The Grays

TWENTY

CONNER AND PAULIE WOKE UP late and had to rush to get to school. When Paulie saw Conner’s mixture of amaranth flakes, wheat germ, and unsweetened live-culture yogurt, he did not ask for an explanation, but gratefully ate the bacon and eggs that Dan, wearing only green boxer shorts and huge, fluffy slippers, provided to him. He was fascinated to watch Conner eat what looked like upchuck.

Conner had called in aliens, which was damn amazing. But now here he was gobbling down this fantastically geekish food. Nobody could eat like this and get away with it. Paulie had an obligation to uphold the reputation of Bell Attached as a cool school.

“So, what’s your lunch?” he asked Conner. They’d stop by his house to pick up his, which would be Cheetos, a ham sandwich, and a power bar.

“My lunch?” He went over to a little plastic greenhouse that was sitting on the kitchen counter. “Ah, excellent. Sprouting alfalfa, I’m happy to say. Some organic hummus, which is really pretty delicious if you’d like to share, buddy.”

Aliens or not, Paulie saw that the Connerbusters had to continue.

“Sounds great, but I’ve got my dumb old ham sandwich waiting for me at home.”

Dan listened to the boys with only half an ear. Conner had somehow managed to bring this off, it appeared. He was more socially resourceful, then, than he seemed. All to the good.

During his own wakeful and uneasy night, Dan had made a decision. Once he was tenured, he was going to do the unthinkable. He was going to circulate his resume, and he was going to concentrate exclusively on schools in large cities far from here. An untenured professor was an academic beggar. But a man operating from tenure was more significant, even if he came from the lower ranks of colleges.

The reason he was going to do this was that he wanted to get his family as far from open spaces and dark, abandoned nights as he could. Preferably, he would raise his remarkable boy in a Manhattan tower, some place like that. Conner was vulnerable, and Dan’s instinct was that moving to a more populated area would protect him.

As for Katelyn, she was in the process of putting Marcie behind her. She dressed for her morning round of classes while listening to the males crashing around downstairs. She would not have believed Conner’s skill in recapturing Paulie. She’d been furious with him last night, but now she was proud of her son.

She hurried downstairs to be in time to give her men good-bye kisses—accepted with dear brusqueness by her son, with hopeful eyes by her husband.

She let him hug her. This family was her responsibility and her achievement. She was not going to let it go awry simply because he’d done something foolish and she felt humiliated. “Men are fools,” her mom had said, “expect the worst.” As, indeed, her dad had been, disappearing on them the way he had, effectively orphaning her and widowing Mom.

So far, her mother’s advice had never been wrong.

AT THE DAYS INN, LAUREN Glass was awakened by a tapping on her door. She was shocked, then frightened. Then she remembered the code that Rob had given her, and recognized the pattern of taps. As if a motel room door would keep out Mike Wilkes or whatever goons he might send.

She still had no clothes but what she’d been wearing when Mike had attacked her, so she went into the bathroom and wrapped herself in a towel before cracking the door.

“What time is it?”

“Six-fifty. We’ve got to get started.”

“What are we doing?”

“Trying to figure out where the kid is, if he’s really here, or if this is some kind of a feint designed to throw Wilkes off, in which case we can concentrate on the issue of you. But we need to solve the child question first.”

His life before hers, that was clear enough. “The grays aren’t protecting this child?”

“We’re not in communication with the grays anymore. As you know.”

“I do indeed. And I have to tell you, I just don’t see them as really understanding how jeopardy functions in our society. They know how the brain works, but I don’t think they understand reality the same way we do. We need to assume that they’re going to be blindsided if this child is attacked.”

MIKE WILKES WAS RETURNING TO the motel from the early run he took every day when he saw, from a distance of about a quarter of a mile, two people get into a USAF motor pool car in the parking lot and drive away. A man and a woman, but too far away to see their faces. He noted that they’d been parked directly in front of his room.

He decided that some sort of Air Force investigative unit must have been activated, no doubt because of what had happened last night, when Lauren Glass had appeared at Wright-Pat after he’d listed her as KIA.

He put in a cell phone call to Charles. “Hey there, sorry I’m so early. Yeah, it went fine—at least, the trip was fine. Look, there are a couple of officers in mufti sniffing around. I haven’t gotten a close look at them, but I have the feeling that they’re an arrest team. I need that handled, Charles.”

He hung up quickly and did what he now had to do with his cell phone, which was to take out the battery and throw the whole instrument in a ditch. You might as well paint yourself purple as carry one of these things. If you had a cell phone, turned on or turned off, they could track you from twenty-five thousand miles overhead with the WatchStar satellite.

He had probably a dozen cover identities. He didn’t even remember them all. Some of them were essentially perfect, provided to him by the Defense Intelligence Agency. They would stand up to the most rigorous scrutiny. Others, thrown together as needed over the years, were less reliable. But all except two of them were on file somewhere within the U.S. government.

So, at the moment, he had only the two to choose from. He decided to stay with the salesman he’d used last night. He found a gas station, went in, and asked the attendant for directions to the nearest rental car agency. He had about twelve hours to perform a whole complex sequence of actions, then the night to do the really challenging work.

The Three Thieves watched Conner leave home and be driven to school. So far, there had been no threat against him. They wanted to be closer to Conner even than the collective demanded. He was their creation, too, and his mind was like a garden of jewels. They wanted to partake of his rich feelings, but they dared not, he was too precious to disturb in any way.

Because, as a species, they were so close to death, the grays were particularly terrified of it. Their main body was alone in the immensity of space, no longer protected by a home planet and a parent star, their own having long since perished as victims to time. They traveled now in an engineered world on what many considered a hopeless quest, and their collective mind dreamed of oblivion, and worried about it, and clung.

The Thieves had spent much of the night hanging over the town, listening to the people they could hear through implants, trying to ascertain if any of them might seek to harm their treasure.

Last night, they had carried out the instructions of the collective and prepared Conner to receive the extraordinary implant that was going to be given to him.

The fragment of the collective the humans called Adam had been assigned to man some years ago, with the hope that Adam, through exposure to them, would evolve structures in his mind that would enable him to do something that no gray had ever done before—indeed, that was only an idea, a theory, perhaps a hope and maybe a forlorn one. They wanted him to meld into the boy, in effect, to implant his entire being into Conner and become part of him.

Now Adam lay waiting in an empty barn, on the floor of a disused horse stall. Later, when darkness fell, he would complete his mission. Death was in this for him, but a very strange sort of death. It would not be the oblivion that was at the center of the long, complicated drama that obsessed the collective, but rather the surrender of self in a sort of living death. Once his thoughts and knowledge became part of Conner, he believed that he would disappear entirely.

He listened to the dripping of the old barn and the rustle of beetles in the hay, and dreamed formless, uneasy dreams.

The Three Thieves were fascinated and horrified by what Adam was being called upon to do. Like every gray, in the privacy of the self, they regarded it with horror. Superficially, though, they were grateful both that he was trying and that they didn’t have to.

The grays in the scout group had various human genes, this and that, whatever they’d been able to use, and were much healthier than the ones in the main body. The Three Thieves, for example, had human blood, vivid with life, not the dank artificial goo that sustained most of those in the main body. They had taken this blood and adapted their bodies to it, and used it now as their own. It made them quicker, smarter, and also, they thought, more able to understand man.

The Three Thieves watched Conner from above as he moved about in his school. They wanted to get closer, but could not go into a crowd and remain invisible. They could lock their movements to no more than two or three pairs of eyes. So they could not enter his school, they could only watch. This was why grays worked at night, when people were alone.

CONNER HAD SLEPT A RESTLESS, frightened night, and now sat in history class bored senseless because he had realized that his teacher did not understand the events in the Napoleonic Wars that he was teaching. The French loss of the Battle of Borodino in 1812 had led inevitably to the political structure of modern Europe, and discussing the way that had happened would have been interesting. Instead, he had to listen to stupefying trivia about General Kutuzov’s bad feet and Napoleon’s good lunch.

His chest hurt. He remembered some kind of fire, but he had not been burned. He knew he had seen the grays, but it all now seemed curiously unreal, like it had happened to somebody else, or not happened at all.

This disturbed him. He knew that he had seen them. He remembered them, though, in the unstable way that you remember a dream. He understood that this was because the experience had been so strange, but it still troubled him. He wanted these memories. He knew that the grays were here for a reason and they were obviously interested in him. But what was the reason, and why him?

At the ten-fifteen break, he caught up with Paulie before he had reached the protection of Kevin and Will. “Do you still remember?” he asked.

Paulie stopped opening the combination on his locker. He stared down at his feet. “Yeah,” he said in a low voice.

“Paulie, I’m scared.”

“I wasn’t when we got up, but I am now.”

“Yeah, the same thing’s happening to me. I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to be there at night.”

Paulie looked at him, his eyes hollow. “I was gonna restart the busters,” he said, “but I’m not. You’re having too rough a time. But I don’t want us to be together again, Conner. I don’t want ever to see those things again, not ever.”

“I can’t handle it, either!”

“Yeah, you can. You’re as smart as any alien. That’s why they’re after you, I think. Because you can handle it.”

Conner’s throat closed and tears welled in his eyes. “No, I can’t,” he said.

FAR ABOVE, THE THREE THIEVES felt his fear, and drew closer together in their own disquiet. What was the matter with him? Was he in danger? Helplessly, they watched the purple fear flowing up out of the shimmering haze of feelings that hung over the school like a many-colored smoke. They could tell it belonged to Conner by listening to it. They could also talk to him, but dared not. Last night, they had done something with him that the grays had never before managed with human beings, which was to form words in his mind that he could hear and respond to—words, not images.

They dared not do that now, because it might panic him and that must not happen.

Conner went to his physics section at the college, hurrying along the snowy walk that linked Bell Attached to the campus, and wishing that he was safe inside some building and not exposed to the watchful, dangerous sky.

TWENTY-ONE

THE SUN WAS HIGH IN a thin haze by the time Mike reached the Enterprise rental car agency that was tucked between the Wal-Mart and something called Goober’s Used Trucks. He considered buying a truck instead of renting a car, but he didn’t have but about six hundred dollars in his wallet. Too bad, a purchased vehicle would be a hell of a lot more secure than a rental, which any expert could trace, no matter what sort of identity he used.

“I’d like a car, please,” he said. He pulled out the Harry Hill driver’s license and credit card.

“Missouri,” the agent said, looking at the license.

“Yes, sir. Here trying to sell the college on some new band instruments.”

“Well, good luck. Pardon my French, but they’re tighter than a witch’s tit over there. You want a Grand Am?”

“A Grand Am is good.”

“Looks like we’re gonna get some serious weather tonight. If you want, I’ve got a Volvo. It’s three-sixty a week. Front-wheel drive might be useful, though.”

This was certainly true. “Yeah,” he said looking at the sky. “It sure might.” He took the Volvo.

In his top pocket was the remote control that would summon the triangle, which was laying by in some concealed draw somewhere in the hills. The trouble was, it connected through the MilStar communications satellite, and the second he used it, whoever was looking for him would know both where he was and where the triangle was.

