Taken

Chapter One

In the solitude of his study, Eric thought of Becky Clarke, the unexpected love he’d felt for her, the willing gift of her body, then the bitter reality of her betrayal. He knew there was no explanation for the feeling that had swept over him during that one evening he’d been with her. It had been a new experience, and it had shaken him to the bone. Now he thought of her as a part of life he’d missed, a treasure lost and irrecoverable. At times, when he sat alone in his study, the irony was almost more than he could bear, the painful and irreducible fact that he’d spent his life in search of an alien presence when it was a human presence he most powerfully desired.

In the other room his daughter Mary was busily working on a scientific paper for school, but for Eric, the whole vast world of science was reduced to the one thing he could truly claim as his, the one thing that had not been taken from him either by aliens or by humans. The artifact.

The artifact was the unassailable evidence that he had not lived in vain. The artifact was the solid ground in which his life was rooted, and if he gave up his search to decipher it, he felt that his soul would shatter, and he would be as empty as the space from which it had come so many years ago.

He walked to the safe, dialed the combination and removed the artifact. In the gloomy half-light he preferred now, he stared at the indecipherable markings inscribed upon it in the language of another world. This much I have, he thought, this much is mine.

There was knock at the front door, but he left Julie to answer it. It was Chet Wakeman, and he could tell that Mary was suddenly excited, her voice pealing though the house as she greeted her “Uncle Chet.”

After that, he listened to the usual greetings, then Wakeman’s inevitable question.

“So, where’s Eric?”

“In his study,” Julie answered. Eric hurriedly returned the proof to the safe and closed the door just as Wakeman came into the study.

“Hey, Eric,” Wakeman said brightly. “Jesus, turn on some light in here, will ya?” He hit the switch beside the door and the shadows retreated into the far corners of the room. “That little girl of yours is really something,” he said. “You should check in with her once in a while, Eric. She’s a great kid.”

Eric slumped down in the chair behind his desk.

Wakeman gave him a penetrating look. “Whatever happened to you, you need to get over it.”

“You have news?” Eric asked, almost curtly.

“As a matter of fact, I do,” Wakeman said. “They pulled the plug on the project, as expected.”

Eric’s eyes reflexively shot to the safe, then back to Wakeman. “Because all our evidence… all our research is gone.”

“That’s right,” Wakeman said. He laughed. “I thought I had a pretty good argument. Told this senator that the reason we didn’t have any evidence is because it was all taken by a flying saucer. He said when they brought it back, he’d restore the funding.”

“It’s too bad we could never find Charlie Keys,” Eric muttered.

“And you know what really burns my ass?” Wakeman said. “That if we had had any funding at all, I could have gotten that positioning system running, and we’d have tracked Charlie Keys by that thing in his head. We could have found him, or anybody else who’d been taken, in twenty-four hours.”

Eric nodded dully. “So what do you do now?”

Wakeman plopped down in the chair across from Eric’s desk. “I thought I might go out to California. Couple of buddies of mine from Yale are going into bio tech.”

Eric’s face soured. “I keep picturing Tom Clarke smiling that smug smile of his and saying ‘Still don’t know how it flies, do you?’” He looked at the safe again. “I want to know what made Tom a believer all of a sudden.”

“You were supposed to get that out of his sister, weren’t you?” Wakeman said with a wink.

“But I didn’t,” Eric said.

Wakeman looked at his friend knowingly. “What you keep picturing is Tom’s sister dumping you. I think that’s what turned you all gloomy, old buddy.”

Eric’s stare was lethal. “My personal life is none of your business, Chet. But just for your information, I’m not finished yet. Becky or no Becky, I still want to know what changed Tom Clarke’s mind.”

The baseball in his hand felt like a small, densely packed planet, so heavy Jacob Clarke could barely lift his arm. But he had to lift it. Lisa was at the plate, bat in hand, waiting to swing. And so he summoned his strength, made his mind and will provide the power his body lacked, wound his arm, and sent the ball hurtling toward his daughter.

She swung and with a loud crack the ball lifted higher and higher, into the vast blue where Jacob followed it with his eyes, a terrible weariness falling upon him again, like a long-distance runner at the end of his run, with the finish line retreating from him as quickly as the rising ball, impossible to reach.

The ball hit the fence, and Jacob saw the disappointment in Lisa’s eyes.

“It’s a game of inches,” he explained.

Lisa shook her head. “I swung too late. I thought it was going to sink.”

“That’s why I like baseball,” Jacob told her as he came over and knelt beside her. “You can never make assumptions.”

Lisa punched him playfully. “I thought you liked it because it was impossibly hard and there were all these useless statistics to memorize.” She gave him her best “gotcha” look.

“Well,” Jacob admitted. “That too.”

He returned to the mound, picked up another ball, no less heavy than the first, closed his eyes, as if in a prayer for strength, then felt the weight descend upon him, wrap around him like a leaden shroud, leaving him strangely encased and immobile within his own body.

“Are you all right?”

It was Carol’s voice, and with all his strength he managed to pry open his eyes.

“We’d better get you home,” Carol said gently.

Yes, Jacob thought, home.

At the car, he suddenly stopped before getting in. He felt an urgency in his blood, something deep within him crying out a last instruction. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the small jewel box, and opened it. “It was your grandmother’s,” Jacob told his daughter. He drew out the lone-star earring and placed it around his daughter’s neck. “I love you, honey,” he said. “Every day and twice on Sundays.”

Lisa peered at the star, and watching her, Jacob saw that she sensed its importance, the legacy it bore, the terrible mission she had just been given.

“Some guy will meet you one day,” Jacob told her. “And with one look, he’ll tell you that there’s no other place he wants to be.”

