“I’ve been with somebody who shared the life of my soul,” she said. “I don’t think he was a predator like Mike said. Losing him has left a hole in my life, almost as bad as when my dad died.”
“That’s not what you said the last time.”
“I’m being creative.”
What you said was, “They aren’t predators, but I think they’re missing something they know we have, and they’re trying to get it.”
Rob could not take his eyes of Lauren Glass. It wasn’t just her beauty, it was the trembling, delicate play of emotions in her eyes as she spoke about Adam. He could see that the love was genuine, entirely so. But there was also something furtive about Lauren, as if, on some level, she might be lying to herself, and might at least sense that.
This long, repetitive interrogation was leading to a judgement. When he was finished with it, he would draw his conclusions and her life would either continue or it would not. He wondered if she knew, decided to assume that she did. “So tell me, are the grays a danger to us? How do you feel about that?”
“I guess I miss Adam more because I know he’s somewhere. If he’d died in the fire, that would have been cloture, you know.” She fell silent.
“That didn’t answer my question.”
“It did, indirectly. If you want a precise answer, I have never been able to figure out exactly what the grays are here for, so it’s pretty hard for me to tell if they’re a danger. I mean, they look like aliens. God knows, they act like it. But I’ve seen the Bob autopsies. They’re partly biological and partly manufactured, and they have no brain as we know it. Just all those threads of glass in the head. But far, far fewer neurons than we have. So why do they think so well? We don’t know. And since we can’t say what they are, we also can’t assign motive. Those are my thoughts, anyway.”
He watched her. He didn’t know exactly what he was waiting for—perhaps for some mistake, the nature of which would only reveal itself when she made it. Potentially at least, this woman could play an important role. He had no doubt that the grays had maneuvered her very neatly out of Wilkes’s hands and into his, and he had understood that it was so that she could perform a function with the child. Teaching, he thought.
She asked him, “Listen, do you know anything about them? Like, where they’re from? I’ve always asked Adam about that but, you know, he doesn’t tell you much.”
She wasn’t afraid of him, and that was good. “We don’t know anything about where they’re from. We do know that there are a lot of them out there, and they’re on their way here.”
“So the DNA thing is true?”
“You know about that?”
She nodded. “Mike told me that they’ve used up their DNA and they want ours.”
“That’s part of it.”
“So this is the reconnaissance element of an invasion force and we should fear them.”
“I didn’t say that. I think they may also be our only chance of avoiding extinction.”
Her lovely mouth opened. The tip of her tongue, a soft, pink pearl, ran along her lips and withdrew. “Are you—uh . . . no.” She shook her head. “Wow. That’s big.”
“The calculations are correct. There’s going to be a tremendous environmental breakdown. In fact, it’s been building for eons. We’re at the climax.”
She sat there, staring at him.
“Lauren?”
“What about babies?”
He shook his head. “Nobody makes it . . . except your friend Mike and his outfit. Have you ever heard of the Trust?”
“No.”
“The way they’ve got it set up, about a million people will survive, chosen by the Trust—Mike and his group.”
“But then the grays will get them. They’ll have gained nothing.”
“That’s not how it works. We have reason to believe—to know—that the grays will give up on us unless there are billions of us alive. Smaller numbers will be of no use to them. The reason that Adam left when he did is that something has come to crisis, and Adam is apparently involved. Man and the grays are both in danger of extinction, and they’re trying to save us all. Your boss and his friends are trying to prevent that so the grays will go away and leave the Earth to their million elite.”
He watched her thinking, saw the pain in her eyes, the shock . . . saw a young woman’s face reflect fear for children who had not yet been born. “What happens . . . if the grays get their way?”
“Lauren, a very long time ago, there was a war on this Earth. A great civilization fell. When it did, we lost our knowledge of how physics really works. We set off down a road of ignorance that’s led to where we are now: all six billion of us trapped on an overburdened and dying planet. Meantime, the grays are so ancient that they’ve used up their DNA. Without each other, both species go extinct. They’re looking for a sort of marriage: they get access to our youthful DNA, we get access to their brilliant minds. Everybody survives.”
“But how? What happens?”
“Lauren, it’s my growing belief that you are one of the most critical human beings now alive on this planet, because you are a big part of the answer to that question.”
Suddenly, she looked every inch the soldier. Her eyes flashed. Rob thought, as always, that the grays had chosen well. She would be able to do this. He made his decision about her, after all these hours, in that split second. The grays had given her to him so she could be the child’s empath, it was the only explanation that made any sense. “You’ll be a sort of teacher, Lauren. An interpreter, if you will.”
“Of who? Of what?”
“I don’t want to be mysterious, but it’s best that we let this unfold in its own time.”
“That’s hard.”
“So be it, duty is duty. I have one further question. Do you know how to hide? I mean, on a trained, professional level?”
“Why in the world should I hide? Colonel Wilkes had no right to do what he did, you said that yourself. He’s up on charges.”
“He’s also very powerful. More powerful by far than we are. He’s dangerous, Lauren. I hope you understand that.”
