The Grays (32 page)

But this was one time that it was necessary. They began to work on the president’s mind, to touch it with images of the suffering the scalar weapon could cause.

As the collective mind of the grays concentrated on the president’s decision, they failed to address the building crisis in Wilton, or to see just how serious it was, and Conner’s death began to come closer and closer yet, as the fatal hours passed.

ROB LANGFORD PUT DOWN THE
phone. “We’ve got orders,” he said to Lauren. “First, we are to assume that Colonel Wilkes is in the area, second that he is definitely here to kill this child. We are to protect the child at all costs, and deal with Wilkes in whatever way is required.”

“What does that mean?”

“Find him, kill him.”

“Wait a minute on that. Are these orders in writing?”

“No, they are not.”

“I don’t think murder is such a hot idea. I mean, if you don’t have a written order that is definitely legal, that is way out of line.”

“Let me deal with Wilkes. You concentrate on the kid. That’s the way it ought to be, anyway. What we are going to do is uniform up—or rather, I am—and pay an official visit. We will seek cooperation from the parents.”

“How far along is Mike? Do we know?”

“We do not.”

“What if these folks don’t like the Air Force?”

“Our objective is simple. It is to determine if there is an extremely smart child living on Oak Road. If not, then we extend our search to the local schools. Assuming we identify the child, we provide information to the parents and put them under surveillance protection. We must not to do anything that might cause these people to resist the approach of the grays to the child.”

They went to the traveling officer’s quarters where Rob had a suite. She remained in his small living room while he changed.

Rob was an attractive guy, and she wanted, she was finding, to do more than sample him the way she had been doing with men since she’d started
this job. In fact, she could get serious with this guy. In fact, she thought he was the best man she had ever met.

He was also the most dedicated to his mission and the most businesslike.

They drove off the base and through fourteen miles of slowly worsening weather, passing through the town and going onto the Bell campus. On the way, they phoned all four Oak Road houses. They got three answering machines and a non-answer. So everybody was where they were supposed to be, which was working at their various occupations on campus or attending school.

“We’ll try the physics guy first. His discipline fits best, I think.”

“The baby’s not our target.”

“No. It could be one of the two teenagers, the Keltons, unless Adam was lying to you. The other three children seem too young.”

“He was lying.”

“Maybe Oak Road doesn’t even figure in it, then. Maybe the whole thing was a feint in anticipation of some discovery they knew Wilkes was about to make. They directed his—and our—attention to Oak Road because it doesn’t matter.”

She felt a shiver of unease the moment the words were out of his mouth. “My sense of it is that Oak Road is very damned important.”

“They don’t make mistakes.”

“Adam made one. He killed my father.”

“That’s true enough.”

“So they do.”

“What do you think they’ll do if they lose the child?”

She thought about it. “I get a feeling of tremendous rage.”

“Are you in touch with them now?”

“I’m not sure. I think I might be.” She shuddered. “Sometimes I feel sort of as if I am. As if I’m part of a great sorrow. I think that’s the heart of the grays, the way I perceive their collective being.”

“That’s chilling.”

He turned the car into a parking lot, beyond which was a neat white sign with black lettering,
SCIENCE HALL
.

It was a towered old brick pile, Bell’s science center. The enormous windows were designed to gather light, from back in the days before electricity had come to rural Kentucky.

According to a schedule affixed to his door, Dr. Jeffers had been teaching
until five minutes ago, so they waited in his office. He had no secretary and the door wasn’t locked. Inside, it was surprisingly uncluttered for an academic’s lair.

“Uh oh,” Rob said, picking up a book from the professor’s desk.

“We have to expect them to be in a tizzy about UFOs. Look what just happened.”

“Well, we have to stay far from that topic.”

Ten minutes passed. Rob remained composed but Lauren did not wait well, and she got progressively more and more nervous. How could he be so collected? He was like too many military people, in a certain deep way resigned to fate, a fault that, in her opinion, came from living by orders.

“Maybe we should try the school,” she said, somehow keeping herself from screaming it at him.

At that moment a short, quick man came through the door. His eyes fixed on Rob’s blues. “Hello?”

Rob went to his feet. Smiled. Extended his hand. “Good afternoon, Dr. Jeffers, I’m Colonel Langford.”

“The UFO!”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re here about the UFO, yes?”

Rob shook his head. “I’m not aware . . .”

“We saw a UFO. There’s videotape. Our whole neighborhood saw it. There was an Air Force jet chasing it.”

“Uh, I don’t think we do that.”

Rob was really very impressive at this.

“We’re here to talk about gifted students.”

“Gifted students?”

“There’s a new program, and we’re informing science departments all over the country. Seeing as you’re head of the physics department here at Bell, and we’ve got Bell on our list, we decided to come on over.”

“On your list?”

“We’re from Alfred,” Lauren said. “I’m in procurement. He’s—”

“Traffic-control supervisor. I make sure our trainees don’t run into each other. We’ve volunteered for this mission, actually.”

“What mission is it? I’m not understanding.”

“The Air Force is looking for a few very gifted, very extraordinary students. Unusual. Freaks, even. That smart.”

“This is Bell College, nobody here is smart. I’m not even particularly smart. In fact, I’m not smart at all, and certainly my students aren’t. They’re a bunch of idiots, actually.”

“Ah. We always thought—”

“A beautiful campus does not mean smart. It only means lots of red brick and white columns.”

“What about that other school?” Rob asked. “The professors’ kids?”