Lisa caressed the earring, her eyes upon it wonder-ingly. Then she looked up and nodded, and at that instant Jacob knew that he had passed it on, done what remained of his duty. And on that thought, his legs buckled under a heaviness beyond human weight and he fell to earth like a dying star.

The lights of the pizza parlor burned garishly, flooding into the car, the passenger seat where Charlie Keys should have been, where his mother had left him sleeping soundly only minutes before.

Amelia stared helplessly at the empty seat, the pizza dropping from her hand and slamming down upon the pavement as she searched the darkness of the parking lot, peeling back the shadows, looking for her son.

Then suddenly, he was there, standing behind her, looking strangely dazed, like one awakened from a deep sleep.

“Charlie,” she said, “you can’t just go off like that. Where were you? Where did you go?”

Charlie peered at her silently, his hand lifting to his throat where she saw three small scars in a triangular pattern.

“What happened to me?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Amelia answered.

“The men we’re running from… does it have to do with them?”

Amelia shook her head. “I really don’t know, Charlie.”

Charlie stared at her worriedly, a look of terrible abandonment in his eyes, like a boy who’d been left behind on the street on in the railway station, and who could not find his way home. “Dad could tell us,” he said.

Amelia drew her son into her arms. “I don’t know if your dad will ever be able to tell us anything,” she said.

Eric stood next in line as Tom Clarke scribbled his name hastily into the book, while the line of people twining through the bookstore’s cramped aisles steadily grew longer.

“Why do you think the aliens took all their stuff back?” the man in front of Eric asked.

Tom grinned. “How do you know they took it all?” He grabbed the next book from the stack and signed it as the man moved away.

Eric stepped up to the table. “Quite a turnout.”

“What do you want?” Tom asked dryly.

“I find I have a lot of free time on my hands,” Eric replied.

“Imagine that.”

“How’s Becky?”

Tom got to his feet, knocking over a stack of books. “Becky is not your business.”

Eric casually gathered up the fallen books and returned them to the table.

“We’re not enemies anymore, Tom,” he said quietly. “I’m a private citizen now. Our ‘friends’ saw to that when they took back all the evidence.”

Tom peered at him warily. “What do you want, Eric?”

“You went from skeptic to believer in a nanosecond,” Eric replied. “I want to know why.”

“Maybe I just saw the light,” Tom answered cagily.

“If you’re talking about the lights in the Mojave, you changed months before that,” Eric said. His gaze bore down upon Tom. “What do you know that you’re not telling me?”

“I might ask you the same question.”

Eric shrugged, giving up any further effort to win Tom over. “Say hello to your sister,” he said, as he turned and walked to a nearby aisle where Wakeman waited for him.

“Well, what do you think?” Wakeman asked.

“Tom Clarke will never give us anything,” Eric told him.

Wakeman smiled. “You know what I love about chaos theory? It’s about systems that can’t resist outside influence. Something happens somewhere, and the system changes. Which means that at the moment, all we can do is watch the skies.”

Eric shook his head determinedly. “You can watch the skies, Chet, but I’m watching Tom Clarke.”

The apartment still felt empty, and curiously lifeless, as if a strange, invisible energy had been drained from it. Lisa peered at the lone-star earring and thought of her father, how he’d seemed strangely resigned at the end, a man who had done his best and had no more to give. She looked at her mother, the red-rimmed eyes, how bereft she was now, more alone that she’d ever been or dreamed of being.

“He’d been… getting weaker since your grandmother died,” Carol said. “I kept asking him to see someone, but he wouldn’t.” She shook her head. “He was so resigned.”

“He understood what was happening to him,” Lisa said, offering what little comfort was possible for her mother.

“That sounds like something he would say.” Carol touched Lisa’s face. “He loved you so much. He was so proud of you.”

Lisa knew that, and never doubted it, so in the months that followed, and even after her mother had found a simple, kindhearted guitar player named Danny and married him, she still felt that her father was with her in some way. By then, she’d begun to wear her grandmother’s earring around her neck. It was the last thing he’d given her, and she found a strange comfort in keeping it so near.

She was wearing it the day she started classes at Morrison Junior High School three years later, the earring still hanging from a chain around her neck.

“Do you know anybody here?”

Lisa glanced at Nina, took in her shocking pink hair and Husker-Du T-shirt. “No,” she admitted.

“Okay,” Nina said brightly. “So, you wanna be friends for life?”

Before Lisa could answer, a waterfall of paper slid from one of Nina’s notebooks. As she helped her gather them up, Lisa noticed that the drawings were quite good, and decided that Nina was not the frivolous fourteen-year-old she appeared to be.

“I don’t show my stuff,” Nina said self-consciously. She smiled. “I worry about…”

“You shouldn’t worry about what people think,” Lisa said decisively. “If someone doesn’t like them, so what?”

They moved toward a van that rested at the nearby curb, a dusty, beat-up VW.

“That’s my stepdad,” Lisa said. “His name’s Danny.”

Nina looked at Lisa knowingly. “An old hippie?”

“He’s a guitar player,” Lisa told her new friend for life. “He lived near us when my father died. I guess my mother just…” She shrugged. “My mom’s at Berkeley, taking a course in alternative nutrition.”

“So it’s just you and… Jerry Garcia?”

Lisa nodded. “For now,” she said.

But it wasn’t all that bad, Lisa told herself that night as she and Danny prepared pork chops, the two of them listening to the television as President Reagan talked about how the people of the earth had a lot in common, and that if the planet were ever attacked by aliens, the whole world would unite.

After dinner, Nina dropped by. They talked a while, and Lisa demonstrated the drum set Danny had bought for her. Nina won Danny over almost instantly, despite her earnest vegetarianism, and the lack of interest in the pork chops he so proudly offered.

