The Grays (29 page)

“He’s also very powerful. More powerful by far than we are. He’s dangerous, Lauren. I hope you understand that.”

“He’s trying to kill me, of course I understand it! But I have no idea how to hide.”

“You got this far. That’s saying something. A hell of a lot, in fact.”

“If I’m a KIA, then I have no Air Force standing. If I’m already dead, he can kill me without fear of penalty.”

“We’re going to hide you, Lauren.”

“I wish the grays were here.”

“Keep trying to contact them.”

When they went outside, the snow of earlier had stopped. The base was very quiet, the flight line now shut down.

She noticed that he moved very quickly, striding across the base to the carpool. He had a car of his own, but he requisitioned a staff vehicle instead. “This is part of staying hidden,” he said. “I’ll exchange this for another staff vehicle after I drop you off.”

He took her to a Days Inn, which appeared to be about the only motel in this small town.

Thus it was that Lauren ended up in the room next door to Mike Wilkes, an event that had not been orchestrated by the grays, but was not entirely chance, either. Rather it emerged out of the fates of both species, human and gray, as they rode the dark rails of their destinies.

Mike heard voices next door, a man and a woman. He took no notice.

Rob wanted to stay with Lauren—he told himself, to protect her. But he had work to do, because if he didn’t find Wilkes, not only was Lauren going
to be in trouble, the rest of this thing was going to come apart. He could not imagine the consequences if the grays were thwarted, dared not even think about what might happen.

As he drove back to his office, Mike Wilkes and Lauren Glass both lay on their beds unable to even think of sleeping, their heads separated by just six inches of drywall. Lauren’s mind whirled with the astonishing secrets she had learned, and, as she sank into exhaustion, also with the image of Colonel Rob Langford, who appeared to her as a sort of angel, powerful and good and strong enough to take her the way she loved to be taken, and give her the babies her whole heart and soul told her that the future needed.

Mike would doze for a moment, then see Adam looming up, his insect eyes glaring. Then he would start awake and toss and turn, and nuzzle his gun close to his side.

Far overhead, in a sky that had cleared magnificently, strange stars hung over the town. The Three Thieves had been joined by Adam, and the first phase had been accomplished. They were counting the hours, now, the minutes, the seconds, the nanoseconds until they acted again, and Adam entered Conner, and became part of him, and either it worked or it did not.

It was an amazing time, truly, with six billion human lives and six billion gray lives hanging in the balance, in the quiet of a little town, in a dark corner of a small state, in a strange and faraway place called Earth.

LOST LAND

There was a child went forth every day,

And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,

And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day,

Or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.

—
WALT WHITMAN

“There Was a Child Went Forth”

CONNER AND PAULIE WOKE UP
late and had to rush to get to school. When Paulie saw Conner’s mixture of amaranth flakes, wheat germ, and unsweetened live-culture yogurt, he did not ask for an explanation, but gratefully ate the bacon and eggs that Dan, wearing only green boxer shorts and huge, fluffy slippers, provided to him. He was fascinated to watch Conner eat what looked like upchuck.

Conner had called in aliens, which was damn amazing. But now here he was gobbling down this fantastically geekish food. Nobody could eat like this and get away with it. Paulie had an obligation to uphold the reputation of Bell Attached as a cool school.

“So, what’s your lunch?” he asked Conner. They’d stop by his house to pick up his, which would be Cheetos, a ham sandwich, and a power bar.

“My lunch?” He went over to a little plastic greenhouse that was sitting on the kitchen counter. “Ah, excellent.
Sprouting
alfalfa, I’m happy to say. Some organic hummus, which is really pretty delicious if you’d like to share, buddy.”

Aliens or not, Paulie saw that the Connerbusters had to continue.

“Sounds great, but I’ve got my dumb old ham sandwich waiting for me at home.”

Dan listened to the boys with only half an ear. Conner had somehow managed to bring this off, it appeared. He was more socially resourceful, then, than he seemed. All to the good.

During his own wakeful and uneasy night, Dan had made a decision. Once he was tenured, he was going to do the unthinkable. He was going to circulate his resume, and he was going to concentrate exclusively on schools in large cities far from here. An untenured professor was an academic beggar.
But a man operating from tenure was more significant, even if he came from the lower ranks of colleges.

The reason he was going to do this was that he wanted to get his family as far from open spaces and dark, abandoned nights as he could. Preferably, he would raise his remarkable boy in a Manhattan tower, some place like that. Conner was vulnerable, and Dan’s instinct was that moving to a more populated area would protect him.

As for Katelyn, she was in the process of putting Marcie behind her. She dressed for her morning round of classes while listening to the males crashing around downstairs. She would not have believed Conner’s skill in recapturing Paulie. She’d been furious with him last night, but now she was proud of her son.

She hurried downstairs to be in time to give her men good-bye kisses—accepted with dear brusqueness by her son, with hopeful eyes by her husband.

She let him hug her. This family was her responsibility and her achievement. She was not going to let it go awry simply because he’d done something foolish and she felt humiliated. “Men are fools,” her mom had said, “expect the worst.” As, indeed, her dad had been, disappearing on them the way he had, effectively orphaning her and widowing Mom.

So far, her mother’s advice had never been wrong.

AT THE DAYS INN, LAUREN
Glass was awakened by a tapping on her door. She was shocked, then frightened. Then she remembered the code that Rob had given her, and recognized the pattern of taps. As if a motel room door would keep out Mike Wilkes or whatever goons he might send.

