The Grays (35 page)

In a moment, he began to go up through his body. In another moment, he was seeing through his eyes again.

The wind blew, the pines moaned, snow flew. He had been taken deep into Lost Land, so deep that there was nothing around them but pines. No lights, no houses, just the pale glow of the snow.

We’re the Three Thieves but we didn’t steal you
.

Yes we did
.

Shut up!

“Okay . . . I hear you.”

Nobody moved.

He was well aware of the mystery he was facing. Remarkable, indeed. Then he saw movement in the woods, and a fourth gray appeared. He was not squat and kludgy like these three. He strode on long legs and his head was more in proportion. Coming through the snow, he was as graceful as a dancer.

He stopped behind the three and raised a long, thin arm, sort of like an Indian chief or something. Conner noted: no muscles. Therefore the skin itself must contain millions of micromuscles.

He took a step toward him. Conner took a step back. He came closer.

Conner yelled as loud as he could: “Get away! Get away from me!” Then he clapped his hands over his mouth, actually surprised at himself. But there was more than one Conner in here, and the other one, the little child alone in the woods, was still really, really scared and did not care about the fact that this was contact, it was historical and damn awesome that it was
him
doing it or any of that.

The other Conner took over and ran, he just ran, he didn’t care where,
deeper into Lost Land, past the great, frowning trees, into the tangled places where nobody ever went.

The more he ran, the more the panicked Conner replaced the curious Conner, and the wilder and more frantic his flight became.

Soon he began to feel his feet burning. He was getting cold. When he wasn’t around the grays, he needed more than just pajamas out in this blizzard. Something they did had been keeping him warm. Curious Conner thought,
Heat without radiance or forced air or anything. I wonder how they do that?

And he slowed down a little. Now his breath was coming out in huge puffs and his feet were really burning and it was meat-locker cold.

Sobbing like an infant, he stumbled to a halt. He forced the tears down, and finally stood trembling from the cold, rubbing his shoulders.

The wind roared in the trees, and a big gust stung him head to toe with snow. Cold this cold felt just like being burned and he screamed into its howl, but his loudest cry was so small against it that he could hardly hear it himself.

This was idiotic. He was here to think, not cry like some idiot. So okay, he turned around and around, trying to get his bearings.

No bearings.

He hopped from foot to foot to keep the agony down. But it didn’t work, he was barefoot in the snow in the middle of a blizzard and wearing cotton pajamas. He was quite familiar with the dangers of hypothermia. If he’d known the temperature, he could probably have calculated to the second just how long before he lost so much reason that he could no longer hope to survive.

He had never thought much about dying before, but he thought about it now because it appeared that it was going to happen to him. He was already getting numb and that was a really bad sign, it was a sign of death coming, he knew that. The next step was the final sleep.

“Dad! Mom! Hey, I’m lost out here! Hey, HEY!”

Ridiculous, meaningless effort.

“Grays! Hey, I’m here! I’m willing to negotiate! HEY!”

Nothing.

How could such a smart kid turn into such a moron? He’d just blown contact, and probably frozen himself to death in the process.

When he tried to walk, his legs wouldn’t move. Muscle spasm due to advancing hypothermia.

He did not want to die before he’d kissed a girl or had a paper published, or even driven a damn car.

His pajamas snapped in the wind, his face got more and more caked in frost, and he prayed his usual prayer, “Any God who happens to be real, this is Conner Callaghan and I could use some help. Thank you! Uh,
really
use it!”

The world around him seemed to grow quiet. He looked down at his right hand. He could see the snow hitting it and bouncing off, but he could no longer feel anything. But he did feel something really funny, a sort of jittering in his heels. It spread through his feet, and he noticed it in his hands, too. Then it went up his arms and legs, bringing with it wonderful warmth like a really good blanket would if he was cold and Mom came in and tucked him in.

Then a face popped out from behind a tree, huge eyes, tiny mouth communicating surprise, fear, concern all at once.
Boy
, Conner thought,
do they ever look like bugs
.

Oh, no
.

“I won’t run, relax. As long as you keep me warm, consider us friends.”

What’s he saying?

I have no idea
.

Striding out of the snow on his long, thin legs, came the tall gray. As he came closer, Conner could see that his body shimmered with light, as if he was swathed in flickering, ever-changing rainbows. His eyes gleamed with bright reflections of the trees around them even though it was night, almost as if they somehow enhanced light. Then he saw this beautiful figure in the creature’s eyes, a person blazing with light of a thousand different colors.

He looked around him, trying to see this person. Then he moved his hand, and saw that it was him. He looked down at his own arm, and the glow wasn’t there. Only in the eyes of the gray. He knew about auras, that they were a faint electrical field emitted by the nervous system. The gray’s eyes were somehow amplifying its visibility.

As the tall gray came closer, the three short, squat ones buzzed nervously around him.

Okay,” Conner said, “my name is Conner Callaghan and I’m going to do this. I hope.”

Talk to us in your head. Form the words in your mind, but don’t speak them aloud. We will be more easily able to hear you, then
.

He sounded actually sort of okay. An ultra-precise voice that appeared right in the center of your head, as if you were wearing earphones. He felt for that earbud, but it was gone. “How are you doing that?”

I can’t hear you!

“WHAT—no. Uh . . .”
How do you do this?