Once Nina left, Lisa took her dog Watson on a walk through the trailer park. She could hear the usual sounds of early evening, couples talking, kids playing, the steady drone of televisions and radios. The trailer park was not a bad place, but on these walks in the evening, Lisa thought of her other home, the one she’d had with her father, and how, during the last few years she seemed only to miss him more, and yet to feel that he was not actually gone at all, but remained around her, she still the object of his loving, but now distant, gaze.

Suddenly Watson stopped and began to growl.

“Watson?” Lisa asked. “What is it?”

Watson bolted forward, racing among the trailers and then into the woods, Lisa in full pursuit, rushing through the undergrowth, catching Watson in brief glimpses ahead of her as he darted through the shadows.

“Watson, come back,” Lisa cried.

But the dog continued to dart through the woods, the lights of the trailer park suddenly extinguishing behind her, Lisa running tiredly, growing exhausted, the woods steadily thinning as she neared a clearing where she saw a man sitting on a log, smoking, his crooked body framed by the side of old carnival truck marked TRAVELING ATTRACTIONS.

The carny sat entirely still as Lisa broke into the clearing. Then his eyes shifted over to her, his face wreathed in smoke. “Lisa,” he said. “Today you are a woman.”

Charlie turned onto the darkest stretch of Madison Street. A faint breeze scattered bits of litter across the pavement and rattled the tin signs that lined the deserted street.

He stopped, as if by a hand at his arm, drew in a long breath and steeled himself. If you let this street scare you, he told himself, then you’ll live in fear your whole life long.

He stepped forward resolutely and headed down the street, the breeze at his back, pressing him forward like an invisible hand to where the street made a slow curve toward a bus stop. He could see a man sitting on the bench at the stop, his crooked profile in silhouette beneath the streetlamp, a dusty old carnival truck rooted in the distance, traveling attractions that seemed to have traveled very far.

Charlie stopped, felt a spike of fear, and kept his eyes on the man before him, watching fearfully as he continued to smoke idly, the ghostly curls from his cigarette rising skyward into the darkness like souls released from their long travail.

Lisa wasn’t sure why it had come over her, this sudden interest, only that it grew more intense with each passing day. Now she was reading The Mojave Desert Sightings, by Tom Clarke, a book she’d hardly have noticed before… what? She didn’t know. It had simply come upon her, this need to explore the far-fetched notion that strange beings walked the earth, or hovered above it, looking down, waiting to be discovered.

Carol glanced at Danny worriedly, then across the table to where Lisa continued to read intently, her food untouched before her.

“Are you reading that for an assignment?” Carol asked.

Lisa did not look up from the book. “No.”

“Then why are you reading it?”

Lisa shrugged, her eyes riveted to the page. “I don’t know,” she answered. “I just got curious.”

Danny looked at the book, the photograph of Tom Clarke on the back cover.

“Tom Clarke,” he said to Carol. “That’s Jacob’s brother, right?”

Carol nodded.

“Kind of a fruit-loop.”

Lisa tensed. “I’ll be in my room,” she said.

In her room, she was not sure why she’d suddenly felt so hostile to Danny, or so defensive about Tom Clarke. After all, Danny had always been good to her, and she hardly knew Tom Clarke. And yet, she’d bristled visibly when Danny had made light of Tom. It was almost like he’d insulted her as well, called her a fruit-loop, too.

Strange, she thought, as she sat down on her bed, reading intently once again, her eyes fixed on the page, her mind so focused on the account of the Mojave sightings that she barely noticed when her mother stepped into the room.

“What’s going on, Lisa?” Carol asked.

“Nothing,” Lisa answered. She could see that her mother wasn’t buying it. “I’m fine,” she added reassuringly. “Really.”

Carol sat down on the bed beside her. “Your uncle Tom has a lot of weird ideas, Lisa.” She glanced at the book apprehensively, as if it were a loaded gun. “You’re not starting to… have the same ideas, are you?”

“What if I am?” Lisa replied, a touch of defiance edging into her voice.

“Lisa,” Carol said softly, “you come from a… special family. Your father had an amazing mind. He could look at things and figure them out. With people too. He could see things other people couldn’t see.” She touched Lisa’s hand. “Honey, your life is changing because you’re growing up. You’re not being abducted by a spaceship, you’re being taken into adulthood.” She released a short, awkward laugh. “Of the two, I’d say that’s far and away the scarier proposition.”

Lisa listened as her mother continued, but found her mind continually drawn back to the Mojave sightings, her uncle’s book, so that by the time Carol left her room, she had made up her mind to contact him.

Chapter Two

Wakeman gave Eric a boyish wink. “So, what’s this all about?” he asked.

Eric didn’t know. He knew only that he and Wakeman had been summoned to the Office of Science and Technology for what had been described as an important briefing.

The briefing began with the solemn description of a disturbing event.

“About three weeks ago we sent a manned mission into space,” Hinkle told them. “This launch was unannounced. The purpose of the mission was to put certain very sensitive equipment into orbit.” He glanced at General Beers, as if for approval to go on. The general nodded silently, and Hinkle continued. “It had to do with President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative.”

“Star Wars,” Wakeman said in a carefree tone Hinkle did all he could to ignore.

“As you probably remember,” Hinkle said. “There were some questions about whether or not this program was feasible. Before President Bush revisits the project, we need to know if it is…”

“So what did you send up?” Wakeman asked. “A reactor?”

“One of the major issues was finding a compact power system that put out enough kilowatts to power both particle-beam weapons and rail guns.”

“So, a reactor, like I said,” Wakeman said happily.

Hinkle looked at Wakeman irritably, but continued. “Our payload was highly classified. The capsule has been in orbit for fourteen hours. It was two hours away from the position where the payload was to be… delivered when… well… the astronauts went dark for almost two and a half hours.”

