Taken

Chapter One

Jacob Clarke felt his boyhood return to him as the old Pacer joggled along the dirt road that led to his mother’s house. His brother Tom was at the wheel, and in the backseat, Carol, his wife, and their seven-year-old daughter, Lisa. A warmth came from each of them, one that reached out and touched him, palpable as a hand. A normal life, he thought. A normal life was a treasure beyond price, a life where things came and lingered for a time, then passed away according to the iron laws of earth. A life punctuated by the usual triumphs and misfortunes, within a fixed range both predictable and unpredictable, a life where darkness brought only night, and light brought only morning. It was all he wanted or had ever wanted, and briefly, as he closed in upon the old home place, he thought it might actually lie within his grasp.

“What are you listening to?” Tom asked cheerfully.

“What?” Jacob said.

“I was talking to Lisa,” Tom said. He glanced toward the backseat, where Jacob’s daughter sat, listening to a first-generation Walkman.

Carol laughed. “She can’t hear you,” she said, pointing to the headphones.

Tom mouthed the words slowly and with maximum expansion.

“The Ramones,” Lisa answered brightly.

Tom turned back to the road and nodded toward the old farmhouse as it came into view

“Look like you remember it?” he asked.

Jacob nodded. “Exactly. It doesn’t change much.”

Once they parked, Jacob got out of the car and stared silently at the house. The years had taken their toll, as time… and experience… always did. It needed paint and new screens for the windows and the rusty gutters no doubt leaked badly. It looked like a thousand other run-down houses, and thus gave no hint of the unearthly things that had happened in its rooms, or within the old, tumbledown shed that still stood in the distance, or beneath the trees that edged its dusty grounds.

Becky rushed out of the house, the screen door slapping closed behind her, ran over to Jacob and hugged him fiercely.

“Mom’s just waking up,” she said. She looked at Carol. “I’m glad you guys came. Mom really wanted to see Lisa before…”

“I know,” Carol said softly.

Sally lay in her bed, hooked up to an oxygen machine.

Jacob had never seen her this way, so wasted, and for a moment it left him unable to speak, so that he only stared at her, this woman now grown old and withered, but who’d once been so bold and determined, built “con-tactors” and yearned with all her heart to speak with other worlds.

“You grew up nice,” Sally said weakly, her voice rattling with each word. “You all right?”

Jacob nodded.

She smiled, then closed her eyes for a moment, as if the nearness of her son after so many years was a pressure she could hardly bear. When she opened them again, Carol stood before her, Lisa huddled shyly at her mothers side.

“Mom, this is my wife, Carol,” Jacob told her. “And this is Lisa, your granddaughter.”

Sally struggled to rise, urging herself up in bed. “Lisa, let me look at you,” she said.

Lisa stepped up to her grandmother’s bed.

“Say hello,” Jacob told her.

“Hello, Grandma,” Lisa said.

Sally peered into Lisa’s face, and for a moment seemed to return to the past. “She has your father’s eyes,” she said to Jacob.

Jacob took Sally’s hand, and watched as she lifted her eyes upward longingly, still searching desperately for the one who’d appeared that night so long ago, lingered briefly, then vanished. The effort appeared to exhaust her, and she sank back down into the rumpled bed.

“She never stops thinking about him, does she?” Jacob said later that night as he sat in the kitchen with Tom.

“I know who he was, you know,” Tom said.

Jacob looked at him doubtfully.

“Back in the Cold War, the government experimented with soldiers,” Tom explained. “It’s all in documents you can get with the Freedom of Information Act. They were giving drugs to soldiers. I think your dad was one of them. He escaped from an Army base in Roswell. Owen Crawford came to get him.” He leaned forward earnestly. “Your ‘abilities’ came from your father, Jake. From whatever drugs they gave him. Not because he came from outer space.” His voice grew more grave. “The problem is, they’re doing it again, with civilians this time. Same experiments. Mind control. Processing. Some of these people, they think they’ve been abducted by aliens, but that’s just what the government wants them to believe.”

“Alien abduction as a cover story?” Jacob asked skeptically. “It seems a little far-fetched, Tom.” He drew in a cautious breath. “I mean…”

Just then Becky came into the room. “Mom’s in a lot of pain,” she said. “The morphine doesn’t seem to be helping.”

Jacob got to his feet and rushed to his mother’s side. He took her hand and held it softly. “It’s all right, Mom. It’s all right.”

Sally looked at him wearily. “I’m going now, aren’t I?”

“Soon,” Jacob answered.

“I want to sit up a little,” Sally said weakly.

Jacob carefully supported her back as she rose, then fluffed the pillow behind her, before gently placing his hand on her brow. Then he concentrated on the vision, determined to bring it to her during these final seconds of her life. He knew the vision was forming as her eyes filled with wonder. She reached for her ear, plucked something from it, invisible to Jacob and the others but as real to her as the breath she drew. “John,” she whispered.

Jacob knew that she was seeing him in her mind, Jacob’s father as he’d been in 1947, perhaps the moment when she’d known absolutely that she was in love with him, the moment when she’d drawn her grandmother’s lone-star earring from her ear and placed it in his hand.

Jacob reached to take Tom’s hand, and Tom, too, turned in the direction of Sally’s gaze. Tom placed his other hand in Becky’s, and the vision was visible to them all now, not just to Sally. A figure emerged from the blinding radiance, a visitor to earth who had miraculously returned.

The figure stretched out his hand. “Come on, Sally.” Jacob looked at Tom and Becky and knew that they saw him, too. Then he looked at his mother, and saw that she had gone, her eyes closed now, her expression, for once, utterly serene.

Eric sat back in the LTD as it sped toward Groom Lake. The voice at the other end of the bulky car phone was scratchy, but not so lost in distortion that he couldn’t understand what was being said to him… and be angered by it.

