Close Encounters of the Third Kind (19 page)

Jillian and Neary rolled up their windows and locked the car doors without consulting each other. For a moment, nothing happened. Then the van doors opened and figures started coming out into the open sunlight. They looked like golden people.

It was impossible to tell whether they were military or not, but they were all dressed alike in sealed astronaut-type one-piece golden plastic suits with Plexiglas-bubble helmets and tanks strapped to their backs. They seemed to be hermetically sealed by the shiny metallic plastic. Neary thought they looked like a cooking-foil commercial.

One of them advanced cautiously until he was standing in front of the Vega. He then held up a small blackboard on which a message had been chalked:

“HOW DO YOU FEEL?”

The inanity of the question broke Neary’s tension. He rolled down the window on his side. “Fine!” he yelled. “How do you clowns feel?”

The man in the gold suit put away the blackboard and gestured to them to get out of the car.

“The hell with that,” Neary snapped. “The only gas in this area is from you guys farting around.”

Another golden man with a Red Cross insignia on his right arm reached in and took the birdcage out of Jillian’s hand. He walked to the front of the Vega and held it up for Neary to see. Both birds were lying on their backs, motionless.

Neary surrendered.

As soon as he and Jillian got out of the Vega, each was given a face mask and taken to a different van. “Hey!” Neary yelled as the van with Jillian moved off. But his followed an instant later.

Inside, the vans had been equipped as mobile medical centers. The men in the golden suits, Neary supposed, were in fact some sort of medics. It seemed to him, however, that they were functioning more as guards than doctors. He had no way of looking outside as the van jolted along rough terrain for some time.

When at last the trip was over and the medic-guard opened the van’s rear door, Neary saw that the sun was starting to set. Its rays slanted sideways through a small campground of trailer offices, green tents, and vans like the one in which he’d been brought here.

In the distance, hard to make out in the gathering darkness, technicians were busy unloading the trailers of a great number of heavy semi-rigs. No time to witness more.

A golden medic helped him into one of the sealed coffin-sized trailers. Since the man was still wearing his bubble, he said nothing, nor did Neary. Time passed. Neary glanced at his watch. Seven
P.M.

Suddenly the trailer doors swung open. Two masked men came in through the air lock. The man in the golden plastic suit immediately left. Neary had been sitting on the edge of an examining table. He stared at the tall, thin, gray-haired man, then at the younger man beside him as they removed their face masks.

“Well?” he asked. “You the boss cow?”

The white-haired man frowned and turned to the other.
“Comment? Qu’est-ce que c’est un honcho
?”

The other man grinned.
“Le grand fromage
,” he responded. He turned back to Neary.

“We have very little time, Mr. Neary,” he snapped. “This is Mr. Lacombe. We need answers from you that are expressly honest, direct, and to the point.”

“So do I,” Neary countered. “Where’s Jillian?”

“Your friend is in no danger,” Laughlin said.

Lacombe sat down across from Neary. His blue-green eyes seemed to crackle slightly with—Neary couldn’t be sure—annoyance, amazement? Lacombe delivered a barrage of French with Laughlin translating merely syllables behind him. “Are you aware,” he said, “of the danger you and your companion risked?”

Neary was confused by the French and the English. Whom should he speak to, the man with the authority or the man who was speaking English? “What danger?”

“There are toxins in the area,” the two men told him.

“We’re alive. I’m alive. I’m talking.”

Laughlin continued translating rapidly. “If the wind had shifted to the south, we would not be having this conversation.”

“There’s nothing wrong with the air,” Neary insisted doggedly.

The Frenchman ran his fingers through unruly gray hair. He pulled a pencil from inside his jacket and propped up a clipboard on the edge of a desk. “Some questions, Mr. Neary. Do you have any objections?”

“What kind of questions?”

Lacombe scanned the xeroxed sheet. Laughlin translated. “For example: Do you suffer from insomnia?”

“No.”

“Headaches?”

“No.”

“Have you ever been treated for a mental illness?”

“Not yet.” Neary’s weak laugh produced no response. “No.”

“Anyone in your family so treated?”

“No.”

Lacombe’s pencil raced down the sheet of paper, making marks. “Bad dreams?”

“No.”

“Have you recently had a skin disorder?”

“No. Not unless—”

“Yes?” the Frenchman prompted.

“Sort of a one-sided sunburn. But I wasn’t out in the sun.”

The piercing blue-green eyes stared thoughtfully at him for a moment. Laughlin translated. “About the bad dreams. Do you wish to reconsider your answer?”

“No. Well—” Neary paused. “I had this
thing
. This, uh, thing in mind.”

Lacombe waited, pencil poised. “More specific, please.”

Neary shrugged. “It wasn’t really much . . . just an idea.”

The Frenchman frowned and checked his wristwatch. He ran his pencil down the list and picked up the next question. “Have you ever heard voices?”

“No voices. No little green men.”

“Mr. Neary,” Lacombe began carefully, slowly, “have you ever had a close encounter? A close encounter with something very unusual?”

That one clicked and Neary started a sloppy smile, “Who are you guys?” He searched them for a few specific truths. They had his candy. But this wasn’t fair play, only one piece at a time.

Lacombe looked up and offered another piece. “Ever hear a ringing in the ears?” Laughlin interpreted. “An almost agreeable, sometimes pleasant, ringing. A particularly melodic tone or series of tones?”

“Who are you people?” Neary insisted.

