The older scientists stroked their beards in contemplation. Okun, with no beard to stroke, came up with an idea. “These variations, do they follow any kind of a pattern?”
Again, Cibatutto had the answer. “Yes, they do. The belts experience seasonal fluctuations, but these do not correspond directly to Earth’s seasons. The energy level of the inner belt remains low for several months, then erupts into short periods of intense activity.”
“Hmmm, would it be possible to find out what season the belts were in on July 4, 1947, between the hours of 10 P.M. and midnight in New Mexico?”
“I don’t see why not.” Cibatutto brought a thick reference book into the kitchen and began working through a series of mathematical equations. Okun was too eager to let the man work in peace.
“How often does this inner belt thingie erupt?” Brackish asked.
“About five consecutive days each year, sometimes twice a year. You have to run each date through the equation.” When he was finished crunching the numbers, Cibatutto stared down at the results, nodding in an unconscious imitation of one of his colleagues. “On the date in question, the energy was at its peak.”
Okun grinned and turned to the others. “Anybody up for a wager?” The scientists, accustomed to taking money from men who asked them such questions, were all ears. “You guys choose whichever alien encounter you think is the most real, the one you think really happened, and I’ll bet you a month of washing the dishes that it happened during one of these flare-ups.”
“Eau Claire, Wisconsin,” Lenel said without hesitation. The other men agreed. Next to Roswell, this was the case with the most convincing physical evidence.
In the Eau Claire case, a policeman claimed to have “surprised” an alien saucer hovering over a farmhouse. When the craft moved away, he pursued at high speed until it fired a blue ray, which struck his vehicle and knocked him unconscious. An examination of the car revealed it had undergone a massive failure of the electrical system. Everything from the ignition to the taillights was ruined. The spark plugs and points were melted. The officer involved lived through the experience, but died six months later of nervous depression. His vehicle was taken to the UFO evidence compound at the Air Force Academy.
Cibatutto worked the date of the Eau Claire event through the equation, then made an announcement. “The good news is we seem to have found a connection between the alien visitations and the activity of the Van Allen belts. The bad news is each of us has to do the dishes 1.55 extra times this month. I propose we go in reverse-alphabetical order.” The old men cheered and slapped Okun on the back.
“Progress of this magnitude deserves more than dirty dishes,” Dworkin declared. “It calls for champagne!”
*
If the group’s new theory was correct, it would be the single most important discovery about the aliens since their ship had crash-landed twenty-six years before, more important than Okun’s unproved discovery that the ships must fly in groups: If the visitors only penetrated earth’s atmosphere during these short bursts of radioactivity, it would mean two things. First, researchers could weed out the many bogus sightings and reports of contact in order to concentrate their attention on the real McCoys. Second, it would give them the power to predict when the creatures would come again.
While the older men set to work finding all the files that fell into one of these windows, Okun checked the dates of the case studies he’d already looked at. To his surprise, only one of them turned out to be true—the Bridget Jones incident. The lying girl had been telling the truth after all.
It turned out to be a long day of pulling reports, but their enthusiasm was high. They brought a radio into the stacks and sang the songs they knew the words to. Even Lenel was cheery. As they searched, Okun had the bright idea of calling Radecker and telling him what they’d learned. Dworkin called him over and explained why that might not be such a good idea. “Yesterday in Los Angeles, as we were parked in front of your house, I watched your expression change when we learned your mother wasn’t at home. It occurred to me then how much I’d like for you to be able to leave here when your contract is finished. I think that’s what you want for yourself. So call Mr. Radecker if you like, but remember this: the more you know, the deeper you’re buried.”
9
MRS. GLUCK AND HER DAUGHTER
Okun didn’t understand the precise relationship between the Van Allen belts and the arrival of the spaceships. And he didn’t much care. What was important to him was that the dates matched. Now he had a way of sifting through the rubbish and finding the gold. But he was dismayed by two discoveries. First; there were hardly any real reports. Lenel hadn’t been exaggerating when he said 99.9 percent of everything in the stacks was a bunch of hooey of bullpucky or whatever he’d called it. After several days of combing through the files, they had found about four hundred case studies occurring during the specified five-day periods. Then came the long process of poring over them and throwing out the fakes that happened to have been reported during those times. The scientists ruled out all but sixty-two of the reported sightings and encounters. Only twenty of these had occurred later than 1960. And four of those were mere sightings. That left only sixteen good reports.
One of them was the Eau Claire, Wisconsin incident.
One was the Bridget Jones case, where the central witness was dead.
Then there were thirteen people who claimed they had been abducted. And that’s where things got interesting. All told very similar stories. They had been driving along lonely roads or at home engaged in some quiet activity when they suddenly stopped whatever they were doing. The drivers pulled to the side of the road. The people taken from their homes sat down or stood still. All the abductees described being surrounded by short, quick-moving creatures with enlarged heads. Many claimed they had been flown to a spaceship, where various experiments were performed on their persons. Six of them described a leader who was much taller that the others. Okun knew from other reading he had done that mentions of a much taller leader were common.
