Close Encounters of the Third Kind (6 page)

Jack DeForest let the complaining run its course. Behind him, Lacombe entered the aircraft, Laughlin at his shoulder. They all watched the passengers, still grumbling, begin filling in the IBM cards.

Lacombe turned sideways to Laughlin and whispered something to him in French.

“Mr. DeForest,” Laughlin said, at which point the eyes of every passenger raised up to see what was going to happen now. “Tell the flight crew we need the flight recorder intact. And one thing more.”

“Yes.”

“Don’t wash the plane.”

Laughlin had snapped out Lacombe’s whispered orders without thinking of anything more than translating them into English. Now, as he watched the passengers’ frightened and concerned reactions, David realized it would have been smarter to have talked to the flight crew personally.

The passengers’ faces reflected exactly what nobody wanted them to reflect. It had been the business of not washing the plane.

It was a bad moment. But no one spoke. Perhaps they were too tired. Perhaps they didn’t really want to know. Perhaps they’d just had enough for one day.

Lacombe, Laughlin, DeForest, and the others knew that at least a couple of the passengers would start searching out the press the next day. But they felt sure that the only accounts of the experience that would ever get into print would appear in the pages of the
Enquirer,
the
Star, Argosy,
and other periodicals. Still, Lacombe, Laughlin, DeForest, and the others knew that there was no way to stop what was happening that night. It was only the beginning.

8  

T
here was no way the dispatcher could get to Neary. He’d switched off the mobile phone unit in his car. Roy didn’t want Ike Harris calling him. As he drove through the night to Tolono, he could see a blanket of stars above him, although the usual spring night ground fog was rising out of the gullies, bouncing his headlights back at him.

Neary did not ride alone. He had the police calls for company.

“U-5. Officer Longly. Over.”

“Go ahead.”

“Responding to the 10-75 on Cornbread Road and Middletown Pike. I am observing . . . I think it’s street lights in the foothill residentials. Couple hundred neighbors in their pajamas think it’s Saturday night out here,” Longly observed on the police band.

A bright group of high beams appeared over Neary’s shoulder out the back window. He was tearing at his maps and absently waved his arm out the side window. The automobile headlights passed him, and somebody shouted out the car, “You’re in the middle of the road, jackass!”

Neary spread a map over the steering wheel, finally located Cornbread and Middletown. D-5, M-34. He took off, tires screeching.

Within five minutes, Neary was hopelessly lost. Finally, in utter desperation, he pulled into a row of darkened fast-food franchises. The blackout had, apparently, provided a perfect excuse for everyone to hang out in the parking areas. As soon as a bunch of them saw Neary’s DWP truck, they crowded about him, waving flashlights and cans of Coors.

“Did your lights come back on?” he asked them.

“You asking us?” a lady in curlers and kerchief asked. “What do you do for a living?”

“What about the street lights? When they went off did they come on? On-off, on-off.”

A wise-ass kid stuck a flashlight in Roy’s face. “Like this?” he said, blinking the light blindingly on and off, on and off in Neary’s eyes.

“Yes.”

“No,” the kid said, laughing cretinously.

“Am I in Tolono or where?” Neary asked Mrs. Curlers.

“It’s all lit up out here,” Officer Longly’s radio voice said suddenly. “These street lamps . . . I think sodium vapor. Don’t want to stay still. They’re revolving in some draft. They go up . . . they go down . . . wait one . . . they also want to go a little sideways.”

“Jesus!” Neary said.

“Longly,” the dispatcher said, sounding bored. “Give us a location.”

“Give me one, too,” said Neary.

“It’s over the Ingelside Elementary School heading northeast.”

Roy yelled out the window, “Where’s the Ingelside Elementary School . . . Anybody?”

“That’s easy,” said a guy, who was carrying a shotgun for some reason. “You go back to seventy, then—”

“No, wait a sec,” Longly called. “Heading northwest on Daytona.”

“Where’s Daytona? Quick!”

“That’s even easier.” The gunslinger was seeing action now. “Okay, Jack, take any road out east of here till you get to city nine and farm eleven, but don’t stop there ’cause there’s a detour sign: ‘Pardon Our Progress.’ ”

He was still going on as Neary shifted gears and backed away.

Five minutes later, Neary was lost in his own home town. He was on some country road, surrounded by more of that insipid ground fog. Bumping over a rutted crossroads, the DWP truck stopped and Roy Neary shone his spotlight at a street sign. Shit! he checked the map again.
Shit!
Neary scooped out two troughs of Indiana clay as he ground the gears backward; he stopped again and spread the map over the steering wheel, twisting the little gooseneck lamp into bright submission.

Behind him a bank of lights from an approaching vehicle lit up the rear window. They drew right up behind Neary and stopped. The glare, bouncing off his rear- and side-view mirrors, was almost as irritating as that municipal map with all of its myopic lines. Absently, he stuck his hand out the side window and waved the other vehicle around him.

For a moment, nothing happened. The intense light, as if from a semi-truck’s double-beams, now stung his eyes. Impatiently now, he waved them around again.

Without a sound, moving at a slow, hypnotic pace, the super high beams complied . . . rising
vertically
out of sight, leaving darkness behind.

Intent on the map, Roy Neary had seen none of this. His subconscious registered vaguely that the bright lights were no longer bothering him. What finally penetrated his consciousness was the noise. It sounded like the rattling of tin. Neary looked up, then around, and finally shone his spotlight on the road sign.

