Close Encounters of the Third Kind (23 page)

Lacombe walked up the strip to within one hundred and fifty yards of the hovering, nonresponding vehicles. The booth technician dialed the synthesizer all the way up and the notes reverberated hugely off the walls of the canyon.

The Frenchman had become very impatient. “
Qu’est-ce que ce passe?”
he asked the objects.
“Allez, allez, allez. Allons-y.
Lets go.” Lacombe was shouting over the Moog, making the five-note hand movements.

Lacombe waved his hands at the hovering vehicles and called to the musician,
“Plus vite, plus vite,”
then headed back toward the console.

Shakespeare was playing his brains out and the scoreboard was flashing through the colors of the spectrum from ultraviolet to infrared and everything in between.

All of a sudden the vehicles responded. Not in sounds but in colors. They began to repeat the colors on the scoreboard. Each object was repeating separately the colors flashing across the board. Shakespeare stopped playing. As the notes faded away across the canyon, there was utter silence. For a long moment, all they could hear was the wind blowing down the canyon.

Then Lacombe pointed to Shakespeare and said, “Come on. Keep going, keep going.”

The team leader exhorted his man on. “Kick that mule, boy!”

The musician/engineer began playing very, very quickly and the scoreboard and the three vehicles picked up the action, changing colors in the same variation in total synchrony. The men around him were all sweating profusely, too, concentrating fiercely as the objects flashed their colors. They were filled with joy. In fact, they were beyond joy. In a state that no humans had previously experienced or described. For this was the first contact, the first contact in recorded history.

And suddenly the three objects stopped responding. They just flew off. In three different directions. One shot straight up and disappeared, lights off, apparently, into a large cloud. The other two swooped over the edge of the canyon and out of sight.

The music stopped. The scoreboard went to black. Silence. The wind.

And then the arena went crazy. Everyone began applauding and screaming. These restrained, laid-back scientists and technicians were jumping up and down, hugging each other, shaking hands, pounding each other on the backs. The stadium lights came back on full, and the men in their jumpsuits and civilian clothes started coming out of their cubicles. Everything, it seemed, was over.

The booth technicians came down and sought out Lacombe and the team leader.

“Beautiful,” he said. “Beautiful.”

Lacombe spoke to David Laughlin in English. “I am very happy tonight.”

The team leader shook all their hands, including Shakespeare’s. “Congratulations. Not Merle Haggard, but it was great!”

Above this scene of jubilation, on their rocky ledge, Roy was completely elated and Jillian in tears. “I know that sound,” she kept on saying. “I just know it. I’ve heard it, I know that sound.”

Below, in one of the radar communications cubicles, the instruments started showing targets. The deep dish radar scoops had stopped sweeping again, focusing on the mountain above Neary and Jillian. Something was happening in the sky beyond Devil’s Tower.

On the floor of the stadium, one of the technicians approached the Frenchman, saying, “Mr. Lacombe,” and pointed up.

Lacombe and Laughlin walked away looking up at the sky.

“What is it?” David Laughlin asked. “What’s happening?”

“Je ne sais pas.”

Roy and Jill turned, looking back and up toward where the men below were now all looking and pointing. Then they saw it, too.

A number of large cumulus clouds had formed in the sky over the mountain. Within the clouds was an extraordinary display of flashing pyrotechnics—an electrical storm different from anything that they had seen before and frightening in its scale and turbulence.

Simultaneously, and without words, Neary and Jillian felt that they must get away from the sky, so together they started the perilous scramble down. Jillian was terrified. The flashing clouds suddenly reminded her of the awful day that Barry was taken.

The clouds had come down very close to the top of the mountain. There seemed to be more of them now. Suddenly zooming out of the clouds, one of the brilliantly lighted objects swept down across the arena, stopping just where it had hovered before. It hovered again and then suddenly flashed all its lights. Red. Three times.

It was, evidently, a signal of some kind.

The largest part of the cloud formation flashed red three times. Then it flashed white and blue three times.

There was a brief pause during which all the technicians looked at each other uneasily. What the hell next?

Then the invasion began.

Out of the clouds burst a formation of fifty pinpoints of light that swiftly materialized into flaming convex planar shapes and dazzling colors. And tricks. These ultra-performance vehicles were performing low-level stunts for their audience.

Three of them stopped in midair and fell toward the ground. Just when it seemed that there must be a tremendous impact, they came to a complete stop and hovered, causing a huge displacement of air that thundered and roared and rumbled across the canyon.

The objects were making no sounds by themselves now, but their gravity-defying maneuvers were creating thunder that rattled the cubicles, the instruments within, short-circuiting several of the computers, and everyone’s brains. The lights! The heat! So hot that some of the paper debris caught fire as the vehicles carried out their low, swooshing passes over the field.

They played games. Two formations headed breakneck straight ahead toward each other. Just as a massive head-on collision seemed inevitable, the objects somehow filtered through each other, sweeping up, barrel-rolling and swooping back down again.

