The Grays (16 page)

Still, he had built a life for them at Bell. Conner’s life was here. Katelyn was having a successful career in the sociology department.
She
was tenured, popular with students, had crowded classes. She was pulling down seventy grand to his forty-eight-five, also. It would not be fair for his failure to uproot her.

Tomorrow at ten sharp, he would have his final tenure review with Marcie.
Of course, it wasn’t the official word, that came from the tenure committee next week. But by the end of the meeting tomorrow, he’d know.

He drove past Marcie’s house, noted that all the blinds were down. A signal? An omen? He drove on, circling blocks—but not Marcie’s of course, God forbid—and forcing back these ridiculous, if thankfully silent, tears.

When he arrived home, he hoped to avoid Conner.

“I was right,” his son said as he got out of the car. “I was exactly right.”

“Conner, you were wrong. It was a cyst.”

“Where is it?”

“Oh, brother. Son, it’s in the garbage at the health center.”

“Dad, do you realize what that is? It’s an alien artifact! It’s important, there’s even a Web site about them. A lot of Web sites.”

Dan tried to get past his son and into the house.

“Dad, it’s important! You’re involved in a close-encounter situation and—”

“SHUT UP!” He ran across the garage. “Will you just SHUT UP!”

Katelyn appeared. “What’s the matter with you? What’s going on out here?”

“Katelyn—oh, God. Katelyn, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Conner. Please forgive me, both of you.” He tried to smile. Failed. Shook his head. “Look, Conner, you’re always asking for space. I need some space right now. I need some, okay?”

“Dad, are you crying?”

“It’s a mild allergy to the anesthesia.”

“Dad’s just had an operation, Conner. We need to back off.”

“But Mom, he’s letting them throw away an implant!”

“Goddamnit, there’s no such thing! Conner, for a supposed genius, you can be an amazing idiot. A Web site on
alien implants
is your source of information? You urgently need to learn some discrimination, son. You can do calculus backward and recite Wittgenstein, and yet you come up with this garbage.”

“Be careful, Dad. It was Wittgenstein who said, ‘Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.’ ”

Dan knew not to pursue it. No matter how correct he might be, in a sentence or two more, Conner would win the argument. To avoid that, Dan went inside, took a relatively good Barolo out of the wine rack, opened it and grabbed a glass, and headed for the family room. Golf, decent wine, and deep, deep sleep were what he needed.

He’d gone over the top, of course. The boy was terribly sensitive, of course. Well, he’d apologize later. Conner got under your skin. He really did have a skill at that.

He poured some wine, drank it . . . and felt his ear. The damned thing had moved again. It had returned to its original site, under the stitch.

He considered screaming. But no, that would be rude. Instead, he poured himself another full glass and drank it down.

THE HANGED MAN

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! For the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

—
MATTHEW ARNOLD

“Dover Beach”

MIKE WILKES WATCHED AS, ONE
by one, the members of the Trust filed slowly through a large white device that was set into the doorway to the conference room on the second floor of his Georgetown home.

As each trustee stood waiting in what was essentially a magnetic-resonance-imaging system reconfigured and retuned to detect very small metallic objects, Mike watched a whole-body image come into focus on a flat-panel display located beside the entrance.

“Come in, Charles,” he said to their chairman, Charles Gunn.

“I’m wiped every morning at home,” Charles said. “I had one pulled out of my damn neck last week.”

“Uh-oh, hold it, Richard.” The display showed a bright spot deep in the brain of Richard Forbes, the Trust’s security chief. “They got one in your damn temporal lobe, buddy.”

“Is it deep?”

“Oh, yeah. You’re gonna need a neurosurgeon, big time.”

“Well, guys, I’m out of this for the duration, then. I’ll see you after my lobotomy.”

There was nervous laughter. Brain implants were rare. They required an abduction, while an object that went in under the skin could be placed while the host was wide awake. All it would do would be to cause some pain, but there would be no wound, certainly no scar. The grays were, among other things, masters of atomic structure. They could walk through walls if they wished, and they could certainly deposit an implant under the skin without surgery. The terrifying thing about a brain implant was that it could be used for subtle mind control, detectable only by someone with profound understanding.

“They anticipated this meeting,” Charles said.

“Yeah, they know damn well we’d want our security guy in a meeting called because of a security issue,” Henry Vorona added as he came through.

Then Ted Cassius had one under his scalp. These were nasties, too, because that close to the brain, they could be used not only for monitoring, but for a degree of mind control as well.

“How long have you had this, Ted?”

“I got a splitting headache two days ago. Jesus, I should have known.”

“We need to assume that you’re both under mind control and we have to get your asses out of here fast.” He opened his cell phone. “I’m calling for a Secret Service escort for both of you guys to Walter Reed. If you go under your own steam, you just might change your minds, as you know.”

“Thank you.”

Nobody else, thankfully, was implanted, and Mike finally was able to take his customary place at the conference table, second from the head on the left. Charles Gunn was head of table. Normally, he would not be at a meeting of the security-operations committee, but Mike had specifically requested his attendance.

Henry Vorona shuffled some papers as the Three Blind Mice took their places, three sour and mutually indistinguishable liaison officers from the main corporate groups that accepted delivery of the technologies and processes that evolved out of the liaison with Adam. They were Todd Able, Alex Starnes, and Timothy Greenfield, all in their forties, all looking like undertakers. It was their corporate dollars that funded the survival program. Creating the database of people who would be sheltered was costly, and monitoring their movements even more so. But those things were nothing compared to the cost of the underground shelters themselves, a hundred at half a billion dollars each, hidden around the world.