It was vibrating so fast that the letters seemed to multiply and superimpose. He looked again, unknowingly making a “Huuuh?” sound. Next, the truck’s spotlight, dashboard lamp and headlights faded to a faint amber glow and then went out.

Abruptly, the entire area for thirty yards around him was assaulted by a silent explosion of the brightest light imaginable. It was suddenly daytime. Neary tried to look out his open window, but the light was too bright and he had to duck back in. He felt an immediate burning, followed by a prickling sensation on the side of his face that he had been unwise enough to stick out the window. Neary went for the phone, but it was dead. The broadband radio had crackled out, too.

By now, Roy was too frightened to budge. Just his eyes moved. Then he threw his hands over his eyes and groped for his metal-rimmed sunglasses clipped to the visor above the windshield. He managed to get them on, and then—to his horror—found they were buzzing at his temples, vibrating as intensely as the road sign.

That was when the glove compartment, falling open at the hinges, began to rattle violently as everything metallic started sticking together. A box of paper clips popped open and dozens of the damn things flew past Neary’s head and fastened themselves to the roof of the truck.

The sunglasses were too hot. They were burning his skin. Neary whipped them off his face and let them drop to the seat. Instead, they, too, flew past his head and stuck to the roof. He closed his eyes against the fierce light. The ashtray emptied itself out as though sucked weightless by a current of air from outside the truck and—

The hot light was gone. Paper clips rained down on Roy’s head. He could no longer hear the sign shaking. He looked up and—for a second—saw the stars. Then, as if some tremendous tray were sliding out overhead, all the stars (except a few around the edges) were inked out by the limbo shape. Fluidly, the mass moved on and the stars started coming back out.

A distant rattling caused Neary to bring his head back inside and swing around in his seat. Suddenly his high beams, spot and lamp switched back on. Down the road there was a four-way stop. All four signs were dancing to and fro, vibrating so violently that metal around the signs’ edges curled against the force. For a second the intersection was awash in that same blinding light. But for only a second. And in the dark, the signs were no longer vibrating.

All was still.

But when the radio blasted on, Neary screamed.

It was making noises that sounded like an electrical overload, and the voices weren’t much better so far as Roy was concerned.

“I don’t know. I’m asking
you.
Is there a full moon tonight?” came a police voice.

“That’s a negativethe dispatcher, a female voice, said. “New moon on the thirteenth.”

“Get out of here. Me and my partner are seeing this thing over Signal Hill. This is the thing everybody is screaming about. It’s the moon . . .” There was a lot of static. “Wait a sec. Okay. It’s starting to move now. West to east.”

“This is Tolono Police,” a new voice came on. “We are watching it, confirming it is definitely the moon. Be advised it is not moving. The clouds behind it are moving, giving it the illusion of movement over—”

“Where’d you study astronomy, Tolono?” a voice that Roy recognized as Longly’s broke in. “When did you ever see clouds moving
behind
the moon?”

“What’s your location?” the lady dispatcher asked wearily.

“Just off the Telemar Expressway and east toward Harper Valley.”

“Oh, my God!” Roy Neary cried. “I know where that is.”

Neary hit ninety-plus. He found himself entering a long, dark tunnel and as his high headlights cut through it, Roy became aware again of the prickling sensation on the side of his face. He also remembered how frightened he had been back there, and now here he was chasing after the thing that had so scared him. He really ought to stop, turn around and go back to Earl and the other guys. But, Neary realized, he was more excited than frightened now. He felt like a kid. It was too late to stop now. He was having too much fun. And so were the police.

“I see them, Charlie! I’m in pursuit.”

“You can take it for what it’s worth. These things were not manufactured in Detroit.” That was Longly!

“It’s decelerating. I don’t know why it’s decelerating, but it’s getting closer. Three hundred yards.”

“Can you catch up to it?” the dispatcher asked.

“I don’t think so. About two hundred yards. That’s it for me. I don’t think we should rush into it.”

“It’s following all the S-turns. It’s following all the roads.”

“Radar shows ’em down to twenty-five miles per hour.”

“Shit, that’s a school zone they just passed through.”

“Look at the traffic lights! They turn to green just as they get up to them.”

A lot of static.

“Yes, sir . . . They’re going right out east on Harper Valley.”

Neary came out of the tunnel and rounded a curve at ninety-five miles an hour, traded paint with a guardrail, went into a skid and managed to correct without running off into the central divider gully. He shot past a sign: E
AST
H
ARPER
V
ALLEY
E
XIT
—3 M
ILES
. Then Neary really stood on the accelerator, slowing to eighty-five when the Harper Valley exit loomed up.

Skidding and braking, he whipped the truck off onto the exit road. It turned onto a two-lane country road, and Roy came down to a more cautious seventy.

Up ahead he thought he might have seen something on the—

A child!

Neary stood on the brakes. An instant later, a woman ran out onto the road and grabbed for the child. The truck was skidding wildly now as Roy fought the wheel. The woman and child were frozen in his headlights for another instant—yards, feet ahead, directly under the wheels.

Neary threw the wheel hard left, skidded by the two bodies, and plowed into a snow fence, taking some of it with him before coming to rest.

For a long moment, everything was very still except for his panting breath. He switched off the engine. It took him three tries to get the door handle to work, so shaky were his arm muscles.