He got a topo of the entire eastern half of the state, then went offline and zoomed to the Wilton area. The map was from 1988, but Oak Road was there, and the houses. He saw the way the land worked, coming down in a series of ridges. Across Oak Road was an old rail line, and beyond it a very large forest. Half a mile behind the houses was Wilton Road, with the field where the glowboy had come down visible between them.
He found one hill with an elevation of a hundred and eight feet, but it wasn’t enough to cause him a problem. His choice of the grain elevator for his antenna and transmitter was the correct one. As the trap that would lead to the death of the kid was sprung, the evidence of its existence would be destroyed.
His next step was to buy the various items that would have been in an operative’s surgical kit. Everything was important, but the most important was a small reel of narrow-gauge copper wire that would provide both his transmitter’s antenna and his receiver’s. He also needed a radio transmitter, an X-Acto knife, electrical tape, and, from a drugstore, a topical anesthetic and that old reliable, ether.
He got everything except the drugstore items at a Radio Shack he found in an almost derelict strip mall. There was a chain drugstore down the street, where he picked up a fairly decent tube of anesthetic. The local druggist was able to sell him a bottle of solvent-grade ether.
He drove until he found a rural area, where he opened the transmitter carton. He read the schematic and specifications, opened the back of the transmitter with the tool pack he had bought, and modified the circuit board by bypassing a couple of resistors. The unit would now transmit at a far greater power output than allowed by amateur equipment. Carefully, he stabilized the connections with electrical tape.
He returned to Wilton, driving the quiet country road in an unhurried manner, listening to the radio and making certain that he violated no traffic laws. He passed the motel, observing nothing unusual. His room opened onto the parking strip, which was now empty. He drove to the end of the block and turned. To his right was the field he had come down in the night before, now covered with a new dusting of snow. Snowflakes drifted slowly out of a hard, gray sky. The field was empty, and there was no sign of any tracks, human or vehicular, in the new snow. Beyond the field stood the immense grain elevator.
He drove past the elevator and then turned into its concrete loading area. It was abandoned at this time of year, and the large bay doors were carefully padlocked. He went to the personnel entrance and opened it by sliding a credit card between the door and the jamb. Nobody expected an empty grain elevator to be robbed in a small town, so the security was extremely light.
Inside, he went to the control room. It was simple enough to understand. The conveyor that moved the grain from trucks into the silo was what he was interested in. He descended to the cellar and threw the switch that turned on the power. Then he went back to the control room and started the conveyor. It screeched and clanged, then began to rattle along doing exactly what he wanted it to. Its tubs threw off dust every they time bounced. Overnight, the constant motion of the conveyor would fill the whole enormous space with a volatile haze. Explosive dust like this was the reason that elevators were not run when the weather was too dry.
Later tonight, he would return and set up the transmitter.
He left the grain elevator and drove out into a neighborhood. He found a corner lot with a house set back on it. The place was silent and dark, the family obviously off at work. He turned into the driveway, parked, and went up to the back door. He tapped on the glass.
A dog barked, came rushing to the door, its claws clattering on the kitchen floor. As it barked furiously, its face kept appearing at the lower edge of the door’s window. It was a big dog, he thought some sort of hound, maybe a coonhound. Whatever, a big, mean dog was just what he was looking for.
He had learned how to handle dogs years ago, when he was a young officer and had been in training for the Air Police. But he would not risk tackling the Keltons’ mutt without a practice run. The dog was one of the few weapons man had against the grays. They could not control a dog’s mind. They hated and feared the dog.
He got the door unlocked after a small struggle with the mechanism. After soaking a handkerchief with ether, he pulled it open.
The dog rushed him, of course, and he clapped his hand over the snout and grabbed the animal by its scruff. While it was still struggling, he pushed his way into the kitchen. By the time he had closed the door with his heel, the dog was limp.
He spent a moment examining the skull, then cut into it about two inches above the right eye, making an incision so tiny that it hardly bled. He inserted a half-inch length of wire into the incision. Now he covered the wound with a little anesthetic. The dog would feel no pain when it woke up. Later, the wound would look like an insect bite, if it was noticed at all in the animal’s fur.
He was about to leave when he noticed a faint sound coming from the back of the house. A television, a soap opera. Moving swiftly and quietly, he was quite surprised to find a man, big, in his fifties, asleep in a chair in the family room.
A nice chance to practice. Working gently and swiftly, he dropped the man into a deeper sleep with the ether, then wired him, too. He did not hypnotize this man. He had no way of knowing what the name “Conner Callaghan” might mean to him, if anything. To direct an assassin at a target, the assassin had to have a means of identifying the target. This was why most of Mike’s subjects would be kids from Bell Attached School. Conner would be killed by somebody who knew him. It would look like a particularly vicious and crazy version of a school shooting.
He looked at his watch. One-forty. So, around breakfast time tomorrow, these two would be the first to enter a state of rage.
THE GRAYS WERE DEPLOYED ACROSS Earth in strict and carefully guarded territories. In the United States, they even adhered to the agreement they had made with the humans, and minimized their activities so that the Air Force would not come buzzing around and annoy them. In the rest of the world, they observed no such strictures.