Gradually, a new thing—resembling the bottom of an electric griddle, bright red and blinking—moved out over the base at an agonizingly slow five miles per hour. It was traveling very low and sucking up—apparently magnetically—everything loose that was metal: clipboards, pens, spectacles, and headsets right off the technicians’ heads, cigarette lighters out of their pockets, soda pop cans. One fellow grabbed his mouth as a loose filling flew out of his dental work and stuck to the bottom of the griddle fryer.

Suddenly, the vehicle flashed a blue color, and everything it had sucked up was let go and fell in a pile onto the ground.

Lacombe walked casually over after it had released its booty and stuck his hand up. The Frenchman walked directly under the strange thing, reached up and actually touched its bottom. It was not hot, but it must have been ticklish, for as soon as Lacombe touched it, it jumped up, scattering the technicians with their cameras and heat-sensory devices and other instruments who had followed Lacombe, and flew off toward the heavens so suddenly that it left behind an enormous thunderclap, which smashed several cubicle windows and scared the hell out of everyone.

Neary was more thrilled than scared. “I’ve got to get closer,” he told her.

“I know you do,” she said. “This is close enough for me.”

“I’ve got to get down there. Won’t you come just a little bit further?”

“No, Roy. I’ll wait here.”

“I gotta get down there,” he said almost apologetically.

“I know,” Jill said. “I really know. I really know what you want to do.”

They looked at each other closely, sadly. And for the first time since they had known each other they kissed.

Then they parted.

Jillian climbed thirty feet back up the cliff to a small wooded area where she felt she might be more protected and would not be seen by the figures below.

Neary started the long, dangerous scramble down.

26  

A
s Roy clambered down the edge of the mountain, he noticed that the display was over. As though some signal had been given, all the objects receded into the night.

Now in the background, coming out of the low clouds, a hundred points of light flared up around the entire twenty-mile perimeter of the box canyon. Although these light points were hovering at least ten miles away, Neary could tell they were large nuts and bolts vehicles, just hanging there, seeming to guard the perimeter of the base. Now they rose up higher in the sky and dimmed their lights. Roy could barely make out the black shapes behind the glow.

Things got stranger still.

Down in the stadium, everyone was exhausted now, picking themselves up stunned silly. They had all been going through total culture shock, and each man was trying to deal with it in his own way.

There was no conversation. The wind had dropped off completely now, and the silence was total.

Neary had kept coming all this time and was now on the floor of the mountain, edging his way toward the perimeter of the base when something made him stop and look up.

From behind the mountain and from inside a cloud, something began coming out of the cloud that was completely black. It was not only black but it was huge. So huge that Roy could not comprehend its size. As the huge black shape came over the top of the mountain, blotting out the moon and casting a shadow that crawled over everybody in the canyon, Neary thought he was going to pass out.

Inside the base, the master of ceremonies murmured, “Oh, my God!”

“Holy shit!” Laughlin exclaimed, not hearing himself.

Lacombe stared, transfixed.
“Mon Dieu!”
he said, realizing that if they could measure this shape, this thing, that it would be over a mile wide and the length of it, covering the entire sky, was still unknown because the end of it was not in sight.

Suddenly it turned on. A surgical sliver of light circumscribed the underside of the thing, and then something opened—some round circle of light exploded.

It was the size of a city, Neary thought. The top of it looked like an oil refinery, with huge tanks and pipes and working lights everywhere. The phantom mass, sliding across the canyon, seemed somehow old and dirty. It looked junky, like an old city or an immense old ship that had been sailing the skies for thousands of years. Neither Roy nor any of the scientists or technicians—nor anyone else on earth, for that matter—had ever seen or even imagined anything like it.

As it came over the base, a huge explosion of light arced out behind it and separated into what looked like a thousand brilliant fireflies, except that each “firefly” was a small (by comparison) vehicle acting like a tugboat. Each “tugboat” flashed different colors and the thousand of them together formed a scaffold of many-colored lights onto which the phantom mass—two miles long and a mile wide—seemed to settle. The mass made a slight list as the scaffold—crossbeams blinking colors—escorted it to a landing area of its own far downfield.

Neary had vaulted over the six-foot retaining wall and was now wedged in among the technicians and scientists, all of whom were simply stunned by what they were seeing.

The scaffolding guided the mass down, shattering about a mile of the landing coordinate lights. It was so big that when it settled the leading edge of the mass formed a roof over the top of the entire camp.

The mass had created its own negative gravity field, and within moments everyone and everything became 40 percent weightless. This cheered everyone. They started bouncing and cavorting buoyantly in the air, some of the more athletic doing cartwheels and somersaults, hanging in the air like Dr. J., their colleagues in jumpsuits sliding and bouncing beneath them with their cameras, snapping pictures of the whole incredible thing.

Lacombe and the team leader were the first to recover partially. They decided to move the synthesizer, which was mounted on casters, closer to the mass. After they had rolled it about seventy-five feet downfield, the members of the team, still feeling otherworldly and unglued, plugged themselves in again.

The master of ceremonies spoke as dispassionately as he could into his pencil microphone. “All departments at operational during this phase signify by beeping twice.”

Two tones rang across the canyon, startling the utter silence.