Dreamcatcher (30 page)

“They just arrived. Twelve cartons of them, and more on the w—”

“Good. We want Polaroids of the Ripley. We need mucho documentation. Exhibit A, Exhibit B, so on and so forth. Got it?”

“Yes.”

“And none of our . . . our guests get away, right?”

“Absolutely not.” Perlmutter was shocked by the idea, and looked it.

Kurtz's lips stretched. The thin smile grew and once more became the shark's grin. Those empty eyes looked through Perlmutter—looked all the way to the center of the earth, for all Perlmutter knew. He found himself wondering if anyone would leave Blue Base when this was over. Except Kurtz, that was.

“Carry on, Citizen Perlmutter. In the name of the government, I order you to carry on.”

Archie Perlmutter watched Kurtz continue on toward the bus, where Underhill—a squat jug of a man—was climbing off. Never in his life had he been so utterly delighted to see a man's back.

2

“Hello, boss,” Underhill said. Like the rest, he wore a plain green coverall, but like Kurtz, he also wore a sidearm. Sitting in the bus were roughly two dozen men, most of them just finishing an early lunch.

“What have they got there, buck?” Kurtz asked. At six-foot-six he towered above Underhill, but Underhill probably outweighed him by seventy pounds.

“Burger King. We drove through. I didn't think the bus would fit, but Yoder said it would, and he was right. Want a Whopper? They're probably a little on the cold side by now, but there must be a microwave in there someplace.” Underhill nodded toward the store.

“I'll pass. Cholesterol's not so good these days.”

“Groin okay?” Six years before, Kurtz had suffered a serious groin-pull while playing racquetball. This had indirectly led to their only disagreement. Not a serious one, Owen Underhill judged, but with Kurtz, it was hard to tell. Behind the man's patented game-face, thoughts came and went at near light-speed, agendas were constantly being rewritten, and emotions were turning on a dime. There were people—quite a few of
them, actually—who thought Kurtz was crazy. Owen Underhill didn't know if he was or not, but he knew you wanted to be careful around this one. Very.

“As the Irish might put it,” Kurtz said, “me groin's foine.” He reached between his legs, gave his balls a burlesque yank, and favored Owen with that teeth-baring grin.

“Good.”

“And you? Been okay?”

“Me groin's foine,” Owen said, and Kurtz laughed.

Now coming up the road, rolling slowly and carefully but having an easier time than the bus, was a brand-new Lincoln Navigator with three orange-clad hunters inside, hefty boys all three, gawking at the helicopters and the double-timing soldiers in their green coveralls. Gawking at the guns, mostly. Vietnam comes to northern Maine, praise God. Soon they would join the others in the Holding Area.

Half a dozen men approached as the Navigator pulled up behind the bus, with its stickers reading
BLUE DEVIL PRIDE
and
THIS VEHICLE STOPS AT ALL RR CROSSINGS.
Three lawyers or bankers with their own cholesterol problems and fat stock portfolios, lawyers or bankers pretending to be good old boys, under the impression (of which they would soon be disabused) that they were still in an America at peace. Soon they would be in the barn (or the corral, if they craved fresh air), where their Visa cards would not be honored. They would be allowed to keep their cell phones. They wouldn't work this far up in the willywags, but hitting
REDIAL
might keep them amused.

“You plugged in tight?” Kurtz asked.

“I think so, yes.”

“Still a quick study?”

Owen shrugged.

“How many people in the Blue Zone altogether, Owen?”

“We estimate eight hundred. No more than a hundred in Zones Prime A and Prime B.”

That was good, assuming no one slipped through. In terms of possible contamination, a few slips wouldn't matter—the news, at least so far, was good on that score. In terms of information management, however, it would not be good at all. It was hard to ride a phooka horse these days. Too many people with videocams. Too many TV station helicopters. Too many watching eyes.

Kurtz said, “Come inside the store. They're setting me up a 'Bago, but it's not here yet.”

“Un momento,”
Underhill said, and dashed up the steps of the bus. When he came back down, he had a grease-spotted Burger King sack in his hand and a tape recorder over his shoulder on a strap.