“Listen to me,” he fired back. “I need that funding shifted into biological research, Ted.” He paused and listened impatiently for a moment. “Find the resources. What? None of your goddamned business. Ted? Listen to me. Do your job or lose it.”

He slammed the phone into its cradle and glared out the window.

There they were again, the usual crowd, the nation’s inexhaustible supply of gooney birds, all of them focused on Roswell now, the crack in every crackpot, America’s number one lightning rod for morons and geeks and…

He shook his head at the hopeless idiocy of it. “We ought to put up a gift shop,” he snapped. “Sell little bobbing alien heads for the jerks to take home.” His mocking laughter held a bitter edge.

At the Groom Lake Facility, he leaped from the LTD and strode quickly through its growing field of Quonset huts and hangars to where he knew they waited for him, the scientists and technicians who belonged to him now, belonged to the project he oversaw, and which, unlike his father, he would never allow to slip from his grasp.

Inside the hangar, several men and women lay unconscious on stretchers, while other people, mostly in street clothes, catalogued them in preparation for removal.

Eric gave the scene a quick glance, sizing up the level of activity, who was working efficiently, who was not, and on that basis instantaneously deciding who would keep his job and who would lose it.

But he was not here to evaluate this part of the project, and so moved on, the heels of his boots clicking loudly across the concrete floor, until he reached his destination, a white room where Dr. Chet Wakeman waited.

“I have our people taking the test subjects out across the desert to avoid the… amateurs at the gate,” Wakeman said with the hearty laugh of a man in his element- obviously feeding off the bustling amosphere’s kinetic energy.

“The crowd gets bigger every day, Chet,” Eric said as he stepped up to the table. “Like a damn circus.”

Wakeman grinned. “Well, if you’re going to be in a circus, best be in the center ring.” Suddenly his tone became matter-of-fact. “We had to open up half a dozen people today before we got one,” he said. “Like looking for pearls.” He smiled proudly. “But what we did find is quite amazing.” He turned to the right, where a glass wall looked out onto an observation room furnished with a single table upon which rested a small lead box. He reached for a microphone and spoke into it. “Send in the soldier.”

The door to the observation room opened and a young Army private stepped inside.

Eric estimated the soldier’s age at eighteen, his experience minimal, his mental attitude profoundly naive. Perfect, he thought, as the soldier moved farther into the room, peering about until the door abruptly closed behind him and he startled visibly, then returned to himself and gazed about without concern, his attention not in the least drawn to the table or the lead box in which the specimen rested.

Suddenly he began to laugh, the laughter growing as the seconds passed, becoming ever more frantic and oddly desperate, the laugher of the madhouse. Then the laugher stopped, as if on command, and the soldier charged toward the booth where Eric stood watching. He crashed his head into the glass, then lifted it and slammed it against the glass once again and then yet again, turning his head into a bloody pulp blow by suicidal blow.

“In Buddhism we are taught that enlightenment is best attained through hardship and struggle,” Wakeman said calmly. “A man will, for example, make himself angry because he seeks the energy of anger.”

The soldier’s head slammed loudly against the glass, but Wakeman remained oddly unconcerned. “We know that our little pals from the stars have found a very deep and very real correlation between thought and energy.” He looked at Eric. “Seven seconds. That’s how long it took for exposure to that thing to completely destroy this young man’s brain.” He tapped the blood-streaked glass of the observation room. “That’s what the implants do. They pull out any thought, any memory, and play it for us to see.”

The soldier collapsed in a crumpled, lifeless mass.

“Of course, these devices can short-circuit in truly fabulous ways,” Wakeman continued. “But that’s a byproduct of what they are.”

“Which is?” Eric asked.

“Tracking devices,” Wakeman answered without hesitation. “Tags. A sort of neurological fingerprint.” He shrugged. “We don’t know how they work exactly. We don’t even know why the glass is keeping us safe.” He took a glass vial from his lab coat and poured a half-dozen tiny implants onto the table. “We found these in a sampling of brain tumor patients we’ve been monitoring for the last couple of years.” Eric stepped away from the table nervously. Wakeman gave a dismissive wave of the hand. “These particular devices are dead.”

“Dead?” Eric asked.

“Like old batteries. They can’t transmit anymore.”

“Why did they stop transmitting?”

“My guess is that they stopped when the ‘lab rat’ was no longer useful to our… visitors.”

Eric studied the dead implants. “What if they come back on?”

Wakeman smiled in a way that struck Eric as unset-tlingly boyish and carefree. “Then we party hardy,” he said.

Chapter Two

Jacob stared out the window as Becky pulled a blouse out of her mother’s closet and held it up to Tom. “Remember this one? Her favorite. She wore it to my graduation. Went all the way to Fort Worth to buy it.”

“You should keep it,” Tom told her.

Becky drew the blouse into her arms as if it were her dead mother. “I’ve been thinking about what the preacher said at Mom’s funeral,” she said. “About how a cruel death makes you wonder about God.”

Jacob turned from the bleak landscape beyond the window, the vast sky that hung above the dry fields. “The ways of God are not the ways of man,” he said. “That’s a distinguishing tenet of modern science.”

“How do you mean?” Tom asked.

“Science is just like religion,” Jacob explained. “Only without the comfort. We tell you there’s a plan, but part of that plan is for you to turn to dust.”

Becky nodded. “Dust,” she repeated, her eyes now on her mother’s blouse. “I just wanted her around to talk to a little longer,” she said as she began to cry.

Tom hugged her gently. “I know,” he said.

Jacob stood up, the grief closing in on him, driving him from the room. He walked out onto the porch and stood alone until Tom joined him there.

“You okay?” Tom asked quietly.

“Just a little tired.”

“Is it what you did for Mom?”

“I’ll be all right,” Jacob replied. He looked at his brother closely. “You don’t want to believe what happened to me, do you? Or to Mom?”

“No, I don’t want to believe it, Jake,” Tom answered quietly.

“But you always kind of did, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Tom answered. “Kind of ironic. The country’s number one debunker turns out to have a half-alien half-brother.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I want you to come forward.”