Once he had the car, he went through a drive-though and got some food. It was too dangerous to stop and eat, lest some sort of horrible serendipity expose him to those two investigators. Professionalism in a situation like this was defined by attention to detail. He also knew from long experience that going without food was a mistake when you were dealing with complex and stressful issues.

AIR FORCE CHIEF OF STAFF Samuel Gold was ushered into the presidential executive office next to the Oval, which was open. No matter how often he passed near that room, he was always inspired by its history. No matter which president happened to be sitting at that desk, the power of the office was so intense that it was like a kind of scent around them all. Gold saw the presidency of the United States as the greatest governmental institution ever devised to expand human freedom and happiness. So he was especially concerned about this order he had come to discuss.

“Sir,” he began, “I won’t take up but five minutes of your time. I am requesting confirmation of an order received at oh-nine-hundred today, directing—”

“I know the order,” the president said. “You’re to prepare to fire the scalar weapon.”

“Yes, sir! I just—sir, what you may not know is that this weapon is not stable. It’s still in development.”

“The tests have worked pretty well.”

“Yes, sir. But you’re going to fire it into the New Madrid fault line.”

“Oh?”

“Mr. President, this thing is going to devastate the entire central United States. You might see half a million deaths and trillions of dollars in damage. Sir, if I may ask, why do you need this?”

“General Gold, you can’t ask. But I do want you to put a hold on that order until further notice.”

“Yes, sir, thank you, sir.”

“Thank you for coming in.”

Gold’s thick neck flushed. He went to his feet, saluted, turned, and stiffly left the room. The president watched until the door was closed, then called for his next meeting to be delayed. He went out into the Rose Garden, bleak in winter, and stood a long time alone and in silence. To slow his pounding heart and damp his rage, he sucked long, deep breaths. And it passed, and he returned to his work.

MIKE WILKES’S NEXT STOP WAS Bell Attached School. They were all college families on Oak Road, so he could be reasonably sure that the children attended Bell, which went from kindergarten through high school. He wasn’t concerned about the Jeffers infant. The grays needed their instrument to be ready by 2012, not in twenty years. That left the two Kelton boys, Paul Warner and his sister Amy, and Conner Callaghan. There was a fair chance that he’d find his candidate among these children. If not, then he’d expand his search. He would not fail, that was unthinkable.

The school was housed in two elegant old redbrick structures on the edge of the Bell College campus. The place was certainly beautiful, with its tall white columns and broad sports field behind the main complex. As he walked up the long sidewalk to the main entrance, he reached in his side pocket and turned on his Palm Pilot. Tucked in beside it was the remote that would call the triangle.

Now the Palm would record the emissions of any computer in any room he entered. He would be able to access that computer again from the parking lot. If they used paper files, he’d find a way to physically invade them.

He had held the belief for many years that a person with sufficient training and resources quite simply could not be thwarted. Today, he would put that theory to the test.

As school was in session, the doors were locked. He identified himself over the intercom as “Dr. Wenders,” interested in enrolling his children in the school.

He was admitted by a student volunteer and led to the principal’s office. Mary Childs was a quick-voiced woman, big and ready to smile.

“Dr. Wenders,” she said, thrusting out her hand. “I thought I knew everybody on the faculty.”

“I’m not on the faculty just yet. I’m considering an offer, so I’m trying to get the lay of the land.”

“Oh, okay. How can I help you?”

“My son is a rather special case.”

“All right.”

“He’s extremely bright.”

“So is everybody here. The whole school is a gifted-and-talented program, essentially.”

“At nine, Jamie devised a muon detector that won a Westinghouse commendation. His IQ is over two hundred. As you know, even in a very accelerated program, students like this can pose some special challenges.”

“We have such students.”

“I’m surprised to hear that. They’re relatively rare.”

“Oh, we have one or two.”

“That’s very reassuring. How do you approach their needs, if I may ask?”

“Certainly.” She turned aside and began typing into her computer. “Here,” she said, “we devise special enrichment programs to address the needs and strengths of each child.”

“Could I see such a program, something you’ve developed for a two-hundred-plus student?”

“We don’t actually do IQ tests, but there is a student who we’ve identified as hyperintelligent, and we’ve devised a special program for him.”

“Could I see that, please?”

“Well, I can show you the program itself, I think—just a minute, let’s see if I can print out his curriculum without his identity. Yeah—no, it’s not gonna let me do that. Here, I’ll read it.”

As she read off a list of the special tutoring, the accelerated reading program, the various high school and college language, physics, and math classes the child was attending, and his grade-point levels, Mike knew that he had almost certainly identified his kid. If he was also among the Oak Road families, then it was final.

“That’s certainly very impressive.”

“It’s an advantage that we’ve got the college right here, of course. His college-level courses are just a short walk away.”

That little slip told him that it wasn’t a girl. Mary Childs was easy to handle. “That’s a very impressive program. I don’t think my son’s in as good a situation now.”

“Where are you, if I may ask?”

Here was a chance to work his list a little more. He chose the professor with the most candidate children. His response rolled out smoothly. “I’m at Mabry in California. I’m in history.”

“Then you know John Kelton, our department head.”

“I certainly do. He sent me over here, in fact. But he didn’t say anything about his boys being like my son.”

“No. But we do have one actively matriculated. That program is in current use, I can assure you.”

Another two off the list. Nice. That left Paul and Amy Warner and Conner Callaghan among the Oak Road possibilities. But the information had come at a cost: at any time, this woman might mention “Dr. Wenders” to John Kelton. Probably, it would amount to nothing more than a moment of confusion between them, but if it went further, it could be dangerous. “I haven’t actually resigned Mabry yet, so if you don’t mind…”

“Of course, I understand perfectly. Not a word.”

“May I take a tour? Just look in on a few classes? We’ll be in middle school.”

She conducted him through their science lab first. Among the things it contained was a truly elaborate tangle of lab glass, with three retorts bubbling happily away. “Oh, boy,” she said, striding over to the rig. “This should not be left on unattended.” She looked quickly around the lab. “Conner?”

Silence.

“That boy, he’s always doing this sort of thing. This is supposed to measure the body burden for some-odd-thousand pollutants found in common foodstuffs. But he can’t just leave Bunsen burners on like this.”

“This is your super-gifted one?”

She laughed. “Please keep my confidence, too!”

“Of course.”

“The Callaghans have their hands full with this one. He’s absolutely awesome. But this experiment’s going to have to be moved to Science Hall, we can’t have this in our lab anymore. Look at some of that glass!”

“I’ve never seen anything quite like it.”

“Oh, I’m sure it separates each molecule into a different container or something. Probably has five original inventions floating around in there. And he speaks French, German, and Spanish and, God love him, Cantonese.”

“He must annoy the other students.”

“Let’s put it this way. If yours comes in, he will be eternally grateful to you for a companion who runs at the same speed.”

“My son isn’t in this kind of overdrive, but he’s close enough to where I can guess that it’ll be a relief for both of them.” He glanced at his watch. “I’m off to see the libraries,” he said. “I want to thank you for your help. You’ve moved Bell to the top of my list.”

“Which is where it darned well should be. We’re the best little overlooked and ignored college in the United States.”

In other words, a perfect backwater for the grays to hide their bright little baby, Conner Callaghan. On the way back to her office, he said, “I’m seeing a rather high class density.”

“I don’t think so.”

“That class back there—I saw about thirty kids.”

“Where?”

“Back opposite the lab.”

She shook her head. “Let’s check that out.” She went into her office and did just what he needed: called up a class list. “Nope. Twenty-two in sixth-grade English B. And that’s high for us. We try to stay around eighteen.”

Back in his car, he opened the Palm and tapped the screen a few times. He was out of Wi-Fi range, so he attached the antenna to the Palm and was soon looking at her computer’s desktop. The class list was still there. He downloaded it to his Palm’s memory.

He had his weapon, now, as well, in the form of that list. Armed with it, he would not need to go near Oak Road to carry out his plan, nor would he need to be anywhere near Conner Callaghan when he died, nor would it appear to be an assassination.

But he would go to Oak Road. Two could play the gray’s lying game, and he planned to trick them into believing that he had bought into their deception. He knew that Conner Callaghan and Paul Warner were in middle school, and that the description given to Lauren was of a high school student. That meant that it was one of the Kelton boys. So Mike would enter the Kelton house and only the Kelton house. The grays would think that he had swallowed their bait.

What he was going to do there and elsewhere in the community did not involve directly killing anybody. Nor was the process in any way extracted from the grays. It had been invented during World War II, in fact, by a Dr. Antonio Krause, who had brought it from Auschwitz to Dr. Hubertus Strughold’s operation in Texas as part of Operation Paperclip in 1947.

By now, it was part of CIA routine. Field-tested, reliable as rain. The only difference between what he had to do and how a field agent might function was that he didn’t have a neat little surgical kit and would have to devise his own.

He drove down to the county seat. He needed a good map of the community, as well as the large property that surrounded the Oak Road development, in addition to a look at the plans of the houses.

By the time he reached Somersburg, the thin light had gone. The sky was dull now, the sun pallid. The air had that empty coldness that portends a blizzard. He was glad of the car he’d chosen. A lot of this work had to be done tonight, and he absolutely could not get stuck, not at any point.

He went into the small county records office, and up to a clerk who sat behind a counter playing Texas Hold ’Em on a computer. He froze his screen and looked up.

“Any luck?” Mike asked with a smile.

The clerk raised his eyebrows as if to say that yes, he was having some luck, which meant only one thing: he was having no luck. “What can I do you for?”

“I’ve seen a large farm out Oak Road east of the town, and—”

“One, that’s the Niederdorfer farm. Two, they aren’t sellers.”

“I’d still like to take a look at the plat, if I may.”

The clerk got up and came back with a large black record book. Mike took it to one of the three tables in the room and opened it. He familiarized himself with the layout of the farm, and noted down the longitude and latitude. In the car, he would use his Palm Pilot to go online and get a topo map. Unlike a cell phone, a Palm Pilot could not be specifically identified just by using it in a wireless context, as long as it was effectively firewall protected, which his was.

He then went to the pages that contained the little Oak Road development. He copied the plat numbers of each property, then went back to the clerk and asked for the blueprints of the houses.

“You looking to buy?”

“Not sure. I want to see what kind of construction I’m looking at in the area.” This office was too small and this man was too inquisitive. He would remember every detail of Mike’s visit, which was really damned unfortunate.

He finished drawing a diagram of the Kelton place, then returned the book. “I’m looking at the wrong area. Is there an Oak Street in Wilton, maybe?”

The clerk consulted a map of the community on the wall. “No, not up there.”

“Well, thank you then.” He cursed himself as he left. This had been sloppy. His problem was that he was too used to power.

He sat in his car, letting the Palm look for a network. Sure enough, it found one—the town clerk’s. It was WEP encrypted. Good, WEP was easy. The software was online in ten seconds, the encryption solved.