He leaned back in his desk chair, stared at the ceiling. “Actually, my neighbors have a sort of monster. Aggressive, peculiar, frenetically loquacious for age eleven. Builds remarkably detailed model trains.”

This didn’t sound promising to Lauren, but Rob said, “Should we interview him? It could mean an appointment to the Air Force Academy.”

“Somehow I don’t see Conner in a uniform. He’s . . . anarchic. I really find him quite disturbing, but now that you mention it, he is pretty much of a genius.”

Now it sounded promising. “Can we meet him?” Lauren asked.

“His father’s over in the psych building. Daniel Callaghan. Or he could be off fucking some administrator. Apparently he does a bit of that.”

What a bitter man this was. Bitter, mean little man. “So he’s a monster and his father’s a womanizer. Has he got a mother, or has she killed herself?”

Rob shot her a frown, but she couldn’t help it. This was a very nasty little man, and she wanted him to know it.

“Surprisingly not. Actually, I’m being mean, which I suppose what’s got your back up. I am rather frustrated, I’m afraid.” He held up the UFO book. “I believe in this, which has demoted me from CalTech through the middle Ivies to Bell. I thought you were here about our astonishing, wonderful UFO. I thought everything was about to change. Instead, you’re here for some totally conventional and annoying reason. The Callaghans would never let that precious child of theirs anywhere near the military. At least, I hope not. I suppose I was trying to scare you off, to preserve them from a temptation I don’t actually trust them to resist. Truth be told, he’s the most marvelous human being I have ever encountered, and I bless the day we happened by sheerest chance to move next door.”

She knew for certain, then, that they had found the child of the grays. She thought of all the generations of effort that must have gone into his creation, of the struggles in the night, the long and careful thought of those strange, exquisite minds, and all the people who had suffered their bruising attentions, all for this person with the euphonious name of Conner Callaghan.

She knew, also, that she had more than a little of Adam still within her, whether due to some arcane connection devised by the grays or from her own beating heart, but she felt at that moment that, without question, she would give her life to save him.

Rob had flushed and grown silent. In his silence, he had taken the book from Professor Jeffers.
“UFOs and the National Security State,”
he said. “What does this mean?”

“Essentially that another academic has been marginalized for promoting folklore as fact. However, it’s actually an expertly written and devastating indictment. By careful and scholarly inches, it proves without question that the government is engaged in a cover-up of the UFO phenomenon. So what would you do with him, Air Force people, shoot him, get him fired, trump up some charges against him?”

How extraordinary to sit here and see this man suffering like this for a truth he believed in—and to know that he was right, to know it better than he did, and to still lie to him, and curse his innocent soul and condemn it with your lie.

“Dr. Jeffers,” Rob said, “we’d like to thank you for your time and help. We’ll contact this family in due time. Who knows, perhaps Conner Callaghan will solve the mystery for us.” He handed back the book. “I’ve always thought that the Air Force hid a lot of things that it shouldn’t. Maybe about this. But it’s not my lookout, unfortunately.”

He gave the wild-haired professor a grin that made his face explode into gleaming, twinkling boyishness.

On the walk to the parking lot, the snow was more persistent.

“That was pitiful,” Rob said.

“Why don’t we just tell them?”

“You don’t know? Even yet?”

“Sure I know. You tell people that something is going to invade not only their space but their actual, personal bodies, they are going to panic. I’m panicked, just thinking about it. If there was any viable alternative, I’d take it.”

“I think that’s how we all feel. But our next step is to meet this family. Because if we found this kid, we can be sure that Mike has found him, too.”

“Maybe the grays will attack him.”

“If he showed up with a gun they’d probably abduct him and barbecue his damned brain. But what if he’s more indirect? They have their limits, Lauren, as you must know.”

“Look, I don’t know how to protect him, either, okay! And it’s winter, it’s
snowing, and it’s starting to get dark, so one of us had better come up with an idea. How about it, boss?”

“I’m not the boss. You’re the one closest to the grays. You’re the boss.”

“Fine. I say we go out to Oak Road. Take it from there.”

First they returned to Alfred. Rob threaded his way around to the parking lot closest to his billet and went up to change again. After Jeffers’s reaction, he no longer felt that the uniform was such a good idea.

She sat in the car and listened to the radio, which told the story of the onrushing storm.

“HI, CHRIS,” KATELYN SAID. SHE
was quite surprised to see him. The Jefferses usually called before they came over. As he entered the foyer, snow swirled behind him and he brushed off his coat. He looked extremely solemn, she noticed. “Are you okay?”

“Where’s Conner?”

“Downstairs designing a train wreck. He had an unpleasant day, apparently. Why do you ask?”

“We need to talk. Where’s Dan?”

“Dan,” Katelyn called, “Chris is here.”

“Yo. Hey there,” he said coming in from the kitchen. “Whassup?” Then he saw Chris’s face. “What’s wrong?”

They went into the family room together. The TV was blasting. Katelyn turned it off.

“I got the classic visit from the Air Force today.”

What was he talking about? “What visit?”

“You’re not conversant in the UFO literature, of course. You’ve never read a word of anything I’ve given you.”

“That would be correct,” Dan said.

“I got a visit from the Air Force.” He looked from one of them to the other.

Katelyn had no idea what to say. She was at a complete loss.

“All right, let me background you. There is this legend that when somebody has a serious sighting or gets video or something like that, the Air Force secretly investigates. Do you follow that?”