Close Encounters of the Third Kind Read online

  Then she caught sight of her son. He, too, was crawling on the floor. Toward the dog-door opening. He reached it and started trying to wriggle through the narrow opening.

  Jillian lunged forward and grabbed for Barry’s foot. She caught it and started to haul him back in. She pulled hard. He slid across the linoleum toward her. The air smelled brassy and dank with electricity.

  Then something pulled him away. Some force was tugging him outside the house.

  “Let go of him!” she screamed.

  Jillian gritted her teeth and pulled back. The boy’s body shifted forward and back a few inches.

  Jillian held on to her son until she felt, she knew, that if she did not let go, he would be dislocated. Sobbing, Jillian loosened her grip and Barry slipped away from her hands and out the little door.

  In a flash, he was gone.

  Jillian heaved herself up off the floor and threw open the kitchen door, staggering into the back yard, but Barry was nowhere in sight. She saw the tornadolike formation hovering above the house, as if parked, lit up by the tiny geodesic points of flashing and bursting lights.

  Then the cloud eased away into the gathering darkness. And Jillian, not really knowing what she was doing, not really caring about anything anymore, started to follow, started to chase after it, until an immense shape loomed up, gigantic arms enfolding her. All the breath came out of Jill. She fell to the stubble of a cornfield.

  Cringing, she glanced at the giant figure entangling her. A straw-stuffed scarecrow looked down, smiling his idiot grin, arms flapping loosely as she slapped them away. Jill had lost.

  Barry was gone.

  For a moment, Jillian lay there, sobbing in anger and pain. As she looked up through tears, she saw a lone star overhead change from white to blue to red.

  And then disappear.

  16

  “What were you doing up on the garage roof?” Ronnie asked.

  Neary had come in and gone straight to the bathroom to wash. “Some carpentry,” he shouted past the noise of running water.

  Ronnie went to the kitchen window and saw that he had knocked together some sort of platform at the peak of the garage, a platform on which a folding deck chair sat. “It’s a lookout, isn’t it?” she called.

  She turned away from the window to find him with his face buried in a towel, scrubbing himself dry. “Roy, instead of building platforms …”

  She let the idea drop. She didn’t want to become the wife who nagged her unemployed husband into finding work. But she also didn’t want to be the wife of the neighborhood fruitcake, sitting up there in his makeshift planetarium watching for orange Betty Crocker crescent rolls.

  “You had a phone call,” she said.

  He dropped the towel. “Big storm toward Harper Valley!” he announced. “You can see for miles up here!”

  “She didn’t give her name.”

  “She?”

  “Or wouldn’t.” Ronnie took a small, measured breath. “Seemed kind of shattered to be talking to your wife.”

  “Who?”

  “Hung up, finally, after a lot of thrashing-around noise.”

  Neary nodded absentmindedly, his glance going past Ronnie to the kitchen clock. “We don’t have that much time. It’s an hour’s drive. Baby-sitter here yet?”

  “She’s here.” Ronnie took another small, cautious breath. “Roy, I hope you understand that, after this, we can’t be laying out money for baby-sitters. Not until …”

  He had the good grace to look guilty. “I know. I appreciate your going along with this, Ronnie.”

  “But it’s on one condition.”

  “Which is?”

  “That when the meeting is over, you drop the whole thing. Isn’t that why the Air Force announced this meeting?”

  The fifty-mile drive went slowly, Neary realized, because Ronnie was not in a talkative mood. They approached the outskirts of DAX Air Base with about ten minutes to spare before the start of the meeting, whose time had been announced over radio and TV for several days now.

  Up ahead the first sentry post loomed. Ronnie sank down in her seat. “I’ll never forgive you,” she said, “if we run into anybody we know here.”

  He stopped to ask the sentry for directions to the Civilian Information Center. “It’s that big all-glass building,” the corporal said, tucking a green visitor’s pass in behind the windshield wiper. “You can’t miss it.”