“They disappeared,” Eric said dryly.

“There was no contact,” Hinkle confirmed. “Nothing. Then they came back, clear as day. They had no idea that they’d lost two and a half hours of their lives.”

“What happened to the payload?” Eric asked matter-of-factly.

“Gone,” Hinkle replied.

“And the astronauts?”

“We’ve debriefed them extensively, used hypnosis and drugs, but they simply have no recollection of this… missing time.”

Wakeman sat back and grinned. “So, gentlemen, what have you come up with for an explanation?”

General Beers leaned forward. “Let’s get something straight,” he said to Wakeman sternly. “The people in this room represent seven billion dollars a year in defense spending.” He glanced from Wakeman to Eric. “We need your help, gentlemen.”

“What do you need from us?” Eric asked.

“What you know about whatever might be… out there,” Beers answered. “Who they are and what they want.”

Eric and Wakeman left the room a few seconds later.

“We’re back, baby,” Wakeman said cheerily.

Eric stopped and looked at him seriously. “You get started.” He smiled. “I’m going to keep working on this Tom Clarke thing.”

“Tom Clarke?” Wakeman asked.

“He keeps getting calls from someone in Los Altos, California,” Eric explained. “The phone is registered to a guy named Danny Holden. I thought I’d run out there and take a look.”

Wakeman looked at him and smiled. “For a while, I thought this was all a bluff. I thought you had something big and you were holding out on me.”

Two weeks later Eric arrived at Los Altos, all the other trailers in the park little more than a blur beside the one he came toward like a bullet.

At the door, he presented his ID as a census taker.

The man at the door gave it only a cursory glance, then swung open the door and let him in.

“Let’s begin with your name,” Eric said as he took a seat in the trailer’s cramped living room.

“Danny Holden.”

“Do you rent or own?”

Danny laughed. “Who would rent a trailer?”

Eric smiled. “And you wife is?”

“Carol.”

“Children?”

“One daughter. Carol’s. Her name is Lisa.”

Eric wrote the names down on his form.

“She’s my stepdaughter,” Danny added. “From my wife’s first marriage.”

At that moment, Lisa entered the room, lugging her drums.

“Lisa, this is Mr…”

“Jones,” Eric said.

“Mr. Jones. He’s from the census.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Lisa told him.

Eric offered his hand. “I’m very, very glad to meet you,” he said. He saw the odd look in her eye, the lightning glint of her suspicion. It was pure intuition, a way of knowing more than the simple facts revealed. It was not unusual to see it in people, this intuition, and he’d have thought nothing of it had Lisa’s particular form of it not struck him as far more powerful than any he’d seen before, like steel made stronger by some alloy from another world.

The apartment was small and modest, but no more so than the trailer she’d lived in almost all her life.

“Homey,” Tom said, though with a wry expression on his face.

“I think it’s nice,” Lisa told him. “Thank you.”

She’d called Tom a few days before, told him about the man from the census who’d suddenly turned up at the trailer. Tom had responded immediately, told her to come to Seattle, that he would make arrangements for her to stay there.

And so now she stood in a new apartment, embarked upon what she thought must surely be a new direction in life.

“You said you’d tell me,” she said to Tom. “About these people, and why you think they’re looking for me.”

Tom’s expression turned serious. “From your description, I’m sure that the man who came to see you was Eric Crawford. His father was an Army colonel named Owen Crawford. It was Owen who came after your father.”

“Why was Owen Crawford looking for my father?”

“Because he thought he might be… proof.”

“Of what?”

“That people had been… taken,” Tom answered.

“By…?”

“Yes,” Tom said.

“And my mom, does she know about all this?”

“She knows that your father was very… special. But this alien thing? No. She thinks I’m out of my mind.”

Lisa suddenly felt strangely burdened, like one who’d been given a deadly secret she could not share.

Tom touched her face. “Listen, if you need me, put a personal ad in The New York Times. ‘Drummer seeking gig with Texas country band.’ ”

Lisa nodded.

“You’re going to be all right, Lisa,” Tom assured her.

He hugged her, then headed for the door.

“Thanks,” Lisa said.

“And believe me,” Tom added. “No one’s going to find you.”

She waved good-bye as he left the room. She knew that he’d believed everything he’d just told her, especially that she was going to be fine, that no one was ever going to find her, not the people from the government, and certainly not the aliens. She could only hope that he was right.

Charlie had not been able to stop thinking about his father since his death, and now, with the war medals in his hand, he felt closer than ever, as if his father were with him, standing over him, watching from some great distance.

“Your dad never kept his own medals,” his mother told him. “These are your grandfather’s from World War II.” She looked at them lovingly, as if they connected him to Jesse rather than his grandfather. “He carried them every day of his life. They were in his pocket when he died.”

Charlie looked down at the box that had held Russell Keys’ medals. A photograph lay at the bottom of the box. He took it out and looked at it closely.

“It’s a picture of your father,” Amelia said. “When he was eight years old. I think the guy with him is his stepfather.” She studied the photograph and Charlie could see a dark recollection form in her mind. “Oh yes,” she said quietly. “This was the time your father went to the carnival. His stepfather took him. He said it was the most terrifying thing he ever went through. Worse than anything in Vietnam.” Her fingers held the photograph gingerly, like something that might at any moment burst into flame. “It was one of those… traveling carnivals,” she added, “with rides that spin you around.”

“Is that what scared him?” Charlie asked. “The rides?”

Amelia shook her head, her gaze fixed on the picture, staring at it as if through a rent in time. “No, it was the carnies,” she said. One finger slid over to a tall slender figure who slouched, smoking, beside a ticket booth. “Like him.”