He got a topo of the entire eastern half of the state, then went offline and zoomed to the Wilton area. The map was from 1988, but Oak Road was there, and the houses. He saw the way the land worked, coming down in a series of ridges. Across Oak Road was an old rail line, and beyond it a very large forest. Half a mile behind the houses was Wilton Road, with the field where the glowboy had come down visible between them.

He found one hill with an elevation of a hundred and eight feet, but it wasn’t enough to cause him a problem. His choice of the grain elevator for his antenna and transmitter was the correct one. As the trap that would lead to the death of the kid was sprung, the evidence of its existence would be destroyed.

His next step was to buy the various items that would have been in an operative’s surgical kit. Everything was important, but the most important was a small reel of narrow-gauge copper wire that would provide both his transmitter’s antenna and his receiver’s. He also needed a radio transmitter, an X-Acto knife, electrical tape, and, from a drugstore, a topical anesthetic and that old reliable, ether.

He got everything except the drugstore items at a Radio Shack he found in an almost derelict strip mall. There was a chain drugstore down the street, where he picked up a fairly decent tube of anesthetic. The local druggist was able to sell him a bottle of solvent-grade ether.

He drove until he found a rural area, where he opened the transmitter carton. He read the schematic and specifications, opened the back of the transmitter with the tool pack he had bought, and modified the circuit board by bypassing a couple of resistors. The unit would now transmit at a far greater power output than allowed by amateur equipment. Carefully, he stabilized the connections with electrical tape.

He returned to Wilton, driving the quiet country road in an unhurried manner, listening to the radio and making certain that he violated no traffic laws. He passed the motel, observing nothing unusual. His room opened onto the parking strip, which was now empty. He drove to the end of the block and turned. To his right was the field he had come down in the night before, now covered with a new dusting of snow. Snowflakes drifted slowly out of a hard, gray sky. The field was empty, and there was no sign of any tracks, human or vehicular, in the new snow. Beyond the field stood the immense grain elevator.

He drove past the elevator and then turned into its concrete loading area. It was abandoned at this time of year, and the large bay doors were carefully padlocked. He went to the personnel entrance and opened it by sliding a credit card between the door and the jamb. Nobody expected an empty grain elevator to be robbed in a small town, so the security was extremely light.

Inside, he went to the control room. It was simple enough to understand. The conveyor that moved the grain from trucks into the silo was what he was interested in. He descended to the cellar and threw the switch that turned on the power. Then he went back to the control room and started the conveyor. It screeched and clanged, then began to rattle along doing exactly what he wanted it to. Its tubs threw off dust every they time bounced. Overnight, the constant motion of the conveyor would fill the whole enormous space with a volatile haze. Explosive dust like this was the reason that elevators were not run when the weather was too dry.

Later tonight, he would return and set up the transmitter.

He left the grain elevator and drove out into a neighborhood. He found a corner lot with a house set back on it. The place was silent and dark, the family obviously off at work. He turned into the driveway, parked, and went up to the back door. He tapped on the glass.

A dog barked, came rushing to the door, its claws clattering on the kitchen floor. As it barked furiously, its face kept appearing at the lower edge of the door’s window. It was a big dog, he thought some sort of hound, maybe a coonhound. Whatever, a big, mean dog was just what he was looking for.

He had learned how to handle dogs years ago, when he was a young officer and had been in training for the Air Police. But he would not risk tackling the Keltons’ mutt without a practice run. The dog was one of the few weapons man had against the grays. They could not control a dog’s mind. They hated and feared the dog.

He got the door unlocked after a small struggle with the mechanism. After soaking a handkerchief with ether, he pulled it open.

The dog rushed him, of course, and he clapped his hand over the snout and grabbed the animal by its scruff. While it was still struggling, he pushed his way into the kitchen. By the time he had closed the door with his heel, the dog was limp.

He spent a moment examining the skull, then cut into it about two inches above the right eye, making an incision so tiny that it hardly bled. He inserted a half-inch length of wire into the incision. Now he covered the wound with a little anesthetic. The dog would feel no pain when it woke up. Later, the wound would look like an insect bite, if it was noticed at all in the animal’s fur.

He was about to leave when he noticed a faint sound coming from the back of the house. A television, a soap opera. Moving swiftly and quietly, he was quite surprised to find a man, big, in his fifties, asleep in a chair in the family room.

A nice chance to practice. Working gently and swiftly, he dropped the man into a deeper sleep with the ether, then wired him, too. He did not hypnotize this man. He had no way of knowing what the name “Conner Callaghan” might mean to him, if anything. To direct an assassin at a target, the assassin had to have a means of identifying the target. This was why most of Mike’s subjects would be kids from Bell Attached School. Conner would be killed by somebody who knew him. It would look like a particularly vicious and crazy version of a school shooting.

He looked at his watch. One-forty. So, around breakfast time tomorrow, these two would be the first to enter a state of rage.

THE GRAYS WERE DEPLOYED ACROSS Earth in strict and carefully guarded territories. In the United States, they even adhered to the agreement they had made with the humans, and minimized their activities so that the Air Force would not come buzzing around and annoy them. In the rest of the world, they observed no such strictures.

It was difficult to reach into the human mind, but it was not hard to communicate with each other. The collective was growing excited, almost holding its breath, as the time for the attempt drew nearer. They did not know what their creation would be like, could hardly imagine a mind greater than their own. They felt a sense of worship and hope, and the Three Thieves an even more intimate wonder, because, as his guardians and his link to the collective, they were closest to him. Indeed, the feelings toward Conner were the strongest any gray had known in eons. And the hope, now that they had come this far and were so close to success, was very intense.

The other scouts, a million of them who had been scattered throughout the galaxy searching, had started racing toward Earth at 99 percent of the speed of light as soon as it had been understood what a perfect fit man was, a species that needed the grays as much as they needed man.

Inside the gigantic artificial world that was the main body, creeping along at half light speed, the sorrowing ranks stirred with hope so intense that they thought that a plague of suicide would overtake them if they failed.

When one of the lucky thousand scouts here on Earth tasted of a human dream, or licked the suffering off the soul of a prisoner or swam in the delicious sea of discovery that defined a child, all the billions quivered with joy, and all longed, themselves, to once again have such feelings of their own.

So, when it became clear that a particularly dangerous satellite was moving from one orbit to another, and that its new orbit would park it twenty-five-thousand miles above Conner’s head, the whole mass of the grays fluttered with unease. They knew exactly how this satellite worked, they had seen it built. Had they wished, they could have built a similar instrument based on much more elegant principles, and with it shattered the planet.

They would never do that, of course, not to precious Earth, to precious man. They knew that there must be a way to revive their souls, to make their lives worth living again. Locked somewhere in the human genome was the secret of man’s vitality. Conner would find this spark, and understand how to enable the grays to share it.

At least, that was the dream. But if this atrocious weapon was fired at him, maybe the dream would end.

The collective directed a triad to attend to the thoughts of the president. Ever since Harry Truman had, in 1947, ordered his airplanes to shoot at the grays, all presidents were routinely implanted. This made their minds easy to hear, with the result that their most private fantasies, desires, and actions were part of the vast public entertainment the grays had constructed for themselves by implanting humans.

This was one of the main reasons they abducted human beings, to implant them so that they could enjoy them from a distance. Thus some of the most peculiar and most intense people, the ones with the most colorful fantasies—usually deeply hidden—were actually among the most famous creatures in the universe.

This president was a marvelous seraglio of sexual invention and hungry, innovative desire. His thought processes were more conventional. Sexy he might be, but he was also an efficient man.

Listening to the flowing whisper of words and watching in their own minds the flickering mass of colors, fantasized human body parts—long feminine legs and white, full breasts, mostly—and the low growls of desire that were the mental “voice” of his subconscious, they saw that he was uneasy about Charles Gunn’s murderous request. But would he deny it? Of this they could not be sure. Mind control was not a reliable tool. Also, they did not like to interfere in the action of human will. They had wrecked their own independent spirits by creating their collective. They would not also wreck man’s independence with excessive use of the tools of collective thought.

But this was one time that it was necessary. They began to work on the president’s mind, to touch it with images of the suffering the scalar weapon could cause.

As the collective mind of the grays concentrated on the president’s decision, they failed to address the building crisis in Wilton, or to see just how serious it was, and Conner’s death began to come closer and closer yet, as the fatal hours passed.

TWENTY-TWO

ROB LANGFORD PUT DOWN THE phone. “We’ve got orders,” he said to Lauren. “First, we are to assume that Colonel Wilkes is in the area, second that he is definitely here to kill this child. We are to protect the child at all costs, and deal with Wilkes in whatever way is required.”

“What does that mean?”

“Find him, kill him.”

“Wait a minute on that. Are these orders in writing?”

“No, they are not.”

“I don’t think murder is such a hot idea. I mean, if you don’t have a written order that is definitely legal, that is way out of line.”

“Let me deal with Wilkes. You concentrate on the kid. That’s the way it ought to be, anyway. What we are going to do is uniform up—or rather, I am—and pay an official visit. We will seek cooperation from the parents.”

“How far along is Mike? Do we know?”

“We do not.”

“What if these folks don’t like the Air Force?”

“Our objective is simple. It is to determine if there is an extremely smart child living on Oak Road. If not, then we extend our search to the local schools. Assuming we identify the child, we provide information to the parents and put them under surveillance protection. We must not to do anything that might cause these people to resist the approach of the grays to the child.”

They went to the traveling officer’s quarters where Rob had a suite. She remained in his small living room while he changed.

Rob was an attractive guy, and she wanted, she was finding, to do more than sample him the way she had been doing with men since she’d started this job. In fact, she could get serious with this guy. In fact, she thought he was the best man she had ever met.

He was also the most dedicated to his mission and the most businesslike.

They drove off the base and through fourteen miles of slowly worsening weather, passing through the town and going onto the Bell campus. On the way, they phoned all four Oak Road houses. They got three answering machines and a non-answer. So everybody was where they were supposed to be, which was working at their various occupations on campus or attending school.

“We’ll try the physics guy first. His discipline fits best, I think.”

“The baby’s not our target.”

“No. It could be one of the two teenagers, the Keltons, unless Adam was lying to you. The other three children seem too young.”

“He was lying.”

“Maybe Oak Road doesn’t even figure in it, then. Maybe the whole thing was a feint in anticipation of some discovery they knew Wilkes was about to make. They directed his—and our—attention to Oak Road because it doesn’t matter.”

She felt a shiver of unease the moment the words were out of his mouth. “My sense of it is that Oak Road is very damned important.”

“They don’t make mistakes.”

“Adam made one. He killed my father.”

“That’s true enough.”

“So they do.”

“What do you think they’ll do if they lose the child?”

She thought about it. “I get a feeling of tremendous rage.”

“Are you in touch with them now?”

“I’m not sure. I think I might be.” She shuddered. “Sometimes I feel sort of as if I am. As if I’m part of a great sorrow. I think that’s the heart of the grays, the way I perceive their collective being.”