Kurtz nodded toward the bag. “That stuff'll kill you.”

“We're starring in
The War of the Worlds
and you're worried about high cholesterol?”

Behind them, one of the newly arrived mighty hunters was saying he wanted to call his lawyer, which probably meant he was a banker. Kurtz led Underhill into the store. Above them, the flashlights were back, running their glow over the bottoms of
the clouds, jumping and dancing like animated characters in a Disney cartoon.

3

Old Man Gosselin's office smelled of salami, cigars, beer, Musterole, and sulfur—either farts or boiled eggs, Kurtz reckoned. Maybe both. There was also a smell, faint but discernible, of ethyl alcohol. The smell of
them.
It was everywhere up here now. Another man might have been tempted to ascribe that smell to a combination of nerves and too much imagination, but Kurtz had never been overburdened with either. In any case, he did not believe the hundred or so square miles of forestland surrounding Gosselin's Country Market had much future as a viable ecosystem. Sometimes you just had to sand a piece of furniture down to the bare wood and start again.

Kurtz sat behind the desk and opened one of the drawers. A cardboard box with
CHEM/U.S
./10
UNITS
stamped on it lay within. Good for Perlmutter. Kurtz took it out and opened it. Inside were a number of small plastic masks, the transparent sort that fitted over the mouth and nose. He tossed one to Underhill and then put one on himself, quickly adjusting the elastic straps.

“Are these necessary?” Owen asked.

“We don't know. And don't feel privileged; in another hour, everyone is going to be wearing them. Except for the John Q's in the Holding Area, that is.”

Underhill donned his mask and adjusted the straps
without further comment. Kurtz sat behind the desk with his head leaning back against the latest piece of OSHA paperwork (post it or die) taped to the wall behind him.

“Do they work?” Underhill's voice was hardly muffled at all. The clear plastic did not fog with his breathing. It seemed to have no pores or filters, but he found he could breathe easily enough.

“They work on Ebola, they work on anthrax, they work on the new super-cholera. Do they work on Ripley? Probably. If not, we're fucked, soldier. In fact, we may be fucked already. But the clock is running and the game is on. Should I hear the tape you've doubtless got in that thing over your shoulder?”

“There's no need for you to hear all of it, but you ought to taste, I think.”

Kurtz nodded, made a spinning motion in the air with his forefinger (like an ump signalling a home run, Owen thought), and leaned back further in Gosselin's chair.

Underhill unslung the tape recorder, set it on the desk facing Kurtz, and pushed
PLAY
. A toneless robot voice said: “NSA radio intercept. Multiband. 62914A44. This material is classified top secret. Time of intercept 0627, November fourteen, two-zero-zero-one. Intercept recording begins after the tone. If you are not rated Security Clearance One, please press
STOP
now.”

“Please,” Kurtz said, nodding. “Good. That'd stop most unauthorized personnel, don't you think?”

There was a pause, a two-second beep, then a young
woman's voice said: “One. Two. Three. Please don't hurt us.
Ne nous blessez pas.
” A two-second silence, and then a young man's voice said: “Five. Seven. Eleven. We are helpless.
Nous sommes sans défense.
Please don't hurt us, we are helpless.
Ne nous faites
—”

“By God, it's like a Berlitz language lesson from the Great Beyond,” Kurtz said.

“Recognize the voices?” Underhill asked.

Kurtz shook his head and put a finger to his lips.

The next voice was Bill Clinton's. “Thirteen. Seventeen. Nineteen.” In Clinton's Arkansas accent, the last one came out
Nahnteen.
“There is no infection here.
Il n'y a pas d'infection ici.
” Another two-second pause, and then Tom Brokaw spoke from the tape recorder. “Twenty-three. Twenty-nine. We are dying.
On se meurt, on crève.
We are dying.”

Underhill pushed
STOP
. “In case you wondered, the first voice is Sarah Jessica Parker, an actress. The second is Brad Pitt.”

“Who's he?”