She handed Charlie the photograph, and as he peered at it, his hand reflexively moved to the red scar behind his ear. “What was wrong with Dad?” he asked.

“He had a… brain disorder. He believed certain things.”

“What things?”

“He’s dead, Charlie,” Amelia said. “Do you really want to remember that part of him?”

“I want whatever I can get.”

“All right,” Amelia said. “He believed that he’d been taken by aliens. Lots of times.”

Charlie glanced at the photograph, the carny whose face he recognized. “But the people we’re hiding from, they’re not… aliens.”

“No,” Amelia said. “They believe in them, though. They believe that your father was taken by them and that’s why they wanted him.”

“How about you?” Charlie asked. “What do you believe?”

“I don’t know,” Amelia said. “Your father thought that the aliens were his guardian angels. That they protected him. Because they wanted something. He believed that they saved him in Vietnam.” She hesitated a moment, then added, “And he believed that they were coming for you.”

Charlie’s eyes fell upon the carny. “They have come for me. More than once,” he said. He saw the terror crawl into his mother’s eyes. “But you know what, Mom? None of this scares me anymore. It just makes me mad.”

She smiled, and he could see the pride she had in him, and the pride his father would have had.

“If they come for me again,” Charlie added determinedly, “I won’t go without a fight.”

Lisa set the drums down just inside the door. She’d lugged them for blocks, but it had been worth it, because she’d actually gotten a job with a band. The band wasn’t much, and she’d been the only drummer to show up for a tryout. She hadn’t been very good either. In fact, the leader of the band had told her that she “sucked,” but that if she could “unsuck” in a week she could join them for a hotel gig.

Lisa started to close the door, then was startled to notice the band’s guitar player standing behind her, his eyes on the “I Married a Monster From Outer Space” poster she’d tacked to the wall.

“I remember the night before I left home,” he said. “I was sleeping in the bed I’d slept in since I was nine. All my stuff still on my walls. I’m lying there thinking how weird it is, this is exactly like it’s always been and tomorrow it will be different forever. Do you know what I mean?”

“Oh, yeah,” Lisa said.

“You do?”

“That’s exactly what happened to me.” Lisa smiled. “I expect to wake up any minute in my old room.” She made a slow turn, taking in the cramped, but oddly cozy room, and as she turned the old walls changed into something bright and gleaming, and she was… now back in her room, staring first at the poster, then at the doorway, which was empty now, the guitar player abruptly vanished… if he’d ever been there at all.

Eric pulled up to the fish cannery, observed its rusty tin roof and dilapidated exterior. He smiled. Very good, he thought.

Inside the cannery, banks of monitors lined the walls, their screens gleaming brightly as people bustled about, the whole atmosphere so feverishly active and intently focused that it reminded him of Houston Mission Control.

“Welcome back,” Wakeman said as he made his way through the welter of machinery and technicians. “How was California?”

“Sunny,” Eric replied. “Very sunny.”

Wakeman turned serious. “I’ve got earth-shattering news, Eric. Are you ready?”

Eric nodded.

“I was wrong,” Wakeman said with a delighted laugh. “I took all the money the generals threw at us and I told my guys to build me something that will pick up the impulse signals from the implants. Remember, those faint little beeps that were amplified by the transformer? The transformer I said was the body we had stored at Groom Lake?” He pointed to a large monitor that displayed a map of the United States peppered with lights. “Okay, so we build the thing and we turn it on, and, see there, it lights up like a Christmas tree because those signals are big and bad and boosted.”

“Which means what?” Eric asked.

“Which means there’s still a transmitter and that we can track any implant, Eric,” Wakeman told him proudly, motioning him over to the monitor. “Suppose we want to find Alan, the guy loaded with a chip from that Cleveland girl. Guy works for the Department of the Interior, thinks he went in for a root canal.” He looked at the map, then pressed a button on the console. The map enlarged and closed in on Medford, Oregon. “So, okay, there’s Alan,” Wakeman said happily as the letters appeared on the screen. “Motel Six. Nine seven six Apple Street, nine seven five oh two.” Wakeman grinned broadly. “Shall I check in on him, Eric?”

Eric shook his head. “How does this help us, Chet?”

“How does it help us?” Wakeman asked broadly. “How does it help us the man asks.” He motioned toward the screen. “Here’s how. It provides us with our very own galaxy of abductees.”

“I can see that,” Eric said coolly.

“Well, here’s what you don’t see, evidently,” Wakeman said. “We can cross check the implants we made, eliminate each one, and what are we left with, my good man? We’re left with the unidentified abductees.”

“Like Charlie Keys?” Eric asked.

“Exactly,” Wakeman said delightedly.

“And someone else?” Eric asked, a note of challenge in his voice.

“Just give me the name,” Wakeman said confidently.

“Lisa Clarke.”

Wakeman sat down at the monitor and typed in the name.

No light flashed.

“She’s not coming up,” Wakeman said disappointedly.

“Looks like you still have a bit of work to do on your system,” Eric said.

“The system’s fine,” Wakeman shot back. “She doesn’t have an implant.” He thought a moment, then said, “And why would she? She’s part… them. They don’t need an implant to track her.”

“So how is she… connected?”

“Probably by some sort of psychic link,” Wakeman answered. He tapped a few keys and the image of a brain appeared on the screen. “This is a brain section from the sample we recovered in Alaska.”

Eric studied the image, noting the internal structure, the uniformity of color, everything he’d expect to find, but with something added, a green spiral of neutrons.

Wakeman sat back, convinced of his analysis. “Antennae,” he said. He looked at Eric. “Lisa Clarke probably has a set just like them.”

Eric nodded. “I think the time has come to find out.”