“That’s chilling.”

He turned the car into a parking lot, beyond which was a neat white sign with black lettering, SCIENCE HALL.

It was a towered old brick pile, Bell’s science center. The enormous windows were designed to gather light, from back in the days before electricity had come to rural Kentucky.

According to a schedule affixed to his door, Dr. Jeffers had been teaching until five minutes ago, so they waited in his office. He had no secretary and the door wasn’t locked. Inside, it was surprisingly uncluttered for an academic’s lair.

“Uh oh,” Rob said, picking up a book from the professor’s desk.

“We have to expect them to be in a tizzy about UFOs. Look what just happened.”

“Well, we have to stay far from that topic.”

Ten minutes passed. Rob remained composed but Lauren did not wait well, and she got progressively more and more nervous. How could he be so collected? He was like too many military people, in a certain deep way resigned to fate, a fault that, in her opinion, came from living by orders.

“Maybe we should try the school,” she said, somehow keeping herself from screaming it at him.

At that moment a short, quick man came through the door. His eyes fixed on Rob’s blues. “Hello?”

Rob went to his feet. Smiled. Extended his hand. “Good afternoon, Dr. Jeffers, I’m Colonel Langford.”

“The UFO!”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re here about the UFO, yes?”

Rob shook his head. “I’m not aware…”

“We saw a UFO. There’s videotape. Our whole neighborhood saw it. There was an Air Force jet chasing it.”

“Uh, I don’t think we do that.”

Rob was really very impressive at this.

“We’re here to talk about gifted students.”

“Gifted students?”

“There’s a new program, and we’re informing science departments all over the country. Seeing as you’re head of the physics department here at Bell, and we’ve got Bell on our list, we decided to come on over.”

“On your list?”

“We’re from Alfred,” Lauren said. “I’m in procurement. He’s—”

“Traffic-control supervisor. I make sure our trainees don’t run into each other. We’ve volunteered for this mission, actually.”

“What mission is it? I’m not understanding.”

“The Air Force is looking for a few very gifted, very extraordinary students. Unusual. Freaks, even. That smart.”

“This is Bell College, nobody here is smart. I’m not even particularly smart. In fact, I’m not smart at all, and certainly my students aren’t. They’re a bunch of idiots, actually.”

“Ah. We always thought—”

“A beautiful campus does not mean smart. It only means lots of red brick and white columns.”

“What about that other school?” Rob asked. “The professors’ kids?”

He leaned back in his desk chair, stared at the ceiling. “Actually, my neighbors have a sort of monster. Aggressive, peculiar, frenetically loquacious for age eleven. Builds remarkably detailed model trains.”

This didn’t sound promising to Lauren, but Rob said, “Should we interview him? It could mean an appointment to the Air Force Academy.”

“Somehow I don’t see Conner in a uniform. He’s… anarchic. I really find him quite disturbing, but now that you mention it, he is pretty much of a genius.”

Now it sounded promising. “Can we meet him?” Lauren asked.

“His father’s over in the psych building. Daniel Callaghan. Or he could be off fucking some administrator. Apparently he does a bit of that.”

What a bitter man this was. Bitter, mean little man. “So he’s a monster and his father’s a womanizer. Has he got a mother, or has she killed herself?”

Rob shot her a frown, but she couldn’t help it. This was a very nasty little man, and she wanted him to know it.

“Surprisingly not. Actually, I’m being mean, which I suppose what’s got your back up. I am rather frustrated, I’m afraid.” He held up the UFO book. “I believe in this, which has demoted me from CalTech through the middle Ivies to Bell. I thought you were here about our astonishing, wonderful UFO. I thought everything was about to change. Instead, you’re here for some totally conventional and annoying reason. The Callaghans would never let that precious child of theirs anywhere near the military. At least, I hope not. I suppose I was trying to scare you off, to preserve them from a temptation I don’t actually trust them to resist. Truth be told, he’s the most marvelous human being I have ever encountered, and I bless the day we happened by sheerest chance to move next door.”

She knew for certain, then, that they had found the child of the grays. She thought of all the generations of effort that must have gone into his creation, of the struggles in the night, the long and careful thought of those strange, exquisite minds, and all the people who had suffered their bruising attentions, all for this person with the euphonious name of Conner Callaghan.

She knew, also, that she had more than a little of Adam still within her, whether due to some arcane connection devised by the grays or from her own beating heart, but she felt at that moment that, without question, she would give her life to save him.

Rob had flushed and grown silent. In his silence, he had taken the book from Professor Jeffers. “UFOs and the National Security State,” he said. “What does this mean?”

“Essentially that another academic has been marginalized for promoting folklore as fact. However, it’s actually an expertly written and devastating indictment. By careful and scholarly inches, it proves without question that the government is engaged in a cover-up of the UFO phenomenon. So what would you do with him, Air Force people, shoot him, get him fired, trump up some charges against him?”

How extraordinary to sit here and see this man suffering like this for a truth he believed in—and to know that he was right, to know it better than he did, and to still lie to him, and curse his innocent soul and condemn it with your lie.

“Dr. Jeffers,” Rob said, “we’d like to thank you for your time and help. We’ll contact this family in due time. Who knows, perhaps Conner Callaghan will solve the mystery for us.” He handed back the book. “I’ve always thought that the Air Force hid a lot of things that it shouldn’t. Maybe about this. But it’s not my lookout, unfortunately.”

He gave the wild-haired professor a grin that made his face explode into gleaming, twinkling boyishness.

On the walk to the parking lot, the snow was more persistent.

“That was pitiful,” Rob said.

“Why don’t we just tell them?”

“You don’t know? Even yet?”

“Sure I know. You tell people that something is going to invade not only their space but their actual, personal bodies, they are going to panic. I’m panicked, just thinking about it. If there was any viable alternative, I’d take it.”

“I think that’s how we all feel. But our next step is to meet this family. Because if we found this kid, we can be sure that Mike has found him, too.”

“Maybe the grays will attack him.”

“If he showed up with a gun they’d probably abduct him and barbecue his damned brain. But what if he’s more indirect? They have their limits, Lauren, as you must know.”

“Look, I don’t know how to protect him, either, okay! And it’s winter, it’s snowing, and it’s starting to get dark, so one of us had better come up with an idea. How about it, boss?”

“I’m not the boss. You’re the one closest to the grays. You’re the boss.”

“Fine. I say we go out to Oak Road. Take it from there.”

First they returned to Alfred. Rob threaded his way around to the parking lot closest to his billet and went up to change again. After Jeffers’s reaction, he no longer felt that the uniform was such a good idea.

She sat in the car and listened to the radio, which told the story of the onrushing storm.

TWENTY-THREE

“HI, CHRIS,” KATELYN SAID. SHE was quite surprised to see him. The Jefferses usually called before they came over. As he entered the foyer, snow swirled behind him and he brushed off his coat. He looked extremely solemn, she noticed. “Are you okay?”

“Where’s Conner?”

“Downstairs designing a train wreck. He had an unpleasant day, apparently. Why do you ask?”

“We need to talk. Where’s Dan?”

“Dan,” Katelyn called, “Chris is here.”

“Yo. Hey there,” he said coming in from the kitchen. “Whassup?” Then he saw Chris’s face. “What’s wrong?”

They went into the family room together. The TV was blasting. Katelyn turned it off.

“I got the classic visit from the Air Force today.”

What was he talking about? “What visit?”

“You’re not conversant in the UFO literature, of course. You’ve never read a word of anything I’ve given you.”

“That would be correct,” Dan said.

“I got a visit from the Air Force.” He looked from one of them to the other.

Katelyn had no idea what to say. She was at a complete loss.

“All right, let me background you. There is this legend that when somebody has a serious sighting or gets video or something like that, the Air Force secretly investigates. Do you follow that?”

“Yeah,” Dan said. “Of course.”

Katelyn felt kind of queasy. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear this.

“Okay, so I went back to my office after class and who’s there but this Air Force colonel and this woman—my God, this woman!”

Not another one down, Katelyn thought. “Is Nancy at home? Is she aware of this woman?”

“Yes, she’ll be over in a minute. The baby’s going to sleep. But I didn’t want to wait, and you’ll see why in a second. Just listen. Okay, so I come in and the colonel is looking at UFOs and the National Security State, which I believe I foisted off on you last summer.”

“Okay,” Dan said. “Ended up on the shelf with Trailer Park Ghosts, and Bigfoot: First American, I’m afraid.”

Chris’s voice had a curious, measured quality to it, so different from his normal tone that Katelyn felt a twinge of concern that he might be sort of crazy just at the moment.

She did not want him to be crazy here. She and Dan were trying to work their way past the Marcie incident and having trouble. She wanted to let him make love to her, but so far had been unable. Unable just a couple of hours ago.

“Anyway, I have a prediction. These two folks are going to show up right here at this house sometime very soon, and they are going to ask to meet Conner.”

That focused Katelyn at once. “That’ll be the day,” she said.

“The man is this very big, tough-looking type. But fatherly, sort of. You know this guy is in on the secrets the second you lay eyes on him. Very imposing figure, indeed. The woman—well, you have to see her. She radiates something and it is weird. If I ever saw anyone who might be an alien in human form, it’s this woman. She has these big, staring eyes and she is very, very still. She just sits there staring at you, and you get these bizarre feelings, like she’s penetrating your mind, somehow.”

This was all beginning to sound more than a little crazy, even for Chris. “You’re scared,” she said. “Tell us why.”

“I didn’t realize at first what was going on, and I slipped. I told them something I don’t think I should have. About Conner being a genius.”

“But they were there asking about the UFO,” Dan said, “so what does it matter?”

“Oh, no, they never mentioned the UFO. Of course not. That isn’t the way these things are done. They were asking if we had any physics geniuses at Bell for some kind of Air Force program.”

Katelyn laughed, she couldn’t help it. He glared at her, though, and she stopped.

“I’ve had enough laughter,” he said in a low voice. “The point is—”

“They didn’t actually mention UFOs, though?”

“No, Katelyn, they did not.”

The phone rang. Katelyn got up and took it in the kitchen. “Hi, Nancy.”

“It’s snowing too hard, I’m staying put. Has he told you?” Nancy asked.

“He thinks the Air Force is interested in Conner because of the UFO. He’s not making a lot of sense, Nancy.” She did not tell her that he sounded like he was on his way around the bend, not with a little baby for her to worry about. Anyway, he’d probably be fine in the morning. He had these flights of weirdness every time a big UFO report appeared on one of the crazy-person Web sites he haunted.

“The reality part is that the Air Force is looking for geniuses for some sort of program of theirs,” Nancy said. “The Chris part is that they’re secretly investigating UFOs.”

“Well, then, I’m glad he told them about Conner. Conner could use more stimulation.”

“Be careful, Katelyn. This is some kind of military thing. I’d make certain that you can supervise Conner at all times.”

Katelyn had no real problem with the military. But then again, she would protect Conner and Conner’s mind from any kind of intrusion at all. “For sure,” she said.