She still had no clothes but what she’d been wearing when Mike had attacked her, so she went into the bathroom and wrapped herself in a towel before cracking the door.

“What time is it?”

“Six-fifty. We’ve got to get started.”

“What are we doing?”

“Trying to figure out where the kid is, if he’s really here, or if this is some kind of a feint designed to throw Wilkes off, in which case we can concentrate on the issue of you. But we need to solve the child question first.”

His life before hers, that was clear enough. “The grays aren’t protecting this child?”

“We’re not in communication with the grays anymore. As you know.”

“I do indeed. And I have to tell you, I just don’t see them as really understanding how jeopardy functions in our society. They know how the brain works, but I don’t think they understand reality the same way we do. We need to assume that they’re going to be blindsided if this child is attacked.”

MIKE WILKES WAS RETURNING TO
the motel from the early run he took every day when he saw, from a distance of about a quarter of a mile, two people get into a USAF motor pool car in the parking lot and drive away. A man and a woman, but too far away to see their faces. He noted that they’d been parked directly in front of his room.

He decided that some sort of Air Force investigative unit must have been activated, no doubt because of what had happened last night, when Lauren Glass had appeared at Wright-Pat after he’d listed her as KIA.

He put in a cell phone call to Charles. “Hey there, sorry I’m so early. Yeah, it went fine—at least, the trip was fine. Look, there are a couple of officers in mufti sniffing around. I haven’t gotten a close look at them, but I have the feeling that they’re an arrest team. I need that handled, Charles.”

He hung up quickly and did what he now had to do with his cell phone, which was to take out the battery and throw the whole instrument in a ditch. You might as well paint yourself purple as carry one of these things. If you had a cell phone, turned on or turned off, they could track you from twenty-five thousand miles overhead with the WatchStar satellite.

He had probably a dozen cover identities. He didn’t even remember them all. Some of them were essentially perfect, provided to him by the Defense Intelligence Agency. They would stand up to the most rigorous scrutiny. Others, thrown together as needed over the years, were less reliable. But all except two of them were on file somewhere within the U.S. government.

So, at the moment, he had only the two to choose from. He decided to stay with the salesman he’d used last night. He found a gas station, went in, and asked the attendant for directions to the nearest rental car agency. He had about twelve hours to perform a whole complex sequence of actions, then the night to do the really challenging work.

The Three Thieves watched Conner leave home and be driven to school. So far, there had been no threat against him. They wanted to be closer to Conner even than the collective demanded. He was their creation, too, and his mind was like a garden of jewels. They wanted to partake of his rich feelings, but they dared not, he was too precious to disturb in any way.

Because, as a species, they were so close to death, the grays were particularly terrified of it. Their main body was alone in the immensity of space, no longer protected by a home planet and a parent star, their own having long since perished as victims to time. They traveled now in an engineered world on what many considered a hopeless quest, and their collective mind dreamed of oblivion, and worried about it, and clung.

The Thieves had spent much of the night hanging over the town, listening to the people they could hear through implants, trying to ascertain if any of them might seek to harm their treasure.

Last night, they had carried out the instructions of the collective and prepared Conner to receive the extraordinary implant that was going to be given to him.

The fragment of the collective the humans called Adam had been assigned to man some years ago, with the hope that Adam, through exposure to them, would evolve structures in his mind that would enable him to do something that no gray had ever done before—indeed, that was only an idea, a theory, perhaps a hope and maybe a forlorn one. They wanted him to meld into the boy, in effect, to implant his entire being into Conner and become part of him.

Now Adam lay waiting in an empty barn, on the floor of a disused horse stall. Later, when darkness fell, he would complete his mission. Death was in this for him, but a very strange sort of death. It would not be the oblivion that was at the center of the long, complicated drama that obsessed the collective, but rather the surrender of self in a sort of living death. Once his thoughts and knowledge became part of Conner, he believed that he would disappear entirely.

He listened to the dripping of the old barn and the rustle of beetles in the hay, and dreamed formless, uneasy dreams.

The Three Thieves were fascinated and horrified by what Adam was being called upon to do. Like every gray, in the privacy of the self, they regarded it with horror. Superficially, though, they were grateful both that he was trying and that they didn’t have to.

The grays in the scout group had various human genes, this and that, whatever they’d been able to use, and were much healthier than the ones in the main body. The Three Thieves, for example, had human blood, vivid with life, not the dank artificial goo that sustained most of those in the main body. They had taken this blood and adapted their bodies to it, and
used it now as their own. It made them quicker, smarter, and also, they thought, more able to understand man.

The Three Thieves watched Conner from above as he moved about in his school. They wanted to get closer, but could not go into a crowd and remain invisible. They could lock their movements to no more than two or three pairs of eyes. So they could not enter his school, they could only watch. This was why grays worked at night, when people were alone.

CONNER HAD SLEPT A RESTLESS,
frightened night, and now sat in history class bored senseless because he had realized that his teacher did not understand the events in the Napoleonic Wars that he was teaching. The French loss of the Battle of Borodino in 1812 had led inevitably to the political structure of modern Europe, and discussing the way that had happened would have been interesting. Instead, he had to listen to stupefying trivia about General Kutuzov’s bad feet and Napoleon’s good lunch.

His chest hurt. He remembered some kind of fire, but he had not been burned. He knew he had seen the grays, but it all now seemed curiously unreal, like it had happened to somebody else, or not happened at all.