But there was one report that stood out from the others. It was about a woman who claimed she had been interrogated about a Y-shape. Her file said she was a person in the public eye, and care was taken to expunge any clue to her identity. But Okun knew her name was Trina Gluck and she lived in Fresno. In fact, he knew her street and house number. Scrawled onto the front page of the document in a handwriting style he was learning to recognize was the woman’s name and address.
Two weeks later, he rode into Las Vegas with the boys. As always, the van dropped them off in front of their bank, Parducci Savings. Nothing on the outside of the building let on that it was a bank. There was no logo, no place to park, no slot for night deposits. Inside, the lobby looked like someone’s living room, with lots of family photos on the walls and too much furniture. There was a counter with two teller’s windows and behind that a couple of doors leading to private offices. These doors were never open. Salvatore Parducci, a heavyset man with an appetite for fine suits and gold bracelets, was the manager. He spoke in a luxuriously soft voice punctuated by sudden bursts of loud, braying laughter.
Okun knew there was something unusual about the bank on his first visit. Moments after opening his new account, Salvatore came around the counter with his arms spread wide and embraced him. While he was being squeezed against the powerful man’s girth, Salvatore looked down, and purred, “Welcome. My family thanks you for trusting us with your money.” On another occasion, Okun watched a helicopter land beside the building. An old lady stepped out of it carrying a casserole dish and came inside. It turned out to be Signora Parducci, delivering lunch to her son. She flirted shamelessly with Cibatutto in Italian before disappearing into one of the back offices. Very shady.
This morning’s transaction had been uneventful except for Okun withdrawing an unusually large amount of cash, three hundred dollars. “Feeling lucky,” he explained with a grin.
It was a sunny morning, and the ol
d fellows were in high spirits. They were marching down the boulevard toward a café that offered one-cent breakfasts. After that, it was onward to the casinos for a day of cards. Okun seemed preoccupied. He kept to the back of the pack, fingering the wad of cash in his pocket. “Hey, you guys,” he called. The old men stopped walking and turned around. “Nothing personal, but I think I’ll try my luck at one of the smaller casinos today. By myself.” His friends were visibly disappointed.
“Hey, what happened to all for one and one for all?” Freiling asked. “We’re supposed to play as a team.” When that approach didn’t work, he tried another. “We’ll let you win a few.”
“It’s not the money. I just feel like being alone today.”
“Completely understandable,” Lenel declared. “I’m tired of looking at these ugly old coots myself. It wouldn’t hurt to have a break.”
“Dr. Freiling,” Cibatutto cried. “This man called you an ugly coot!”
Freiling put up his dukes. “Who said so? I’ll knock his block off.”
As the two men began sparring, Dworkin came a step closer to his young friend, and silently pronounced the words, “Be careful.” Okun wondered if he knew.
An hour later, he had rented a car and was heading west.
*
Brinelle Cluck was the girl he’d always wanted to meet—nerdy, artsy, and, in her own way, beautiful. It was love at first sight. She was a couple of years older and a couple of inches taller than him and as slender as a microscope. From her moccasins to her perfect miniature breasts to her long straight hair, she was, for him, a vision of loveliness. He immediately regretted having dressed like a total square.
“Do I know you?” she asked when she opened the door.
Hating to begin anything with the word “no,” he answered, “Maybe in a past life. Were you ever a monkey in Tibet?”
Instead of slamming the door in his face, she actually thought about it for a second before she answered. “Yes, now that you mention it, I was.”
They both laughed at her reply and spent the next thirty minutes rambling through one topic after another. After reincarnation, they talked about Brinelle’s poetry and modem dance, the Beatles, Bangladesh, biointensive gardening, the world’s scariest roller coasters, and the Carlos Castaneda books. Okun felt his heart racing with excitement when she reached out and briefly touched his chest. She fondled his ankh.
“I don’t usually like jewelry, but that is the most outtasight piece. Where’d you get it?”
The question caught him off guard. “Um, I can’t remember. I’ve had it for years.”
When she asked him his name, he blurted, “Bob. Bob Robertson.”
“I’m Brinelle Gluck. I wish I had a nice normal name like yours. You have no idea what it’s like to get teased about your name all the time. So, Mr. Bob Robertson, what do you do? Got a job?”
“Yeah, I guess you could call it a job.”
“What is it you do?” Okun was starting to get uncomfortable with this part of the conversation.
“I’m a scientist.”
“Really? What branch of science?
“Boring stuff, planes, rockets, just a lot of technical stuff.”
“I see. Where do you do all this boring stuff?
“Labs, mainly.”
“No duh. I mean what’s the name of the lab. My dad knows hundreds of people who work at Livermore and Stanford and UCLA.”
He really liked this girl, and he wanted desperately to tell her the truth or at least to explain that he wasn’t allowed to say. But he’d been coached a thousand times never ever to give that response. It aroused suspicion and curiosity, two things to which Area 51 was allergic. He had been told to turn and walk away or, if that wasn’t possible, to lie.
“I work at JPL in the microcircuitry division. We do the circuit boards and harness wiring for the space program, mostly satellites.”
Then she did something that broke his heart. She nodded. It was a big dopey nod with an expression on her face that showed how impressed she was. She had just gotten around to asking him why he’d knocked on the door when the phone rang.