  “I sure can’t,” Neary commented. The building was huge, flat and thin, like a matchbook on end, acres of picture windows framed in anodized aluminum mullions. He parked next to someone’s battered old farm pickup truck, another green card on its windshield.

  The waiting room of this all-glass skyscraper was huge, endless. A civilian woman sat at a desk, took Neary’s name, and gave him a name tag to wear, as she had the more than thirty people already sitting there.

  “These people,” Ronnie whispered in Neary’s ear as they sat down. “They’re all misled.”

  “Shssh.”

  “I knew it would be like this.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about,” Neary whispered fiercely.

  “Look at that one over by the elevators,” Ronnie whispered back. She indicated a woman in her late fifties, raddled, white hair flying in several directions at once, her gaze as empty as an ancient headstone.

  “Halfway over the edge,” Ronnie murmured.

  “On her way to the rocks below.”

  Just then, Jillian Guiler came through the door, and the reporters came to life, surrounding her instantly.

  “Could you give us a statement, Mrs. Guiler?” a reporter asked as the hot lights were turned on her and the cameras started grinding.

  Jillian, looking distraught and very tired, said nothing.

  “Your report to the police was … ah … really quite breathtaking. We’d like to make the six o’clock. We lose our young audience at eleven.”

  Jillian seemed not to have heard.

  Another journalist said to a colleague, “That’s her, isn’t it? That’s the lady in the clouds.”

  “We understand no ransom note has been found.”

  The first reporter tried to follow up. “What about the FBI story? Is there any truth to that … that the child is missing? You gave the police a report. Would you mind repeating it for television?”

  Jillian started to panic. The questions were furious, maligning, and irrational. Jill was retreating to the elevators when she caught Neary’s eye across the room. As the elevator arrived she formed the words, “They got him!”

  “What?” Roy hadn’t read her, but Ronnie sure did and buried her husband with one of her prize-winning rotten looks as the elevator doors opened and swallowed Jillian from view.

  A master sergeant in full-dress uniform came into the room.

  “Folks … you can go in now. Room 3655. Just follow me.”

  The Tolono group, lead by Neary and Ronnie, headed for the corridor. TV news cameras were waiting this time just on the other side of the doors. On went the quartz lights and the cameras started to whir.

  Ronnie jerked her purse up to cover her face, just as if she had been arrested. “Damn you, Roy!” she muttered behind the bag.

  The thirty or so civilian witnesses looked suddenly seedy, bleached out by the brilliant light from quartz bulbs in reflectors towering toward the ceiling of the room.

  With the entrance of the Air Force team, and a phalanx of accompanying newspaper reporters and photographers, it became clear to Neary that whatever he had hoped to get from this meeting, what the Air Force wanted was publicity. So be it. For a change he and the military saw eye to eye. Let the whole world know what happened.

  His initial feeling of satisfaction was dampened a bit when he saw that the Air Force spokesmen, all in civilian suits, would be sitting at ease on bent-plywood-and-foam-rubber contour swivel chairs, elevated on a platform a little above the rest of the room. In a hollow square around them ranged the voluntary witnesses, un
comfortable on folding chairs, unprepared for being the focus of so much publicity, still dressed for the most part in clothes they’d worn all day at work or on the farm.

  “I’m Major Benchley,” the younger man mused. “And this,” he continued, holding up a large color blowup of an eerie high-resolution disc in blurred motion, “is a flying saucer.”

  That got everybody’s attention, producing some “oohs” and “aahs” and ad-libbed responses to the effect that “I saw that one.” and “That’s the one.”

  “Made of pewter,” Benchley went on after the stir had subsided. “Made in Japan. And thrown across the lawn by one of my children. I wanted to open up with this to show you that were not all polished brass about these things and to make another point clear. Last year Americans took more than seven billion photographs, spending a record six point six billion on film equipment and processing. With all those clicking shutters, where is the indisputable photographic evidence that extraordinary phenomena exist in the skies over your homes?”