Jacob turned away, now watching Carol and Lisa as they strolled along a line of crumbling fence. “I can’t do that.”

“But, Jacob,” Tom argued, “this is something the world has a right to know. You are the proof that it really happened.”

“What do you want me to do, go on TV and bend spoons? It would be a freak show.”

“But after that, people would know.”

“What would they know?” Jacob asked. “Not why they came. Not what they want,” He shrugged. “Besides, I’m not the only one.”

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t really,” Jacob admitted. “It’s just a feeling I get sometimes. That there’s… someone else.”

“Like you?”

Jacob peered out over the barren land. “They’re playing catch-up. The government. They’re trying to figure out the same things.” He looked at Tom darkly. “Owen Crawford knew about me,” he said. “Maybe he knew about whoever else there is.”

“Jesse Keys,” Wakeman said excitedly, like a prospector who’d just stumbled onto a vein of gold.

Eric stared without enthusiasm at the black and white photograph of a teenaged boy Wakeman displayed on his computer monitor. “One of my father’s many failures,” he said dully.

“Failure?”

“I’d call it that,” Eric said harshly.

“Your father couldn’t have known what would happen when they took out Russell Keys’ implant,” Wakeman noted. “After all he…”

“I don’t want to talk about my father,” Eric interrupted sharply “Tell me about this one. This Jesse Keys.”

“One thing’s for sure about him.”

“Which is?”

“That he mattered to them,” Wakeman answered authoritatively.

“How do you know that?”

“Because they pulled him right through the wall of a bomb shelter in order to take him. They wouldn’t have done that if they hadn’t considered him vital.”

“What do you think it all means?” Eric asked.

“Maybe nothing,” Wakeman admitted. “But it’s clear that some they chew on repeatedly, and some they spit out after one bite. They came for Jesse Keys and they took him. Now that we’re looking more at the genetics, perhaps we’ll figure out what he had that they wouldn’t let us keep.”

“Genetics,” Eric mused. “What have you learned about those brothers in Alaska?”

“My guess is that they were failed attempts at crossbreeding,” Wakeman said. “Like that kid your old man tried to bring back from Texas.” His eyes sparkled suddenly. “You see what they’re doing, don’t you?”

Eric felt a jolt of energy. “What?”

“Everything they can,” Wakeman said, and began typing rapidly, like a man seized by a vision. “This is an FBI ‘aging’ program,” he explained. “Some fugitive has been underground for ten years and they want to make sure they’ll know him if they see him.” He punched the Enter key and waited as the pixels slowly revealed a computer-aged version of Jesse Keys. “I’ll lay you diamonds to doughnuts this Jesse Keys is still alive. If you want to know what’s so important about him, maybe we should ask the man himself.”

The distress call cut in, and Jesse Keys yanked the microphone to his mouth. “Yes?”

“Chief, we got a pileup on Old Cayton Road,” the dispatcher said. “Car full of college kids. Paramedics on the scene.”

“I’m on my way.”

When Jesse reached the site of the collision, the destruction amazed him.

The car had all but disintegrated around the telephone pole. A few other vehicles were strewn about, some involved in the accident, others belonging to motorists who’d stopped at the scene, backing up traffic in both directions.

“What have we got, Bobby?” Jesse asked the first EMS tech he saw.

“Kids coming back from Milton,” Bobby answered breathlessly. “Two boys in the back pretty banged up. Already on their way to County. Girl’s still in the passenger seat. Looks like a spinal. We’re getting her out now.”

Jesse raced to the car and looked in. The girl was pinned into the passenger seat, a neck collar already securing her neck. He adjusted the collar slightly.

“My friends?” the girl asked.

“On the way to the hospital,” Jesse answered.

“Kevin?”

Jesse shook his head.

The young woman’s eyes went blank and began to roll upward.

She was rapidly losing consciousness.

Desperate to keep her from going under, Jesse quickly snapped a pen from his pocket. “Listen, can you do something for me?”

The girl blinked rapidly. “What?”

“Can you keep your head straight and follow my pen with your eyes?”

He moved the pen slowly right to left, watching as the young woman’s eyes labored to follow it.

“Good,” he said, pocketing the pen. “We’ll have you out of here in no time.” He smiled. “You just keep looking at where my pen was, and keep your head straight.”

He rose and moved through the wreckage, the usual scenes playing out before him, crumpled metal, gawking motorists, a landscape of flashing lights. Nothing drew his attention until he noticed Bobby standing off in a field, his shoulders hunched, head down.

“Jesus, I’m sorry, Chief,” Bobby explained when Jesse got to him. “I just…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Jesse told him. “My first accident, I puked all over my chief’s shoes.” He patted Bobby’s shoulder. “And remember this, when you come upon a bad thing like this, everything you do makes it better.” He pulled out his pen and nodded toward the young woman in the car. “Keep her staring at this pen. Don’t let her look at that hole in the windshield.”

Bobby nodded softly and took the pen. “Thanks, Chief.”

Jesse rushed away, still moving quickly among the wreckage, looking for anything that might have escaped the notice of the other police and EMS workers who’d gathered at the scene.

Within minutes, the chaos of the initial response had resolved itself in an orderly arrangement of activity.

Jesse stood within the flow of cars, watching as they whizzed past, getting glimpses of the far side of the road as he paced about, cars blocking his view as they passed, then revealing it again, a cop giving directions, an EMS worker standing by an ambulance, and finally a tall, slender man, hawk-faced and leaden-eyed, smoking a cigarette beside a large truck, its sides hand-painted, TRAVELING ATTRACTIONS.

Jesse froze.

It was him. He knew it instantly. It was the same man who’d chased him down the alley when he was kid.

The carny touched his baseball cap and nodded like someone greeting an old familiar friend.

