The Grays

had come after his seizures.

He thought he knew why the syndrome had returned. This was probably the most tense period he had never known in his life. He was not a particularly successful teacher. In fact, he was pretty much a failure. Bell wasn’t just a holding tank for second-rate students, it was a refuge for dead-end teachers, too.

He had his good points. You could not find a more loving husband. You could not find a better man to father a kid as sensitive and exasperating as Conner. But he tended to the pedantic when he lectured. He was too careful, too humorless, too predictable.

Still, he had built a life for them at Bell. Conner’s life was here. Katelyn was having a successful career in the sociology department. She was tenured, popular with students, had crowded classes. She was pulling down seventy grand to his forty-eight-five, also. It would not be fair for his failure to uproot her.

Tomorrow at ten sharp, he would have his final tenure review with Marcie. Of course, it wasn’t the official word, that came from the tenure committee next week. But by the end of the meeting tomorrow, he’d know.

He drove past Marcie’s house, noted that all the blinds were down. A signal? An omen? He drove on, circling blocks—but not Marcie’s of course, God forbid—and forcing back these ridiculous, if thankfully silent, tears.

When he arrived home, he hoped to avoid Conner.

“I was right,” his son said as he got out of the car. “I was exactly right.”

“Conner, you were wrong. It was a cyst.”

“Where is it?”

“Oh, brother. Son, it’s in the garbage at the health center.”

“Dad, do you realize what that is? It’s an alien artifact! It’s important, there’s even a Web site about them. A lot of Web sites.”

Dan tried to get past his son and into the house.

“Dad, it’s important! You’re involved in a close-encounter situation and—”

“SHUT UP!” He ran across the garage. “Will you just SHUT UP!”

Katelyn appeared. “What’s the matter with you? What’s going on out here?”

“Katelyn—oh, God. Katelyn, I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Conner. Please forgive me, both of you.” He tried to smile. Failed. Shook his head. “Look, Conner, you’re always asking for space. I need some space right now. I need some, okay?”

“Dad, are you crying?”

“It’s a mild allergy to the anesthesia.”

“Dad’s just had an operation, Conner. We need to back off.”

“But Mom, he’s letting them throw away an implant!”

“Goddamnit, there’s no such thing! Conner, for a supposed genius, you can be an amazing idiot. A Web site on alien implants is your source of information? You urgently need to learn some discrimination, son. You can do calculus backward and recite Wittgenstein, and yet you come up with this garbage.”

“Be careful, Dad. It was Wittgenstein who said, ‘Our greatest stupidities may be very wise.’ ”

Dan knew not to pursue it. No matter how correct he might be, in a sentence or two more, Conner would win the argument. To avoid that, Dan went inside, took a relatively good Barolo out of the wine rack, opened it and grabbed a glass, and headed for the family room. Golf, decent wine, and deep, deep sleep were what he needed.

He’d gone over the top, of course. The boy was terribly sensitive, of course. Well, he’d apologize later. Conner got under your skin. He really did have a skill at that.

He poured some wine, drank it… and felt his ear. The damned thing had moved again. It had returned to its original site, under the stitch.

He considered screaming. But no, that would be rude. Instead, he poured himself another full glass and drank it down.

PART FOUR The Hanged Man

Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! For the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

—MATTHEW ARNOLD

“Dover Beach”

ELEVEN

MIKE WILKES WATCHED AS, ONE by one, the members of the Trust filed slowly through a large white device that was set into the doorway to the conference room on the second floor of his Georgetown home.

As each trustee stood waiting in what was essentially a magnetic-resonance-imaging system reconfigured and retuned to detect very small metallic objects, Mike watched a whole-body image come into focus on a flat- panel display located beside the entrance.

“Come in, Charles,” he said to their chairman, Charles Gunn.

“I’m wiped every morning at home,” Charles said. “I had one pulled out of my damn neck last week.”

“Uh-oh, hold it, Richard.” The display showed a bright spot deep in the brain of Richard Forbes, the Trust’s security chief. “They got one in your damn temporal lobe, buddy.”

“Is it deep?”

“Oh, yeah. You’re gonna need a neurosurgeon, big time.”

“Well, guys, I’m out of this for the duration, then. I’ll see you after my lobotomy.”

There was nervous laughter. Brain implants were rare. They required an abduction, while an object that went in under the skin could be placed while the host was wide awake. All it would do would be to cause some pain, but there would be no wound, certainly no scar. The grays were, among other things, masters of atomic structure. They could walk through walls if they wished, and they could certainly deposit an implant under the skin without surgery. The terrifying thing about a brain implant was that it could be used for subtle mind control, detectable only by someone with profound understanding.

“They anticipated this meeting,” Charles said.

“Yeah, they know damn well we’d want our security guy in a meeting called because of a security issue,” Henry Vorona added as he came through.

Then Ted Cassius had one under his scalp. These were nasties, too, because that close to the brain, they could be used not only for monitoring, but for a degree of mind control as well.

“How long have you had this, Ted?”