Mr. Fahrenheit

by T. Michael Martin

  The clouds in front of the moon hadn’t turned white. They’d become green.

  “Banjo?” CR called. “What’s up?”

  “Good question,” Benji murmured.

  And then, while Benji watched, a cluster of clouds separated from the rest. The cluster was high in the heavens, thousands of feet above him, but now it began to descend, like the clouds were in a controlled dive, piloting themselves toward the quarry.

  Benji’s brain jabbered a string of explanations, but only for a moment before his whole head was filled with silence.

  The green light saturating the detached cluster intensified. By the time it was a few hundred feet above Earth, the color neared neon. In the perfect center of the clouds was a nucleus, brighter than everything around it. Witchy veins of light webbed outward from it.

  It looks like an eye, Benji thought, and remembered seeing something similar outside the field house. Like an eye, opening up.

  He was conscious of Ellie, and Zeeko and CR, sounding surprised and concerned up on the embankment. But they were far away, voices at the other end of a tunnel. Benji was just watching the sky, mesmerized by that cloud and whatever was inside it—

  The beach chair on the shore beside him levitated.

  He let out a shocked shout. The chair rose up in the windless air, then whiplashed forward as if wrenched by an imperceptible tether. It shot end over end across the lake like a stone, skipping on ice with sparks of frost, then dematerialized into the cloud, which had now journeyed into the quarry and kissed the face of the ice itself.

  “What was that?” Zeeko said shakily somewhere behind Benji. “Ellie, I can’t see anything, bring back my glasses!”

  “Benji Lightman,” said Ellie, coming down the embankment, “I don’t love this.”

  What is “this”? Benji started to say.

  But the junkyard spoke before he could.

  Up there in the dark beyond their cars, colossal pipes began to vibrate, to issue musical tones like harmonic ghosts.

  CR’s truck throttled to life, its headlights igniting, the light beams spearing across the lake, striking the ancient torpedo-shaped gas tanks on the opposite shore.

  The barrel of CR’s rifle lifted from the ground beside Benji, looking like a finger trying to scrape the sky. Then, as the chair had done, the gun flung itself into the air toward the lake.

  With an athletic instinct alien to him, Benji raised his hand and snatched the rifle in mid-flight. He looked back to CR and Ellie, who had come down to the shore and were watching in confused fear. “You see that?” was all Benji could say, heart surging with wonder.

  The cloud had grown, obscuring the sides of the quarry. The gas tanks, which had glittered on the far shore, were all but invisible.

  It’s not “growing,” he thought. It’s just coming closer. It’s coming at us.

  That’s stupid. Clouds don’t do that.

  Clouds don’t glow, either—

  At that moment, the cloud-light winked out.

  It happened all at once, like when someone trips on a cord and unplugs the Christmas tree. The junkyard became still and silent; the truck’s headlights snapped off.

  A horizontal seam opened in the fog.

  Slowly, a silhouette clarified from the mist.

  “What the ass is that . . . ?” whispered CR beside Benji.

  Goose bumps flew across Benji’s whole body, and a wild memory flared through his mind.

  As a boy, he’d loved the Wizard of Oz. Not the book or even the movie, but the Wizard himself, that titanic head that floated in space. Benji hadn’t seen the whole movie until he was older, only the scene when Dorothy met the Wizard, so for years he didn’t know there was “a man behind the curtain”; to him, the Wizard and his sorcery were real. And right now, gazing from the abandoned lakeshore as the silhouetted shape emerged and took charge of the night, the Wizard was what lit up in Benji’s mind. He thought of that dreadful, enchanted face. He thought of the Great and Terrible.

  “That’s a flying saucer,” Benji said.

  The disc.

  The disc.

  The disc whirled fifty yards from the shore. It spun in the bright and soundless night above the false starscape of the lake. Lights, trillions of eerily beautiful green lights, blinked on the underbody of the craft. They illuminated its shape, which looked for all the world like two silver Frisbees whose lips had been fused.

  Benji felt a hand on his shoulder, heard CR say, “Leaving, holy shit, we’re leaving, let’s leave!” Ellie nodded and began retreating up the shore.