But he was not a friend, Jesse knew, not a friend at all, and so he strode toward him determinedly, cars screeching their brakes as he stepped into the traffic, moving forward in a trance until something flashed and he awakened to find himself standing in the middle of a deserted road, nothing left of the accident save the occasional small bits of broken glass, the shadows deepening all around him as night fell.

The hours of missing time were still playing darkly in Jesse’s mind the next day as he went through the routine motions of mowing his lawn. He’d not planned to mow that day, but after what had happened the day before, he felt drawn to the familiar, things he could do by rote, the safety of routine.

His nine-year-old son, Charlie, walked along beside him, his bare legs sprayed by tiny green flecks of severed grass.

“Did you know that twelve people have gone to the moon since 1969?” Charlie asked.

Jesse shook his head as he gave the mower a quick shove. “I didn’t realize it was that many.”

“My report is going to be on the first landing,” Charlie said. “It’s going to be a play.”

“I’ll be there,” Jesse said.

Charlie looked delighted. “Even if there’s an accident?”

“I’ll get someone to work my shift,” Jesse assured him.

Charlie gave Jesse a hesitant look. “That accident yesterday, are the people all right?”

“Most of them.”

“Are you all right?”

Jesse stopped moving forward with the mower and looked at his son, wondering what change in his manner had given Charlie the idea that he was… different. “I’m fine,” he said. He saw that his son didn’t believe him, that he suspected something had gone wrong, or been wrong… or was destined to go wrong. He wasn’t sure what his son sensed. He knew only that he wanted to avoid it. He unhooked the lawn mower bag and dumped the grass clippings. “Let’s get this place hosed down before your mom gets home,” he said.

He reached for the hose and turned on the water. The hose moved oddly, like something alive, a serpent wriggling in his hand. A blade of terror cut through him. He dropped the hose, and fixed his gaze on where it lay, half expecting it to rise, coil, strike.

“Jesse.”

Jesse felt his insides leap.

Amelia was standing just behind him.

“Honey, what is it?” she asked. “What’s the matter?”

Jesse stared blankly at Amelia, then at Charlie, unable to speak, his gaze riveted upon the hose as it wriggled wildly, spewing foamy venom across the glistening lawn.

He felt a strange itch in his chest, as if something had bitten him, and headed into the house. From the bathroom, he could see Amelia and Charlie talking worriedly on the front lawn, worried about him, about something… strange.

The itch struck again, sharp and painful, like a bite.

He lifted his shirt and his eyes widened in horror and disbelief, his mind barely able to take in what he saw, not a bite mark, as he’d expected, or a rash, but the boiling mark of a four-fingered hand.

Eric sipped his morning coffee and perused the newspaper. Reagan led. in the polls, and there’d been no resolution of the hostage crisis in Iran.

“This hostage thing just shows you what happens when you let your enemy see your weakness,” he said. “We should have gone in there and gotten our people, no matter what the cost.”

His daughter Mary looked up from her cereal. “My teacher says if we’d done that, they’d have all been killed.”

“Maybe,” Eric told her. “But the Iranians would have been less likely to do it again.”

Julie sat down at the table. “Can we talk about something else?”

Eric returned to the paper. For the last few days he’d been going over reports of “flying saucer” sightings in Maine. With each new sighting, he’d felt the pull of a change, a break from the arid land he had occupied nearly all his life, the desert wastes of Nevada. Except for the Roswell incident, the West had proven of little interest to the visitors. So what was the point of remaining in an area where those he sought rarely appeared, he asked himself. If you wanted to kill a polar bear, you had to go the Arctic, and increasingly in the last few days he’d determined that if he wanted to complete his father’s work, he could not remain where his father had remained. In a sense, he decided, Owen Crawford had lived like a hunter in a duck blind, waiting for his prey to show up, rather than actively pursuing it.

The decision came like a clap of thunder. “I think we should move,” he announced.

Julie turned this idea over, considering. “To somewhere a little farther out of town?”

“No,” Eric replied. “ Maine.”

“Don’t you think this is a bit too sudden?” Julie asked, stunned by what Eric had just said.

Mary gave Eric a knowing look. “Is this ‘cause there’s flying saucers in Maine?” she asked brightly.

Eric looked at Mary, astonished by her cleverness… or was it intuition? “How did you know about that?” he asked.

“Dylan Peters said that he and his family had gone out to some mailbox and taken pictures of flying saucers but the pictures didn’t come out and that you were the flying saucer soldier and you were in charge and all that… like those guys in Close Encounters that kill the cows.”

“Smart girl,” Eric said proudly. He turned to Julie. “I don’t think it’s too sudden at all.”

Jesse sat alone, reading, but hardly noticing what he read as his mind returned to something that had happened a few days before. It had been a night like this, clear and crisp. A terrible restlessness had seized him, something invisible urging him from his bed. He’d got-ten up, leaving Amelia asleep in their bed, dressed and gone for a drive, down the state highway, where he’d finally ended up near the accident site of a few days before, standing in a wheat field as the wind rippled through the tall green blades. He’d thought himself alone in the field, then a farmer had shown up, shotgun in hand, recognized him as the man who’d pulled his son from a sweep augur the year before, and lowered the gun. The farmer’s question sounded in Jesse’s mind, You come to look at my glow-in-the-dark field?

Minutes later, Jesse had seen the field for himself, a circle burned out of it, the farmer saying directly what Jesse had thought at the time, Looks like a flying saucer, don’t it?

It did, yes, and now, as Jesse glanced up from his book, the night clear and crisp beyond the house, he felt oddly ready for what he saw: a light, bright and searing, reflected in the mirror above the fireplace.

He drew in a deep breath. They were coming for him, and he knew it. They were coming for him again, but this time it was going to be different. He got to his feet. This time he was going to fight them.

He knocked over a table as he rushed out of the house and into the street. The light was huge now, and steadily lowering, its bright glow intensifying as it descended.

“What do you want?” Jesse cried. “Leave me alone!”

“Dad?”

