The thing was that Paulie, leader of the Connerbusters though he was, also remained the only real friend he’d ever had. He had to reach him somehow, and he thought that the way to do it was still through the idea of the aliens, despite what had happened. If they were real, then maybe he could contact them somehow and get them to come back, with Paulie as a witness.
It was an audacious, insane idea, but there were more than a few Web sites out there put up by folks who were doing just that, and posting video of the UFOs that had turned up. He’d communicated with one or two of them and gotten detailed instructions about how to do it using, as one of them had put it, “a flashlight, patience, and a serious interest in meeting them.”
All day at school, he had kept to himself. There was nothing else he could do, not without triggering some sort of additional humiliation. As it was, everybody had gotten up from the table and moved when he sat down for lunch. He had eaten alone, ostentatiously and purposely reading a book none of them could begin to understand, Physics from Fisher Information, a rather basic text, actually.
He had considered going the total eccentric route, perhaps refusing to speak anything except Latin and dying his hair purple or something. But that would just justify his isolation, and he did not really want to be isolated. Faint though it might be, there remained the possibility that some girl might some day do just slightly more than run screaming when he drew near. Amy, for example. After all, they had an embarrassing past in the woods, did they not? It had, when he was ten and she was eleven, involved the revelation of body parts, back where the little stream flowed and the bluebells nodded along its banks.
He had been thinking fairly carefully this past couple of days about what actually had happened the other night. What did the Keltons’ video really show? The answer to that question, he thought, might be far less obvious than it seemed.
It was possible that the legendary grays of Internet fame actually were involved, but only very remotely.
Although the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence people claimed that the chances of finding a signal from another world was vanishingly small, that was incorrect. They were actually pretty good—about 0.4 percent a year.
He thought that, if somebody actually had appeared here from another planet, they must be desperate. It would take vast resources to cross interstellar space, and huge amounts of time. Wormholes and such were science fiction. The reason was simple: it was theoretically possible to bend space until two distant points touched, but the amount of energy necessary was unimaginable. To bend the United States until, say, Phoenix and Buffalo touched, would be child’s play by comparison. Faster-than-light transmission of signals was indirectly possible using quantum-entangled particles, but the movement of structured physical objects at hyper speeds was out of the question.
So, if they were here, they had come at less than light speed, probably far less, and thus even a journey from Centauri A, the closest sun-like star, would have taken many years. Internet scuttlebut had the grays coming from Zeta Reticuli, a double star. Such a situation would make for planets with lots of seasons and some really eccentric orbits, but it wasn’t completely impossible.
All of these thoughts danced in his mind even while, at another level, he considered his father’s straightforward advice to confront the kids who were tormenting him. Dad was no genius, but his advice could be relied on, and Conner intended to take it.
“Paulie,” he said as he came down the steps, “hey.”
“Hey, Conner.”
“Would you like to come over?”
Paulie stopped. He stared at him like he was some kind of bizarre animal. He was flanked by two of his most unpleasant new friends, Kevin Sears and Will Heckle. “ ’Course not,” he said.
“The video’s real, Paulie. We all ought to respect what it means. The event happened.”
“I wasn’t there, Conner, I didn’t see it.”
Conner was pleased to hear the anger and disappointment in his voice. This was precisely what he had expected. He had taken Paulie exactly where he wanted him to go, and now he would win him back. “You know I can fix things,” he said. “Maybe I can fix that.”
“How? Build a time machine?”
“What if I could get them to come back?”
Will Heckle burst out laughing. A smiling Kevin shook his head.
“No, wait,” Paulie said. “I want to hear this.”
“I can call them,” Conner said, “with you as a witness.”
The boys were not laughing now.
“If I do it, then will you agree to cancel the Connerbusters?”
“Oh, sure. Sure, Conner.”
“Come over after supper and spend the night. You’ll meet the grays.”
“What about us? Can we meet the grays, too, little boy?”
