Journal of a UFO Investigator (10 page)

“I guess . . . what you're trying to say is—I mean—”

Tom gave an angry, bitter laugh, almost a cough. I wanted to grab him by his tie and shake him until he explained just what about me he found amusing. “No,” I said, “I don't understand. I don't have the slightest idea what you're talking about.”

He shook his head, tore a roll in two, and began mopping up the gravy on his plate.

“Danny,” said Rochelle very patiently, “in 1956, Morris Jessup started getting incredibly strange letters, from a man he was never able to track down. About an experiment in the navy yard thirteen years earlier, during the war. . . . So!” She broke into a smile. “Lights going on inside, I see!”

They weren't really. But at least I wasn't getting any more confused. “Go on,” I said.

“The letter writer sounded half crazy,” she said. “But only half. That was what got Morris all excited. Most of the people in that experiment, the men who'd been made invisible, had gone insane from it. They'd become paralyzed, frozen. Sometimes they'd catch on fire too. ‘They burned for eighteen days.' The whole experience was ‘Hell Incorporated.' That's what the man who wrote the letters said.
Hell Incorporated
.”

“ ‘The experiment was a complete success,' ” Julian said. “Remember that, Rochelle? ‘The men were complete failures.' ”

Rochelle shivered and grimaced. “Yes, Julian. I remember. That's from one of the letters,” she said to me. “No, I don't know what it meant. Neither did Morris. But it seemed like the kind of thing you know is true, even if you don't have one speck of evidence for it.

“And the man claimed to have more evidence than anyone could possibly want. He kept asking Morris to put him under hypnosis, to bring back all the details he'd forgotten. Morris couldn't wait. He thought this was the clue to antigravity. How the UFOs fly. How
we
can fly, if we've a mind to.”

I thought of Rosa. How flight was practically the only thing on her mind these days, and how excited she'd be if she were here with us. And that I was glad she wasn't, I didn't know why. I really must ask to use their phone, give her a call.... “Think of it this way,” said Tom. “The Philadelphia experiment was to Einstein's unified field theory what Alamogordo was to
E = mc
²
. Only without the mushroom cloud.”

“So did he?” I asked Rochelle. “Did Jessup ever hypnotize the man?”

“Danny, he never could
find
the man.”

“Or maybe,” said Julian, “they found him.”

He drew his finger across his throat. His eyebrows jumped up and down in comic Groucho mode, just like in the kitchen. Only here the effect was macabre, chilling. Over the empty dinner plates I looked from Julian's face to Rochelle's to Tom's. Then back to Rochelle. What exactly would I tell Rosa when I did phone her? That I was safe, I could trust these people, we wouldn't need the police? Was I sure of any of this?

“Morris got a call,” said Rochelle, “from the Office of Naval Research in Washington. Someone had sent them a copy of his book
The Case for the UFO.
Not just the book. There were annotations all over the pages. Three different people had written notes to themselves and one another, all through the book. It was like they were passing Morris's book back and forth among them, underlining passages, writing comments like ‘Now he's getting close,' or sometimes, ‘He doesn't understand, none of the gaiyars can understand.' ”

“Gaiyars?” I said.

“A word Gypsies sometimes use for people who aren't Gypsies. That's why we think they were Gypsies, these three men. They talked like they were some secret society, the ones in the know. About the invisibility experiment—they had a lot to say about that—and about the UFOs, and all the kinds of things we want to know. I mean, we, the SSS. The government too, most likely. Though they'll never come out and say it.”

“And that book,” I said. “Have you seen it?”

“Yes. I've seen it.”

She moved her empty wineglass back and forth, as though she were writing some invisible message to herself on the tablecloth. The clock ticked loudly in the silent house.

“How to tell it?” she said. She stared into the glass. “We found out Morris was dying from the Dade County police. Most of the deputies were Daddy's friends. They phoned him that evening, as soon as they found Morris in the park. There was nobody else they could phone. His wife had packed up and left him. He lived all alone in the house at the end of our street.

“I'd never seen Daddy drive like that. He must have run three or four red lights on the way to the park. I don't think he'd run a red light in his life before that evening.”

“Your father took you with him?” I felt a strange creeping sensation, as though something were beginning to crawl over me, into me, through me. As when my father had taken me—

“The sun was setting when we reached the park,” Rochelle said. “Morris's car was there, the way I'd seen it a million times in front of his house. He was behind the wheel, the way he always was. But he was slumped back in the seat, dead, his eyes staring open. Danny, you have
never
seen eyes looking like that.

“He looked like he'd been gasping for breath,” she said. “He
was
gasping for breath, actually, when they found him. That was what the deputy said. He'd run a hose from the exhaust pipe in through the window, the police said, and cranked up the car.”

“Or somebody did it for him,” said Julian.

Rochelle nodded. “The hose was still there when we came supposedly. I didn't see it. I couldn't look at anything, except Morris's face. And the book on the seat next to him.”

“The book—” I said.

“Yes, Danny. Morris's
Case for the UFO
. I'd read it a few years before, when it first came out and I was nine and we lived in Jerusalem. That was about all I had to do with myself those summers in Jordan, sit in the garden and read books from the British Council Library. That, and learn Arabic and French. Wasn't like I had any friends to play with . . .

“And now there was that same book, lying next to his body. Only it
wasn't
the same. Be patient—you'll understand in a minute what I mean. I stole it.”

“You what?”

“I was pretty good at stealing, even back then. The deputy wasn't paying attention. He was yelling at Daddy. ‘What'd you bring her here for?' he kept hollering. And Daddy yelled back that it was important I be there, important I see this, that I
see
—”

—and “What'd you bring him in here for?” the bundle on the bed had croaked out when my father brought me into her room—so weak, but still I could hear her; I let out such a howl—

“I think I would have gone insane,” I said.

