Close Encounters of the Third Kind Read online

  In the distance, the line of tollbooths looked deserted to Neary. The normal bluish fluorescent light apparently blacked out here by the power failure, too. At this hour of the night, there was little traffic between Indiana and Ohio.

  At the tollbooths, one of the attendants was dozing on his stool. The three flaming orbs soared smoothly up and over the line of booths. All hell broke loose. Red battery-operated alarm lights flashed on and off. Sirens tore the stillness to pieces. The dozing attendant jerked awake. Some dude was trying to get through his tolls without paying! In the blink of an eye, the first police cruiser shot through the gates. The second cruiser whooshed past, sirens and roof lights crazy. As the attendant started out of the booth to see what the hell, the third cruiser displaced air, followed closely by Neary’s yellow DWP truck.

  “I’m closing the gap,” one of the policemen called.

  “Man, you gotta see this. They’re glued to the road!” A hairpin curve was just ahead, and for the first time since the pursuit began the objects decided not to stay glued to the road. They shot straight out over the guardrail and into the air. An instant later, the police officer, obviously locked in on the night lights and doing at least eighty-five, followed them through the guardrail and high into Ohio airspace for a sensational moment before it pancaked into the embankment and lost all its wheels and doors.

  “DeWitt! You okay, DeWitt!”

  The second patrol car seized the opportunity to save itself and, brakes on fire, sideslipped right up to the littered cliffside. Roy saw the two police officers jump over the mangled guardrail and tear down the embankment to the creamed cruiser.

  The third police car and then Neary, following, finally stopped. The other cops ran down the embankment while Neary looked up at the sky. The three firelights arced upward into a lowlying cloud bank. Once inside they turned the clouds to fire until the internal illumination gently faded restoring normal night again. Neary turned back toward Indiana. The fluorescent lighting on both sides of the tollbooths was flickering back to life. Then Roy saw on the horizon a tapestry of light. A distant city was coming back on. Tolono? Harper Valley? It seemed the blackout was over.

  As it turned out, Trooper Roger DeWitt was in better shape than his wrinkled cruiser. Sporting a broken nose, minor but multiple contusions and a possible concussion, he had strutted around the stationhouse for one hour telling everybody including DWIs, one male rape victim, and a dozen witnesses of that evening’s skyjinks his version of God’s truth. Now he was inside making his verbal report to Captain Rasmussen while in the State Highway Patrol processing room the other officers and Roy Neary were working up reports of their night to remember. It was now three thirty A.M., and Neary was fading. A man only has so many ounces of adrenaline, Neary thought. He craved a Mars Bar but would have settled for Mounds or M&M’s. There weren’t enough typewriters to go round, so Roy worked in pencil. He had a landslide of a headache.

  “Got any aspirin?” he asked the room.

  No one paid any attention to him.

  “If Longly hadn’t been with me,” one of the troopers said to another, “I would have gone psychiatric.”

  Longly grinned. “I don’t want to file this report,” he said. “I want to publish it.”

  Just then, a door across the room burst open and DeWitt emerged, limping, from the captain’s office, closing the door behind him, but not before the captain had shoved through it. “It’s enough to outrage common sense.” The captain addressed everyone in the processing room. “Ordinary people look to the police not to make bizarre reports of this nature.”

  “My knowledge is Gods truth,” DeWitt offered in his own defense.

  “I will not see this department pressed between the pages of the National Enquirer.” Rasmussen looked at Longly and another trooper behind their typewriters. Again he spoke to the room. “When Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers are done, have them get their behinds in here.”

  Slamming back, from whence the room fell stone quiet.

  “Was he mad ’cause your car’s gonna be a taxi next week?”

  “Sweet Jesus.” DeWitt now looked dazed as well as damaged. “I told him the whole thing. I didn’t hold back nothing. The shooting stars. The speed. What the hell, I ain’t no demolition derby … not on purpose.”

  “And?”

  “He gave me a two-week suspension.”

  “What?” The other troopers stopped what they were doing and stared at the man.