Jesse wheeled around to see his son standing a short distance away, his small hand lifted toward him imploringly. Amelia stood beside Charlie, a bag of groceries in her arms, the headlights of her car illuminating the scene.“Come back into the house, Dad,” Charlie said.

Jesse nodded, his shoulders slumped, as if beneath the accusatory looks he saw in his neighbors’ eyes.

Later that night, as he lay in bed with Amelia, he knew that the time had come, and so he told her everything, how they’d rescued him from the temple in Vietnam, how he’d thought of them as his dark guardian angels, and put himself in danger time and again to see if they would save him, the fact that they always had. But even all this was not enough. Everything had to come out, and so he went on, talking without restraint, the story pouring out of him in a flood of revelation, the way he’d been “taken” from a bomb shelter, the people who were after him, not aliens this time, but military people, how he’d assumed a false name and joined the Army in order to conceal himself. At last, he showed her the red imprint of the hand on his chest, though it was clear she saw only a rash.

“Maybe it’s… all in your mind, Jesse,” Amelia said cautiously.

“You don’t see a hand?” Jesse asked.

She touched him softly. “We’ve been through a lot,” she said. “And we’ll get through this. But, please, see someone, Jesse. I want you to see someone.”

He shook his head. “They’d just tell me I have a tumor. My father died of one. There is something in my head, Amelia, but it’s not a tumor. It’s something they put there. Something that tells them about me.”

Amelia stroked his brow, a nurse again, only this time to a husband who was going mad. “Jesse, listen to yourself. You’ve got to see someone. If you won’t do it for me, do it for Charlie.”

He thought of Charlie, how much he wanted to stay alive and healthy and watch his son grow up. “All right,” he said. “I will.”

He met Dr. Findlay the next day, went through every test the doctor suggested, then returned for the results. The doctor’s diagnosis did not surprise him.

“The tumor is very small,” Dr. Findlay said. “There’s no sign of fluid buildup… but still, it could explain your recent behavior.”

Jesse knew that it was not a tumor, but what was the point of saying so.

Dr. Findlay handed him a small card with a name and address written on it. “Dr. Franklin Traub. He’s the best in the country.”

Jesse took the card. He knew that Dr. Traub would recommend surgery, and that during the course of that surgery, he would surely die as his father had, bearing an unbearable secret to the grave. For a moment, that death seemed sweet, a way of escaping… and allowing his family to escape.

Jacob and Becky watched the television screen where Tom appeared, sitting in a chair like a real celebrity, talking to the host, explaining his certainty that people were being abducted by aliens, even displaying a picture of the aliens themselves, creatures he estimated as being about four feet tall with pear-shaped heads, almond-shaped eyes, elongated arms, and long, extra-jointed fingers.

“Any minute he’ll do a card trick,” Jacob said.

Becky looked at him somberly. “I always knew, Jake. I always did. But I never thought that contactor Mom was building in the garage was going to get… your father’s attention.”

Jacob concentrated on the screen. Tom was now declaring that although he’d once been the nation’s foremost debunker of alien abductions, he had recently come to accept such stories as entirely true, a change he attributed to a “personal experience” he was not “at liberty” to discuss.

Jacob shook his head. No one would believe him, he thought. No one in the world save a few “crackpots” who were actually looking for the proof. And the price to Tom would be enormous. He would be ridiculed ceaselessly, caricatured and lampooned, the butt of a thousand cruel jokes. Ordinary people would cross the street in order to avoid him.

Jacob glanced across the room to where Carol sat with Lisa in her arms, reading to her quietly. It was a frail world, he knew, one he could blast into a thousand pieces with a single word.

He glanced back at the television. The audience was laughing.

Not me, he thought, not me.

Jesse and Amelia took their seats in Dr. Traub’s wood-paneled office and waited for the test results.

The doctor remained behind his desk, his hand on a slender folder.

“You were right,” he said to Jesse. “That thing in your brain is not a tumor.”

Jesse could hardly believe that Dr. Traub had actually confirmed what he’d always known, but never expected anyone to believe, that the thing in his brain had not been formed by his body, not a malignancy of flesh… but of intent.

“It’s very small,” Traub went on. “It looks metallic.” This last remark seemed almost physically to yank Traub forward in his seat. “Where did you grow up?” he asked.

“ Illinois.”

“Any exposure to chemicals?”

“Heroin,” Jesse admitted.

“And you say your father had a similar tumor?”

“Not similar.”

“No?”

“Identical.”

“I see.” Dr. Traub smiled reassuringly. “Well, for the record, we see such deposits occasionally in people who work with unusual chemicals,” he explained. “They’re usually made up of some kind of foreign matter that got swept into a little pile because your body couldn’t figure out how to get rid of it.” He clasped his hands together. “The important thing is that we can treat it without surgery. We can use localized ultrasound therapy to break it up. Once that’s happened, you’ll pass it in a matter of days.”

Jesse glanced at Amelia, then back to Dr. Traub. “No surgery?” he asked with great relief.

Dr. Traub nodded.

“So, if you get this thing out of my head,” Jesse asked tentatively, almost afraid to hear the answer, “then it might make… them… go away?”

“Them?”

Jesse shook his head. “It doesn’t matter.”

Traub looked at him gently. “You don’t think you’ve got a metallic deposit in your head, do you, Jesse?”

“You’ve got your ideas about what’s in my head. I’ve got mine.”

“Why are you here, if you don’t think I can help you?”

“You have to help me,” Jesse said, his desperation rising to the surface. “You have to make this thing go away. I don’t care what it is anymore. I have a nine-year-old son. I don’t want to see him hurt… because of this thing in my head.”

Dr. Traub smiled quietly, though in some way, as Jesse noticed, his eyes remained oddly calculating. “Don’t worry,” he said. “You’ll soon be fine.”