  The “witnesses” seemed stunned or intimidated in silence until one of the journalists said, “How many times can we reach for our cameras when a sudden surprise catches us off guard? How many actual automobile or plane crashes are filmed and make the evening news?”

  There were sounds of general agreement from the Tolono group, and one of the more rational of their number stood up and said, “To dismiss out of hand the evidence for UFOs will not quiet the fears that we may be living through the first stages of exploration from elsewhere.”

  “I am a reasonable person,” said the little old lady with the remains of her photo album. “A reasonable person,” she repeated reasonably enough. “All I know is that I saw something that was unlike anything I have ever seen before.”

  Nobody spoke for a while so Neary raised his hand.

  “Let someone else speak,” Ronnie hissed, reaching out to pull down his arm.

  But Roy was already on his feet. “Look, sir. You people run the sky, right? Have you looked up recently? There’s a whole airshow going on.”

  “I can only reiterate,” the major said, “that after ten years with the Air Tactical Intelligence and the Office of Special Investigations there has been no indisputable proof of the physical existence of these things.”

  “Which things?” Neary asked.

  Major Benchley had leaned over to confer with two colleagues. Now he straightened up and peered at Roy’s name tag. “Please understand me, Mr. Neary. I’m not attacking your credibility …”

  “That’s okay. Just tell us what’s going on.”

  “Were not sure. We can’t just assume, as you seem to, that these were excursion vehicles from another planet.”

  “Well, it sure wasn’t the Goodyear blimp,” Neary said.

  Many of the “witnesses” laughed. Ronnie did not.

  “Let’s say it’s foreign technology,” the major said in a conciliatory tone. “Why assume it’s that foreign?” He gestured with his thumb to the sky.

  “Fine. Great,” Neary responded. “Lets say the Russians are building and flying them. So what are they doing in Indiana airspace?”

  That got a laugh from everyone—Air Force, civilians, press, and “witnesses.”

  Major Benchley waited for order and started over. “We have had some high-altitude refueling missions in the visible vicinity, and I’m told of a high build-up of static electricity—heat lightning. Also we have a condition called temperature inversion whereby a layer of cold air is sandwiched between layers of warm air.”

  Neary looked around the packed conference with mock incredulity. “You guys called this meeting to tell us what’s going on and all we’re getting are weather reports.”

  “What would you like to believe is going on?”

  Ronnie tried to pull Roy down, but he took her hand away and said, “I’d like to believe the United States Air Force knows.” Then he sat down.

  “Who’s going to pay for the damage to my land?”

  Major Benchley blinked. “Pardon me?”

  “I own the land where these people have been squatting at night,” said the man, whom Roy recognized as the well-to-do gentleman he had noticed earlier. “This man over here”—he indicated Neary—“tore down several yards of my snow fence. There’s trash all over the place from where these people have been staying up all night, eating Kentucky fried chicken and drinking beer. Who’s going to pay for it all?”

  Major Benchley pointed a finger at the landowner. “Did you see anything that night?”

  The man laughed. “My family has owned that piece for more than eighty years and we’ve never seen one damn thing.”

  The television cameras had swung quickly to the landowner, and Neary realized that the meeting was starting to fall apart. If he didn’t jump in fast, the focus would be lost forever.

  “Wait a goddamn minute!” he said loudly, sensing Ronnie physically edge away from him as he jumped to his feet again. “I saw something.” The cameras swiveled back to him. “This thing has cost me my job! That’s how serious it is to me. It happened to me, it happened to some of you, and we want to know what it is!”

  Benchley had begun talking over the last of Neary’s words. “If the evidence is good, the case will stand up and the existence of extraordinary phenomena will have to be taken seriously.”

  “We are the evidence!” Roy shouted. “And we want to be taken seriously.”

  “Please, Mr. Neary.”

  “Please, Major Benchley,” Neary mimicked him. “I would like to believe that I’m not going crazy. There are other people in this room who saw what I saw and they would like to believe that they are not going crazy. Is that such an unreasonable request?”