  “That’s what I said.” DeWitt started limping for the door. “Go try to tell somebody the truth and we’ll all be watching TV in the daytime.”

  Roy watched the officers turn to their typewriters. He watched them reading over their respective reports. Some cops exchanged forced smiles. Then, as if some invisible puppeteer pulled simultaneously on five strings, five right hands reached into five typewriters and yanked out five n217 forms, crumpled them, and dropped them into wastebaskets.

  “Go ahead, talk, mister,” one officer said to Roy, smiling sheepishly as he inserted a new report form in his typewriter. “Be my guest.”

  Neary searched for a friend in the room and immediately understood the general situation. He got up and left.

  10

  It was after four by the time Neary got home. From somewhere he had inhaled a new burst of energy while charging down the hall to the bedroom, shouting “Ronnie! Ronnie!” Neary couldn’t control himself, every muscle was vibrating from an unforeseen reserve of adrenaline. He was nauseated from all the excitement and his second word almost blew Ronnie out of bed.

  “Honey, wake up.”

  Her two blue eyes filled with terror, her long blond hair sprang tangled with sleep.

  “What’s it, kids … and fire, wh—?”

  “It’s okay, kids are okay,” he said again. “Honey, you won’t believe this.”

  Ronnie caught her breath and stared at the luminous clock dial. “Right. I don’t believe you’re waking me up at ten minutes after four.”

  “You’re not going to believe what’s happening.”

  “I’m not listening,” Ronnie said distinctly, and pulled the covers over her head.

  “You don’t have to listen.” Roy’s breathing reminded Ronnie of the way little Toby would wolf down dessert. “They don’t make any noise at all. There was nothing but air and all of a sudden, whoosh … then whoosh … then a little red whoosh … Jesus!”

  From under the covers Ronnie absorbed the whooshes before remembering. “The Department’s been trying to reach you. They couldn’t reach you …”

  “Yeah, I know. I shut my phone off.”

  She started to wake up. “Roy, you shouldn’t do that. They have to talk to you … all kinds of crazy things are going on. The phone has been ringing off the hook. I remember now. They want you to call them now!”

  Neary saw that words weren’t enough so he used two hands to pull his wife out of bed.

  “Come on! Get outta bed. What do you want to wear, dammit? The sun’s gonna put the stars out.”

  “Roy! What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing. I’m not talking nothing until you see ’em yourself. Ronnie, oh, Ronnie. This is so important. I need you to see this with me. I really need you with me now.”

  Ronnie saw no humor in his face and softened immediately. “Well, we can’t leave the kids.”

  “The kids, yeah, the kids … lads!! kids!!”

  While he prodded his family into their clothes and out of the house, Neary collected cameras, binoculars, opera glasses and blankets.

  “Are we going to a drive-in?” Brad asked, still half-asleep.

  “You stole my luminous paints,” Toby remembered.

  “You’ll get your luminous paint!” Neary was jubilant. “Everything’s going to be luminous!”

  He got everyone as far as the kitchen, where Ronnie diverted to the refrigerator. She opened the door and grabbed her raw vegetable pouch. The refrigerator light was an unappetizing green, and Toby said, “That
green light makes me barf.”

  “I’ll change it after I lose another three pounds,” his mother told him for the twentieth time.

  Neary started hustling them all out of the house again and toward the family’s Chevy station wagon parked around the back of the driveway.

  “Roy.” Ronnie was leaking steam. “You’ve proved your point. We all got out of the house. Now can we go back to bed?”

  Instead of answering, Neary started shoving the children inside the car.

  “This is only funny if it ends here in the driveway,” Ronnie said, going around to her side of the car.

  “You promised Goofy Golf,” Toby said from the middle seat. His eyes were already closed again.

  Finally, everyone was in. Ronnie had not closed her door and the ceiling light inside the car was still on. For the first time Ronnie saw it: Neary was red on one half of his face. Bright red.

  “Roy, what is that? You’re sunburned.”