Lisa saw him as soon as she walked out of the club, a man in a dark jacket, leaning against the wall. He lifted the hood of his jacket, and there was something in the way he did it, the odd concentration of his eyes upon her, that raked a blade of fear down her spine.

She picked up her pace, now focused on a woman in a yellow parka who stepped away from a pay phone as she approached. She glanced behind her. The man in the dark jacket had fallen in behind her.

She continued to move head, the woman in the yellow parka now closing in behind her too.

A lighted bus stop beckoned from the far end of the street, and she headed for it immediately, almost trotting now, her apprehension building. The bus stop seemed very near, yet very far. She could hear the footsteps growing louder and more insistent behind her. They were closing in, and she knew it, but she did not look back.

Then, suddenly, her fear spiked, and she bolted forward and began to run, heading for the cross street now, the footsteps clattering at her rear, so that she knew that the woman in the yellow parka and the hooded man were now running too, rushing after her in full pursuit.

She reached the cross street just as a car sped into it and skidded to a stop, blocking her way. She stopped and glanced behind her. The woman and the man were running toward her at full throttle, the man now with a pistol in his hand.

She whirled around and faced the car.

The window on the driver’s side was down now, and she saw a man sitting behind the wheel.

“Lisa,” the man said. “How are you doing?” He smiled. “We have so much to talk about.”

She stared at him, stunned that he knew her name. Behind her, the man and woman were closing in. She was trapped, and she knew it. There was no escape.

Then, suddenly, five beams of lights converged into a single shining brilliance that swept around her protectively. The light was impossibly bright, and yet she could see through it, as if she were encased in a vase of shining crystal. Through a veil of sparkling light she saw the woman and the man freeze instantly, as if blinded by the very light that held her. She turned and saw the man in the car. He was smiling oddly, and looking up. She followed the direction of his upward gaze and saw a shimmering craft hovering a hundred feet above her, the protective beam shooting down from its base. From inside her tube of light, she could see five globes of blue light, dancing and coming together, the underside of the craft barely visible beyond them.

She lowered her eyes and peered out through the shimmering wall of light. The woman in the yellow parka was very near now, almost touching the rim of light, so that the light itself began to sizzle. The woman jerked away suddenly, and Lisa saw that her face was badly burned.

Her eyes shot over toward the hooded man. He was standing beyond the light, his eyes frozen in stricken awe, the pistol still in his hand, but useless to him now.

Then the light began to move, and Lisa felt herself move with it, floating inside the beam, carried by it like a small child, and she knew that she was being taken home.

She was safe, and she knew it. She saw the hooded man lift his pistol toward her, then the man in the car, nod for him to put it down. Another car arrived, and she saw the man who’d come with the census forms get out and stare at her through the light, helpless to reach her, his eyes locked on hers as the light swept her on and on until, abruptly, it vanished, and she stood alone in her apartment.

She drew in a deep, calming breath, then knew what she had to do, walked determinedly to the phone and dialed the number.

“Information,” a man said.

“The national edition of The New York Times,” Lisa said.

The man gave her the number and she dialed it.

“I’d like to place an ad in the personals, please,” Lisa said, when someone answered in New York.

Chapter Three

The photographs scrolled by in two columns on the monitor, scores of human faces that had been collected in the database.

“These are matched repeaters,” Wakeman explained. “We started with anyone who’d been taken more than once. We noticed there was a subset. People who were repeatedly taken on the same day as others. These are the eight-timers. Taken eight times since childhood, all on the same day, every time. Fifty men and fifty women. They seem to take them when they’re young. Again when they hit puberty.”

“Breeding pairs?” Eric asked.

Wakeman shrugged. “It makes about as much sense as anything else they’re doing.” His eyes suddenly sparked when Charlie Keys’ photograph scrolled onto the screen. “Stop,” he cried. “Russell Keys’ son.”

Eric nodded.

Wakeman indicated the picture just beneath it. “And this, of course, is Lisa Clarke.” He considered the two photographs briefly, then said, “They were both taken on September eighth of last year. That’s the most recent simultaneous abduction. In fact, they’re the only one among the fifty pairs in the last year and a half.”

“You think they’re being bred?” Eric asked, returning to his earlier idea. “Keys with a girl who’s one-quarter alien?”

“You know, maybe I’ve been looking at this the wrong way,” Wakeman said, almost to himself. He looked at Eric. “I’m used to looking at genetic engineering as a way of breeding out certain traits. What if our friends are interested in breeding in?”

“Meaning what?” Eric asked.

“Well, think about Russell Keys. He was a pilot, right? Brave, courageous and bold, so to speak. His son Jesse had the same characteristics. That is, when they were taken, they fought back.”

“And the Clarkes. I know Jacob could… do things,” Eric offered.

“But what are they breeding for?”

“It could be anything,” Wakeman said. “Maybe they’re trying to create a superweapon.” He shrugged. “Or a supersavior.” He returned his attention to the photographs on the screen. “Either way, we should have the answer in another couple of months,” he said.

Lisa stood at the stove, making tea for her mother and Nina.

“What do you think?” Nina asked, displaying the spi-raling conch tattoo on her shoulder.

“I think it must have hurt a lot,” Lisa said. She glanced over and caught her mother looking at her silently.

She knew what her mother was thinking, that her little girl had moved to Seattle, gotten a dingy little apartment, and was now pregnant. Not very impressive.

“Come home,” Carol said.

“I can’t,” Lisa told her. “I’m safe here.”

“Why?” Carol said, her voice laced with anger and frustration. “Because beings from another world are looking out for you?”

“Yes, Mom,” Lisa answered, daring her mother to say otherwise. “And if you’d seen what happened to me, you’d…”

Carol got to her feet. “Enough, Lisa.”