It was difficult to reach into the human mind, but it was not hard to communicate with each other. The collective was growing excited, almost holding its breath, as the time for the attempt drew nearer. They did not know what their creation would be like, could hardly imagine a mind greater than their own. They felt a sense of worship and hope, and the Three Thieves an even more intimate wonder, because, as his guardians and his link to the collective, they were closest to him. Indeed, the feelings toward Conner were the strongest any gray had known in eons. And the hope, now that they had come this far and were so close to success, was very intense.
The other scouts, a million of them who had been scattered throughout the galaxy searching, had started racing toward Earth at 99 percent of the speed of light as soon as it had been understood what a perfect fit man was, a species that needed the grays as much as they needed man.
Inside the gigantic artificial world that was the main body, creeping along at half light speed, the sorrowing ranks stirred with hope so intense that they thought that a plague of suicide would overtake them if they failed.
When one of the lucky thousand scouts here on Earth tasted of a human dream, or licked the suffering off the soul of a prisoner or swam in the delicious sea of discovery that defined a child, all the billions quivered with joy, and all longed, themselves, to once again have such feelings of their own.
So, when it became clear that a particularly dangerous satellite was moving from one orbit to another, and that its new orbit would park it twenty-five-thousand miles above Conner’s head, the whole mass of the grays fluttered with unease. They knew exactly how this satellite worked, they had seen it built. Had they wished, they could have built a similar instrument based on much more elegant principles, and with it shattered the planet.
They would never do that, of course, not to precious Earth, to precious man. They knew that there must be a way to revive their souls, to make their lives worth living again.
Locked somewhere in the human genome was the secret of man’s vitality. Conner would find this spark, and understand how to enable the grays to share it.
At least, that was the dream. But if this atrocious weapon was fired at him, maybe the dream would end.
The collective directed a triad to attend to the thoughts of the president. Ever since Harry Truman had, in 1947, ordered his airplanes to shoot at the grays, all presidents were routinely implanted. This made their minds easy to hear, with the result that their most private fantasies, desires, and actions were part of the vast public entertainment the grays had constructed for themselves by implanting humans.
This was one of the main reasons they abducted human beings, to implant them so that they could enjoy them from a distance. Thus some of the most peculiar and most intense people, the ones with the most colorful fantasies—usually deeply hidden—were actually among the most famous creatures in the universe.
This president was a marvelous seraglio of sexual invention and hungry, innovative desire. His thought processes were more conventional. Sexy he might be, but he was also an efficient man.
Listening to the flowing whisper of words and watching in their own minds the flickering mass of colors, fantasized human body parts—long feminine legs and white, full breasts, mostly—and the low growls of desire that were the mental “voice” of his subconscious, they saw that he was uneasy about Charles Gunn’s murderous request. But would he deny it? Of this they could not be sure. Mind control was not a reliable tool. Also, they did not like to interfere in the action of human will. They had wrecked their own independent spirits by creating their collective. They would not also wreck man’s independence with excessive use of the tools of collective thought.
But this was one time that it was necessary. They began to work on the president’s mind, to touch it with images of the suffering the scalar weapon could cause.
As the collective mind of the grays concentrated on the president’s decision, they failed to address the building crisis in Wilton, or to see just how serious it was, and Conner’s death began to come closer and closer yet, as the fatal hours passed.
TWENTY-TWO
ROB LANGFORD PUT DOWN THE phone. “We’ve got orders,” he said to Lauren. “First, we are to assume that Colonel Wilkes is in the area, second that he is definitely here to kill this child. We are to protect the child at all costs, and deal with Wilkes in whatever way is required.”
“What does that mean?”
“Find him, kill him.”
“Wait a minute on that. Are these orders in writing?”
“No, they are not.”
“I don’t think murder is such a hot idea. I mean, if you don’t have a written order that is definitely legal, that is way out of line.”
“Let me deal with Wilkes. You concentrate on the kid. That’s the way it ought to be, anyway. What we are going to do is uniform up—or rather, I am—and pay an official visit. We will seek cooperation from the parents.”
“How far along is Mike? Do we know?”
“We do not.”
“What if these folks don’t like the Air Force?”
“Our objective is simple. It is to determine if there is an extremely smart child living on Oak Road. If not, then we extend our search to the local schools. Assuming we identify the child, we provide information to the parents and put them under surveillance protection. We must not to do anything that might cause these people to resist the approach of the grays to the child.”
They went to the traveling officer’s quarters where Rob had a suite. She remained in his small living room while he changed.
Rob was an attractive guy, and she wanted, she was finding, to do more than sample him the way she had been doing with men since she’d started this job. In fact, she could get serious with this guy. In fact, she thought he was the best man she had ever met.
He was also the most dedicated to his mission and the most businesslike.
They drove off the base and through fourteen miles of slowly worsening weather, passing through the town and going onto the Bell campus. On the way, they phoned all four Oak Road houses. They got three answering machines and a non-answer. So everybody was where they were supposed to be, which was working at their various occupations on campus or attending school.