  Neary peered into the rear-view mirror. This visible evidence made him even redder. “Holy shit,” he whispered. “I guess I took my vacation while you were sleeping.”

  “But it’s only half your face.”

  But Neary was already backing down the driveway, returning to where the excitement had been most extreme.

  He drove quickly to the place where it had all happened, pulled off the road and stopped near the scattered snow fence. The farmer and his family were gone, leaving behind some Colonel Sanders’ boxes and one bottle of Wild Turkey.

  Ronnie and the kids sounded like a sleeping symphony of adenoid troubles. But Roy was on point. He kicked circles for a while in the cool early morning, waiting … waiting for what? Waiting for the experience to come again. Please come again, he thought to himself. Why had something that was so frightening become so enthralling? He wanted seconds but now the dark was playing tricks.

  The police weren’t with him now. He was alone out here. Did they like people who waited alone? Was it easier to get away when—?

  Something woke Ronnie. She glanced back and saw her three children snoring against one another. And then there was her husband pacing back and forth nervously, eyes skyward. She got out, closing the car door softly, and fell into step.

  “What are we doing here, Roy? Why won’t you tell me what you’re waiting for?”

  “You’ll know it when you see it,” he told her without confidence.

  “Come on,” Ronnie said. “I came here with you. I’m taking this very well. Now tell me. What did it look like?”

  Roy waited, stared up and down the road, watched the sky a moment longer, then: “Kind of … like an ice cream cone.”

  This was almost too much for Ronnie. “What flavor?” she asked with murderous innocence.

  But Neary took her seriously. “Orange. It was orange … and it wasn’t really like an ice cream cone … it was sort of in a shell … this …” He made sculpting motions with both hands.

  “Like a taco?”

  “No, rounder, larger … and sometimes … it was like … like … you know, those rolls we had yesterday?”

  “Bran muffins?”

  “No! Not for breakfast—” Neary was conscious that his wife was humoring him and also running out of humor, but he persisted anyway. “For dinner. What were those rolls? Those curvy ones?”

  “You mean the crescent rolls?” she exclaimed, as though dealing with a Romper Room student.

  “Yeah!” he said, excited all over again. “And it gave off a kind of neon glow.”

  That was definitely too much for Ronnie. She reached into her Baggie for a carrot. Neary walked a few paces away from her munching and hunched down near a rock, eyes heavenward again. Ronnie watched him anxiously. Obviously Roy was going through something … something she couldn’t begin to understand, but, apparently, it was important to him. Maybe she had been too bitchy.

  Ronnie approached Roy and used her favorite Little Miss Marker voice. “Don’t you think I’m taking this really well?”

  He didn’t answer but stood up, still looking at the stars starting to fade in the ever lightening sky.

  Ronnie looked up too and gave a little shudder. She didn’t know why, but she was slightly frightened. It was all a little weird. A lot weird.

  “Snuggle,” she said to him.

  Neary dutifully put his arm around her and drew her to him. Ronnie put her arms around his waist and began to nibble his ear.

  “I remember when we used to come to places like this to look at each other.” She said it like Bambi.

  Neary looked down at her and, seeming to remember some good old times, he smiled. Ronnie smiled back and gently sucked on Roy’s upper lip. He had always gone for that in a big way, and soon their kisses spread inside. But Roy was not so engrossed that he couldn’t weasel open half an eye and turn it to the skies. Because that’s precisely when everything exploded with a blue-hot fire-whoosh that tore at his clothes. Neary almost jumped out of his skin as the red lights diminished in the distance, but Ronnie knew it was only a semi-truck-trailer, and after a few seconds so, glumly, did Roy.

  The spell was broken.

  Ronnie, testing her husband, asked, “If one of those things came down right now and the door opened, would you go on it?”

  Roy, thrilled at the proposition, cried, “Jesus Christ, yes!” Then, seeing and feeling the hurt tense through her, he added, “Well, anyone would.”

  But the damage was done. Ronnie broke away from him, and went back toward the car. He hurried after her.