“But it’s true,” Lisa pleaded. She rose and drew her mother into her arms. “It’s going to be all right, Mom,” she said. “I can feel it.”

Carol looked at her, and Lisa saw that she was seeing her father also, the terrible burden of what he’d known, the long years of his suffering.

“I never wanted to believe any of this,” Carol said. “Your father let me see some things, but I really couldn’t accept that any of it was real. I just thought it was his way of dealing with his own life, the fact that he never knew his father.”

Charlie startled at the knock at the door and grabbed the ball bat before answering it.

Naomi glanced at the bat, then at Charlie. “What are you doing?”

“Nothing,” Charlie said. He put down the bat. “I’m sorry.”

Naomi stepped into the room, surveying its disarray, the piles of paper, library copies of articles, magazines, books. “So this is how you’ve been using your leave of absence,” she said. “Sitting in the dark, reading with a baseball bat by the door in case anyone drops by.”

Charlie closed the door. He could imagine what his friend was thinking, that he was a nut, the sort of crazy eccentric who ended up talking to himself on street corners or in parks, destined for the mental hospital. “I just needed a little time to myself,” he said lamely.

Naomi faced him squarely, her stern middle-aged face a perfect vision of the no-nonsense disciplinarian. “I’ve been principal at Lincoln for ten years, Charlie,” she said. “I taught there before that, and let me tell you something, you’re the best teacher I’ve ever seen and I’m not going to lose you without a fight.” Her gaze fell on one particular book. She picked it up, stared at the illustration of a little gray space creature on the cover and read the title skeptically. “Arrival, by Tom Clarke.” She looked at Charlie. “What’s this?”

“Nothing,” Charlie said, embarrassed.

Naomi read the subtitle. “The alien agenda-what the abductions really mean.” She let the book slip from her hand, then snatched up another. “Compendium of Alien Races.” She looked at Charlie in stunned disbelief. “Charlie, you think you’ve been abducted by aliens, don’t you?”

Charlie knew that he had no answer to give her. She thought he was crazy as a loon. Everyone did. Or would, if they knew the… what he… his… it was all so useless, he thought, so utterly futile, and yet he knew the truth.

“Do you have any idea how many people say they’ve been abducted every year?” he asked.

Naomi looked at him as if he were a small child in need of serious correction. “Charlie, people believe in these things because they want to believe in something.”

“If that’s true, then why are all the stories so similar?”

“Because we all see the same movies and read the same books,” Naomi answered emphatically. She picked up the first book and turned the cover over to the face on the back. “For instance, this guy, Tom Clarke. He’s everywhere, Charlie.”

Charlie felt something break inside him, the last reserves of his argument, leaving him nothing but the raw edge of his pain, the heartbreak of the pariah. He saw the sadness in Naomi’s eyes, how much she wanted to help him, and how helpless she felt in the face of what she had to believe was his madness.

“They’ve been taking me since I was nine years old, Naomi,” he said quietly. “They came again seven months ago. I fought back. I kicked and bit and…” He stopped and stared into Naomi’s fretful eyes and more than anything yearned simply to be believed! “I’m not crazy,” he said. “And so I’ll find the proof.”

Eric peered at the map of the world that Wakeman had displayed on a huge board. It was filled with lights, and in each light Eric saw the nature of the encounter, the fear and wonder of it all, the news both dreadful and awe-inspiring, that we were not alone.

“Always the same story,” Wakeman said. “A woman in Siberia. Another one in Norway. A third in Alaska. All over the world. Zanzibar. Australia. One hundred and forty-four multiwitness, confirmable reports.”

Eric kept his eyes on the map. Something had changed, he knew.

“When did all this start?” he asked.

“Six weeks ago. One big rush, then zilch. No activity since then.”

“What do you think it means?”

“It’s the calm.”

“The calm?”

Wakeman returned his attention to the map. “The one before the storm,” he said.

Lisa stared out the window of her room in the maternity ward, listening to the radio as the reports came one after the other, lights in Grand Teton, in Coeur D’Alene, Idaho, lights seen by all manner of people, farmers, workers, doctors, cops… and now here, in Seattle, where she could see them, radiant orbs that hung silently in the night sky as the radio reporter breathlessly narrated the scene, all the wild speculation, the government’s unwillingness to confirm or deny anything.

“Are you focused?” Nina asked.

Lisa felt the cramp draw in like a belt yanked tight around her.

Nina pressed her hand on Lisa’s sweat-spattered forehead. “Listen, I have a great idea for a tattoo for the baby,” she said with a nervous laugh. “Nothing too big. Just a little snake.”

The cramp subsided, and Lisa once again stared out at the night sky.

“When the next contraction comes,” Nina told her, “take in a deep breath.”

The cramp came again, fierce and searing, but Lisa continued to gaze into the sparkling night.

“She’s fully dilated,” one of the nurses said. “Stop pushing.”

Lisa was not aware that she’d been pushing. It was the baby who was pushing, being born at its own pace and of its own free will.

“Stop pushing,” the nurse cried.

Lisa watched the heavens. “I can’t,” she said.

The nurse’s voice was tense. “ Call Dr. Catrell.”

Lisa’s eyes swept over to the nurse. “What’s wrong?” she demanded. “What’s going on?”

She heard the nurse give her blood pressure. “She’s having seizures,” the nurse said, but Lisa felt no seizures. She turned her eyes back to the window, where scores of lights sparkled brightly in the night sky. One, two, three, she said to herself, counting the lights as rapidly as she could. Six, seven, eight…

“She’s preeclamptic,” the nurse called.

“Let’s stabilize her.”

The lights were coming together, and Lisa’s eyes widened as the dazzling display began to move in upon itself.

“Four grams magnesium.”

The beauty of the lights bloomed like a flower in her mind, but she continued to count.