“He’s trying to kill me, of course I understand it! But I have no idea how to hide.”
“You got this far. That’s saying something. A hell of a lot, in fact.”
“If I’m a KIA, then I have no Air Force standing. If I’m already dead, he can kill me without fear of penalty.”
“We’re going to hide you, Lauren.”
“I wish the grays were here.”
“Keep trying to contact them.”
When they went outside, the snow of earlier had stopped. The base was very quiet, the flight line now shut down.
She noticed that he moved very quickly, striding across the base to the carpool. He had a car of his own, but he requisitioned a staff vehicle instead. “This is part of staying hidden,” he said. “I’ll exchange this for another staff vehicle after I drop you off.”
He took her to a Days Inn, which appeared to be about the only motel in this small town.
Thus it was that Lauren ended up in the room next door to Mike Wilkes, an event that had not been orchestrated by the grays, but was not entirely chance, either. Rather it emerged out of the fates of both species, human and gray, as they rode the dark rails of their destinies.
Mike heard voices next door, a man and a woman. He took no notice.
Rob wanted to stay with Lauren—he told himself, to protect her. But he had work to do, because if he didn’t find Wilkes, not only was Lauren going to be in trouble, the rest of this thing was going to come apart. He could not imagine the consequences if the grays were thwarted, dared not even think about what might happen.
As he drove back to his office, Mike Wilkes and Lauren Glass both lay on their beds unable to even think of sleeping, their heads separated by just six inches of drywall. Lauren’s mind whirled with the astonishing secrets she had learned, and, as she sank into exhaustion, also with the image of Colonel Rob Langford, who app
eared to her as a sort of angel, powerful and good and strong enough to take her the way she loved to be taken, and give her the babies her whole heart and soul told her that the future needed.
Mike would doze for a moment, then see Adam looming up, his insect eyes glaring. Then he would start awake and toss and turn, and nuzzle his gun close to his side.
Far overhead, in a sky that had cleared magnificently, strange stars hung over the town. The Three Thieves had been joined by Adam, and the first phase had been accomplished. They were counting the hours, now, the minutes, the seconds, the nanoseconds until they acted again, and Adam entered Conner, and became part of him, and either it worked or it did not.
It was an amazing time, truly, with six billion human lives and six billion gray lives hanging in the balance, in the quiet of a little town, in a dark corner of a small state, in a strange and faraway place called Earth.
PART SEVEN
LOST LAND
There was a child went forth every day,
And the first object he look’d upon, that object he became,
And that object became part of him for the day, or a certain part of the day,
Or for many years, or stretching cycles of years.
—WALT WHITMAN
“There Was a Child Went Forth”
TWENTY
CONNER AND PAULIE WOKE UP late and had to rush to get to school. When Paulie saw Conner’s mixture of amaranth flakes, wheat germ, and unsweetened live-culture yogurt, he did not ask for an explanation, but gratefully ate the bacon and eggs that Dan, wearing only green boxer shorts and huge, fluffy slippers, provided to him. He was fascinated to watch Conner eat what looked like upchuck.
Conner had called in aliens, which was damn amazing. But now here he was gobbling down this fantastically geekish food. Nobody could eat like this and get away with it. Paulie had an obligation to uphold the reputation of Bell Attached as a cool school.
“So, what’s your lunch?” he asked Conner. They’d stop by his house to pick up his, which would be Cheetos, a ham sandwich, and a power bar.
“My lunch?” He went over to a little plastic greenhouse that was sitting on the kitchen counter. “Ah, excellent. Sprouting alfalfa, I’m happy to say. Some organic hummus, which is really pretty delicious if you’d like to share, buddy.”
Aliens or not, Paulie saw that the Connerbusters had to continue.
“Sounds great, but I’ve got my dumb old ham sandwich waiting for me at home.”
Dan listened to the boys with only half an ear. Conner had somehow managed to bring this off, it appeared. He was more socially resourceful, then, than he seemed. All to the good.
During his own wakeful and uneasy night, Dan had made a decision. Once he was tenured, he was going to do the unthinkable. He was going to circulate his resume, and he was going to concentrate exclusively on schools in large cities far from here. An untenured professor was an academic beggar. But a man operating from tenure was more significant, even if he came from the lower ranks of colleges.
The reason he was going to do this was that he wanted to get his family as far from open spaces and dark, abandoned nights as he could. Preferably, he would raise his remarkable boy in a Manhattan tower, some place like that. Conner was vulnerable, and Dan’s instinct was that moving to a more populated area would protect him.
As for Katelyn, she was in the process of putting Marcie behind her. She dressed for her morning round of classes while listening to the males crashing around downstairs. She would not have believed Conner’s skill in recapturing Paulie. She’d been furious with him last night, but now she was proud of her son.
She hurried downstairs to be in time to give her men good-bye kisses—accepted with dear brusqueness by her son, with hopeful eyes by her husband.