“Is Chris drinking, by the way?”

“No, he didn’t ask and I didn’t offer. Dan got tanked at the Peep the other day and I loaded the liquor into the garage attic.”

“Over the Marcie thing, yeah, I heard.”

God, this was such a little place! “You mean, the fact that he got tenure?”

There was the briefest of silences, then Nancy said, “Congratulations, by the way.”

“We’re holding off on the official celebration until after the official announcement. You want me to send yours home?”

“Yeah, please. Before the UFOs come out.”

She went back into the living room, where Dan and Chris were staring at each other like two people at a funeral. “Momma called, Chris. Time to go home.”

“Katelyn,” Dan said, “I’m what they call an abductee, and so are you.”

She sat down. “That again. Okay, Dan, it has to do with folklore, not with reality. There’s nobody being abducted by aliens because there are no aliens, at least not here at the moment. I’ll grant that the video is strange, but we are in no way involved.”

The doorbell rang—and sent a shock through her. Silence fell. Dan jumped to his feet, strode off to answer it.

Katelyn brushed past him. “I’ll get it.”

She swung the door open.

A QUARTER OF A MILE away, Mike Wilkes crouched watching the Kelton house. He was freezing cold, despite the fact that he’d bought boots, gloves, and a black Eddie Bauer jacket. He knew the house’s layout, and by nine he also knew that the boys both slept in the same room, that the dog was a Doberman, and that nobody in the house was in good enough condition to match him, despite the boys’ age advantages.

Lights flickering drew his gaze to the road. A car came, moving slowly in the snow. He slid back a little, lest the lights reflect on the lenses of his tiny, light-amplifying binoculars. He did not recognize the vehicle, but he could see two dim figures inside.

The lights went out abruptly, and he was sure that it had stopped around the bend. That would mean that it was either at the Jefferses’ or the Callaghans’ house. That was of interest, and he had to find out. He left his position but remained behind the tree line as he worked his way to a location that would enable him to see the last two houses on the road.

OVERHEAD, THE THREE THIEVES SAW the radiant energies of all the bodies on Oak Road. Given the alteration of the deadly satellite’s orbit, they were on full alert now. Below them, they observed the shimmering darkness that was Colonel Wilkes moving among the trees. The Thieves were uneasy about Wilkes being out here. But he showed no interest in the Callaghan house. The collective had instructed them to let him proceed, as long as he didn’t threaten Conner directly. In fact, it was eager for him to proceed. Maybe he had bought their little trick.

MIKE RETURNED TO HIS ORIGINAL position. He had wanted to see if it was a motor pool car. It was not. Not only that, it was in front of the Jeffers house. His conclusion: continue with his plan.

KATELYN WAS THUNDERSTRUCK TO SEE the very people that Chris was talking about standing on her stoop. They were snowblown and miserable looking, and she immediately let them in.

In the family room, Chris, smiling tightly, introduced them. He was at least partly right about the appearance of the Glass woman. She had huge eyes, but they worked well in her face. She was a beautiful woman, and Katelyn knew instantly that her friend Colonel Langford was head over heels in love with her. Was she weird? Not at all.

They began a spiel about a special Air Force program for the very brilliant.

“Now,” Katelyn said, “let me get this straight. You put Conner in this tutorial program. But he does or doesn’t have to commit to the Air Force Academy?”

“Oh, no,” Miss Glass said, “no commitment at all. What will happen is that I’ll visit Conner daily and work with him in these accelerated concepts we’ve been referring to.”

“And back we go,” Dan said, “around the circle again. Let me be blunt. We want, in writing, an exact description of what you intend to do with Conner. And we want to be physically present at all times when you are with him.”

“And why don’t you just tell the truth about this?” Chris said.

Lauren Glass turned to him, and for an instant Katelyn saw a flicker in her eyes that was most definitely not normal. Katelyn thought she knew why. This girl was also super-bright. There is an aura around such people. They are not the same as the rest of us.

“The truth is that we’re in trouble with some important classified problems, and the country needs its very best minds to work on them.”

“Is it weapons?” Dan asked.

“Sir,” Colonel Langford said, “I can only repeat that we cannot go into detail.”

“Not with us,” Katelyn said, “but with our eleven-year-old son. I don’t think so.”

“Yes!” Chris said. “Way to go!”

Katelyn watched Lauren Glass grow very still, then saw her lips go into a line and her face become pale. The big eyes glittered with suppressed rage.

“Folks, I’m sorry, but I think we’re ready for you to leave,” Dan said. “Because I think that you’re here because of that UFO and aliens and abduction and all that sort of thing, and the fact that you’re trying to involve our son just plain scares me.”

“Me, too,” Katelyn said. She stood up. “So let’s just call it a night, shall we? And don’t come near our son, because if we find out you’re trying to approach him, we’re going to report you to the police.”

They gave each other frantic glances. “Ma’am, sir—we can talk to him. We can approach him. We have the right.”

“Okay, that’s it,” Dan said. He went out across the hall and upstairs, and Katelyn suddenly knew what he was doing.

“Dan!”

“Ma’am, your son is the most intelligent human being presently alive,” Lauren Glass babbled. “Please listen to us, because I am uniquely capable of teaching him what he needs to learn.”

Dan came rushing back with his hand thrust in his pocket.

“My gun is bigger than your gun,” Colonel Langford said with frightening nonchalance. “I want to see that thing on this table right now.” He pointed at the coffee table. “Right now, Dan. Do it!”

Dan took the pistol out and put it on the table.

“You’re right,” Langford continued. “This does have to do with certain extraordinary secrets.”

“At last,” Chris said.

“I remember me and Katelyn being brought together when we were kids. Being brought together in this dark, womb-like place. And I think you might know something about what this was.”

“I have some odd memories, too,” Katelyn said. “But nothing…” She trailed off. She didn’t know what more to say.

“We believe that you were abducted together, so that, by a process we don’t understand, you would inevitably later marry and have Conner.”

Katelyn’s mouth was so dry that she could hardly speak. She didn’t remember anything about any aliens when she was a kid, and she hadn’t even known Dan back in Madison, but she had gone from being furious at these people and scared because they were obviously a couple of stinking liars, to a sort of nauseated dread. From the dark, in other words, to the very dark.

“And Conner is the smartest person in the world,” she said.

“There could be others, of course. But he must be among no more than a very, very few. Certainly, in this country, yes.”

“That part doesn’t surprise me. But as far as me and Dan—I met Dan years after we lived in Madison. So that’s all conjecture.”

Again, Lauren Glass smiled. She was a person with a thousand different faces, it seemed to Katelyn. This one combined what appeared to be contempt with anger, thinly masked beneath the grin. And the more you looked at her eyes, the odder they got.

“Conner’s a staggeringly good physics student,” Chris said. “He’s doing advanced graduate-level physics at the college and his work is… well, beautiful. The grasp of math is a lovely thing to witness.”

Langford spoke, his voice dense with authority. “Dr. and Mrs. Callaghan, what has happened here is that your child is intended to be the point of contact between mankind and a very old, very brilliant, and very advanced galactic civilization.”

Katelyn felt suddenly horribly dizzy. Then a sort of bomb seemed to go off within her. Did this mean that Chris’s nonsense… wasn’t?

Something came rising up from deep within her that seemed like a kind of release, as if some part of her had been in a trap and was now free.

To her own amazement she reached up so quickly that she didn’t have a chance to check herself, and slapped the colonel across the face.

Nobody said a word. Then Dan began to shake. For an instant, it seemed as if he was having a full-bore seizure, but it emerged into silent laughter. His eyes were closed tight, tears filling them.

Lauren Glass had cried out softly when the slap had taken place. Now she sat still and silent, rigid in her chair.

Rubbing his cheek, the colonel said, “It’s an understandable reaction.”

“I’m sorry! I just—Dan, will you stop that!”

He took a deep breath. Another. “What do we do?”

“What do you do?”

“With our little boy? Who is he? Who are we?”

“Let me give you a piece of advice,” Langford said, “you just take things as they come. Don’t worry about anything happening to your boy. He’s well protected.”

“He needs to be protected?” Katelyn asked. But then it seemed a rather obvious question. Of course he needed to be protected, and so did his secret. “I don’t want anybody told this.”

“Oh, no. Not at all. We tried to avoid telling even you.”

“This should be public knowledge. It’s immoral to hide it.” Chris’s face was alight with zeal and excitement.

Katelyn had a sudden, chilling thought that he might go on TV with that stupid video the Keltons had made. “Conner’s life probably depends on hiding it,” she told him. “Think about it. Think how many different fanatic groups would want him dead. How many governments would fear his power.”

“I hadn’t considered that.”

“Announcing the most amazing railway accident in the history of this or any other century!” There stood Conner, his shirt smeared with model paint and his tattered engineer’s cap on the back of his head. He glared at them. “Doom on the railways. Come and seeeee…” Then he saw the two strangers. “Oh. I’m so sorry.” He came into the room.

“This is our son, Conner,” Dan said. “This is, uh, Mr. Langford and Miss Glass. They’re from the, from, ah—”

“We’re from St. Francis Parish, Conner,” Colonel Langford said. “Soliciting for a fund drive.”

“I don’t guess this is the right moment for a train wreck, then. It’s quite amazing, though.”

“Conner has a train set,” Dan explained to the two wondering faces. “He often builds staged railroad accidents.”

“I guess Catholics wouldn’t approve, somehow,” he said. “We don’t actually go to church—or, oops, perhaps—”

“We know that, Conner.”

Conner took a step back. He had noticed a sense of winter that clung to them both. They were not pleasant people to be around. But all suspicions immediately dropped away when the colonel said, “We’d love to see the train wreck.”

“Great! I’ve been working very hard.”

“Conner, did you do my homework?” Chris asked as the adults followed him down into his basement room.

“Absolutment,” he said. “I’ve got a new way of integrating the calculus, boy-o.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I have no idea! Look at it and see if it flies.” He crossed his room, picked up a badly tattered notebook, and thrust it into Chris’s hands. “And now, may I present, the Wreck of Old Ninety-seven.” He looked up at Lauren. “It’s a metaphor,” he said, “of my day.”

“Conner, this is beautiful,” she said, looking over the train board. “Oh my God, Rob, look at this. Look at the detail!”

“Glad you like it,” Conner said. There was something in his voice that Katelyn knew well. These two were going to get a surprise.

OUTSIDE, MIKE WILKES HAD BEEN forced to return to his car, which was hidden about a quarter of a mile away. The snow was getting more persistent, and he couldn’t risk it becoming immobilized. He had processed a few of the kids in the town, but he needed the night to finish his work. He wished the damn Keltons would go to sleep. He pulled the car out into the road and drove it for a distance in the giving snow, getting it onto the crown of the road. There would be no plow through here tonight. He decided that he had about an hour. After that, he was going to be forced to abandon this part of the plan.

Not good, possibly even fatal.

WHILE THE COLLECTIVE WORRIED ABOUT the president, the Three Thieves worried about the fact that Wilkes was still close to Conner.