“Let’s get going,” Charles said. “I’ve brought a little patents-and-processes business to deal with first. Where are we with the plasmonics device?”

Mike was confused by that question. The invisibility fabric was deep in the pipeline. “Uh, do we need more from Adam? Because I wasn’t aware—”

Tim Greenfield said, “We have a report, Mike. It’s on its way to you.”

“Then there’s a problem, Timmy?”

Tim Greenfield’s pate flushed. “It doesn’t work.”

“Well, that is a problem.” The concept was a material that would reduce light scatterback to zero, thus rendering an object effectively impossible to
see. They knew that the grays used invisibility cloaking in their abductions, in addition to their peculiar physical ability to lock movement with the slightest flickering of the eye, so their victim could not see them.

Adam and Bob had been queried on the cloaking, in the tiny bits and pieces necessary to extract information from them, for fifteen years. They had a ten-billion-dollar check riding on the success of the process.

“There’s a compositional issue. Chemical. We need a real formula. What they’ve given us is not real.”

So the grays had lied again. All of those years of work, those hundreds and hundreds of tiny, seemingly innocuous questions had led down another blind alley.

Not that they didn’t have successes. “How are we doing with the electrostatic anti-friction shield?” Mike asked Todd Able, who was team leader on that project. He knew the answer better than Todd did, but he wanted to remind everybody that his work with Bob and Adam had resulted in its share of successes.

“It’s deploying and we’re looking at a ninety-seven percent decrease in friction across angular surfaces. If we could mine gravitite, we could fabricate non-aerodynamic spherical vehicles and we’d be looking at the same zero-friction profile we see in the grays’ craft. All we’d be missing is their engine.”

“The coherent mercury plasma can’t be made more efficient,” Henry Vorona said. “We’re getting everything we can out of it.”

Mike knew that well. Using a combination of research into ancient Vedic texts about the technology of Earth’s previous civilization and questions to Adam, they had evolved a device that rotated a mercury plasma inside a powerful magnetic field, that reduced the weight of the craft that carried it by 40 percent. Simply knowing that the Vedic references to aircraft and weapons referred to actual devices had enabled scientists to proceed much more quickly.

“So what about gravitite? Progress?” Charles asked in his peculiarly cheerful voice, so improbable in a man who looked like the director of his own funeral.

“We know what it is and where it is, but extracting it is another matter,” Mike said. He looked toward Henry Vorona, who was a substantial shareholder in a dozen companies that were feeding off the grays’ technology. One of those companies, Photonic Research, had been mining for years in the same seams of iron in the southern Catskills that the grays used, pulling
iron out of shafts directly adjacent to theirs, but failing to extract more than a few molecules of gravitite.

Henry said, “We’re not going to be saving the human race with gravitite. We can pull up the iron and cut it up atom by atom, but we find one atom of gravitite for every three hundred billion atoms of iron. The grays must have a more efficient process, otherwise they would have used up every bit of iron on the planet to get a handful of gravity-negative product.”

Charles now rested his eyes on Mike. “Colonel, if you’d like to go on to this security matter now.”

Mike told himself that he wasn’t frightened, but he was, he felt like a schoolboy about to get a thrashing. “We have a potential crisis that needs to be addressed immediately.”

“Adam’s not sick?”

Bob had been invaded by common household molds. This was why they kept Adam in an ultra-dry, ultra-clean environment. They were all terrified of losing their only captive gray. “Not that, thank the Lord, but something might be unfolding that could be bad for us.”

Henry Vorona sighed. He was not a patient man and Mike could see an explosion building. He hurried on. “Basically, we’ve obtained information about a very unusual operation on the part of the grays. Spectacularly threatening, I am sorry to say. What happened initially was that the triad that works Pennsylvania and up into Canada, came out of their boundaries and did an abduction in a college town in Kentucky.”

“Okay,” Todd said, “I’ll bite.”

“The grays have devised a way to communicate with mankind. To teach us how to save ourselves. They’ve been working on it for probably a couple of thousand years. And now, gentlemen, they are going to spring it on us. Of course, we save ourselves not for us, but for them. Mankind survives, but as a genetic milk carton for them. Slaves.”

That brought total silence. These men had counted on the coming catastrophe to free their carefully selected fragment of humankind from the grays. None of them liked the idea of the disaster that they knew was coming. But they feared this slavery more. If six billion were alive in 2012, they would all be enslaved. If only a million were left alive by then, they would be left alone. So, at least, went the theory.

“So, get on with it,” Henry Vorona snapped.

“Okay,” Mike continued, “we’ve known for some time, based on the abduction
pattern we’ve observed over five decades, that the grays are especially interested in children.”

“Because they’re small, easy to control, and emotionally rich,” Henry said. “Easy to feed on,” he added in a tone electric with contempt. Every man here shared one truth: he despised the grays.

“That does not explain the ‘why,’ which has always been our problem. The grays can outthink us. They’re always ten moves ahead.”

Henry slammed his briefcase, which had been open on the table. “That’s it then. Let’s all go home. Follow Forrestal out the damn window.”