I don’t know. You’re the only person we’ve ever managed it with. With the others, we have to use pictures. They can’t hear us talking
.

He was quite close now, so close that Conner could see that he had faint, white hair on his head and a wrinkled face.

I am old. We are all old
.

Where are you from?

Endless time. We are so old we’ve lost our history
.

What is your mission?

You are my mission
.

What does that mean?

There was no response . . . except there was. He hung his head.

Are you . . . crying?

I think so
.

Why?

He shook his head, then held out his hands. They were long and the fingers were like snakes tipped with claws. Slowly, his own hands shaking, Conner reached out to him. They stayed like that, their fingers an inch apart, both of them trembling.

The three others came closer. They hovered around the taller one, bouncing slightly in the air when a gust of wind came.

The tall one touched Conner’s cheek with the softest finger he thought you could ever feel. It did not just touch you, it made vibrating electric contact with your skin.

Little colt, not ten minutes ago, my touch would have made you run again. But you do not run
.

Am I going to get to go home?

Home . . .

You’re crying now
.

The gray lay down in the snow. The three others hovered over him. Something then happened that was completely beyond comprehension to Conner. They had a black object that turned out to be a jar, which they opened, screwing the top off in a flash. Out of it they drew three gleaming butcher knives.

As Conner watched in stunned astonishment, they cut open the tall gray like Dad gutting a fish. The knives made a ripping sound.

He struggled. They were killing him.

“Stop it,” Conner shouted.
“Stop it!”

One of them turned toward him, brandishing his knife, and Conner backed away, holding out his hands, trying to convey that he would not interfere.

They opened the gray from his featureless groin to the top of his head, splitting his whole body in half. Inside was a swirling mass of lights in a million, million colors, and Conner recognized them. They looked like an immense star field imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. They looked like the whole universe, somehow contained inside the body of this gray.

They lifted it out, and it wobbled in the air between them, the universe in the shape of a gray, snow swirling around it, flakes blowing into it and away into the vastness of the stars.

There was humming, voices that sounded both innocent and wise, and the notes were so beautiful that Conner gasped aloud, and wanted to cry because this was the richest, the most lovely sound he had ever heard. It was a sound with a scent, almost, as if the flowers of heaven had bloomed.

THE LITTLE GROUP OF GRAYS
with Conner were by no means the only ones who were witness to what was happening. On the contrary, there was vast witness in the huge device that carried the main body toward Earth. The gigantic sphere was now two light years away and had been decelerating almost since 1947, when it had turned in the direction of Earth. Large though it was, with its thousand-mile diameter, it was still far too small to be detected by earthly telescopes. In fact, it probably wouldn’t be noticed until it was actually in orbit around the planet, because its surface was black, designed to absorb any and all light energy that might reach it.

Inside, a tiny sun glared in a strangely constricted sky. In fact, this was a miniature star just six hundred feet across, built by the grays and capable of shining steadily for a million years, at which time it would explode and instantly vaporize the whole sphere. If they hadn’t made it long before then, it wouldn’t matter anyway. There would be nothing left in the sphere but dust.

Its inner surface was landscaped to an exact replica of the grays’ desert home, with cities made of white houses, domed and looking like adobe. A shield moved around the central sun, bringing fifty hours of darkness every
fifty hours to each part of the sphere, the same amount of day and night that the grays had known at home.

As they needed nothing and ate nothing, the grays had no economic life. They had freed themselves from sexual reproduction an epoch ago, then discovered that pleasure is founded in desire, and without reproductive needs, desire fades.

They would have gone collectively mad in this trapped chamber, had they not been able to venture with the earthly triads into the mind of man.

They watched now, sitting in their houses, their heads bowed in concentration, as Adam gave his whole being, all of his experience, all of his knowledge, all that he was, to Conner.

An outline of the child’s body stretched across their strange sky, a body filled with stars, and with it came the wind and the night and the snow.

Slowly, as they listened and felt, one of them and then another, then more and more, raised his head and came to his feet. The tall, gracile ones, the short, squat ones, all of them in their unimaginable billions, raised their heads.

Then they ascended from their white cities, rose into the air, and began to fly like so many soaring eagles, and it became clearer what was happening. These creatures, who could neither laugh nor smile, were doing the only thing they could to express an emotion they had not known in many a long age: they were dancing with happiness.

THE STRANGE FIGURE WENT ROUND
and round Conner, its head getting smaller, its legs and arms thicker, its body like a fluid of stars, taking on a different shape, the shape of a human being, and getting brighter, too.

Each snowflake that touched the thing now went up in a tiny puff of steam, and it was beautiful, the smoking snow and the brightness, and the humming of the thing as if the wind itself had learned to sing.

Conner began to quake down inside his stomach and up his spine and everywhere, even in his toes and in his eyes, and he realized that the thing was vibrating, too.

“Momma . . .”

The thing came closer to him.

“MOMMA!”

Then the humming was all around him, it was in him and his chest was vibrating with it, and he felt as if he had risen off the ground or gotten very large, and for an instant the snowflakes that had looked like stars around
the thing were around him, and were, instead, a whole tremendous universe of stars.

Then it was dark again and Conner had fallen down in the snow. He could not rise. He was completely weak, and when he closed his eyes, he saw the universe in his head, and he saw it, too, when he looked at his palms, in his hands, stars swirling inside his skin.