Journal of a UFO Investigator (6 page)

But the clock on the wall read 3:35, and the second hand swept around its face.

I stepped up to the long, curving counter. RING BELL FOR SERVICE, read a hand-lettered sign. I struck the bell with my hand, listened to it echo through the empty room. I waited. No one came.

I rang again, waited again. My fingers felt for the Delta Device. I forced my hand out of my pocket, back to the counter. Not yet time for that. Nothing was falling from the sky on top of me. Not yet.

For a minute or two I kept on pounding the bell. When I couldn't stand any more of its ringing, I ran out, down the winding corridor, up the stairs. Then up more stairs. Everywhere was neat. Still. Empty.

No librarians . . . no readers, browsers, borrowers . . . no guard at the main exit checking bags and briefcases. The late-afternoon sun shone through the windows of the high-ceilinged reading rooms, onto the carpeted floor. On the spines of silent rows of books, the gold lettering glittered.

UFO invasion? Nuclear war? The missiles that should have been fired last October: were they on their way?

“Jeff,” I called out softly. Then, louder: “Kazik! Kazik!” Before I knew it, the Delta was out of my pocket and I'd squeezed it, hard. The soldering popped open. The wiring crammed inside the sheet metal casing erupted onto my palm.

I stared down at it. I tried to push it all back in, to force the gadget together long enough to send out a signal. All I managed was to cut my thumb on the metal's edge. The mass of curls and coils, spilled out, refused ingathering. The Delta was ruined, wrecked for good, useless as a teddy bear in a thunderstorm. I tossed it somewhere among the long tables and began to run.

At the elevator I jabbed the up button. The arrow of the dial above the sliding doors jerked its poky way along the ring of gold-colored numbers. If it didn't come soon, I'd go insane.

 

Julian Arcturus Margulies, sitting at his desk, seemed unsurprised to see me.

“That's the remarkable thing about rare books, isn't it?” he said. “You fall under their spell, you just can't stay away.”

“
Julian
.”

“You don't have to be so alarmed. Your nice new briefcase isn't lost. You left it here next to my desk. I called after you, but you were in such a hurry, you just didn't hear—”

So that was what I'd had the sensation of missing. I no longer cared about that briefcase. “
Julian!”

“Yes?” He peered at me with an expression of kind attention.

“Did they close early today? Or what?”

“Of course not. Why should they close early?”

“
The library is empty
.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nobody's here! I went down to the ground floor, to the Newspaper Room, and there was nobody. Not in the reading rooms! Not anywhere!”

He looked puzzled. Only for a moment. “Oh,
that
,” he said. “That happens sometimes. It'll be all right.” He walked around the desk and put his hand on my shoulder. “Danny, you've got to stay calm. Are you listening to me?”

I nodded.

“You know the elevator you just got off?” He pointed down the hall. I nodded again. “Go back there. When you get in, push the button for the basement. The one marked ‘B.' As in
boy
. Not ‘G,' this time; the floor below it. Have you got that?”

“I think so,” I said.

“When the doors open, walk out and turn to your left. Go about fifty feet, and you'll see a small door to the outside. To Nineteenth Street. It's below street level, though. Are you listening?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Go out that door. Climb to the sidewalk. Directly up the slope. It's icy, but I think you can make it. You've got that?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Then go around to Vine Street, to the front entrance. Come in again. It'll be all right.”

I started off toward the elevator. “Danny!” he called.

“What?”

“Don't forget your briefcase.”

 

I pressed “B.” I rode down to the basement. I forced myself, faint with dread, down the dimly lit hallway. On either side of me boxes were stacked nearly to the ceiling, such that I could barely make my way through the passage. The door was where Julian had said it would be.

I slipped more than once, getting up that slope.

At first, when I reached the sidewalk, it was the library all over again. Nineteenth Street was empty, still, silent. But then I began to feel the rush of traffic, to hear the honking of a taxicab. I saw I'd wandered into the street and leaped back to the sidewalk. I leaned against a building, catching my breath. A man in earmuffs and a thick overcoat marched past, glaring.