Adam was with them as well, preparing himself for what would happen tonight.

He detected a familiar voice. Lauren was nearby. He shifted his interest away from Wilkes. The collective wanted to let him make his mistake, and that seemed a good idea. But Adam needed Lauren away from here, too, and soon. What was to be done required absolute privacy.

He sailed across the snowy fields and into the yard behind the Callaghans’ house. There he built a vivid picture of Lauren’s car being covered with snow. He sent this like a drift of smoke into her mind.

AS THE TRAIN MOVED AROUND the tracks, Conner made sound effects, screeching and huffing. Then he touched an edge of track, which sprung open.

“It broke,” Lauren shouted.

The next instant, the wonderful black-and-brass steam engine, spewing smoke, struck the sprung track and bounded off into the superbly modeled little town. It churned down the main street crashing into stores, snapping light poles, and sending figures flying.

“Wow,” Rob said into the silence that followed this remarkably realistic effect.

“Why did you do this?” Lauren asked the boy.

“So I can build it all up again a new way. Hey. I just got this flash. Are you people gonna want to get back to town tonight?”

“Well, yes, we live in town.”

“Then I see in my mind’s eye your car getting slowly buried. Or, actually, quickly.”

THOUGHTS HAD TO BE PUSHED into Lauren’s mind, but the child just sucked them up. Adam regarded him, a smiling, strutting little thing, the aura around his body vastly more complex and colorful than those around the others.

Adam prepared to die.

TWENTY-FOUR

CONNER WOKE UP—AND REALIZED instantly that he was not in bed. He could hear wind and he seemed to be standing.

He opened his eyes. White flying dots. Cold. A leathery thing beside him. This was all impossible, so he closed them again. He opened them for just a second, saw darkness and millions of white dots, and closed them again, tight.

He surveyed his situation. The strange church people had left, he’d gone to bed in his upstairs room. Mom had come in and stared at him and gone all eerie. She’d cried for no apparent reason and Dan had come and they’d hugged each other, then gone across the hall to their room. Sometime after that, he’d fallen asleep.

Without opening his eyes again, he tried to decide what was happening to him now.

Then he knew: he was going down the street in the snow, but he wasn’t walking, he was sort of… flying.

Which couldn’t be real, therefore he was asleep.

Again, he opened his eyes. He could see the house, which was drifting back behind him. This looked like a dream and felt like a dream, but it sounded and smelled like the real world.

Perplexing, in other words—not a dream, yet not possible.

For a second he thought he heard the living room clock chiming, but it was the wind clattering pine branches in Lost Land, which was what he had named the big woods across the street.

The woods were drifting closer, home farther away. There were three big leathery heads bobbing along around him.

He gasped, started to scream, then forced himself back under control. He had to stay calm, this was contact, it had to be handled with all the skill and intelligence he possessed. You’re up to this, he told himself.

But he was being taken.

Okay, this was bad, he was being kidnapped by these guys, no question, no way to get around it. Is kidnapping ever good? If you’re going to be straight, why not just ring the doorbell?

He realized that he was hearing something odd in his left ear, a sort of deep whine, if such a sound could exist. He reached up and touched an earbud. Then he saw that one of the big-headed creatures had an MP3 player. There was no music coming out, though, just this odd noise.

He ripped the earbud out and immediately fell down in a big puff of snow. For a second he lay trying to understand just how this worked. It was sound, sound that had caused him to defy gravity. Okay, there had to be some kind of harmonic—or, no, was he crazy, he’d figure the damn thing out later!

The creatures swirled around with their mouths open and their hands on their cheeks. They were not menacing looking. In fact, far from it. They looked scared, too. Then one of them thrust the earbud at him—not toward his ear but toward his hand.

He looked down at it. They hovered and wobbled their heads.

Please, came a sort of nice-sounding voice, the same one he’d heard in his head during the encounter with Paulie.

No, it wasn’t on, not out in the woods with no explanation. He ran back toward the house as fast as he could go.

What can we do to help you stop screaming?

He’s not screaming, you fool, he’s running!

He ran faster, his legs pumping. “Dad! Mom! Help me! Help me!”

The creatures buzzed around him like giant flies. The one with the earbud buzzed along ahead of him, face to face, holding out the earbud.

The house was farther away than he thought. It was hard to make progress in the snow.

Then the creature made a sort of thrust at his head. Sorry! Sorrrysorry!

The earbud was in again and he was all of a sudden running in midair. He yanked it out and hit the ground and got up and ran again, his feet crunching in the snow.

He got to the front walk, vaulted the gate, landed in the snow, fell and got up, then slipped on the icy stones and fell harder, rolling off into the drift-choked front yard. He went slipping and sliding up the walk, his feet stinging from the cold. He reached the door, pulled on the handle.

Locked. He rattled it. “Mom! Dad!” He dragged at it. “Oh, please, please…” He saw the doorbell under its little light, and moved to press it.

We have to!

We can’t!

Conner, come on!

Go in him, you idiot! NOW!

Conner then felt something that few human beings have ever felt. He experienced the sense of something moving inside his own body, slithering up from his gut as if alive.

OF COURSE, THE THREE THIEVES could have turned him off with a little whiff of gas, and taken him wherever they cared to take him, but that was not what this was about. The collective had known that Conner would need to be tamed.

HORRIFIED AT WHAT HE WAS feeling, Conner looked down at himself. His chest and belly were visible, his pajama top having blown open in the wind. Something glowed through his skin, and it was coming up from his chest toward his head. Bright light shone out of his body in the shape of the thing, a snake that twisted and turned inside.

He cried out, he clutched at his chest—and the thing shot into his head and the cry was stifled. His head glowed for an instant so brightly that the whole front yard was lit up. The icicles on the windows reflected blue light brighter than a flashbulb.

Then it was dark. Real dark. Because Conner was not anywhere anymore. He was not looking out of his eyes, it didn’t feel like. What it felt like was so odd that he could hardly believe it, but the truth was that he seemed to have been swallowed by his body, as if he’d gone down into his own stomach.

This was all so totally new that he could not even think about it, let alone explain it. In truth, he was being affected by a simple electromagnetic field that was being applied with great care to about two million specific neurons in his brain. It wasn’t magic. There is no magic. There is only the unknown—in this case, a very old and experienced science possessed of a great knowledge of how bodies and brains work.

Objectively, he recognized that it must be some sort of illusion. Even so, the fear was a claw clutching his heart.

He felt his body turn and begin to move away from the house. No amount of effort would get him back into his head or enable him to regain control of his movements.

He tried to call to Dad, then, in his rising panic, to the police. Nothing worked. He could not make his voice turn on. Despairing now, he thought of how very, very sad his parents were going to be, never knowing what happened to him like this.

Somebody help me. Please, somebody!

We are helping you.

He felt himself turn, felt his feet dip into the snow, felt it blow against his chest.

Now I will remove myself from you, the voice said. Do not run again.

In a moment, he began to go up through his body. In another moment, he was seeing through his eyes again.

The wind blew, the pines moaned, snow flew. He had been taken deep into Lost Land, so deep that there was nothing around them but pines. No lights, no houses, just the pale glow of the snow.

We’re the Three Thieves but we didn’t steal you.

Yes we did.

Shut up!

“Okay… I hear you.”

Nobody moved.

He was well aware of the mystery he was facing. Remarkable, indeed. Then he saw movement in the woods, and a fourth gray appeared. He was not squat and kludgy like these three. He strode on long legs and his head was more in proportion. Coming through the snow, he was as graceful as a dancer.

He stopped behind the three and raised a long, thin arm, sort of like an Indian chief or something. Conner noted: no muscles. Therefore the skin itself must contain millions of micromuscles.

He took a step toward him. Conner took a step back. He came closer.

Conner yelled as loud as he could: “Get away! Get away from me!” Then he clapped his hands over his mouth, actually surprised at himself. But there was more than one Conner in here, and the other one, the little child alone in the woods, was still really, really scared and did not care about the fact that this was contact, it was historical and damn awesome that it was him doing it or any of that.

The other Conner took over and ran, he just ran, he didn’t care where, deeper into Lost Land, past the great, frowning trees, into the tangled places where nobody ever went.

The more he ran, the more the panicked Conner replaced the curious Conner, and the wilder and more frantic his flight became.

Soon he began to feel his feet burning. He was getting cold. When he wasn’t around the grays, he needed more than just pajamas out in this blizzard. Something they did had been keeping him warm. Curious Conner thought, Heat without radiance or forced air or anything. I wonder how they do that?

And he slowed down a little. Now his breath was coming out in huge puffs and his feet were really burning and it was meat-locker cold.

Sobbing like an infant, he stumbled to a halt. He forced the tears down, and finally stood trembling from the cold, rubbing his shoulders.

The wind roared in the trees, and a big gust stung him head to toe with snow. Cold this cold felt just like being burned and he screamed into its howl, but his loudest cry was so small against it that he could hardly hear it himself.

This was idiotic. He was here to think, not cry like some idiot. So okay, he turned around and around, trying to get his bearings.

No bearings.

He hopped from foot to foot to keep the agony down. But it didn’t work, he was barefoot in the snow in the middle of a blizzard and wearing cotton pajamas. He was quite familiar with the dangers of hypothermia. If he’d known the temperature, he could probably have calculated to the second just how long before he lost so much reason that he could no longer hope to survive.

He had never thought much about dying before, but he thought about it now because it appeared that it was going to happen to him. He was already getting numb and that was a really bad sign, it was a sign of death coming, he knew that. The next step was the final sleep.

“Dad! Mom! Hey, I’m lost out here! Hey, HEY!”

Ridiculous, meaningless effort.

“Grays! Hey, I’m here! I’m willing to negotiate! HEY!”

Nothing.

How could such a smart kid turn into such a moron? He’d just blown contact, and probably frozen himself to death in the process.

When he tried to walk, his legs wouldn’t move. Muscle spasm due to advancing hypothermia.

He did not want to die before he’d kissed a girl or had a paper published, or even driven a damn car.

His pajamas snapped in the wind, his face got more and more caked in frost, and he prayed his usual prayer, “Any God who happens to be real, this is Conner Callaghan and I could use some help. Thank you! Uh, really use it!”

The world around him seemed to grow quiet. He looked down at his right hand. He could see the snow hitting it and bouncing off, but he could no longer feel anything. But he did feel something really funny, a sort of jittering in his heels. It spread through his feet, and he noticed it in his hands, too. Then it went up his arms and legs, bringing with it wonderful warmth like a really good blanket would if he was cold and Mom came in and tucked him in.

Then a face popped out from behind a tree, huge eyes, tiny mouth communicating surprise, fear, concern all at once. Boy, Conner thought, do they ever look like bugs.

Oh, no.

“I won’t run, relax. As long as you keep me warm, consider us friends.”

What’s he saying?

I have no idea.