“I gotta get that. Come in and sit down.” Brinelle disappeared into another room.
Hie house was impressive. It was a small palace built in the Spanish style, with lots of exposed wood and high, whitewashed ceilings. He wandered into the sunken living room and examined a painting. It looked vaguely familiar, and he wondered if it might be the work of a famous artist. It was that kind of house.
He sat down on the sofa and let his life flash before his eyes. This chick is mondo diggable, he told himself I haven’t known her an hour, and I’ve already lied to her a couple of times. If I keep working at Area 51, I’ll never be friends with her or anyone else. There are too many secrets to keep. Suddenly, he pictured himself at forty, still with long hair, still puttering around with the spaceship, still single. When Dworkin and the others were gone would he continue to work down there alone?
Contemplating these matters, he reached into a bowl of nuts on the coffee table and was trying to open one with his teeth when another woman walked into the room. “And who might you be?” she asked.
“Um, hello. Is your name Gluck? Trina Gluck?”
“It might be. Who are you?”
“Hello, I’m Bob. Bob Robertson. I work at JPL in the microcircuitry division. We do a lot of the electronic work for the space program. I was just having a very pleasant conversation with your daughter.”
The woman, elegant, in her late fifties, was obviously Brinelle’s mom. From the way she was dressed, it looked like she’d just come back from a social function.
“Are you a friend of my daughter’s?”
“Sort of. I mean, I hope so. But actually, I’m here to see you. I recently read the report on your abduction and wanted to ask you some questions about it.”
Instantly, Okun knew he’d said the wrong thing. The woman’s expression turned ugly. “Get out of this house before I call the police.”
Okun tried to make her understand how important it was, but she wouldn’t listen. Brinelle came back in and tried to take his side, but her mom was irate, screaming at the top of her lungs, tears on her face. When he stopped in the doorway, she began pushing the door closed. “Dr. Wells sent me,” he blurted out, just as the door slammed in his face.
He stood on the doorstep, stunned. How could he have been so stupid? Up to that moment, he’d treated it all as a game, the Great American Flying Saucer Hunt. But obviously, it was a deep personal wound for this woman. The instant he’d mentioned the word abduction, a wave of pain had broken across her face. For Trina Gluck, it wasn’t a game. Okun started off down the brick driveway when the door opened again.
Mrs. Gluck stepped onto the porch and waved him back inside. “If Dr. Wells sent you, you can come in.”
*
The kidnapping, as she called it, had taken place about ten years earlier, shortly after her husband, a congressman, had declared his candidacy for one of California’s Senate seats. It was Memorial Day weekend, and Brinelle was away at her first slumber party. Trina’s husband was in bed reading. She was in the bathroom brushing her teeth when her arm suddenly relaxed to her side. A moment later, the toothbrush clattered into the sink. Although she’d never so much as imagined an encounter with aliens before, she somehow knew immediately what was happening. She was terrified and felt the impulse to scream, but couldn’t. She still had control over her eyes and tried to turn toward the door, but her neck would not cooperate. She felt the first one come into the room a moment before she saw its reflection in the mirror. She described it as being about three or four feet tall with a large head and shiny silver eyes, but it moved about the room so quickly she couldn’t get a good look at it. After the first one examined her hair and nightgown, others came through the doorway.
One of them stood directly behind her, hidden from view, and identified itself to her as “the friend.” This creature spoke to her using he
r own voice for what seemed like a long time. The distinction between her own thoughts and those of the friend began to blur. She felt small hands touching her body in several places and heard them rummaging through the drawers and cabinets. She felt her shock settling into anger and struggled to regain control of herself. When the friend asked how they could help her relax and cooperate, she asked for her husband. Go get my husband out of bed. But a moment later she heard her own voice reply, “Your husband is asleep now.”
She was taken outdoors and laid on her back in some of the bushes by the side of the house. The friend made her understand she had a skin disease, something contagious on her stomach and pelvis. Small hands lifted her nightgown while other hands lifted her head so she could watch the operation that would cure her. Silently begging them to stop, she watched a needlelike instrument slice into her skin. The blade opened a bloodless incision down the left side of her belly, from the rib cage down to the hip. A second instrument she couldn’t see was inserted into the opening. As it slid between her skin and stomach, the friend congratulated her on being clean again. Still listening to her own voice being used by another being, she was given a brief lecture of some sort. It might have been on hygiene, but she couldn’t be sure.
When the operation was finished she was put into a sitting position, then lifted up into the sky. It was the sensation of sitting in a strong net and being lifted by a very fast crane. She watched as the lights of the city receded between her knees.
Then she was in a gray room. She heard the soft rustling of their movements, like pieces of silk being rubbed together. She rolled her head to the side, and noticed she was lying on a platform or table a few feet above the floor. The room appeared to be circular, almost spherical in shape. A bank of windows was set low against the wall, almost part of the floor. Nearby she noticed a pile of clothing, old dirty clothes, and she had the sense that someone had been sleeping there. The friend came and repositioned her head so that all she could see was the blank gray ceiling. She was told that the examination would continue.
Complete Independence Day Omnibus, The Page 43