by Tom DeLonge
He settled back, turning the big Chevy’s steering wheel with a firm but easy grip as he angled it round the winding country road. It was a good car. A classic already. The kind that never went out of style and, with a little loving care, would run forever.
They passed through Lancaster, following Route 3 south towards White Mountain National Forest, with Mount Washington looming on their left. It was a region infamous for erratic weather and lost hikers—over a hundred fatalities, it was said—and Barney was glad that they were making the trip now, before the cold weather set in. He checked the Bel Air’s gas gauge. The last thing he wanted was to get stranded up here. He didn’t think they’d be in any real danger, but his buddies at the post office—who’d been calling him the Fearless Explorer ever since he’d told them about the trip north of the border—would never let him live it down
He grinned at the thought.
“What’s that?”
Betty was, apparently, still awake.
“What’s what?” he said.
“Over there,” she said. She popped the glove compartment open and pulled out the field glasses they had used to look at the waterfall earlier. “Slow down,” she said. “I can’t see it.”
“See what?” he said, easing off on the gas.
“Up there,” said Betty. “Look. There’s a light. See? Just to the side of the moon. It’s moving.”
“I don’t see it.”
“Right there. Look, it’s getting brighter.”
“Shooting star, maybe.”
“It’s going up.”
“Plane then.”
“Pull over,” said Betty. “I want to use the binoculars.”
“Oh, come on, Betty,” Barney replied. “We still have a ways to go.”
“Going to have let Delsey out soon,” said Betty. “May as well be now.”
Barney sighed and shot the dog a sour look.
“Fine,” he said, turning the wheel and applying the brakes. He wasn’t sure why they’d brought the damn dog in the first place. It wasn’t like she needed to see the sights. They could have kenneled her for a night or two. Wouldn’t have been the end of the world. But Betty wouldn’t hear of it.
Part of the family, she’d said. Barney rolled his eyes, but he smiled at the same time. People didn’t get them, but he loved his wife very much, and for all the looks they got, he had never doubted, for one moment, that marrying her had been the right thing to do.
While Betty fussed with the binoculars, he watched the dog do its business on the grass shoulder, inhaling the cool of the forest air and listening to the chirp of insects and thanking God it wasn’t black fly season. He’d turned the headlights off, and the mountains and trees were dark to the point of blackness.
“It’s crossing in front of the moon,” said Betty, tracking with her binoculars. “It has lights on it.”
“Probably a jetliner headed to Montreal,” said Barney.
“It’s not the right shape. Look.”
She handed him the binoculars. At first he couldn’t find it. There was nothing to focus on, but when he saw the light tracking northwest with his naked eye, he was able to home in with the field glasses.
“Plane,” he said, peering at the lighted craft as it angled steadily up the way they had come. “Gotta be.”
And then, without warning, it changed direction, a sharp turn and hard descent, a move unlike any plane he had ever seen before. He lowered the binoculars so he could find the craft again, and tried to refocus on it, but it was moving too quickly.
“It’s coming right for us,” he said, baffled. For a moment, the two of them watched, their disinterested dog snuffling at their feet, and then Barney felt a slow but rising unease that he could not explain. “Pick up Delsey,” he said. “Get back in the car.”
Betty gave him a quizzical look, but she didn’t hesitate, and he knew she could feel it too: a muffled and unspecific urgency, just this side of alarm.
But once they were back in the car, headlights on, moving toward Franconia Notch, the feeling turned into a kind of childish excitement. Betty had heard talk of flying saucers from her sister, and the idea that they might have seen one was exhilarating. Barney wasn’t so sure, but he had to admit that the way the craft had moved was about the damnedest thing he’d ever seen.
It took a moment to realize it was still there, and that it seemed to have descended, and if he were a fanciful kind of guy, which he wasn’t, Barney would have sworn it was following them. It had been heading north before. Not anymore. Now it was slipping south, lower and lower in the sky, so that from time to time, it would be screened out entirely by the craggy landscape of mountains and the tall pines that lined the road. As they passed Cannon Mountain, the object seemed to scud through the air only a couple of hundred yards above them. It was now clearly not a plane. It had no wings, and resembled a flattened yo-yo with lights along the edge, which seemed to be rotating.
It was also big.
When it passed the great granite outcrop known locally as The Old Man of the Mountain, because of how it looked, in profile, like a head sticking out of the cliff—eyes, mouth, forehead and chin all quite visible—Barney finally got a sense of scale. The thing must have been close to sixty feet across. It was also, as far as he could tell over the noise of the car engine, completely silent, moving in looping bounds, little surges of acceleration that took it up and down, weaving effortlessly from side to side, so that in spite of the dread he’d felt before, Barney couldn’t help sensing something playful in the craft’s pursuit.
He wondered about that word. Was it really pursuing them? Tracking them, certainly. Watching. Maybe they should find some place where they could call the police or the Air Force.
But Barney didn’t like showing up in places he wasn’t expected. Not at night, a black man with a white woman in the American backcountry. He’d wait until they saw familiar faces. And maybe even then …? Barney knew how to fight from his corner. As a leading member of the Portsmouth NAACP, he was proud of who he was, but he had also learned to pick his battles. He knew that white people looked for a reason not to take him seriously. Telling the world he’d spent the evening playing hide and seek with a flying saucer was as good as dressing up as Uncle Remus and sitting on the porch with a hay stalk between his teeth.
