Dreamcatcher

smell, faint but discernible, of ethyl alcohol. The smell of them. It was everywhere up here now. Another man might have been tempted to ascribe that smell to a combination of nerves and too much imagination, but Kurtz had never been overburdened with either. In any case, he did not believe the hundred or so square miles of forestland surrounding Gosselin’s Country Market had much future as a viable ecosystem. Sometimes you just had to sand a piece of furniture down to the bare wood and start again.

Kurtz sat behind the desk and opened one of the drawers. A cardboard box with CHEM/U.S./IO UNITS stamped on it lay within. Good for Perlmutter. Kurtz took it out and opened it. Inside were a number of small plastic masks, the transparent sort that fitted over the mouth and nose. He tossed one to Underhill and then put one on himself, quickly adjusting the elastic straps.

“Are these necessary?” Owen asked. “We don’t know. And don’t feel privileged; in another hour, everyone is going to be wearing them. Except for the John Q’s in the Holding Area, that is.”

Underhill donned his mask and adjusted the straps without further comment. Kurtz sat behind the desk with his head leaning back against the latest piece of OSHA paperwork (post it or die) taped to the wall behind him.

“Do they work?” Underhill’s voice was hardly muffled at all. The clear plastic did not fog with his breathing. It seemed to have no pores or filters, but he found he could breathe easily enough.

“They work on Ebola, they work on anthrax, they work on the new super-cholera. Do they work on Ripley? Probably. If not, we’re tucked, soldier. In fact, we may be tucked already. But the clock is running and the game is on. Should I hear the tape you’ve doubtless got in that thing over your shoulder?”

“There’s no need for you to hear all of it, but you ought to taste, I think.”

Kurtz nodded, made a spinning motion in the air with his forefinger Oike an ump signalling a home run, Owen thought), and leaned back further in Gosselin’s chair.

Underhill unslung the tape recorder, set it on the desk facing

Kurtz, and pushed PLAY. A toneless robot voice said: “NSA radio intercept. Multiband. 62914A44. This material is classified top secret. Time of intercept 0627, November fourteen, two-zero-zero-one. Intercept recording begins after the tone. If you are not rated Security 91 Clearance One, please press STOP now.”

“Please,” Kurtz said, nodding. “Good. That’d stop most unauthorized personnel, don’t you think?”

There was a pause, a two-second beep, then a young woman’s voice said: “One. Two. Three. Please don’t hurt us. Ne tious blessez pas.” A two-second silence, and then a young man’s voice said. “Five. Seven. Eleven. We are helpless. Nous sommes sans defense. Please don’t hurt us, we are helpless. Ne nous faites-”

“By God, it’s like a Berlitz language lesson from the Great Beyond,” Kurtz said.

“Recognize the voices?” Underhill asked.

Kurtz shook his head and put a finger to his lips.

The next voice was Bill Clinton’s. “Thirteen. Seventeen. Nineteen.” In Clinton’s Arkansas accent, the last one came out Nahnteen. “There is no infection here. Il n'y a pas d'infection ici.” Another two-second pause, and then Tom Brokaw spoke from the tape recorder. “Twenty-three. Twenty-seven. Twenty-nine. We are dying. On se meurt, on creve. We are dying.”

Underhill pushed STOP. “In case you wondered, the first voice is Sarah Jessica Parker, an actress. The second is Brad Pitt.”

“Who’s he?”

“An actor.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Each pause is followed by another voice. All the voices are or would be recognizable to large segments of the people in this area. There’s Alfred Hitchcock, Paul Harvey, Garth Brooks, Tim Sample-he’s a Maine-style humorist, very popular-and hundreds of others, some of which we haven’t identified.”

“Hundreds of others? How long did this intercept last?”

“Strictly speaking, it’s not an intercept at all but a clear-band transmission which we have been jamming since 0800. Which means a bunch of it got out, but we doubt if anyone who picked it up will have understood much of it. And if they do-” Underhill gave a little What can you do shrug. “It’s still going on. The voices appear to be real. The few voiceprint comparisons that were run are identical. Whatever else they are, these guys could put Rich Little out of business.”

The whup-whup-whup of the helicopters came clearly through the walls. Kurtz could feel it as well as hear it. Through the boards, through the OSHA poster, and from there into the gray meat that was mostly water, telling him to come on come on come on, hurry up hurry up hurry up. His blood responded to it, but he sat quietly, looking at Owen Underhill. Thinking about Owen Underhill. Make haste slowly; that was a useful saying. Especially when dealing with folks like Owen. How’s your groin, indeed.