Lacombe spoke in whispers to Laughlin. They were exchanging notes in French, and Neary just sat there on his stool, feeling complete isolation.

“Is that it?” Neary cried. “Is that all you’re going to ask me?” The frustration of these absurd weeks surged out of him. “Well . . . I got a couple of thousand goddamn questions! Are you the head man around here? I want to lodge a complaint. You have no right to make people crazy! You think I personally investigate every news story on Walter Cronkite? If this is just a cloud of gas . . . why is it I know this mountain in every detail, and I’ve never been here?”

Neary had spoken the magic words and now it was Lacombe who “clicked.”

The Frenchman stopped and studied this strange American. There was a knock on the door. Bad timing. Another golden man—without medical insignia—stepped inside.

“Com-Sec says to take them to Evac-Reliance and a bus ride home,” the bubble-headed fellow said.

The man backed out of the room.

Lacombe returned to his seat and motioned to Neary and Laughlin to do the same. Now Lacombe was quite excited. “You tell me,” he said in slow, careful English, “you imagined this mountain before you had discovered its existence? It manifested itself to you in many ways. Shadows on the wall, ideas, geometric images that to you, Mr. Neary, seemed like progress toward the familiar but sadly and for so long without any meaning until, finally, it came to you. And it was right!!”

Neary held back his tears with great effort. He nodded bleakly.

“And you feel—” Lacombe paused, obviously searching for just the right word. He found it.
“Compelled
to be here?”

“I guess you might say that,” Roy responded out of the depth of irony he had never known he possessed.

Ignoring that, Lacombe took an envelope from David Laughlin, opened it and produced a dozen colored Polaroids which he handed to Neary.

“These people? These are all people who were trying to get to the mountain. They are strangers to you?”

Roy went through the stack. “Yes,” he said. “All except her.” He held up Jillian’s picture.

Lacombe took all the pictures back, put them in the envelope and gave it back to Laughlin.

“By being here,” the Frenchman asked quietly, “what do you expect to find?”

Neary struggled to formulate a reply. What the hell
was
he doing here? “The answer,” he said, at last. “That’s not crazy, is it?”

Lacombe got up to go. “No, Mr. Neary, it is not.” When he reached the door he turned back quickly, spoke simply. “I want to say to you that you are not alone. I wish you could know this. You have many friends and . . . I envy you.”

The three men paused in the air lock to put their helmets on. On a long wall table lay five or six unused masks, some long rubber gloves and a cheap birdcage. In it were two canaries. They huddled together in a corner and watched Neary’s movements with too-bright eyes. Laughlin opened the outer door of the air lock and the three men walked into the early evening.

The sky in the west still glowed red, but overhead the heavens had darkened to a deep velvety blue. Neary glanced up and saw stars coming out in clusters through the thin mountain air.

Lacombe and his interpreter walked him to a Huey assault chopper, its engines purring but its rotor still.

“No!” Neary exclaimed. “I’m not going back. I’m not going on any bus ride home!”

A gloved hand slid open the starboard door. Neary could see seven or eight civilians, all wearing masks, seated inside. Jillian lifted her hand listlessly, as if she had no energy left. Neary climbed aboard. One of the copter pilots handed a packet to Laughlin, standing on the ground below.

Laughlin leafed through the packet of paper and cardboard. He passed it along to Lacombe. “You see? Everyone drew his own version of the Tower before they came here.”

The Frenchman studied the drawings, some no more than doodles, some carefully done in crayon or felt-tipped pen. After a long moment he looked up through the open door of the Huey and stared at the people inside. Then his sharp glance shifted to the pilot and he spoke quickly to Laughlin in French.

“You are not to take off,” Laughlin relayed to the pilot.

“Sir, I have my orders from Com-Sec.”

“You have my orders now. No departure.”

“Sorry, sir,” the pilot said in a mulish tone. There was something about the “sorry” that conveyed its opposite and something about the “sir” that downgraded it to an epithet.

“Five minutes, then!” Lacombe snapped.

The pilot relented and held up three fingers.

Lacombe and Laughlin were off and running toward an OD trailer a hundred yards closer to the Devil’s Tower.

23  

T
he communications trailer was darkened at one end to allow the radar officers to watch their scopes. At the other end, where a window looked out at the waiting helicopter in the distance, two civilians—Lacombe and his translator—squared off with a project security officer known to them as Wild Bill.

Wild Bill was about Lacombe’s age, Dave Laughlin estimated, somewhere near fifty—or at least looking that age, regardless of how old he really was. Wild Bill was short, squat, and loud. He had a flat, monotonous drawl, as if face-to-face conversation between human beings was of the same order of verbal traffic. Similar to control tower and approaching aircraft, or NASA Mission Control and project astronauts.

“You
cannot send them away!” Lacombe burst out, more agitated than his interpreter had ever seen him. “I will take responsibility for keeping them here.”

“You have no responsibility this side of ‘Mayflower,’ ” Wild Bill responded almost mechanically. “As Com-Sec, I have all the base camp responsibility.”

“Major Walsh,” the Frenchman began.

Wild Bill interrupted. “Three miles from right here, you are the boss. Christ, we’ve spent enough setting up the D.S.M. It’s taken us ten zillion dollars. That’s your bailiwick. This down here is mine.”

“You don’t understand,” Laughlin said, trying to break up the irreversible conflict shaping between the two men. “Whatever you’re doing down here at the base camp is for only one reason, so Mr. Lacombe’s project can proceed on schedule upstairs.”