 

It was a few minutes past four when I walked back through the library's entrance hall. Filled, as usual, with people. I wasn't ready for the Newspaper Room. I walked into the general reading room on the second floor and sat down at one of the long tables. I opened my briefcase. I pulled out Bender's
Flying Saucers and the Three Men
and the three Jewish calendars. I began flipping through the calendars, mostly looking at the pictures.

My eye fell upon Saturday, December 22, 1962. My thirteenth birthday, by the Jewish calendar. The day that should have been my bar mitzvah—

When I should have proclaimed myself a man.

Only my mother was too sick, so we couldn't—

I stopped leafing. I thought of all the things over the years that we couldn't do, I couldn't do, because she was too sick. She couldn't go outdoors; needed rest, needed quiet. Needed me to stay with her, read to her. My friends, when I had any, had to be hushed. Asked to leave the house if they couldn't be still . . .

Sadness transfixed me. I could not move so much as my eyeballs. I don't know how long it was before I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“You all right?”

Rosa Pagliano. Some kind of hallucination? Her touch was real, though, or had been before she took away her hand. Relief flooded me; happiness too. But also confusion. “What are you doing here?” I said.

“I wouldn't leave with Jeff. He wanted me to. You wouldn't believe the fight we had. They almost threw us out of the library, we were screaming so loud.”

“So the bus
did
stop in Braxton—”

Of course it had. And today she'd come with us, not just me and Jeff. She'd climbed onto the bus at Braxton, told Jeff to move over, wiggled into the seat beside him. . . . Each detail so vivid; how had I forgotten, even for a moment? “Rosa,” I said, and felt my tongue curl around her name.

“Where
were
you? Why didn't you come back to the Newspaper Room? We waited and waited.”

Rosa slipped into the vacant chair beside me. She carried a book, which she slid into her lap, where I couldn't see it. I caught a whiff of her perfume, strong stuff, the kind the sexier girls in our school wear, but I'd never before noticed it on Rosa. Why hadn't I?

“Jeff got sick of waiting,” she said. “He started carrying on, the way he always does when he doesn't get his way. Got himself so worked up, that finally—”

“I did come down. You were gone. The room was empty.”

“Wha—a?” Her lips parted. “I understand,” she said after a second, which was enough time for my eyes and mind to have glued themselves to those lips. Not quite rose red, as the poets say. Yet red enough, and luscious, without benefit of lipstick. I was too hypnotized, those few silent moments, to ask what it was she'd understood. “Finally he says to me, ‘Come on! The hell with Danny! We're going home.' I told him to screw himself.”

“You told him what?”

“To
screw himself
.” She broke out of her whisper. “Go home and listen to records of his stupid musicals, for all I cared. I wasn't going to leave you alone.”

A librarian frowned at us, finger to her lips. Another minute and we
would
be thrown out. Rosa put her hand on my knee. “So he left by himself,” she said. “Now listen to me, Danny—”

“
Could I have your attention, please? The library is closing in twenty minutes. Please bring all materials to the checkout desk . . .
”

And on and on, while I thought about Jeff, and what he'd do without Rosa as his girlfriend, and whether she liked him all that much to begin with. Whether after this we could still be friends. Our Delta Device, once the link between us, now a piece of junk, a silly, lumpish toy from eighth-grade metal shop—

“What's that book you've got?” I said when the loudspeaker voice finished.

“One of theirs.”

It was still in her lap. I tried to make out what it was, then looked up, embarrassed. She'd think I was peeking under her skirt. As she snatched it away, I glimpsed the jacket picture: a battered, twisted rag doll, stringlike hair tumbled around its averted face. Also the title,
The Scandal of
something. “It's about—” I said, and felt myself turn red, because I knew what that “scandal” had to be but didn't yet know a name for it.