The house was chaos, and all Eric wanted to do was escape it. There were boxes and packing crates everywhere, and Mary was screaming that she didn’t want her Cabbage Patch dolls put in boxes for the move, and Julie was screaming at Mary to do it now, and everything was in such intolerable disarray that Eric heard the knock at the door as sweet relief from the disorder within the house.

Chet Wakeman stood on the front porch. He was beaming. “We’ve had a fantastic stroke of luck, Eric,” he said. “Jesse Keys is in a clinic in Minnesota.”

“How do you know?” Eric asked, astonished.

“I have a contact there,” Wakeman answered. “A Dr. Traub. In seems that Keys came to see him about some odd behavior. Traub found the same kind of ‘tumor’ that was in Keys’ father.” He clapped his hands together delightedly. “We’ve got him!”

“What do you want to do with him?” Eric asked.

Wakeman smiled. “I’m thinking. I’m thinking.”

“Well, while you’re thinking, don’t lose him,” Eric said impatiently. “I’m not going to make the same mistakes my father made.”

Wakeman looked at him. “Your old man’s been dead what, eight years?”

Eric nodded.

“So don’t you think you can stop trying to kick his ass?” Wakeman asked.

Eric frowned darkly.

Wakeman shrugged. “We’re not going to lose him,” he said. “One of our researchers was going through some of the old files, looking for research that we might have missed. He found these.”

Eric looked at the papers Wakeman handed him. They were transcripts of the markings that were identical to the metal artifact his father kept in the safe in his study, but Eric betrayed no sense that he’d ever seen such markings.

“Any idea what they are?” Wakeman asked.

“They look like the glyphs from that excavation in Alaska,” Eric replied. “The one where my brother died.”

“That’s what I thought too. But these are dated 1947, and that burial chamber in Alaska wasn’t opened until 1970.”

“Did you translate it?”

“Can’t be done,” Wakeman said. “But we may be close, what with Jesse Keys under wraps. The genetic guys are finding out more and more about the implants. I think we’re near a breakthrough.” He stopped and looked at Eric darkly. “Is there something you’re not sharing?”

“You know everything that I know.”

Chet Wakeman looked at him, considering, then his gaze fell to Eric’s desk, two books by Tom Clarke. “What’s this?” he asked.

“Did you see him on TV the other day?” Eric asked. “Talking about a government conspiracy to cover up the presence of aliens here on earth?” He laughed. “Suddenly he’s the Woodward and Bernstein of alien abduction.”

Wakeman held his eyes on the books. “Hmm. Tom Clarke.”

“Tom Clarke,” Eric repeated. “The same guy who thought our entire program was a lie. The one who made that peace sign in the corn that cost my father his job. Now he’s suddenly a believer?”

“Evidently,” Wakeman said.

Eric turned Clarke’s inexplicable conversion over in his mind. “I think I’ll find out what made him change his mind.”

Eric stood, half-hidden by the morning light as Becky’s car drew to a stop before the traffic light. He knew the moment had come, and so he quickly approached Becky’s car and yanked open the door. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. He flashed his Army Intelligence identification. “Just drive to the park.”

“Who are you?” Becky demanded.

“Just drive,” Eric told her. “When we get to the park, I’ll tell you.”

Becky eyed him apprehensively.

Eric smiled. “If I were planning to hurt you, would I have you drive me to a public park?”

At the park, Eric escorted Becky to a bench in the open.

“You’re much prettier than I expected,” he told her. “Your surveillance photographs don’t do you justice.”

Becky stared at him edgily. “Is this visit about something more than good looks?”

“My name is Eric Crawford. I’m here because I understand that your brother Tom has switched sides-that now he’s a believer.”

Becky didn’t answer, only peered out into the park, her hands in her lap.

“You look a lot like your mother,” Eric told her.

Becky faced him. “That’s what they say.”

“My father was a bastard,” Eric admitted. “What he did to your mother was unforgivable. But he had a reason for doing it. He found a spaceship in the desert in New Mexico. There were four bodies in that ship. But there were five seats in the craft. He came to your home looking for the visitor who was sitting in the fifth seat. He never stopped looking. And when he died, I started looking.” He leaned forward slightly and his voice took on an unmistakable gravity. “This planet has been visited thousands of times since my father found that ship. People have been taken from their homes. Things have been done to them. But we still don’t know what they’re doing here, or what they want from us.”

Becky nodded softly, and he could see that she no longer feared him.

“My father was a ruthless man, Becky,” Eric added. “But the things he wanted to know were reasonable because these aliens are the greatest threat the world has ever known.” He lowered his voice like one confiding a deep secret. “You don’t have to tell me what changed your brother’s mind. At least not for now. There’s something else you can do instead.”

“What?” Becky asked.

The Crawford smiled slithered onto Eric’s face. “Have dinner with me,” he said.

Dr. Traub glanced up from his desk as Wakeman entered his office.

“There’s something new,” Wakeman said. He dropped a file on Traub’s desk. “My guys have found the signal the tracking devices give off. It’s incredibly weak, and so it has to be amplified somehow before it can be transmitted back to… our little buddies.”

“You mean to their transmitter?” Traub asked.

“Perhaps an organic one,” Wakeman said with a clever grin. “For example, a brain.” He sat down in the chair opposite Traub’s desk. “The energy of thought… of mind. That’s why Jesse Keys is so important to them. He’s their transmitter. Of course, there’s only one way to find out if he really is a transmitter.”

“How?”

“Shut him off.”

Dr. Traub was clearly shocked by Wakeman’s suggestion. “You mean, kill him?”

“Sooner or later the man had to go,” Wakeman answered casually. “A question of security, you know.”

Traub sat back in his chair and looked at Wakeman determinedly. “You’re not going to do that here.”

Wakeman laughed and waved his hand. “Oh, don’t get all hot and bothered, Doctor. I’m going to take him back to Nevada.”

“Good.”

“But I’d like you to pave the way a little, if you don’t mind,” Wakeman said.

“In what way?”