The disk slid into the night behind them and vanished. Then, a mile south of Indian Head, it returned, in front of them now and lower than ever, so that it seemed to sit motionless above the road directly ahead. Barney slowed the Bel Air to a crawl, and eventually came to a halt. The saucer hovered in front of them, no more than eighty feet in the air. Barney, his earlier apprehension returning tenfold, was sure that he did not want to drive the car under the craft.
“Stay here,” he said. He reached over and took the binoculars from his wife’s lap.
“What are you doing?” asked Betty.
“Just wait here,” he said, checking the pistol in his pocket, shouldering the door open and stepping out onto the road.
“Barney, you get back in here,” said Betty, her voice shrill with fear.
“One second,” he said.
He walked up the road, slowly, bathed in the hard white light from the craft in front of him. As he got closer, he found that it seemed to be angled down toward him, and at its rim, he could see windows tilted at the road. At him. As he stepped inside the glare, he could make out shapes at the windows. Figures in what he took to be black uniforms. His sense was that they were human-like but not human. He raised the binoculars to see better, but as he did so, the object seemed to change. Structures descended smoothly from the sides and underbelly, things that might have been legs and some kind of access chute. Barney turned quickly back to the car, suddenly sure that they had to get out of there. Now.
He dragged the Bel Air’s door open and fell into the driver’s seat, hands trembling as he turned the ignition key.
“They’re going to take us!” he babbled. “They’re trying to capture us!
”
“God!” Betty exclaimed.
“Watch for them,” Barney commanded as he gunned the engine.
“It’s moving!”
The legs, or whatever they had been, retracted again. The ship moved directly overhead. For a moment, the car was full of its strange, hard light. Betty was crying. Delsey was whimpering. Barney floored the accelerator, sending them rocketing away down the road as fast as he dared go.
“Are they still behind us?” he asked.
Betty wound down her window and leaned out, craning her neck and looking all around.
“I don’t see it,” she shouted into the wind. “I don’t see anything.”
But then the noise started, a strange rhythmic plinking that seemed to come from the Bel Air’s trunk. The car seemed to hum with energy. Barney touched the metal of the door gingerly, expecting to feel the bite of static electricity, but got only a dull vibration, quite separate from what the Bel Air’s engine was doing. Almost immediately, the long drive and all the mental focus required to operate the car through hundreds of miles of empty road seemed to weigh on him. His eyelids drooped, his head lolled, and he felt the leaden pressure of sleep swallow him.
HE CAME TO WITH A START.
He blinked and shifted deliberately.
That had been close. Falling asleep at the wheel had always been one of his greatest fears. Out here in the woods, that could only end badly. He felt Betty stir beside him and saw she was waking up from a nap too.
There had been something they had been talking about, but he couldn’t remember what it was, and that meant he really had fallen asleep, which was terrifying. Maybe he should get a cup of coffee somewhere. He checked his watch, but it had stopped, and that was weird, because he knew he had wound it that morning.
“What time is it?” he asked.
“It’s … oh, damn.”
“What?”
“Looks like my watch stopped,” Betty answered. “Where are we?”
“Indian Head, right?” said Barney, less sure than he would have liked.
Betty paused.
“That sign said Tilton,” she said.
“Can’t be,” said Barney. “That’s over thirty miles away. We haven’t gone through Plymouth yet.”
But the town that they drove through was indeed Tilton.
“That’s not possible,” said Barney. “I can’t have been that tired and not wrecked the car. You remember going through Plymouth?”
Betty shook her head. She looked rattled.
“I don’t remember anything since …” she reached into her memory, then shook her head. “I don’t know. Something. There was a light in the sky.”
“We stopped,” said Barney, dragging the memory back to the surface as if he were reeling in some strange fish, dark and nightmarish, from the deep sea.
“We set off again,” said Betty. “But there was another light. A roadblock.”
Barney nodded, his skin starting to creep, the hair on his neck rising.
“This isn’t right,” he said. “Let’s stop. I need to get gas and a cup of coffee.”
“And a shower,” said Betty. It was a bizarre thing to say, and she laughed, but it turned into a gasp, almost a sob and there was something haunted in her eyes.
“Yes,” said Barney, sensing it too. “A shower. Yes.”
He felt … unclean. He couldn’t explain it. It was as if something had happened that he could not recall, something had been done to him.
“My dress,” said Betty. Her voice was at once absent and fearful. “It’s torn. When did that happen?”
Barney looked at her, fingering the ragged hem of her dress, and he felt it again, that there was something just out of reach of his memory. He glanced down. His carefully polished shoes were scuffed and dirty.
What the hell?
They stopped at the first all night gas station they could find, and both went inside to use the restroom, to wash—no to scrub—as much of their bodies as they could. They didn’t know why. It was while they were paying for the gas that Betty tried to set her watch to the clock above the register. The watch wouldn’t restart. Neither would Barney’s. But that was nothing compared to the shock of discovering that it was almost dawn.