“Five milligrams hydralazine.”

From the corner of her eye, she saw Dr. Catrell draw near, his lips at her ear. “What’s happening is called eclampsia,” he said.

Lisa watched the sky, the lights moving in upon each other, drawing in as if toward the nucleus of some great cosmic soul.

“BP’s down to one twenty,” the nurse called.

“It’s coming,” the doctor cried.

“So much blood,” the nurse said.

“She’s DIC,” the doctor said.

Lisa held her gaze fixed on the sky, all the lights in their final convergence, becoming one dazzling ball of light.

“She’s bleeding out!”

And the light flashed in a huge magnificent radiance, an explosion in the vast night sky, but silent, utterly silent, so that all Lisa heard as the light engulfed the room was the faint cry of her newborn little girl.

A blackness settled over her, then rose in a slowly building light. When she opened her eyes, it was morning, and Nina sat beside her bed.

“Hey,” Lisa said softly.

“Hey,” Nina said. She smiled. “You weren’t supposed to be here, you know. You were bleeding to death.”

“What happened?”

“The bleeding stopped,” Nina answered. “No one knows why.”

“My baby?” Lisa asked fearfully.

Nina stepped over to a bassinet, picked up the baby and brought her to her mother. “She’s beautiful, isn’t she?” She placed the child in Lisa’s arms. “Seven pounds three ounces of perfect little girl.”

Lisa nodded. “Yes.”

“What are you going to name her?”

She hadn’t considered a name, but one sprang into her consciousness so quickly it seemed to have been there always, as if long ago implanted in her mind.

“Allison,” she said. “Allie. Her name is Allie.”

Eric stirred the lone olive in his martini and looked admiringly at a daughter he’d rarely seen since the divorce. His bright little girl had grown into a lovely, intelligent woman with intense, determined eyes. Looking at her, he felt a vague sadness for the inevitable passage of time, the way fathers grew weak as their children grew strong, shrank as they developed. Becky came to mind again and he wondered how his life might have been different if he’d simply met her on a spring day, just an ordinary guy, a doctor or a scientist perhaps. Had he been only that, she might have loved him. But he was Eric Crawford, Owen Crawford’s son, the dark legacy of his father like a stain on his soul.

“So,” Mary said with her usual directness. “Why did you want to see me, Dad?”

Eric smiled. Right down to business. That was Mary. No time for sentiment, for idle conversation, a simple inquiry into his health.

“There’s something I want to show you,” Eric said. He opened the drawer of his desk, took out the artifact and handed it to her. “Your grandfather found this in Pine Lodge, New Mexico. He found it at a crash site.”

Mary turned the artifact in her hand, and he could see the way she was drawn toward it, almost mystically, a power pulling her in.

She looked at Eric. “It’s all true then,” she said finally. Her eyes swept back down to the artifact, and he saw that she believed it, and was suddenly, miraculously in league with him.

Then he told her everything, the whole history of his involvement with the artifact, as well as her grandfather’s. The artifact she held in her hand was the one proof in all the world that the kooks and crackpots had gotten it right, that out there, somewhere in space, there was another world, that creatures from that world had visited the earth, taken people and in some way used them. He told her about the implants, his theory that people were being bred in some way and for some purpose he had not yet been able to discover. He told her about Charlie Keys and Lisa Clarke. Chet Wakeman knew all of this, Eric said, but he knew nothing of the artifact. That, and that alone, was a secret she must keep to herself.

“Chet’s coming by in a few minutes,” Eric said in conclusion. “He says he has some news. From now on, we’ll all be working together.”

Mary said nothing, but Eric saw her eyes flash with excitement.

When Wakeman came into the room a few minutes later, Eric noticed that Mary’s fingers instantly curled protectively around the artifact.

“Hello, thrill seekers,” Wakeman said as he stepped into the study. His gaze immediately leaped to Mary.

“Well, look at you,” he said. “All grown up and beautiful. How’s the quest for the Nobel Prize coming?”

“I came close to coming up with a genomic-mismatch scanning technique,” Mary answered proudly.

Wakeman smiled. “And you’re only in graduate school.” He looked at her admiringly for a moment, then turned to Eric. “Well, ready for the news?”

Eric nodded.

Wakeman sat down in the chair opposite Eric. “Well, here’s the latest. Lisa Clarke has had a baby. A little girl.”

“Are we going to try to pick them up?” Eric asked immediately.

“What would be the point of that?” Wakeman asked.

A few hours later, Mary lay in Wakeman’s arms, her eyes moving along the walls of the small motel room.

“God, I’ve been waiting a long time to do that,” Wakeman said.

“Me, too,” Mary said. She leaned over, kissed him, then drew away. “Why don’t you pick up the baby?”

Wakeman smiled. “You don’t waste any time, do you?”

“She’s clearly important,” Mary said. “In fact, I’d say, she’s the point of this.”

“Definitely.”

“So pick her up. Take her.”

Wakeman shook his head. “They’d just take her back… and they’re way better at that than we are.”

“So what do we do?”

“We watch and wait,” Wakeman told her. “And we work on a way to take her that will work.”

“‘Watch and wait,’” Mary repeated. “That sounds a lot like my father.”

Wakeman chuckled. “I’m nothing like your father.”

Mary kissed him softly.

“I have a theory about who she is,” Wakeman said. “Want to hear it?”

Mary nodded.

“Evolution tends to eliminate, or at least, subjugate emotion,” Wakeman said. “The limbic brain is still down there.” His eyes slid over to Mary. “Imagine their… abilities combined with the energy of our strong emotions.”

“They’d be cherry bombs,” Mary said, her eyes lifting toward the ceiling as if picturing the terrible force of such a combination. “But she’d be a thermonuclear weapon.”