“We’ll try the physics guy first. His discipline fits best, I think.”
“The baby’s not our target.”
“No. It could be one of the two teenagers, the Keltons, unless Adam was lying to you. The other three children seem too young.”
“He was lying.”
“Maybe Oak Road doesn’t even figure in it, then. Maybe the whole thing was a feint in anticipation of some discovery they knew Wilkes was about to make. They directed his—and our—attention to Oak Road because it doesn’t matter.”
She felt a shiver of unease the moment the words were out of his mouth. “My sense of it is that Oak Road is very damned important.”
“They don’t make mistakes.”
“Adam made one. He killed my father.”
“That’s true enough.”
“So they do.”
“What do you think they’ll do if they lose the child?”
She thought about it. “I get a feeling of tremendous rage.”
“Are you in touch with them now?”
“I’m not sure. I think I might be.” She shuddered. “Sometimes I feel sort of as if I am. As if I’m part of a great sorrow. I think that’s the heart of the grays, the way I perceive their collective being.”
“That’s chilling.”
He turned the car into a parking lot, beyond which was a neat white sign with black lettering, SCIENCE HALL.
It was a towered old brick pile, Bell’s science center. The enormous windows were designed to gather light, from back in the days before electricity had come to rural Kentucky.
According to a schedule affixed to his door, Dr. Jeffers had been teaching until five minutes ago, so they waited in his office. He had no secretary and the door wasn’t locked. Inside, it was surprisingly uncluttered for an academic’s lair.
“Uh oh,” Rob said, picking up a book from the professor’s desk.
“We have to expect them to be in a tizzy about UFOs. Look what just happened.”
“Well, we have to stay far from that topic.”
Ten minutes passed. Rob remained composed but Lauren did not wait well, and she got progressively more and more nervous. How could he be so collected? He was like too many military people, in a certain deep way resigned to fate, a fault that, in her opinion, came from living by orders.
“Maybe we should try the school,” she said, somehow keeping herself from screaming it at him.
At that moment a short, quick man came through the door. His eyes fixed on Rob’s blues. “Hello?”
Rob went to his feet. Smiled. Extended his hand. “Good afternoon, Dr. Jeffers, I’m Colonel Langford.”
“The UFO!”
“Excuse me?”
“You’re here about the UFO, yes?”
Rob shook his head. “I’m not aware . . .”
“We saw a UFO. There’s videotape. Our whole neighborhood saw it. There was an Air Force jet chasing it.”
“Uh, I don’t think we do that.”
Rob was really very impressive at this.
“We’re here to talk about gifted students.”
“Gifted students?”
“There’s a new program, and we’re informing science departments all over the country. Seeing as you’re head of the physics department here at Bell, and we’ve got Bell on our list, we decided to come on over.”
“On your list?”
“We’re from Alfred,” Lauren said. “I’m in procurement. He’s—”
“Traffic-control supervisor. I make sure our trainees don’t run into each other. We’ve volunteered for this mission, actually.”
“What mission is it? I’m not understanding.”
“The Air Force
is looking for a few very gifted, very extraordinary students. Unusual. Freaks, even. That smart.”
“This is Bell College, nobody here is smart. I’m not even particularly smart. In fact, I’m not smart at all, and certainly my students aren’t. They’re a bunch of idiots, actually.”
“Ah. We always thought—”
“A beautiful campus does not mean smart. It only means lots of red brick and white columns.”
“What about that other school?” Rob asked. “The professors’ kids?”
He leaned back in his desk chair, stared at the ceiling. “Actually, my neighbors have a sort of monster. Aggressive, peculiar, frenetically loquacious for age eleven. Builds remarkably detailed model trains.”
This didn’t sound promising to Lauren, but Rob said, “Should we interview him? It could mean an appointment to the Air Force Academy.”
“Somehow I don’t see Conner in a uniform. He’s . . . anarchic. I really find him quite disturbing, but now that you mention it, he is pretty much of a genius.”
Now it sounded promising. “Can we meet him?” Lauren asked.
“His father’s over in the psych building. Daniel Callaghan. Or he could be off fucking some administrator. Apparently he does a bit of that.”
What a bitter man this was. Bitter, mean little man. “So he’s a monster and his father’s a womanizer. Has he got a mother, or has she killed herself?”
Rob shot her a frown, but she couldn’t help it. This was a very nasty little man, and she wanted him to know it.
“Surprisingly not. Actually, I’m being mean, which I suppose what’s got your back up. I am rather frustrated, I’m afraid.” He held up the UFO book. “I believe in this, which has demoted me from CalTech through the middle Ivies to Bell. I thought you were here about our astonishing, wonderful UFO. I thought everything was about to change. Instead, you’re here for some totally conventional and annoying reason. The Callaghans would never let that precious child of theirs anywhere near the military. At least, I hope not. I suppose I was trying to scare you off, to preserve them from a temptation I don’t actually trust them to resist. Truth be told, he’s the most marvelous human being I have ever encountered, and I bless the day we happened by sheerest chance to move next door.”