“Not yet, Kev.”
Kevin grabbed his jacket, loomed over him. “Kevin to you.”
Conner stared right back. “Okay, Kev, I’ll make a note of that.” Finally, Kevin released him. Conner turned and went down the steps, looking for Mom’s car in the line out front.
On the way home, he wondered what the odds were of Paulie showing up. Actually, he thought, they were excellent. In fact, he would show. But the larger question was, how in the world would he get the grays to come to the party?
He also knew that he would get resistance from Mom, so he said nothing in the car. In fact, he waited until after dinner, until just before Paulie would appear.
“Incidentally, Paulie’s gonna sleep over tonight.”
She stopped clearing the kitchen table of dishes. “No, he isn’t.”
“Yes, he is, Mom. He’s been invited and he is.”
“No way, Jose.”
This did not surprise him, but he pretended that it did. “Mom, come on!”
“Conner, no! You’re groveling.”
“Mom, I have arranged a sleepover. Simple as that.”
“I don’t want any Warners in this house, not Paulie, not Amy, not the parents. Especially not Maggie and Harley. You find other friends.”
“Then let’s move into town! I’m twelve miles from the nearest other kids my age.”
“You’re so handsome when you’re mad,” she said.
“God, the condescension. All right, let’s come to a compromise. I invited Paulie. He didn’t say yes or no. If he comes, he comes.”
“Why did you invite him?”
“Because, Mother, if you diagram the social configuration of my class, you quickly discover that Paulie Warner is at the center of every major structural orbit, and, in fact, I am not going to make any headway with anybody until I have solved my relationship with him.”
She almost burst into tears, to hear him applying his genius to a problem as trivial as being accepted by some little bully with a room-temperature IQ. She went to him and hugged him. He came to her with raglike looseness, neither willing nor unwilling.
“You know something that’s going to happen in a couple of years, Conner? In a couple of years, Paulie, who looks like a little dump truck, is going to be running after girls and getting nowhere. They’re going to be all over you. You’re sweet, you’re smart, and you look like a movie star.”
“That’s then and this is now. What about my compromise? Fair?”
He’d won, of course. She couldn’t very well call the Warners and tell Paulie not to come, only to find that he hadn’t been planning to anyway.
Since last night, Conner had been using the same technique of meditation the Internet contact mavins used, and intended to make the same flashlight signals toward the sky that they did, and at the same time, 3:33 in the morning. One of them had craft showing up about 70 percent of the time. The other had never had a failure in two years, and had hundreds of hours of video, including a photo of the palm of a long, thin-fingered hand with claws pressed against a window. Conner had gotten the guy to upload a high-res file of this photo to his personal FTP site where he usually collected dissertations and th
ings, and had analyzed it carefully.
Using a very conservative extrapolation algorithm, he had been able to bring out the fingerprints. They were absolutely remarkable in one respect: they had completely symmetrical whorls. He’d thought at once, if a machine had fingers, they’d look like this. The design wasn’t a digital trick, it was actually on the hand, and it was self-consistent, too. He’d measured it micrometer by micrometer. It was a real print, all right. Maybe the Keltons had gotten the first somewhat clear shot of a gray; this guy had definitely gotten the first fingerprint.
Mom and Dad were having all kinds of hush-hush conversations about the grays and about their friend Marcie Cotton, who Conner had understood from their transparently cryptic comments to one another, had been the person screaming in the craft the other night. No matter how well they hid it, even from themselves, Conner could see that the incident had terrified his parents. Therefore, he certainly had no intention of telling them that he planned to attempt to vector the grays in.
“Just one thing,” his mom said—and he instantly anticipated one of her little zingers. “I want you guys to sleep upstairs. We don’t want you sleeping alone in the basement anymore.”
“I don’t care for those beds,” Conner said smoothly, hoping to deflect this zinger. “Also, we’re going to be doing gaming until late.”
“Not downstairs you aren’t.”