  Ronnie stopped and turned on him. “You know what you’ve done to us?” she cried out. “You know what this means? You’ve brought us out here twenty miles from home in the middle of the night … and you destroyed our sleep cycle. Your sons are gonna conk out in the middle of the day and Sylvia will be up until one A.M. for the next three nights because their father swears he saw a flat, orange Betty Crocker crescent roll that flies. We might as well all have breakfast right now.”

  She paused to catch her breath and then in a lower tone, completed the demolition. “Don’t ever try anything like this again. We’re your family. It is not normal.”

  There was nothing that Ronnie could have said, Neary knew, that could have been more final. It sure wasn’t normal, but as Neary was about to discover, normality, as he once knew it, was coming to an end.

  11

  There is no fast way to get to Benares. The ancient and most holy city of the Hindus is approachable mainly through faith.

  An approach by military aircraft was out of the question. To have sent a fighter plane or attack bomber through India’s airspace would not only have freaked out the militantly neutral Indians but, more important, would have endangered the secrecy of the project.

  David Laughlin supposed, privately, that if there had been time, Lacombe would have traveled to Benares in the proper manner, on bare feet, wearing a loincloth and supported by a wooden staff. As it was, Laughlin was grateful for the small, fourteen-passenger Corvette jet borrowed from Air Alsace, which made the trip from Paris to Rangoon in just half a day.

  A Vertol chopper brought them in low over the spires and domes of Benares a half hour later, as the sun was setting. The river moved sluggishly beneath the helicopter, its holy waters freighted with the holies of silt.

  The hillside lay a few miles outside the city. The Vertol hovered at a discreet distance while its pilot tried to find a place to land. It wasn’t easy.

  “Look at them!” Laughlin said. “Thousands!”

  “Tens of thousands,” Lacombe corrected.

  “It’s fantastic. I—”

  “The sadhu is a very holy man,” Lacombe cut in quietly, above the rotor noise. “But also very practical. He also wants an answer. In his lifetime. He has been listening for many years. With him it is more than a matter of faith. It is a matter of results.”

  Laughlin thought that over. “But I thought the Hindus went the other way,” he shouted. “Nirvana, not here.”

  Laco
mbe shrugged.

  The chopper set down gently in a space near two Mercedes tour buses. The pilot cut the engines and the rotors whined down. Dust started settling over everything within a hundred yards. Lacombe climbed out first and stood momentarily in the brilliant sunset with Laughlin and two technicians.

  The blood-red orange rays of the sun were coming in almost horizontally now. In a little while the great hot ball of flame, filtered and distorted by endless miles of dusty atmosphere, would swell, darken and hide itself from sight behind the low range of hills to the west.

  “Let us go,” Lacombe said.

  Laughlin gestured to the two technicians, who picked up their microphones, Nagra tape recorder, portable battery-belts, and the lightweight Arriflex 16-mm camera. The four men moved slowly through the crowd of pilgrims.

  The people were densely packed, some on small rugs, with baskets of food beside them. There were whole families, even ancient-looking grandparents (who were probably under forty years of age), wizened and emaciated by hunger and disease.

  The Westerners moved with prudent speed up the hillside toward the cleared area where the sadhu sat, legs crossed beneath him in the lotus position, eyes shut, palms pressed together, elbows out to the side like some strange, meditative bird of passage.

  A sleek young Brahmin in city whites arose at Lacombe’s approach. Laughlin moved in to translate while the technicians began setting up.

  “It lacks half an hour of the sun’s death,” the Brahmin told Lacombe.

  His accent bothered Laughlin: smooth, Oxonian English. The young man wore well-shined chukka boots, pipestem-thin trousers of white muslin, and a collarless jacket of the same fabric. He looked too urbanized for this place, his smooth flow of talk too glib. But even the holiest of men, Laughlin thought, needed managers.

  The sadhu himself moved not a muscle. By not even the flicker of an eyelid did he acknowledge anything around him of this world. Lacombe stood in contemplative silence for a moment, then lowered himself to a lotus seat near, but at a respectful distance from, the sadhu.