“That's right. So I'll know why Helen does to me like she does. I'll take it when we go.”

Helen was her mother. I'd never heard Rosa call her by her first name. “Take the book? You have a library card? Will they let you—”

“No, I don't have a card. And I said ‘take,' not ‘borrow.' That clown who checks bags won't look under my sweater....
For chrissake
”—in a whisper, with a grimace better suited to a scream—“quit looking at me like that! Such a damn goody-good! You don't know what I live with.”

“And me: do you know what I—”

She put her finger to a scab by the corner of my mouth, where a pimple once had been. I pulled away. I didn't want to be reminded of what had made that scab. “It's not easy for you either,” she said. “I
do
know; I'm not blind. But listen to me now. There's something you need to hear.”

She pulled her chair close. Her voice sank. “It was in one of those old newspapers. From Florida. Don't worry, I've got it all written down for you, the exact place and date and source and all that stuff. It scared me. More than anything I've ever seen.”

My arm, which I might have put around her, lay on the table. Too heavy to lift.

“There was this disk. Glowing red. Just like the one that came down on top of you last month. The people didn't see it flying, though. It was on the ground when they spotted it.”

“So it must have landed!”

“If it was ever in the air. Shhh—in a minute you'll see what I mean. They saw it sitting in a field. For a while it didn't do anything. One guy got into his car, to go for the sheriff. And then the disk—it—it—”

“Took off?”

“No. It didn't take off. It sunk into the ground.”

She took a deep breath. She'd never looked this shaken. Not even that time in seventh grade, lifting her skirt to show her wounded legs. Was it really the newspaper story that had spooked her? Or was it me, and what I'd just been through, which she understood even though I had not?

“Down into the ground,” she said. “Like an elevator, they described it. And I thought of that story you and Jeff tell each other, like it's some big joke, about the elevator in Chicago—”

“Into the ground?”

“Like it was sitting on the ocean, and it went down into the water. Only there wasn't any water. Just solid ground.” She closed her eyes; she breathed. “Danny. You've got to promise me—”

“What?”

“If your UFO comes back and drops all the way down and stays there, you won't—you won't—”

“What?”

“Get inside.”

“
Attention. The library is closing in ten minutes. Closing in ten minutes . . .
”

She jumped up, sparing me the need to promise. When I make a promise, I don't break it. “My things are downstairs,” she said. “I'll get yours too. You shouldn't move. You look sick.”

“I'm all right.” But already she was gone.

Before me on the table were the three Jewish calendars. Also my copy of
Flying Saucers and the Three Men
. A business card protruded from it like a bookmark. Of course—Julian's. The one I'd left behind. I pulled it out and quickly turned it over, so I wouldn't have to look at those eyes. On the back was written, in an ornate, nearly Gothic script:
SSS—Super-Science Society. “Science is a turtle that says that its own shell encloses all things”—Charles Hoy Fort.

I picked up the Bender book. I was about to slide it into my briefcase. On impulse I opened it and turned to the last page.

There was my “preliminary evaluation,” dismissing the book as a hoax. There was Jeff's “I agree completely.” And below both, in the same handwriting as the back of the card, was a third annotation.

“ SO YOU DON'T BELIEVE IN THE PLANET CLARION,” SAID JULIAN
Margulies. “My, my. What a hardened skeptic you are. Next you'll be telling me you don't believe in the dero and the underground caves.”

“I don't, not very much,” I said.

“But you do, just a little bit?”

He eased up on the accelerator and downshifted. Our Pontiac still came up fast on the huge truck wheezing ahead of us in the right-hand lane of the Schuylkill Expressway, vomiting foul black exhaust. It was the first Saturday afternoon in April 1963, warmer than I'd have expected; we had opened the windows wide to catch the breezes. Nearly three years have gone by since then. It's February now, and the year is 1966, and I'm in eleventh grade instead of eighth. And it's been forever since I've felt a spring breeze.