There was a crash and Paulie came banging through the back door. “It’s snowing,” he yelled. “We’re gonna be sledding in the morning plus Gestapo Torture Fest came from Games Unlimited!” He brushed past Katelyn and went pounding downstairs, Conner hurrying along behind him.
She went into the living room, where Dan had been watching the Kelton boys’ video again and again. As she walked in, he froze the blurry image of the hydrocephalic with fly eyes on the screen.
“I don’t want the boys sleeping in the basement,” she said.
“God, no.”
“And turn that damned thing off, it’s hideous.” When she sat down, he got up from the far end of the couch and moved closer to her.
Before she realized it, she’d reestablished distance between them.
He did not try again. Instead, he gestured toward the TV. “I’ve had them with me all my life. I’ve never had a seizure. It’s been memory, traumatic memory of this. Which I need you to understand, Katelyn.”
She wished he hadn’t brought it up. She wished it didn’t hurt so very much. “Understand what?”
“About Marcie! Which is connected to this.”
“That again. Dan, you screwed the woman.”
“We were made to do what we did.” As, he thought, were you and I, my precious heart and fellow breed animal.
“Okay, I’ll bite. If the devil made you do it, why? Why does he give a damn about you and Marcie—and me, for that matter? He’s a busy devil, he’s surely got more important things on his mind.”
“I cannot even begin to answer that question. I don’t understand any more than you do. All I can say is, if they wanted me to get tenure, then whatever they did more than worked.”
“I should say. It got you tenure and a mistress.” She heard Conner’s voice rise downstairs as they reached some sort of crisis in the shrieking video game that Paulie had brought.
Angrily, she shook away a tear. She didn’t want to feel like this, all tragic over her marriage. She wanted to feel angry and full of righteous self-justification. She wanted to be strong enough to march off to a lawyer, if that turned out to be what her heart wanted her to do.
Dan reached out across the distance. “Hey,” he said.
She turned away.
He sighed, got up, and went into the kitchen. As she came in behind him, he drank down a glass of wine in a couple of huge gulps.
He turned, looked at her. Dear heaven, she was as beautiful as an angel. What had happened, here? He was getting really scared, he was beginning to think that he’d ruined his life by being honest with her.
He touched the thing in his ear . . . and touched, also, his memory of seeing her as a child. He looked into her eyes, saw the sorrow there.
“Oh, God, Katelyn, you’ve got to accept something. The aliens—”
“No! Shut up!”
“You shut up! You listen!” He touched his ear again. “You know what this is? This is an implant. I got it right here in this kitchen. Right here, right in front of everybody and God only knows how they did that.”
“Dan, I can’t handle this. I warn you.”
He went to her. She turned away from him. “Katelyn, they brought us together when we were children, for God’s sake!” He touched her shoulder. She pulled away. “I remember you, Katelyn, in a blue nightgown. I remember—oh, my God, they’ve been with us all our lives.”
She shook her head, waved her hand in front of her face.
At that moment, Conner burst in. “Can we take the DVD down?”
“Be my guest,” Dan said.
“Be careful with that, the Keltons’ll kill you if you mess it up.”
“We will,” Conner said as he raced off. Then he returned. “Plus, we need a flashlight.”
“A flashlight?”
“Check the snow, see if it’s stickin’!”
Dan got a flashlight out of his toolkit and gave it to him.
“Okay, listen,” Conner said to Paulie when he returned to his basement lair. “I’m reasonably sure that they’ve been in here. In this room.”
Paulie’s eyes opened wide. “They have?”
“What’s interesting is I have a screen memory—”
“Which is? Remind me.”
“Paulie, you’ve gotta quit. Right now.”
“Quit what?”
“I can hear the laughter in your voice. You’ve seen the video, you know this is real. So trying to laugh me out of court is wrong. And that Connerbusters thing, Paulie, it’s incredibly corny. It’s the sort of thing that happens in third grade, not middle school.”
