through the open space, and the drawbridge started to swivel shut. Without waiting for it to close, the train whipped forward and catapulted neatly into space, crashing down on the lake with a metallic clatter.

  Neary’s grin disappeared. “Hmm.”

  Ronnie’s stare lifted from the train crash to her husbands face. “Gee, Roy,” she said in a flat tone. “That was … really … great.”

  “It worked awhile ago.”

  “Um-hm.” Her level stare—her eyes were an even fiercer blue than Toby’s—never lifted. “I give this railroad two more weeks,” she said. “I bet it ends up in the basement with the auto-tennis and the electric toilet and all the rest.”

  “That’s not fair.”

  “Okay, not all,” she granted. “That worm ranch you had in here. At least you dumped that into the back yard and not down in the cellar.” She picked up the newspaper and started paging through it, looking for something, anything. “Jesus, can’t we do something? I’m serving time in this house.”

  “We got out last weekend,” Neary offered.

  “Walking across the street to the Taylors’ is not getting out of the house.”

  “You get out every day when you take Brad to school,” Neary suggested.

  “It’s as fully a rewarding an experience as when I take Toby to school. Or take Sylvia to the supermarket. Or take the car to get snow tires switched to regulars.”

  Neary winced inwardly. “You’re painting a very dull picture,” he said.

  “Give me a different brush.”

  “Listen, if you think my job with the power company is some kind of glamour life …” Neary trailed off, wondering how angry she really was. Ronnie had the ability to burn out her anger quickly. “Listen,” he told her, “when you’ve fixed one burned-out transformer, you fixed them all.”

  Ronnie stared blankly at him. “I think it’s that new thing they’re always talking about,” she said.

  “What new thing?”

  “Life-style. I think we have to change ours.”

  “That’s for rich people, honey,” Roy said. “They just call up the store and order a whole new life-style.”

  “Maybe it isn’t life-style,” Ronnie said. “Maybe it’s that other thing the magazines talk about … quality of life.”

  “Sounds like a soap opera.”

  “There has to be more to life than stalking the supermarket aisles looking for three rolls of paper towels for a dollar.”

  Neary was silent for a long moment. She had never butted him about how much he earned, or whether they had enough money to live on. He’d always assumed they did okay.

  “I got a raise in January,” he began cautiously.

  She shook her head. “Wrong track. I’m not talking about money. I don’t mind searching for specials in the store. As long as something special is going on somewhere in my life. And, Roy,” she added, “you know me. I’m easy.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m not asking for a week in Acapulco. I mean I’m so starved for something to happen, I’d go bananas if you brought me home a flower. One perfect rose.”

  Neary winced again. “I always forget that.”

  “When you crave change the way I do,” Ronnie said, “you’ll settle for anything. New potholders. Going down to the Hertz office and watching them rent Pintos. Calling time and weather and dial-a-joke.”

  “Listen,” Toby said, intent on getting back to important things. “He took my luminous paints.”

  Ronnie folded the newspaper to the movie section and stuck it in front of her husband. “Play through this on your calculator,” she suggested.

  Neary glanced down at the
page. “Hey! Guess what? Pinocchio’s in town.”

  “Who?” Brad asked.

  Ronnie had opened her handbag and was examining her face in a compact mirror. “I smile too much,” she said. “My mouth is thinning out.”

  “Pinocchio,” Neary said. “You boys have never seen Pinocchio. Are you guys in luck!”

  Brad frowned. “You promised Goofy Golf this weekend.”

  For once, Toby was in agreement. “That’s right. Goofy Golf.”

  “But Pinocchio is so great,” Roy said.

  “Thinning out,” Ronnie repeated aloud to herself, “and turning mean. Just like my mother’s mouth.”

  Brad produced a great sigh. “Who wants to see some dumb cartoon rated G for kids?”

  “How old are you?” his father demanded.

  “Eight.”

  “Wanna be nine?”

  “Yes.”

  “Were seeing Pinocchio tomorrow,” Neary said.

  “Winning your children’s hearts and minds,” Ronnie commented to her reflection in the mirror.

  “Just kidding,” he told her. “But I grew up on Pinocchio. Kids are still kids, Ronnie. They’ll eat it up.” He hummed softly for a moment, then sang a few words. “When you wish upon a star … makes no difference—” Neary stopped. He could see that he wasn’t getting through to anybody, neither children nor wife.

  “You’re right,” he said, throwing up his hands. “Fellas, you can make up your own minds and I won’t influence you in any way. Tomorrow you can play miniature golf, which means a lot of waiting in line and pushing and shoving and maybe scoring zero … or … you can see Pinocchio which has music and animals and magical stuff and things you’ll remember for the rest of your lives.”

  Then, in desperation: “Let’s vote.”

  “Golf!” all three children shouted.

  Neary pretended to stagger back. “Okay, tomorrow, golf. Tonight … bedtime. Right now. Get going.”

  “No, wait,” Toby protested. “You said we could watch The Ten Commandments on TV.”

  Across the room the telephone rang. Ronnie moved to answer it. “That picture is four hours long,” she said, picking up the phone on the second ring. “Hello. Oh, hi, Earl.”