“Just tell him that you’ve done all you can for him, and that you think he should go to the Brazel Clinic.”

Traub nodded. “But if he’s a transmitter and you shut him down, do you really think our visitors might show up?”

Wakeman’s smile grew into a dark chuckle. “Wouldn’t it be a gas if they did?”

Becky was already waiting for him when he came to pick her up, and Eric took that fact as a sure sign that he’d already won her over.

“Nice blouse,” he said as he came up to her.

“It was my mother’s favorite,” Becky said.

He motioned her over to his car and opened the door. “I have a plane waiting for us.”

“Why would I get in a plane with you, of all people?” Becky asked him.

“I’ll have you back by two a.m.,” Eric replied with a joking smile. He knew that she wanted to resist him, but couldn’t. “Spook’s honor,” he assured her.

In the plane, a table had been set with food and champagne. Becky looked at it, then back at Eric. “You know how to show a girl a good time.”

The meal went quickly, and there was a lot of laughter, and with each glass of champagne, Eric could see that Becky was falling deeper and deeper beneath his spell. She laughed about the government, about the law, and even about some of Tom’s strange theories.

“Growing up in Las Vegas then, you met a lot of weirdos,” Eric said.

“I guess so,” Becky told him. She looked at her plate. “I’m used to leftovers.”

Eric laughed briefly, then grew serious. “I got married really young. First girl I slept with. First time I slept with her. She’s pregnant. I’m married. Anything to show my father I was grown up.”

“I just needed my own identity,” Becky said. “Someplace where I wasn’t Tom Clarke’s little sister.”

“The brother shadow?” Eric asked. “Me, too. The sun rose and set on my brother, Sam.”

“I guess a lot of people do that,” Becky said. “They’re just kids trying to get away from home and they wind up smack dab in the middle of their lives before they know what hit them.”

The plane landed on a deserted airstrip with only a few Quonset huts surrounded by the desert waste.

“I want to show you something,” Eric told her.

They exited the plane and walked across the airstrip to a large building. The interior corridor was brightly lit, and at the end of it, Eric opened a door and ushered Becky inside.

“This is what I wanted to show you,” Eric said as he switched on the light.

Becky stared in disbelief at a large specimen jar, the small body trapped inside it, with pear-shaped head and almond eyes, now closed in death, so that it seemed to sleep on a cloud of unknowing.

“It’s breathtaking, isn’t it?” Eric whispered. He drew Becky nearer to the jar. “I come here sometimes by myself. I sit and stare at him. I keep feeling that if I stare at it long enough, I’ll be able to understand.”

Becky’s hand lifted to her throat. “Thank you, Eric, for showing me this.”

He touched her hair. “I wasn’t going to, but…” He trailed off, drawing her into his arms.

“What’s happening to us?” she asked.

“Listen, Becky,” Eric told her. “I want you to come with me.”

“Where?”

“I’ve got a spot picked out in Maine. The gawkers will still come to the desert. They’ll see the same experimental planes and think they’re seeing flying saucers.” He drew his arms more tightly around her. “The trucks leave Groom Lake tomorrow. They’ll sneak across the desert to avoid your brother and his friends.”

She looked at him seriously. “Tom says you’ve taken people. Experimented on them.”

His embrace tightened.

“I swear to you, Becky,” he said. “I have never in my life done anything to harm anyone.”

The first kiss was tender, the second more passionate, the third so blinding in its hunger, that he could tell thatt.

Becky had lost track of where she was. The odd and unexpected thing was he felt himself lose track too, and not only of Becky, but of the room around him, the lights and machines, and even the small creature in the clear glass jar, who watched him now with open eyes.

Chapter Three

It had all happened so fast, and even now, as Jesse sat in the passenger seat, watching the unfamiliar landscape, he could scarcely comprehend the series of events. First Dr. Traub had told him that his deposit was not disintegrating as quickly as he’d hoped. Then he’d introduced a Dr. Patterson from the Brazel Clinic, the place Traub said he had to go in order to have the tumor removed. Patterson had given him only enough time to call home, speak to Charlie and hear the frantic voice of a young boy who missed his father terribly.

“Big country,” the driver said. He was tall and very thin and wore a wrinkled sweatshirt, which seemed strange for a guy who claimed to be a doctor.

“Yeah,” Jesse answered dully.

“We’ll take care of that thing in your head,” the driver assured him. “And once that’s done, no more little gray men.”

“I’m ready,” Jesse said wearily.

They drove on in silence for a few moments. Jesse once again went over the last few days, the accident, the lights, the way he’d told Amelia everything, how she’d taken him to Dr. Traub, the whole story of his…

He stopped. Little gray men? He’d never told Dr. Traub anything about “gray” men.

He turned to the driver. “Little gray men? I never said anything to Traub about little gray men.”

The man shrugged. “Educated guess.”

Jesse nodded, steeled himself for what he had to do, and then did it.

The blow came hard and fierce and the man’s head slammed into the side window, his sweatshirt flapping up to reveal the forty-five tucked in his belt.

Jesse grabbed the pistol, wheeled the car around in a wrenching turn and headed back toward Missouri, thinking only of Charlie now, determined to get back to his son, before his son was… taken.

Charlie stood before his class, reciting proudly. “That’s one small step for mankind… I mean for man… one giant step for mankind.” He looked out over the other children in his class, his eyes on the empty chair where he imagined his father sitting, beaming proudly.

Then the door opened, and he was there. His father.

“I can’t believe you came,” Charlie said excitedly. He rushed down the aisle and leaped into Jesse’s arms.

“We have to go now,” his father said, lowering him to the ground, then tugging him swiftly out of the classroom, down the corridor and finally into the car.

“Where are we going?” Charlie asked.

His father didn’t answer, but only pressed down hard on the accelerator, the car now hurtling down the highway until it reached a place Charlie recognized from pictures in the paper, the place where the accident had happened, and where his father suddenly pulled the car over, slammed on the brakes, and brought the car to a screeching halt.