  A portal opened on the bottom of the saucer. A circular beam of atomic-green light blazed out and hit the lake. It had the effect of lightning: The ice glowed, then shattered with a sound like a thunderclap. Shards of ice floated upward in the light.

  Tractor beam.

  “Oh my God!” Zeeko cried. “What is that? Ellie, please, give me my glasses!”

  Suddenly, as if realizing it was not alone, the saucer’s portal closed, cutting off the beam. The ice crashed down into the freshly opened crater in the lake.

  And the saucer began approaching the shore.

  “Benji— CR— Get up here!” Ellie shouted, her voice shaking.

  Thirty feet out now, the portal on the saucer’s belly opened again. Benji took a step backward, stumbled over his bootlaces, fell on his butt. CR lifted him to his feet, saying in the most frightened voice Benji had ever heard him use, “Christ on a friggin’ cracker, man, I said let’s go.”

  “No,” Benji murmured, eyes still drawn to the disc.

  “What?”

  Benji understood he should be terrified, too. And on some level, he was. But fear and awe battled inside him, and wonder won the war.

  Twenty feet away, the saucer eclipsed the moon. Its portal opened. The hypnotic light shot out, again rupturing the ice.

  It’s gonna take us up into the saucer.

  CR grabbed Benji’s arm; Benji yanked it free.

  “Goddammit, what are you doing?!” CR said.

  At first, Benji did not quite know. He was raising his arm, not sure why he was doing it, just suffused with an inexplicable and absolute certainty that he should do it. He was raising CR’s rifle.

  Which was normally so rusted and rickety-looking. But in that instant, as Benji curled his finger on the trigger, the rifle with its black slender barrel and moonlit sights seemed to undergo a metamorphosis.

  Benji pulled the trigger, and the magic wand blazed.

  The bullet screamed over the misted face of the lake and found its target on the far shore: the cluster of propane gas tanks. CR and Zeeko and Ellie shouted in time with the BOOM as the bullet’s impact ignited the tanks’ flammable payload. BOOM BOOM, and a pair of tanks jetted straight up, missiles ripping skyward with rooster tails of red fire. A chain reaction—BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM—animated a half-dozen more rockets, but Benji’s gaze didn’t trail them to the stars.

  The last of the tanks, like an improvised torpedo, came caroming over the surface of the lake toward the saucer’s beam.

  The portal began to seal but the saucer had reacted too late: The flaming tank touched the rim of the tractor beam and screamed up into the ship.

  Benji spun away, shouting, as the detonation bloomed. Air displaced and threw him to the shore, the heat and light rippling his clothes like a storm. He looked back as the saucer nosedived perhaps fifty feet away. Fire and silver smoke bellowed through a breach in the hull as it crashed through the ice.

  The gun dropped from Benji’s quaking grip. His ears rang. His vision was imprinted with the afterimage of the saucer’s explosion.

  Ho.

  Lee.

  Shit.

  A weak red glow streamed from the impact crater in the ice. The pair of propane tanks that had rocketed into the sky now clanked, malformed, onto the lake.

  The light from the lake bottom flickered off, on, off . . . off.

  And then Benji was stepping onto the lake, heading toward the crate
r.

  Through the ringing in his ears, he dimly heard CR shout for him to come back, that Benji was out of his mind, that the ice was going to crack underneath him. Benji stomped on the ice ahead of him. Solid.

  When he reached the crater, he went to his knees, looking into the water. It bubbled like a cauldron.

  Someone arrived next to him. He looked over, and was surprised to see Ellie.

  “What the ass has just happened here, Benji Lightman?” Ellie’s voice shook, and her green eyes filled with . . . not fear, but for a millisecond something purer. Higher. Was it awe? “What exactly did you just do?”

  I don’t know, Benji thought, pulse slamming in his temples. Oh my God, I’ve got no idea.

  “How deep you think the lake is?” Benji asked her, and CR shouted from the shore, “Deep? What does that matter?”

  Benji said, “Where’s Zeeko?”

  Zeeko, who had thrown up beside Ellie’s car, stood up and croaked, “Here.”

  “Are you guys okay?” Benji asked.

  CR said, “Compared to what?”

  Benji’s gaze returned to the water, which was now as seamless as black glass. All he could see was his reflection. “It’s too dark,” he said, mostly to himself.