She let him hug her. This family was her responsibility and her achievement. She was not going to let it go awry simply because he’d done something foolish and she felt humiliated. “Men are fools,” her mom had said, “expect the worst.” As, indeed, her dad had been, disappearing on them the way he had, effectively orphaning her and widowing Mom.
So far, her mother’s advice had never been wrong.
AT THE DAYS INN, LAUREN Glass was awakened by a tapping on her door. She was shocked, then frightened. Then she remembered the code that Rob had given her, and recognized the pattern of taps. As if a motel room door would keep out Mike Wilkes or whatever goons he might send.
She still had no clothes but what she’d been wearing when Mike had attacked her, so she went into the bathroom and wrapped herself in a towel before cracking the door.
“What time is it?”
“Six-fifty. We’ve got to get started.”
“What are we doing?”
“Trying to figure out where the kid is, if he’s really here, or if this is some kind of a feint designed to throw Wilkes off, in which case we can concentrate on the issue of you. But we need to solve the child question first.”
His life before hers, that was clear enough. “The grays aren’t protecting this child?”
“We’re not in communication with the grays anymore. As you know.”
“I do indeed. And I have to tell you, I just don’t see them as really understanding how jeopardy functions in our society. They know how the brain works, but I don’t think they understand reality the same way we do. We need to assume that they’re going to be blindsided if this child is attacked.”
MIKE WILKES WAS RETURNING TO the motel from the early run he took every day when he saw, from a distance of about a quarter of a mile, two people get into a USAF motor pool car in the parking lot and drive away. A man and a woman, but too far away to see their faces. He noted that they’d been parked directly in front of his room.
He decided that some sort of Air Force investigative unit must have been activated, no doubt because of what had happened last night, when Lauren Glass had appeared at Wright-Pat after he’d listed her as KIA.
He put in a cell phone call to Charles. “Hey there, sorry I’m so early. Yeah, it went fine—at least, the trip was fine. Look, there are a couple of officers in mufti sniffing around. I haven’t gotten a close look at them, but I have the feeling that they’re an arrest team. I need that handled, Charles.”
He hung up quickly and did what he now had to do with his cell phone, which was to take out the battery and throw the whole instrument in a ditch. You might as well paint yourself purple as carry one of these things. If you had a cell phone, turned on or turned off, they could track you from twenty-five thousand miles overhead with the WatchStar satellite.
He had probably a dozen cover identities. He didn’t even remember them all. Some of them were essentially perfect, provided to him by the Defense Intelligence Agency. They would stand up to the most rigorous scrutiny. Others, thrown together as needed over the years, were less reliable. But all except two of them were on file somewhere within the U.S. government.
So, at the moment, he had only the two to choose from. He decided to stay with the salesman he’d used last night. He found a gas station, went in, and asked the attendant for directions to the nearest rental car agency. He had about twelve hours to perform a whole complex sequence of actions, then the night to do the really challenging work.
The Three Thieves watched Conner leave home and be driven to school. So far, there had been no threat against him. They wanted to be closer to Conner even than the collective demanded. He was their creation, too, and his mind was like a garden of jewels. They wanted to partake of his rich feelings, but they dared not, he was too precious to disturb in any way.
Because, as a species, they were so close to death, the grays were particularly terrified of it. Their main body was alone in the immensity of space, no longer protected by a home planet and a parent star, their own having long since perished as victims to time. They traveled now in an engineered world on what many considered a hopeless quest, and their collective mind dreamed of oblivion, and worried about it, and clung.
> The Thieves had spent much of the night hanging over the town, listening to the people they could hear through implants, trying to ascertain if any of them might seek to harm their treasure.
Last night, they had carried out the instructions of the collective and prepared Conner to receive the extraordinary implant that was going to be given to him.
The fragment of the collective the humans called Adam had been assigned to man some years ago, with the hope that Adam, through exposure to them, would evolve structures in his mind that would enable him to do something that no gray had ever done before—indeed, that was only an idea, a theory, perhaps a hope and maybe a forlorn one. They wanted him to meld into the boy, in effect, to implant his entire being into Conner and become part of him.
Now Adam lay waiting in an empty barn, on the floor of a disused horse stall. Later, when darkness fell, he would complete his mission. Death was in this for him, but a very strange sort of death. It would not be the oblivion that was at the center of the long, complicated drama that obsessed the collective, but rather the surrender of self in a sort of living death. Once his thoughts and knowledge became part of Conner, he believed that he would disappear entirely.
He listened to the dripping of the old barn and the rustle of beetles in the hay, and dreamed formless, uneasy dreams.
The Three Thieves were fascinated and horrified by what Adam was being called upon to do. Like every gray, in the privacy of the self, they regarded it with horror. Superficially, though, they were grateful both that he was trying and that they didn’t have to.
The grays in the scout group had various human genes, this and that, whatever they’d been able to use, and were much healthier than the ones in the main body. The Three Thieves, for example, had human blood, vivid with life, not the dank artificial goo that sustained most of those in the main body. They had taken this blood and adapted their bodies to it, and used it now as their own. It made them quicker, smarter, and also, they thought, more able to understand man.
The Grays Page 21