“An actor.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Each pause is followed by another voice. All the voices are or would be recognizable to large segments of the people in this area. There's Alfred Hitchcock, Paul Harvey, Garth Brooks, Tim Sample—he's a Maine-style humorist, very popular—and hundreds of others, some of which we haven't identified.”

“
Hundreds
of others? How long did this intercept last?”

“Strictly speaking, it's not an intercept at all but a
clear-band transmission which we have been jamming since 0800. Which means a bunch of it got out, but we doubt if anyone who picked it up will have understood much of it. And if they do—” Underhill gave a little
What can you do
shrug. “It's still going on. The voices appear to be real. The few voiceprint comparisons that were run are identical. Whatever else they are, these guys could put Rich Little out of business.”

The
whup-whup-whup
of the helicopters came clearly through the walls. Kurtz could feel it as well as hear it. Through the boards, through the OSHA poster, and from there into the gray meat that was mostly water, telling him to come on come on come on, hurry up hurry up hurry up. His blood responded to it, but he sat quietly, looking at Owen Underhill. Thinking about Owen Underhill. Make haste slowly; that was a useful saying. Especially when dealing with folks like Owen. How's your groin, indeed.

You fucked with me once, buck,
Kurtz thought.
Maybe didn't cross my line, but by God, you scuffed at it, didn't you? Yes, I think so. And I think you'll bear watching.

“Same four messages over and over,” Underhill said, and ticked them off on the fingers of his left hand. “Don't hurt us. We're helpless. There's no infection here. The last one—”

“No infection,” Kurtz mused. “Huh. They've got their nerve, don't they?”

He had seen pictures of the reddish-gold fuzz growing on all the trees around Blue Boy. And on people. Corpses, mostly, at least so far. The techs had named it Ripley fungus, after the tough broad
Sigourney Weaver had played in those space movies. Most of them were too young to remember the other Ripley, who had done the “Believe It or Not” feature in the newspapers. “Believe It or Not” was pretty much gone, now; too freaky for the politically correct twenty-first century. But it fit this situation, Kurtz thought. Oh yes, like a glove. Made old Mr. Ripley's Siamese twins and two-headed cows look positively normal by comparison.

“The last one is
We're dying,
” Underhill said. “That one's interesting because of the two different French versions accompanying the English. The first is straightforward. The second—
on crève
—is slangy. We might say ‘Our goose is cooked.' ” He looked directly at Kurtz, who wished Perlmutter were here to see that yes, it
could
be done. “
Are
they cooked? I mean, assuming we don't help them along?”

“Why French, Owen?”

Underhill shrugged. “It's still the other language up here.”

“Ah. And the prime numbers? Just to show us we're dealing with intelligent beings? As if any other kind could travel here from another star system, or dimension, or wherever it is they come from?”

“I guess so. What about the flashlights, boss?”

“Most are now down in the woods. They disintegrate fairly rapidly, once they run out of juice. The ones we've been able to retrieve look like soup cans with the labels stripped off. Considering their size, they put on a hell of a show, don't they? Scared the living hell out of the locals.”

When the flashlights disintegrated, they left patches of the fungus or ergot or whatever the hell it was behind. The same seemed true of the aliens themselves. The ones that were left were just up there standing around their ship like commuters standing around a broken-down bus, bawling that they weren't infectious,
il n'y a pas d'infection ici,
praise the Lord and pass the biscuits. And once the stuff was on you, you were most likely—what had Owen said? A cooked goose. They didn't know that for sure, of course, it was early yet, but they had to make the assumption.

“How many ETs still up there?” Owen asked.

“Maybe a hundred.”

“How much don't we know? Does anybody have any idea?”

Kurtz waved this aside. He was not a knower; knowing was someone else's department, and none of those guys had been invited to this particular pre-Thanksgiving party.

“The survivors,” Underhill persisted. “Are they crew?”

“Don't know, but probably not. Too many for crew; not enough to be colonists; nowhere
near
enough to be shock-troops.”

“What else is going on up here, boss?
Something
is.”

“Pretty sure of that, are you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Underhill shrugged. “Intuition?”

“It's not intuition,” Kurtz said, almost gently. “It's telepathy.”