  “Haul ass outta here, that’s what we’ve gotta do. Right? ’C-cause what if more come?” CR shouted, his characteristic confidence gone. “Oh, no!” he cried suddenly.

  “What?” Benji said.

  “We don’t have my keys, y’guys!”

  “Do you have a flashlight in your car?” Benji asked Ellie, then answered himself, “Wait, never mind, I’ve got something.” He reached into his coat and pulled out a fistful of flash paper. The combustible sheets might have failed to wow the audience tonight, but flash paper was phosphorescent, and could burn underwater.

  Benji grabbed a softball-size chunk of ice, wrapping the flash papers around it and twisting them tightly on both ends. He pulled out his magic act “FireFingers”: striking pads affixed to the fingertips of his gloves. He had to snap three times before he got the spark, then he dropped the ignited papers into the lake like a message in a bottle.

  A few sheets separated from the center and spread as they sank, making a glowing jellyfish canopy. The descent took eternities. The light began to dim, and still Benji saw nothing, and he felt an overpowering fear: He hadn’t just done what he thought he’d done, all of this was imaginary . . .

  . . . and something glimmered through the deep dark like chromium.

  The light went out.

  “Who do you call about something like this?” he heard CR say.

  Call?

  “The fire department! Yeah, that’s right!” CR said. Ellie laughed weakly, and CR replied, in an embarrassed and defensive tone, “Well, I don’t know! It was sure-shit on fire!”

  And Benji, staring into his reflection and the velvet abyss beyond, said to himself and to Ellie:

  “I think we should keep it a secret.”

  3

  Benji stared into the crater, waiting for her to say anything.

  He lifted his gaze.

  Ellie looked straight back into him.

  Her eyes stayed locked with his, the bright green irises electrified. Despite the ice, a pleasant warmth rippled through Benji’s body.

  “How about airplane people?” CR called.

  Reluctantly, Benji looked back to the shore. “What?”

  “The dudes that make planes go. The FBA, that’s their name! What’s their number?” CR prospected his phone from one of his pockets.

  “Uh-oh,” Ellie said.

  Benji shot to his feet. “CR, wait a second! I don’t think we should call anyone yet!” He helped Ellie up, then speed-walked toward the shore.

  Zeeko was coming down the embankment now. Just as Benji reached the shore, Zeeko pointed past him, shouting, “Look!”

  Benji flinched, spinning back toward the ice. But he didn’t see anything. “Look at what, Zeeko?”

  “The—under the ice, there was light for a second. Blue light.”

  There wasn’t, though. Zeeko is so freaked out that he literally threw up. And he doesn’t have his glasses. Maybe he didn’t see anything?

  “Well, I thought there was,” Zeeko said. “Benji, what was that thing? Ellie, please, give me my glasses.”

  They were still tangled in Ellie’s hair. She removed them and handed them to Zeeko, who thrust them onto his face.

  “Or nine-one-one,” CR said. “Hey, we can just call the sheriff!”

  Benji snatched the phone from CR’s hand. “Dude, wait. Did you hear what I said?”

  “You want to keep it a secret,” CR said. “That’s—actually, that’s a good idea. The best idea! Okay? We never talk about it or come back here again. We forget it.”

  “Forget it? That’s not what I meant.” Benji shook his head incredulously. “CR, do you know what that was?”

  “Yes.” CR fixed him with a serious stare. “Bro, you just shot the shit out of a government drone.”

  Looking relieved, Zeeko snapped and pointed at CR: Bingo!

  “A drone?” Benji not-quite-guffawed. “Why would there be a drone here? Is Bedford Falls the new target in the War on Terror?”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of right now.”

  “How would a drone shoot, like, an antigravity ray?”

  “Science, probably!”

  Ellie glanced at Benji, subtly rolled her eyes.

  “Whatever that was, wherever it’s from,” Benji said, “shooting it down is not something we can just forget. If I live to be a billion years old, I’ll never forget this. CR, that thing in the bottom of the lake could be the biggest thing to happen since . . . ever. Not just in Bedford Falls—anywhere.” Benji felt his hands shake and goose bumps shiver over his skin; he was not cold. “Guys, I’m freaked out, but don’t you see how amazing this is? How could you possibly want to walk away from that?”