Striding out of the snow on his long, thin legs, came the tall gray. As he came closer, Conner could see that his body shimmered with light, as if he was swathed in flickering, ever-changing rainbows. His eyes gleamed with bright reflections of the trees around them even though it was night, almost as if they somehow enhanced light. Then he saw this beautiful figure in the creature’s eyes, a person blazing with light of a thousand different colors.

He looked around him, trying to see this person. Then he moved his hand, and saw that it was him. He looked down at his own arm, and the glow wasn’t there. Only in the eyes of the gray. He knew about auras, that they were a faint electrical field emitted by the nervous system. The gray’s eyes were somehow amplifying its visibility.

As the tall gray came closer, the three short, squat ones buzzed nervously around him.

Okay,” Conner said, “my name is Conner Callaghan and I’m going to do this. I hope.”

Talk to us in your head. Form the words in your mind, but don’t speak them aloud. We will be more easily able to hear you, then.

He sounded actually sort of okay. An ultra-precise voice that appeared right in the center of your head, as if you were wearing earphones. He felt for that earbud, but it was gone. “How are you doing that?”

I can’t hear you!

“WHAT—no. Uh…” How do you do this?

I don’t know. You’re the only person we’ve ever managed it with. With the others, we have to use pictures. They can’t hear us talking.

He was quite close now, so close that Conner could see that he had faint, white hair on his head and a wrinkled face.

I am old. We are all old.

Where are you from?

Endless time. We are so old we’ve lost our history.

What is your mission?

You are my mission.

What does that mean?

There was no response… except there was. He hung his head.

Are you… crying?

I think so.

Why?

He shook his head, then held out his hands. They were long and the fingers were like snakes tipped with claws. Slowly, his own hands shaking, Conner reached out to him. They stayed like that, their fingers an inch apart, both of them trembling.

The three others came closer. They hovered around the taller one, bouncing slightly in the air when a gust of wind came.

The tall one touched Conner’s cheek with the softest finger he thought you could ever feel. It did not just touch you, it made vibrating electric contact with your skin.

Little colt, not ten minutes ago, my touch would have made you run again. But you do not run.

Am I going to get to go home?

Home…

You’re crying now.

The gray lay down in the snow. The three others hovered over him. Something then happened that was completely beyond comprehension to Conner. They had a black object that turned out to be a jar, which they opened, screwing the top off in a flash. Out of it they drew three gleaming butcher knives.

As Conner watched in stunned astonishment, they cut open the tall gray like Dad gutting a fish. The knives made a ripping sound.

He struggled. They were killing him.

“Stop it,” Conner shouted. “Stop it!”

One of them turned toward him, brandishing his knife, and Conner backed away, holding out his hands, trying to convey that he would not interfere.

They opened the gray from his featureless groin to the top of his head, splitting his whole body in half. Inside was a swirling mass of lights in a million, million colors, and Conner recognized them. They looked like an immense star field imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. They looked like the whole universe, somehow contained inside the body of this gray.

They lifted it out, and it wobbled in the air between them, the universe in the shape of a gray, snow swirling around it, flakes blowing into it and away into the vastness of the stars.

There was humming, voices that sounded both innocent and wise, and the notes were so beautiful that Conner gasped aloud, and wanted to cry because this was the richest, the most lovely sound he had ever heard. It was a sound with a scent, almost, as if the flowers of heaven had bloomed.

THE LITTLE GROUP OF GRAYS with Conner were by no means the only ones who were witness to what was happening. On the contrary, there was vast witness in the huge device that carried the main body toward Earth. The gigantic sphere was now two light years away and had been decelerating almost since 1947, when it had turned in the direction of Earth. Large though it was, with its thousand-mile diameter, it was still far too small to be detected by earthly telescopes. In fact, it probably wouldn’t be noticed until it was actually in orbit around the planet, because its surface was black, designed to absorb any and all light energy that might reach it.

Inside, a tiny sun glared in a strangely constricted sky. In fact, this was a miniature star just six hundred feet across, built by the grays and capable of shining steadily for a million years, at which time it would explode and instantly vaporize the whole sphere. If they hadn’t made it long before then, it wouldn’t matter anyway. There would be nothing left in the sphere but dust.

Its inner surface was landscaped to an exact replica of the grays’ desert home, with cities made of white houses, domed and looking like adobe. A shield moved around the central sun, bringing fifty hours of darkness every fifty hours to each part of the sphere, the same amount of day and night that the grays had known at home.

As they needed nothing and ate nothing, the grays had no economic life. They had freed themselves from sexual reproduction an epoch ago, then discovered that pleasure is founded in desire, and without reproductive needs, desire fades.

They would have gone collectively mad in this trapped chamber, had they not been able to venture with the earthly triads into the mind of man.

They watched now, sitting in their houses, their heads bowed in concentration, as Adam gave his whole being, all of his experience, all of his knowledge, all that he was, to Conner.

An outline of the child’s body stretched across their strange sky, a body filled with stars, and with it came the wind and the night and the snow.

Slowly, as they listened and felt, one of them and then another, then more and more, raised his head and came to his feet. The tall, gracile ones, the short, squat ones, all of them in their unimaginable billions, raised their heads.

Then they ascended from their white cities, rose into the air, and began to fly like so many soaring eagles, and it became clearer what was happening. These creatures, who could neither laugh nor smile, were doing the only thing they could to express an emotion they had not known in many a long age: they were dancing with happiness.

THE STRANGE FIGURE WENT ROUND and round Conner, its head getting smaller, its legs and arms thicker, its body like a fluid of stars, taking on a different shape, the shape of a human being, and getting brighter, too.

Each snowflake that touched the thing now went up in a tiny puff of steam, and it was beautiful, the smoking snow and the brightness, and the humming of the thing as if the wind itself had learned to sing.

Conner began to quake down inside his stomach and up his spine and everywhere, even in his toes and in his eyes, and he realized that the thing was vibrating, too.

“Momma…”

The thing came closer to him.

“MOMMA!”

Then the humming was all around him, it was in him and his chest was vibrating with it, and he felt as if he had risen off the ground or gotten very large, and for an instant the snowflakes that had looked like stars around the thing were around him, and were, instead, a whole tremendous universe of stars.

Then it was dark again and Conner had fallen down in the snow. He could not rise. He was completely weak, and when he closed his eyes, he saw the universe in his head, and he saw it, too, when he looked at his palms, in his hands, stars swirling inside his skin.

The three grays pushed at the tall one until his body closed up again. Then he rose in the air between them, and the four of them ascended, wobbling and buzzing, into the storm.

“Hey! Hey, you! I am still willing to negotiate!”

It got cold again. Conner could no longer see stars inside himself. The wind howled around him and he screamed in agony and clutched his pajamas around him.

Whump whump whump whump.

Up in the snowy sky, a shadow, black and huge. Then light shining down, a glaring blue-white searchlight beam.

The light shone so bright on Conner that he could hardly look into it. He knew that it was a helicopter, and that it must be here to rescue him, and he got up and wallowed in the snow, into a clearing among the pines, waving and waving and yelling with all his might, “I’m here, I’m here!”

Wind from the rotors hit him and with it came ferocious, lung-shattering cold. He screamed, covered his head, and turned away from the blast.

“Conner! Conner Callaghan!” a voice shouted, barely audible over the churning of the helicopter blades and the screaming of the wind.

It was a man in a helmet, not a gray, coming down a rope ladder from the chopper. He had on a faceplate so you couldn’t see his face, but he sounded strong and, above all, normal.

The helicopter roared off into the storm and was gone. The guy knelt before Conner on one knee, and quickly wrapped a space blanket around him. “I’m going to take you home, boy.”

Conner threw his arms around the man, who held out his big gloved hands. “Come on, buddy.” Conner was not a small kid, but the guy was really tall, and picked him up easily. “We need to warm up those feet real quick.”

It felt so good to be carried that Conner just leaned his head against the guy’s shoulder, and let himself be cozy in the space blanket. As the guy strode along, he watched the woods slip away behind them.

“Conner, lots of new things are going to happen to you, I suppose you’ve realized that.”

“I’m sort of getting that feeling.”

“You’re going to have a teacher. You met her earlier tonight. Lauren Glass. I want you to know that you can count on her absolutely.”

“Who are you?”

“Somebody else who’s concerned with your well-being.”

He could feel that it was true, that there was goodness radiating from this man like heat. “Man, I’m glad you found me.” He closed his eyes.

“Sleep, child,” the man said, and held his head against his shoulder.

Then somebody was shaking him. He stirred, pulled at the blanket—and shot straight up in bed. “Dad!”

“You’re having a nightmare, son.”

“I was… outside. I was outside and—” It felt so good to see Dad there that he just threw his arms around him. “Listen, it was no dream. No dream! I was out in the woods, with—”

Conner no!

“What?”

“Conner? Out in the woods? Go on.”

“I mean, uh, in the dream. Obviously. Look, let’s go back to sleep.”

Conner lay back in the bed. Dad lingered. Good, let him stay.

Why not tell him? Conner asked.

In time, Conner, in all good time.

The voice was different, Conner noticed, bigger, somehow, echoing.

Who are you?

The collective.

Okay. What is the collective?

Conner, we are nearly seven billion, and we need your help.

“You’re kidding!”

Shh!

“What? Kidding about what?”

“Let’s go to sleep, Dad, okay?”

“Sure, Conner… of course.”

He could hear singing, then, the same tune that he had heard in the woods. He sensed, but in an indistinct, unformed way, an immense shadowy sea, that seemed to be made up of numbers and words and this deep, fleeting song. It was knowledge, he decided, so high and fine that it was a music, totally simple, utterly pure.

“Something’s happening to me, Dad.”

Dad had tears in his eyes. “Conner, you look like stars.”

“I do?”

DAN COULD NOT UNDERSTAND. HE saw his son, but his son now appeared to be a child made of the stuff of the night sky, a child whose body was somehow shining out of the planetarium of his own boyhood, and he heard a song from his boyhood, a beautiful voice humming “Suo Gan,” the song by which his own mother had seen him off to sleep when he was scared, just come back from a journey into the dark.

He sat on the bedside, and met the music with the words in the old Welsh tongue of his mother’s people: Huna blentyn yn fy mynwes, Clyd a chynnes ydyw hon… sleep, my child, at my breast, ’tis love’s arms around you.

Slowly, as Conner fell into sleep, the stars in his body faded as if with the coming of morning, and Dan was left with his boy gently breathing, lost in the deep sleep that blesses and heals childhood.

Katelyn came, and he stood up. “A miracle,” he said. “Katelyn, a miracle.” He embraced her.

“What do you mean?”

He could not explain it, not as it had been. “I just think you gave me such a grand kid.”

She leaned her head against his shoulder. Arm in arm, they returned to their own bed.

Outside, the storm howled wild, and the footprints of the man in the mask, who had carried Conner home all unseen, and entered the house by stealth and returned him to his bed, slowly filled with snow.

TWENTY-FIVE

AS THE WEE HOURS WORE on, Mike drove the car yet again out of the snow, and went to check the Keltons. He was very annoyed with this family, who were so damnably late to bed. But this time, there was only a single dim light showing out of the upstairs bathroom window.