“Maybe you would have,” said Rochelle. “Maybe I did. Anyway, they were so busy screaming at each other, Daddy and the deputy, they didn't notice me. And they'd left the car door open.

“I reached in. I grabbed the book.

“I was wearing a big, loose smock then, like an artist, and a pair of jeans. I stuffed the book into the front of my jeans, under the smock. And I took it home with me, and Daddy never saw it. I stayed up all that night, with my flashlight under the covers, just like in the comics, reading it.

“Because this wasn't the ordinary book, Danny. Not the one I'd read in our garden in Jerusalem. It was the special copy, the marked-up copy, that the Gypsies or whoever had sent the Office of Naval Research, and afterward they passed on to Morris for his reaction. With all the annotations. And the drawings.

“And I read it all. That was when I first knew—really, really
knew
—the UFOs are real. Them and the invisible ships. The disappearing people. How you get a ship, or a person, or anything you want to vanish. Yourself included.”

Rosa . . . how worried she must surely be getting . . .

“And the different kinds of UFO beings!” Rochelle said. “The ones that are more or less harmless, and the . . . others. Antigravity. How they travel to the stars and back, faster than that ship got from Philadelphia to Norfolk. Go up by going down . . . You sink into the earth, and there's the moon below you—”

“Down, down,
down
,” I said. “Underground, to the caves of the dero.”

It was as if the words were inside me and just forced themselves out, in a voice that sounded strange even to me. The others sat and stared.

In the silence that followed I listened to the clock ticking.

“Listen, Rochelle,” Tom said finally. “Suppose Jessup was murdered, by the three men in black or whoever—”

“I never
said
it was the men in black.”

“Or the three Gypsies or whoever—”

“I never said it was the Gypsies either.”

“Well, whoever,” said Tom. “Why did they leave the book in the car for you to find? If the annotations were so important. Doesn't it stand to reason they would have taken it with them?”

“I don't
know
. Maybe they didn't know about the annotations. Probably they thought it was just one more copy of
The Case for the UFO
. I didn't know about the annotations when I took it. I just took it because—well, it was Morris's book. How proud he always was of having written it.”

“Where is it now?” I asked.

Silence.

“You don't have it, I gather?”

Again silence. Julian seemed to be smiling to himself, and that made me more uneasy even than the finger across the throat.
Jump up from this chair right away
, I instructed myself.
Demand to be led to the telephone. Call Rosa. Tell her to find some way to get me away from here, right now.

I didn't move.

“The police came for it the next day,” said Rochelle. “They'd noticed it was missing. They knew Daddy and I had been there. The deputy came out to our house. At first I lied about it, but then he said he was going to arrest Daddy, so I broke down. He took the book.”

“What did the police do with it?”

“Nobody knows,” said Rochelle. “They say they have no record.”

“So it's gone now? Lost?”

Rochelle looked me full in the face. Her smile had turned strange, crafty. A lot like Julian's. “Maybe lost,” she said. “Maybe not. Hard to find, maybe. But maybe not impossible.”

She had a plan; I was part of it. What I was supposed to do I didn't yet know. I would not be the same after it was done. I had the feeling a crevasse was opening before me in the earth, or possibly the sky, and I was about to fall in.

“Not all that's hard is impossible,” she said. “There are things people call impossible that people like us really ought to try. That's what the SSS is about.”

I tried to speak. No sound came out.

“That's why I'm here right now,” she said. “Not out parking with some twelfth-grade boy, listening to him talk about his college board scores while he's trying to unhook my bra. That's why we took for our emblem the trisected angle.”

And the winged horse?
I wanted to ask. I might have been relieved, heartened by the contempt with which she spoke of those boys. If the crevasse in front of me hadn't just opened about a hundred yards wider.

“When do you get your driver's license?” she said. “No, I don't mean when you're sixteen. Julian's already told you what we do about that.”

She looked toward Julian. He nodded. I must have been blushing. I wished I could hide somewhere until the blush subsided.

“Get your license,” she said. “Get it as soon as you can. Then we can head off for Coral Gables and vicinity. We'll see what we can find, you and I.”

“It might mean missing a few weeks of school,” Julian said to me. “You can live with that, can't you?”

Oh, yes, I could manage. A few weeks less of tedium, of mockery. Of feeling there was no one else like me in the world. Rochelle stood up, stretched. She arched herself back, her hands clasped high over her head. I turned my eyes away from her pushed-out breasts, even while knowing that was precisely where she wanted me to look.

“I can't do all the driving myself,” she said.

THE TOWER ROCHELLE HAD MENTIONED, WHICH WE WERE SUPPOSED
to go up to for “observing,” was the silolike structure I'd seen when we first drove up to the house. A spiral staircase led up through it from the second floor. There weren't any lights in the staircase; Julian had to go before us with a flashlight. The steps were high and narrow, and there were no landings. By the time we reached the top and stepped out onto a circular platform under the sky, I was completely out of breath.

Good thing there's a railing,
was my first thought as I looked about the moonlit platform.
You could walk right off otherwise on a darkish night
.

I was so disoriented, so distracted by my surroundings that it took me a few moments to realize the others had disappeared somewhere and I'd been left alone. I began to panic, to be afraid they'd locked some door behind me and I was trapped here in the moonlight. I was about to call out. But just then a light flashed from within a small domed hutlike structure at the center of the platform. From inside I heard laughter.

I started toward the doorway of the hut. I caught a glimpse, inside, of two bodies twisting against each other. I thought I heard clothes softly rubbing. There was another laugh. A gleaming white hand appeared, pressed against the back of a neck, amid short blondish hairs.