They had lost nearly three hours. What had happened in that time was a dark, narrow hole in their memories. No matter how hard they stared into it, they could not see the bottom.
39
ALAN
Dreamland, Nevada
“WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?” HATCHER demanded. “First tourist flights to Stonehenge, now this! When you are on a mission with Morat, he is your commanding officer and you do as he tells you. You do not go chasing imaginary lights across the sky on a whim.”
“Wasn’t imaginary,” said Alan. “Or a whim.”
“Did I ask you to speak, Major? Then shut up.”
Alan did not reply.
“Your instruments show no record of any other craft,” Hatcher continued, his voice lower, but his eyes as hard and level as ever. “Things are different up there. They look different. What you think you are seeing isn’t always what you are seeing. You don’t yet have the experience to distinguish between the things you see. You need to learn to ignore the irrelevant stuff.”
“Forgive me for saying so, but it looked like …”
“Are you arguing with me, Major?” Hatcher roared, the color rising in his cheeks.
“No, sir, but I’ve had twelve years combat air experience and have logged thousands of hours in the air. My instincts should count for something. If they don’t, why am I here?”
“Your talent is not in doubt, Major,” said Hatcher. “But to answer your question, you’re here to learn. Remember that. You were in charge of a craft that costs as much as the GNP of several small countries, flying it for the first time, God help you, in low earth orbit. Do you know what would have happened if you’d lost control of it, or hit something? You are not God, Alan. It may hurt to admit it, but in spite of all your experience, this is a new field for you. You are, effectively, a cadet. I’ve listened to the recordings. You disobeyed three direct orders and put your craft in peril, on what amounted to no more than a sensory hunch, a glitch. In any other program, you’d not only be grounded, you’d be out. You know that?”
Alan hesitated, then nodded.
Hatcher looked at him for a long moment, then nodded back.
“I don’t think I need to tell you to keep your nose clean from here on,” said Hatcher, returning to his desk. “You will not be given another chance.”
THE NEXT DAY, ALAN TOLD REGIS WHAT HAD HAPPENED, or as much of it as security protocols permitted. The big man shook his head in wonder.
“I can’t believe they didn’t ground you,” he said.
“Me too,” said Alan.
In fact, he wasn’t even given a day off. That evening, he was summoned to the Papoose Lake hangar and directed back to the Locust. There was no sign of either Hatcher or Morat. The man who gave him his instructions was the suited man with the clipboard he’d seen before but did not know. The man was freckled, red headed, and his name badge said “Riordan.”
“Stay in US air space and do not leave the troposphere.”
“That’s it?” said Alan. “Nothing more specific?”
“Consider it free flight practice,” said Riordan. If he knew Alan was in the doghouse, he gave no sign of it.
The ground crew wore helmets that partly covered their faces. Alan was struck, as he boarded the ship, by how, apart from Regis, with whom he was still rebuilding his friendship, he knew almost no one at the base except for the people who seemed most pissed off at him. It was a depressing thought, not because he was a particularly social animal. He never had been. It was one of the things Lacey had found hardest to deal with about him. He didn’t ordinarily crave company, and was happiest, he’d once stupidly admitted to her, when he was alone. But now he felt a strange urge to talk to someone—anyone—about what he was going thro
ugh, about the world he had discovered, and the ship he was flying. He wanted to discuss its strangeness and the truly awesome feeling of being at the helm. He wanted to describe what it was like to dart across the sky at Mach 7 over the Atlantic, or angle his way between satellites as the earth turned slowly beneath him, but he couldn’t. The only people he could talk to about his experiences were watching him for signs that he couldn’t handle his assignment, waiting for him to screw up one more time … He should get a beer with Regis after the mission. Off base. As old friends.
He took the Locust up, turned its lights out and put the craft through a series of maneuvers over the Rockies and out over Utah’s Great Salt Lake before selecting the coordinates for Riverside, Iowa, the fictional home of Star Trek’s Captain James T. Kirk. If he was going to be accused of acting on a whim, he may as well do the thing right. He moved over it at twenty thousand feet, watching for air traffic, then found a solitary farm and settled into a dead air hover only six hundred feet above its barn. The sky was moonless, but there were lights on in the house. Alan watched as a young man came home in an old pickup, went inside, then came out again with a beer and sat on the stoop to drink it. The young man was oblivious, sipping his beer and gazing up at the stars, unaware that a portion of them above the house had been blotted out by an impossible triangular ship.
Hatcher had warned Alan that he wasn’t God. Obviously. So obvious, in fact, that at the time, Alan was surprised that the CIA man had troubled to say it at all. But here he was, watching from the silent heavens as the man on his porch wiped his mouth, took his empty beer bottle inside and closed up the house for the night.
“Of course I’m not God,” Alan reminded himself aloud. “But sometimes it sure does feel like it.”
ALAN MADE FOUR FLIGHTS IN THE NEXT WEEK, TWO INTO low earth orbit. At no time did he glimpse anything like the arrowhead craft he’d seen that first time with Morat. The strange ship tugged at the edge of Alan’s memory, a delta-shaped question mark that made him wonder what was still being kept from him.