You fucked with me once, buck, Kurtz thought. Maybe didn’t cross my line, but by God, you scuffed at it, didn’t you? Yes, I think so. And I think you’ll bear watching. “Same four messages over and over,” Underhill said, and ticked them off on the fingers of his left hand. “Don’t hurt us. We’re helpless. There’s no infection here. The last one-” “No infection,” Kurtz mused. “Huh. They’ve got their nerve, don’t they?”

He had seen pictures of the reddish-gold fuzz growing on all the trees around Blue Boy. And on people. Corpses, mostly, at least so far. The techs had named it Ripley fungus, after the tough broad Sigourney Weaver had played in those space movies. Most of them were too young to remember the other Ripley, who had done the “Believe It or Not” feature in the newspapers. “Believe It or Not” was pretty much gone, now; too freaky for the politically correct twenty-first century. But it fit this situation, Kurtz thought. Oh yes, like a glove. Made old Mr Ripley’s Siamese twins and two-headed cows look positively normal by comparison.

“The last one is We’re dying,” Underhill said. “That one’s interesting because of the two different French versions accompanying the English. The first is straightforward. The second-on creve-is slangy. We might say “Our goose is cooked.'” He looked directly at Kurtz, who wished Perlmutter were here to see that yes, it could be done, “Are they cooked? I mean, assuming we don’t help them along?”

“Why French, Owen?”

Underhill shrugged. “It’s still the other language up here.”

“Ah. And the prime numbers? just to show us we’re dealing with intelligent beings? As if any other kind could travel here from another star system, or dimension, or wherever it is they come from?”

“I guess so. What about the flashlights, boss?”

“Most are now down in the woods. They disintegrate fairly rapidly, once they run out of juice. The ones we’ve been able to retrieve look like soup cans with the labels stripped off. Considering their size, they put on a hell of a show, don’t they? Scared the living hell out of the locals.”

When the flashlights disintegrated, they left patches of the fungus or ergot or whatever the hell it was behind. The same seemed true of the aliens themselves. The ones that were left were just up there standing around their ship like commuters standing around a broken-down bus, bawling that they weren’t infectious, il n'y a pas d'infection ici, praise the Lord and pass the biscuits. And once the stuff was on you, you were most likely-what had Owen said? A cooked goose. They didn’t know that for sure, of course, it was early yet, but they had to make the assumption.

“How many ETs still up there?” Owen asked.

“Maybe a hundred.”

“How much don’t we know? Does anybody have any idea?” Kurtz waved this aside. He was not a knower; knowing was someone else’s department, and none of those guys had been invited to this particular pre-Thanksgiving party.

“The survivors,” Underhill persisted. “Are they crew?” “Don’t know, but probably not. Too many for crew; not enough to be colonists; nowhere near enough to be shock-troops.”

“What else is going on up here, boss? Something is.”

“Pretty sure of that, are you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Underhill shrugged. “Intuition?”

“It’s not intuition,” Kurtz said, almost gently. “It’s telepathy.”

“Say what?”

“Low-grade, but there’s really not any question about it. The men sense something, but they haven’t put a name on it yet. Give them a few hours and they will. Our gray friends are telepaths, and they seem to spread that just as they spread the fungus.”

“Holy fucking shit,” Owen Underhill whispered.

Kurtz sat calmly, watching him think. He liked watching people think, if they were any good at it, and now there was more: he was hearing Owen think, a faint sound like the ocean in a conch shell.

“The fungus isn’t strong in the environment,” Owen said. “Neither are they. What about the ESP?”

“Too soon to tell. If it lasts, though, and if it gets out of this pine-tree pisspot we’re in, everything changes. You know that, don’t you?”

Underhill knew. “I can’t believe it,” he said.

“I’m thinking of a car,” Kurtz said. “What car am I thinking of?”

Owen looked at him, apparently trying to decide if Kurtz was serious. He saw that Kurtz was, then shook his head. “How should I…” He paused. “Fiat.”

“Ferrari, actually. I’m thinking of an ice cream flavor. Which f-”

“Pistachio,” Owen said.

“There you go.”

Owen sat another moment, then asked Kurtz-hesitantly-if Kurtz could tell him his brother’s name.

“Kellogg,” Kurtz replied. “Jesus, Owen, what kind of name is

that for a kid?”

“My mother’s maiden name. Christ. Telepathy.”

“It’s going to fuck with the ratings of Jeopardy and Wants to Be a Millionaire, I can tell you that,” Kurtz said, then repeated, it gets loose. “From outside the building there came a gunshot and a scream. “You didn’t have to do that!”

someone cried in a voice filled with outrage and fear. “You didn’t have to do that!”

They waited, but there was no more.

“The confirmed grayboy body-count is eighty-one,” Kurtz said. “There are probably more. Once they go down, they decompose pretty fast. Nothing left but