THE MORE MARCIE SCREAMED, THE more excited the Three Thieves became. They knew they were too low, they knew they should quiet her, they knew there was a dog nearby, and they could not control dogs. But they also knew that they could reach into her and taste of her emotions, and the taste would fill them with a delicious fire that their kind did not possess, the fire of strong feeling. Man might not be intelligent enough to save himself from the environmental imbalance overpopulation had caused on his planet, but his emotional genius was beyond compare.
They dug into her gushing terror like wolves digging into the flowing guts of a deer… and the collective at first reacted with surprise. Then it raged.
Conner thought the female voice was his mother screaming, and she thought that it was him. They met in the living room, and threw their arms around each other. Then Dan said, “There’s a light in the field.” From their perspective on their rear deck, it was clear that none of the houses were involved.
Conner and Katelyn stayed behind while Dan, wearing slippers and a robe, went out onto the deck and down into the backyard. He carried a flashlight.
Their scraggly yard was quiet. The toys of summer—the slide, the swing set, the empty aboveground pool —were sentinels in the stark light of the setting moon. He moved toward the glow, which was in the field beyond the end of the yard, past a stand of narrow third- or fourth-growth pines.
Katelyn and Conner came out on the deck.
“I think it’s a fire in the field,” he said.
“Are you serious?”
Katelyn clutched her son. “Conner, we’re going back in.”
Conner broke away from her and went racing down the deck stairs. “Look at that,” he yelled.
As he and Dan crossed the yard, hurrying toward the thin woods, a huge light loomed up from below the tree line. They stopped, stunned by this second moon rising.
Katelyn arrived beside them. “Conner, put this on.”
“Thanks, Mom!” He dug his arms into a jacket. “You know what that is?”
“No.”
Dan walked closer to the edge of the woods. “Can we help you?” he shouted.
“Don’t go too close, Dad.”
The thing seemed to wobble, then rise.
“It’s moving this way, Dan!”
It hung above the woods. Not a sound, now.
“I think it’s a balloon,” Katelyn said.
Then more screams whipped out, shrill to cracking.
“A balloon is on fire!” Katelyn shouted.
The three of them ran again, fumbling in the brush, guided by the light.
“Who in the world would be up in a hot-air balloon at night?” Conner asked. “And that’s not fire, that’s a piezoelectric effect of some kind. Look at it shimmer.”
“It’s a student,” Katelyn said. “Something’s gone wrong with some prank.”
It wasn’t anything to do with hazing, not in February, but it could indeed be a prank. Every house that backed onto the field was occupied by a Bell College professor.
THE THREE THIEVES LOOKED OUT across the electromagnetic haze that flowed off the wires with which humans surrounded their shelters. Sharp eyes watched Conner and Dan.
DAN PAUSED IN THE WOODS. “Maybe nothing’s gone wrong. Maybe the screaming is the prank.”
“I hope so,” Katelyn said, calmer now, embracing this most reasonable of probabilities.
“Come on,” Conner said.
Before them, as they left the woods, they saw people running toward the object from various directions, Harley Warner, but not Paulie or his mother or sister, Chris and Nancy Jeffers, and the entire Kelton family, robes flying, Manrico barking furiously, but hanging well back. Jimbo Kelton was using a video camera, and Nancy Jeffers held her cell phone out like some kind of shield, no doubt taking pictures with it.
Another scream pealed out.
Dan shouted, “DO YOU NEED HELP?” He hoped it was just a prank because Bell did not need adverse publicity, not with the sort of enrollment problems faced by a small college located at the burnt-out end of a bus line that only served what the college brochure gamely called “the sophisticated little city of Wilton.” What sophistication there might be in a row of closed stores and a grain elevator was anybody’s guess.
The words seemed to ring in the trees, to leave their narrow trunks trembling.
“Can’t you see that she’s in real trouble?” Conner yelled. He took off toward the object.
THE ONE WATCHED CONNER, WHILE the Two and the Three regarded Marcie with the reverent cunning of boys in a candy store. The Two drew closer, now pressing his face into her churning aura. Angry static bounced around the tiny space—the collective was furious that they were not performing as directed.
Which made little difference. The thousand grays who were here were spread all over the planet, feeding in Brazil and Britain and China, mining gravitite in the iron deposits of New York, extracting Helium 3 fuel on the moon. They were linked to the great collective, yes, but it was moving toward Earth far more slowly than the lead group, so what could it actually do? Nothing, and they would carry out its orders… eventually.
The Three Thieves would have been more efficient with Marcie, but the luscious fears, the darting hopes, the bright, wet desires that filled her smooth flesh were just too much of a temptation. Dan Callaghan was awake anyway, so the whole expedition was a waste. They might as well make of it whatever they could.
The Two, as the negative pole of the triad, showed her a long needle. Her eyes widened as she saw the silver of it appearing out of the dark that surrounded her. She could not see the Thieves, of course, they were too careful for that.
He plunged the needle into her forehead and she shrieked and they gobbled her agony… for the moments that it lasted feeling as alive as their distant ancestors must have, before they had enhanced themselves with machine intelligence, and lost contact with the only thing that mattered, in the end, which was feeling.
Without it, life was ongoing death, and to find it again, crossing a galaxy was as nothing, not even if the journey took fifty generations, not even if it took a thousand.
From a billion times a billion miles away, they had seen Earth glowing with emotion. It had drawn them like excited moths to its mystery, first in hundreds, then in thousands, and soon the billions would come to drink the healing waters of the human soul… if all went well.
THE KELTONS WENT CLOSE, RUNNING low like actors on a movie battlefield. It occurred to Dan that Jimbo Kelton might be recording the prank for the later amusement of fellow perpetrators.
All the people in the neighborhood were not only known to each other, they counted one another as friends. Nancy and Chris were dear friends of Katelyn and Dan. Kelton was a historian, working at the far end of the campus from the Hall of Science, but still a member of the cozy little Oak Road crowd. The Warners and the Callaghans, were very close—or had been.
Nancy clutched her cell phone to her ear. Dan felt for his, miraculously found it in a pocket of his jacket. He punched in 9-1-1. “This is Dr. Daniel Callaghan, one-oh-three Oak Road. There’s a fire in the field behind our house that borders Wilton Road. Somebody’s trapped in it.”
The screams lost form, became a continuous roar of pain.
Dan closed his cell phone while the dispatcher was still talking. He was now convinced that this was serious. Those screams were real. He took off after Conner, going flat-out.
“Don’t let him near it,” Katelyn howled, passing him in her pursuit of her son.
As Dan ran, he looked for the basket, for the burning student, but he could see only the fearsome glare, like looking into a thousand car headlights or a flashbulb that would not quit. He shielded his eyes and struggled closer.