  Major Benchley was silent for several moments and when he spoke again it was spontaneous. “I think there are all sorts of things that would be great fun to believe in. Time Travel and Santa Claus, for instance. You know, everybody, I wish I’d seen it. For years I’ve wanted to see one of those darn silly things hopping around in the sky, because I believe in life in the universe. Odds are against there not being life. The extraterrestrial hypothesis is merely one of many alternate possibles. We seem to want proof that out there is something that can solve our problems for us. It’s an emotional situation we have here. We want answers too, not mysteries.”

  Neary sunk into his aluminum folding chair.

  “Can you tell us … is your Air Force base conducting any tests in Tolono area? You know—secret testing, maybe?”

  Major Benchley hesitated again and then, looking straight at Neary, said, “It sure would be easy to lie to you and say yes. You’d walk away with an answer you could live with. But this is not the case and I won’t mislead you. To tell you the truth, I don’t know what you saw.”

  Neary smiled, and then said, “You can’t fool us by agreeing with us.”

  That produced a burst of laughter, which confused Neary for a moment. He had meant what he said; it was not a joke.

  Benchley laughed, too. Then he held up his hand for quiet, saying, “You must understand, all of you, that there are other considerations at work here. A certain hysteria sets in. We’ve had some schoolchildren burned quite seriously because they were playing with flares. Tonight we even heard from a lady in Harper Valley who blames this thing for the disappearance of her four-year-old son.”

  It was at this point that the old farmer decided to share his experience with everyone. “I saw Big Foot once,” he announced. “It was up in the Sequoia National Park. The winter of nineteen fifty-one. It had a foot on him, thirty-seven inches, heel to toe. Made a sound I would not want to hear twice in my life.”

  “What about the little star of Bethlehem that led the three wise men to Jesus?” an addled lady with bluish hair and a Gideon bible asked. “This star has never been satisfactorily explained by astronomers.”

  The television cameramen were having a wonderful time.

  “Sir, is there any truth at all to this Loch Ness monste
r crap?”

  As they were heading through the lobby for the outside, Major Benchley came up to them, his right hand outstretched.

  “Mr. Neary,” he began. “I just want to say—”

  “Why the hell did your helicopters blow up that ridge without any warning the other night?” Roy shouted. “What the hell is that?”

  “Roy?”

  “Mr. Neary, I don’t know what you’re talking about. I just came over to—”

  “I don’t believe you!” Neary exploded. “I don’t believe anything you say, Benchley.”

  Benchley, truly stunned by this outburst, backed off.

  Ronnie pulled Neary away from the officer with both hands. “Roy,” she said. “Stop it! Stop it!” She pushed him across the lobby in the general direction of a Coke machine, and went back to make their apologies to the Major.

  Neary fed his coins into the machine and, Coke in hand, wandered off down a corridor, trying to cool off, trying to figure out what was the matter with him. He wasn’t like that, blowing off at guys unprovoked. Benchley hadn’t really done anything to him; the guy was just doing his job.

  Roy caught himself staring at a small opening along one long wall. Still sipping away at his Coke, he swung open the panel door and there was a master control circuit box, an array of hundreds of circuit-breaker switches.

  Neary’s forefinger traced the office diagram for the building, which was tacked to the inside of the panel door. Then, moving quickly, he began snapping circuit breakers off here and there. His fingers flipped back and forth as he checked the diagram, threw another set of switches, consulted the diagram and flipped off more circuits.

  “Roy!” Ronnie had found him.

  Neary was smiling now. Shutting the panel door, he took Ronnie’s arm and escorted her out of the building to the parking lot.

  “Roy, what’s the matter with you?”

  “I’m fine. Everything’s fine, just fine.” He felt foolishly pleased with himself.

  Neary started the engine and gunned the car out of the lot toward the sentry post. A line of cars was stopped there, drivers and passengers—civilian and military—standing by their cars, looking back toward the tall glass building. He braked to a stop at the end of the line, and he and Ronnie got out, too.