  “Wait,” Ellie said. Benji could actually see the adrenaline and shock draining from her face. “We might have just killed something. You might have just killed something. That’s seriously screwed up. That’s just serious.”

  “The saucer was coming toward us. I reacted.”

  “So it was self-defense?”

  “I guess. I don’t know.” He felt a pang of guilt or uncertainty, but only fleetingly. “I don’t know if anything bad would have happened. But I felt like I had to. I’m sure it was the right thing to do. Anyway, I don’t think that’s the important thing, Ellie.”

  She frowned. “Then what is?”

  “The future. We have to figure out how to handle this perfectly.” His stomach churning with nerves and excitement, his mind pinballed from one possibility to the next. Should they hold a press conference? Put it online themselves? (Hashtag WTFlyingSaucer, he thought.) He had no idea. He was in a quarry filled with garbage, but he felt the touch of infinity. He had to live up to this.

  Ellie still looked upset. “Can we just slow this train down, please?”

  “There is no choo-choo train here!” CR shouted. “We’re not going to tell anybody! For one thing, I’m drunk. And I’m trespassing. I’m a drunk trespasser! Do you even know how pissed my dad’ll be? If I’m lucky, best-case scenario, he murders me. Worst-case scenario, he won’t let me play in the game this week.”

  “I’m talking about the discovery of the millennium,” Benji said, exasperated but smiling, “and you’re worried about chucking a leather ball through the air. Dude, there might not even be a game. Probably won’t be. This thing could change the whole wor—”

  “Did I say I was done talking, Benji?”

  Benji flinched. It wasn’t that CR had raised his voice. In fact, he had lowered it. But he hadn’t spoken so much as growled. It was his Quarterback Voice, engineered for express intimidation, and he’d never used it against Benji before.

  “There’s going to be a game,” CR said, “because I said there’s going to be a game. We’re telling nobody about this.
Do you understand that?”

  “Hey, hey,” Zeeko said gently, “let’s not be a-holes to each other for a minute, okay?”

  Benji tried to catch Ellie’s gaze, but she walked a few feet away, hands tense on the back of her neck, obviously still trying to process what had happened.

  “I love that plan,” Benji said to CR.

  “What?” said CR.

  “Your plan: Don’t tell anyone about this until after the game on Friday.” Benji smacked himself on the forehead. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  He had thought of it, of course.

  But there is this concept called “the Magician’s Force,” when the magician asks the spectator to pick a card, any card, from the deck, and then forces them, very subtly, to select the one card the magician wants. The magician directs their destiny, in other words, only if the audience believes they have free will.

  Smacking oneself on the forehead was nobody’s idea of “subtle.” But if Benji thought CR would be an easier audience because CR was drunk, well, he was right.

  “So . . . we’re on the same page, plan-wise?” CR said, distinctly less growly.

  “Totally.”

  “Okay. Okay, great. Awesome. Yeah.” You could almost hear the competitive machinery in CR’s head powering down as he gave a sheepish half smile. “Sorry I was an asshole a second ago.”

  Benji waved it off: no big deal. Which it wasn’t.

  Not now.

  And then they were all silent for a long, long time. By now, even the embers and the firefly ash of the bonfire were gone, so the only light came from the moon and stars peppering the sky.

  “So after we wait,” CR finally said, just above a whisper, “what then?”

  Benji walked to where Ellie stood, a few feet away, and said to her, gently but openly hopeful, “What do you think? I could use your help.” But she just shook her head, still overwhelmed. Nevertheless, he turned back toward the lake. The water in the ice crater remained calm, an eerily beautiful mirror reflecting the heavens, like Benji Lightman had somehow tossed a net over the whole of the night sky and reeled it to Bedford Falls.

  “We’ve got a lot of maybes,” he said.

  4

  The Lightman family house had been passed down, father to son, for the better part of a century. Bedford Falls had originally built it to be the city-owned home for whoever they elected sheriff, but after a few decades of Lightmans comfortably holding that office, the city simply sold it to the family. And so the house—smallish but well maintained, built of bricks and ringed by a picket fence—had been owned by several generations of men who uncovered secrets for a living. One day, Papaw often said, Benji would own “this good ol’ house.”