He trotted out into the broadness of the road. In the distance, he saw a flash and thought perhaps he heard a shout carried away by the wind. A long minute’s careful watching and listening brought only the hissing of snow and the moaning of the wind.

He glanced up at the sky. According to the radio, the storm would not abate until morning. That was important to him, because his tracks had to be covered.

He proceeded up the rougher edge of the property, where there would be flower beds in a few months. Any remaining suggestion of tracks would be harder to spot here. He moved to the back of the house, then examined the doors and windows. He found an unlocked window. Carefully, he examined it for any sign of an alarm system. Finding none, he slid it open and pulled himself into the house.

He closed the window behind him. Standing absolutely still, he got used to the sounds of the place. He prepared some ether. His first challenge would be the dog. It was awake now, but would soon fall asleep again, as long as his odor didn’t reach its nostrils. The reek of the ether would cover it, however.

He closed his eyes and listened. He had to locate that animal or he had to back out of here. He moved farther in, through the dining room, to the foot of the stairs in the front hall. It was sleeping on the landing. The instinct of the watchdog is to block the path.

He took a step, another. Could he get around it? He took another step. Now he was on the step just below the landing, looking down at the animal.

The step across it was too long. So he had to use the ether. He came down on his haunches and laid the soaked cloth ever so gently over the animal’s muzzle.

He waited. The dog’s breathing deepened. Now it began to rattle in its chest. He could kill the dog. He’d enjoy that, he detested dogs and their reeking shit and their brainless fawning over people who weren’t worth a damned glance. Like this family of fatsos. But the dog was too useful. First, the grays couldn’t control the minds of dogs. Second, he could—and to great effect.

More confident now, he went to the top of the stairs. The parents would be the lightest sleepers, so he implanted and hypnotized them first. This hypnosis was a simple process, taking only a few moments. The secret of it was that the words were chanted in a rhythm that caused them to be perceived by the subject as his own thought. These people would wake up in the morning thinking violently about Conner. When they came into range of his transmitter in town, the irritation to their temporal lobes would cause the anger to become an uncontrollable obsession.

He went next into the boys’ room and did them with equal efficiency.

Just like that, and very neatly after the agonizingly slow start, his mission on Oak Road was accomplished.

THE THREE THIEVES ALL HEARD it at the same time: breath sliding through nostrils, getting louder. Then they saw Wilkes leave the Keltons’ house. Very well, the collective said, let him go. There was a flicker of suspicion, however, when no soul drifted out of the structure. If Wilkes believed that the Kel-ton child was his target, why had he not killed him?

Of course, he would want to attempt to deceive the grays. He would not want them to know he had done the murder. He would have created some sabotage within the structure that would make the death seem an accident.

The collective had one of the Three Thieves physically observe Wilkes depart in his car. The Two listened to the brown moaning of his mind as he drove away. And then the world was once again silent, and he rejoined his brothers in carrying Adam into Conner’s sleeping form.

Adam was not yet fully depleted. There remained in him structures of thought that would organize Conner’s mind. These structures were the core of him, held in immensely complex fields of electrons that rested in permanent superposition. As such, they were both in Adam and were Adam, and were also everywhere in the universe, and potentially capable of tapping all knowledge. This core could not be implanted in Conner until the rest of Adam’s being had settled in him, or the core would burn the boy’s nervous system like an out-of-control nuclear reaction.

The transfer of this last material would result in the permanent annihilation of Adam—in fact, this was the essence of Adam, the part of him that felt real and alive. Here and now, is when Adam would feel actual death.

He was scared. In fact, so were the Thieves. This was the unspeakable thing that, as emotionless as they were, every gray still feared, the final end, wherein even the memory of self disappears and all the long years lived without emotion and thus without meaning, slide away into useless nothingness.

The whole collective watched, breathless and sorrowful, each one hoping that Conner would find a way to save them, that after this death there would be no other.

The Thieves crossed the yard and slipped into the house via the basement door, and rose quickly through the darkness to Conner. They spread Adam’s body, now thin and as pale as a wraith, and guided it over Conner.

Adam had wondered how this would be, to die into another. He’d feared it, and out there in the woods, he’d cried. Do it.

He felt himself dwindling into the boy, sifting downward as lightly but as inexorably as dew. All that had enabled him to relate to and understand man, what he had learned from Eamon Glass and Lauren Glass, slipped away into the sleeping child.

He had given Conner all he knew, and his ancestors knew, of the universe. Now he gave him himself. As each tiny bit of his being detached and flowed into the hungry new nervous system that was spreading like a fire through the boy, he felt not regret but an abiding joy, an emotion that he had not known he could feel.

Thus, as he died, this ancient creature regained all that time and age had taken from him, the once-rich spirit of the grays with its love of truth and appreciation for the glory of the universe.

It had been eons since a gray had felt. Now, though, Adam’s experience hummed across the gulfs of space, and the whole collective felt with him the anguish and joy of his death.

They sang in their chains, the grays, as they felt, each of them, a taste of hope that they had not experienced since they day they left their planet and began this long dark journey through the nowheres of the sky.

Simply because they were there, water in the vast desert of his heart, the first tears Adam had ever shed—and his last—were tears of joy.

IMAGES FLASHED ON THE WALLS of Conner’s mind, of the long and improbable histories of man and the grays, dancers in a secret dance whose steps were measured in eons. He saw that we, as a species, had lived before, that we’d had another civilization and another science that had worked by different laws, in a time when the light of the human mind had been brighter. He saw the tragic, lingering evening that we have named history, and heard along it the forlorn chanting of the Egyptians as they built boats that would never reach the sky, and the grim, rising roar of human voices that signaled the onset of the modern world, and the ignorant hordes that now marched the Earth, sucking every green blade and morsel. As this vision swept through him, he listened to the booming drums of time.

And so it was done; Adam, ancient in his days, fulfilled a destiny that was also a tragedy: he died. The last light of the wraith flickered in the air above Conner’s bed.

Then it was dark.

FOR BETTER OR FOR WORSE, this phase of the grays’ mission was complete. They searched for memories in Conner’s mind that would shield him from the huge thoughts that now lay hidden within him. Time would be needed before he could bring them forth and put them to work.

Looking through the house, they saw where he had put most of his effort, into his splendid trains. They planted his consciousness in one of his own superbly painted plastic figures. This would give him an unforgettably vivid dream.

CONNER FOUND HIMSELF IN HIS own toy railroad town, under his own streetlights, and everybody else was horrible and plastic, staring at him with painted stares. The sidewalk under his feet was plastic, the trees made of foam. A shrieking rose, and his own train screamed past, impossibly immense, electric fire roaring under its wheels.

He was right in the middle of the street and he couldn’t move. The plastic faces of the people around him stared, expressionless. Then he saw a huge, glaring giant looming back in the shadows of the sky, saw his own hand, now gigantic, come down. He heard a length of track screech as it came loose.

He was trapped in his own train wreck, somehow part of one of the plastic people, as stiff and still as they were. He wanted to run, he was desperate to get off this street because he knew what would happen. But he could not run. He watched in fixed horror as the train’s headlight flickered among the trees to the left, as it came roaring around the bend, and with a curious grace leaped off the track and sped toward him, its wheels churning, the headlight a cyclops eye.

Then a warm hand was on his forehead.

Mom was there.

“Hey, mister,” she said, “you’re gonna wake everybody on Oak Road if you don’t stop running that train.”

“I—oh, wow, I dreamed I was in the train set during the wreck!”

“In the train set?”

“I’d become one of my figures. I couldn’t move and the train came right at me!”

She hugged him. “Oh my love,” she said, “Mom and Dad are always here for nightmares.”

He felt the depth of her love, then, with a power that he never had before. He adored his mom, she was the most beautiful, the smartest, the nicest—she was like Dad, very much the best.

Unseen now, the Three Thieves guided his mind back to a memory of a certain spring day long ago, when the lilacs were bobbing on the lawn and the leaves all were new, and he had come from glory, a tiny, secret spark, and gone gliding down into the house and saw her sleeping, her belly big, and gone closer, and entered into her, and lay, then, in the cradle of her womb.

“I love you, too,” he said. It felt so good to hug her, it felt like floating halfway to heaven.

DAN ALSO REMAINED AWAKE ON this restless, uneasy night. He was determined to prevent the aliens from abducting his son. As he listened to Katelyn speaking softly to Conner, he felt an isolation that made him sad. She had been trying to forgive him, he knew, but there was a coolness in her now that even his most tender efforts—kissing her, speaking to her of love—could not seem to cure. He loved them, both of them. And yet, he did not feel free to join them across the hall, when they were in such intimate communion.

To avoid dealing with his couple crisis in the middle of the night, he turned his mind to what the Air Force people had said. Strange, strange stuff. Lies, of course, on some level.

He would protect Conner from them until they told him the truth. There were dark corners in this world, and Conner was not going to fall into one, not as long as his dad had anything to say about it.

Too bad Katelyn couldn’t handle the idea of being an abductee. What of it, it happened to all kinds of people, just read the books. The notion that people only remembered their encounters after being hypnotized by UFO researchers was, he had discovered, a lie, and a sinister one at that.

And yet, she had a point. No matter that he now believed it, because these two officials had confirmed it, how could anything like this be real?

He closed his eyes, but sleep did not come. Sleep was far away.

His mind returned to Katelyn. She had said that she was past it, that she understood. They had made love again, and it had been sweet, but not as sweet as ever. There was a thin sheen of emotional ice that just would not melt, and he thought now, at this vulnerable hour, that maybe it was the beginning of saying good-bye.

Too bad he hadn’t been able to keep these thoughts away. He opened his eyes again. She was singing in there now, in her high, haunting voice, a lullaby. It was better than the one he had sung, and he was sure that it was helping Conner more.

Did she secretly want separation, perhaps even divorce? No—and yet, maybe yes. Maybe she hadn’t articulated it to herself, not thus far. But she would. He feared that she would. She was the best person he had ever known. How had he ever busted this up? You were not going to find another Katelyn, mister, not in this lifetime. And Conner—how could he live without Conner? Conner claimed a huge part of him, would of any father. He couldn’t give that up. Fatherhood and husbandhood had become his meaning.

He heard her stirring out of Conner’s room. Rather than confront her now, he feigned sleep. He heard her come close, felt her sit on her side of the bed, and heard her sigh. Then she slid in beside him. She turned her back. He lay in silence for a time, then reached over and touched her shoulder.

She didn’t offer any sign that she was even aware of his touch. The night drifted on. In a little while, though, he was aware of movement in the room. When he opened his eyes, he was surprised to see Conner.

Silently, his son came to the bedside. He looked down at them. Dan had seen him before as a child made of stars, but he was ordinary enough now.

“Conner?”

The boy smiled a little, said nothing.

Katelyn stirred. “What’s going on?”

Conner reached over and took her hand, and then took Dan’s hand, and held their hands together. They remained like that, silent in the deep night, a family sailing the ocean of the unknown.