“Dad?” Charlie asked. “Why are we stopping here?”

His father took his hand and quickly urged him out of the car and toward the adjoining field, a wall of wheat undulating weirdly in the distance, his father moving fast now, as if under some invisible lash.

Another sound. Another car.

Charlie looked back over his shoulder and saw his father’s car slide to a stop on the side of the road, then another man get out, identical… his father!

“Dad?” Charlie asked, glancing up at the man who held his hand in a tight grip.

Jesse ran toward him. “Charlie, get away from the field,” he called frantically. “Come over here to me.”

The other father stopped dead and wheeled around to face Jesse. “He’s not your father,” he said to Charlie.

“Don’t listen to him,” Jesse cried.

Charlie looked from one to the other.

“Charlie, it’s me,” the man who held his hand said.

“He’s not me,” Jesse called to him desperately. “It’s going to be all right. Charlie, he’s not me.”

“Charlie, I’m your dad,” the man holding his hand said firmly.

“No,” Jesse shouted. “He’s making me from your head, from your picture of me.”

Charlie glanced back at the man who stood a few yards away begging him not to go into the field.

“Remember last month?” the man called to him loudly. “I cut myself shaving and I didn’t know it. I came down to the breakfast table with blood all over the side of my face, and you and mom…”

Charlie glanced up at the man who still held his hand. Blood had begun to drip from a cut on his cheek. “You’re not…” Charlie began, then stopped, as a group of men suddenly emerged from the wheat.

“Dad!” Charlie screamed, trying to tug free of the man’s grip.

But the man held him tightly.

“Leave my boy alone!” Jesse screamed. He drew the pistol and fired, the blast so loud it shook the earth and seemed to tear from the sun a blinding orb of light.

Jesse came to in a hospital room, his eyes barely able to focus, as if they’d been seared by the light. Through the blur he made out Amelia and Charlie beside the bed.

“They’ll be coming for Charlie now,” he said weakly. He felt a trickle of blood ooze from his nose, then a small sliver of something carried on its flow. The sliver dropped to his chest in a small pool of blood, and he knew it was the thing they’d planted in his brain when they’d taken him years before.

Amelia looked at the device, then frantically at her husband, and Jesse felt a deep wave of vindication pass over him. For he could see that at last she knew that he was not some hopeless paranoid, locked in an insane vision, but simply a man who’d always, and in everything, told his wife the truth.

He started to speak, but a squeal of tires silenced him. He glanced out the hospital window, and they were there, several men in sweatshirts, all of them rushing toward the hospital. He turned to Amelia and with his eyes told her what she had to do.

“Charlie,” she said, acting now on his unspoken command. “Come on.”

He saw her press Charlie urgently out the door, then from the window, watched her emerge again, dressed as a nurse, pushing Charlie in a wheelchair while the men in sweatshirts darted back and forth among the cars. She gave them no notice, but simply moved forward determinedly, this woman he had loved and married and dared to tell the truth, a truth she had at last understood and acted upon, and thus, in the hour of her departure, granted him the hope that his son might yet live an earthly and unbroken life.

Eric could not believe what he saw. Tom Clarke and Becky standing in the middle of the road, facing him squarely, a squad of reporters behind them, ready with their camera. And so he had failed, he realized. Becky had never truly surrendered to him, and he was hit with the surprising fact that for a moment he had surrendered to her.

Eric got out of the truck, walked over to Tom and faced him sternly. “You and your friends here will be driven to Las Vegas. You’ll be detained for seventy-two hours, then released.” He looked at Becky and understood that despite himself, he still loved her, that the full power of that kiss still held him in thrall.

“Detained for what cause?” Tom asked.

Eric returned his attention to Tom. “Detained because you’re interfering with a scheduled movement of Air Force personnel.”

“Bastard,” Becky snapped.

Eric couldn’t bear to look at her and so continued to stare directly at Tom. “It’s over. Get in the damned trucks.”

Tom’s eyes shifted to the right, and peered just over Eric’s shoulder. “Still don’t know how it flies, do you?”

Eric turned around to see four helicopters hovering in the distance, the spacecraft hanging between them, nearly motionless in the dark air.

“How much longer do you think you can hide this kind of evidence?” Tom asked.

Eric wheeled around. “For as long as I have to,” he said sharply. He nodded, and a crowd of armed men suddenly appeared, the two groups now facing each other, both equally determined to stand their ground.

A silence fell over them as the two groups glared at each other.

Then a soft hum sounded in the distance, barely a rustle of air at first. But its steady drone grew louder with each passing second, as the lights of the enormous craft engulfed them. They stood frozen, staring upward in stunned amazement, as the humming craft held weight-lessly above them, encasing them in a light more radiant than earthly light, their ears vibrating with the steadily building hum of an engine without gears or straining levers, the sound of pure propulsion, unhindered and streaked with light, the cosmic energy of a foreign cosmos.

Then both light and sound vanished and they stood, watching in astonished silence as the air went black around them with such blinding speed that all the world suddenly seemed no larger than a cramped, windowless cell in which the last candle had abruptly guttered out.

Eric’s lips parted in stricken awe, leaving him mute, deaf, and very nearly blind, as if he’d been stripped of all sensation save wonder.

Then, slowly, the world returned to him in little particles of sound and vision, and he saw the milling crowd again, the trucks and soldiers, Tom and Becky as they were led away, and finally Wakeman beside him.

“They took your proof,” Wakeman said. “The bodies and the craft. Every bit of proof.”

Then Wakeman walked away, and Eric stood alone in the darkness, watching as the men and women Tom and Becky had brought with them were loaded onto trucks and driven away. When the last of them had been taken, he walked to his jeep, glanced about, careful that no one was nearby, picked up his briefcase and opened it.

The artifact winked up at him from the dark interior of the case. “Not everything,” he said as he gazed at the only proof of unearthly worlds that still remained on earth.