“It’s just a joke, Conner. If you didn’t take it so seriously, nobody else would, either. You gotta be more mature about these things. Kids are assholes. You get a few more years on you, you’ll learn to roll with it.”
Conner said, “You want me to crack that game?”
“Jesus, yes. Can you?”
“You know I can. But you have to promise me, Paulie. We’ve been friends a long time. All of our lives. You stop dumping on me.”
“Is that why I’m here? To get begged? Because I’m not the one you need to beg. You need to beg every guy in the class, Conner, because they all think you’re a complete schmedlock. The schmedlock of the century.”
“Paulie, if you quit, they will quit, which you know very well.”
“You got guts, I’ll say that. You crack the game for me and the Connerbusters are on hold for a week. You vector in the grays, and I’m your puppy dog.” He pulled a Nikon digital camera out of his backpack. “Six megapixels. Detailed pictures should be worth a fortune. So, when do they show up?” He looked at his watch.
“The exact time will be three-thirty-three,” Conner said. He realized that he was setting himself up for something. The odds against him felt huge.
“Okay, then, let’s synchronize watches.”
“My watch—”
“Conner, everybody on planet Bell Attached knows that your Christmas watch automatically sets itself to the Naval Observatory time signal once every twelve hours. So let me rephrase that, let me synchronize my ordinary watch to your awesome one.”
“Paulie, you want this watch?” He started to take it off.
“Conner, you just do not get it. I don’t want your watch. If you’re gonna get people off your back, you need to stop bragging and showing off. Everybody knows you’re a genius. Half the school are geniuses. Maybe you’re our major genius, I don’t know, but kids don’t like having their faces rubbed in the kind of shit you dish out.”
“I’m not understanding you.”
“Like night bef
ore last. You actually tried to communicate with the aliens you thought were out there in English and French. That was so lame, Conner.”
“I hadn’t realized that.”
“Well, try K-Paxian next time. I’m sure you’re fluent in that, too. Now, little boy, if you’re gonna crack Gestapo, crack it and I’ll suck your toes.”
“Conner!” Katelyn called.
“Okay! Okay! In a while.”
“It’s after ten.”
“So, little boy, we gonna get tucked in by mommy?”
“No, we’re not at your house, little boy. Come on.” Conner went across the room and out under the deck. He was outside before he asked himself why he’d done this. He’d just suddenly felt like coming out.
Paulie joined him. “Wow, is it ever snowing! Look at this!” He danced around, then went down on his back and made an angel. He leaped up. “It’s butt cold, we need our coats.”
As he ran back inside, Conner pointed the flashlight upward and flicked it on and off. As he’d learned, he varied the signal, three long, three short, two long, two short. The beam revealed a whirling maelstrom of snowflakes, dancing, racing before the wind. The air was sharp with smoke and the tang of ice. Off to the west, thunder rumbled. Conner went on signaling, even though it was nowhere near 3:33, even though it felt hopeless, even though Paulie was probably right and he’d dreamed up the whole thing.
“Lame-o, Connner! I mean, you really are trying. You believe this.”
“Shut up.”
Paulie brushed Conner’s head with his hand. “Ah, little boy’s getting all covered with snow, isn’t he?”
Conner stopped signaling. A light glowed around them just then. It didn’t last long, but it came from above. “Oh, Jesus,” Conner said. He started signaling again.
“It was lightning.”
“They’re here.” He looked up, letting the snow pummel his face. “You guys,” he whispered, “come on down.”
Suddenly and without a word, Paulie took off toward the house. Then, in the distance, Conner heard the Keltons’ dog Manrico set up a howl. He looked in the direction of the Keltons’ place . . . and saw, standing at the edge of the yard as if they’d just come up out of the woods, three kids. They had really big heads and their eyes were terrible in the reflected light from the house. “Paulie!” Conner whispered. But Paulie was standing under the deck, as still as death “Paulie . . .”