The Grays

In the family room, Chris, smiling tightly, introduced them. He was at least partly right about the appearance of the Glass woman. She had huge eyes, but they worked well in her face. She was a beautiful woman, and Katelyn knew instantly that her friend Colonel Langford was head over heels in love with her. Was she weird? Not at all.

They began a spiel about a special Air Force program for the very brilliant.

“Now,” Katelyn said, “let me get this straight. You put Conner in this tutorial program. But he does or doesn’t have to commit to the Air Force Academy?”

“Oh, no,” Miss Glass said, “no commitment at all. What will happen is that I’ll visit Conner daily and work with him in these accelerated concepts we’ve been referring to.”

“And back we go,” Dan said, “around the circle again. Let me be blunt. We want, in writing, an exact description of what you intend to do with Conner. And we want to be physically present at all times when you are with him.”

“And why don’t you just tell the truth about this?” Chris said.

Lauren Glass turned to him, and for an instant Katelyn saw a flicker in her eyes that was most definitely not normal. Katelyn thought she knew why. This girl was also super-bright. There is an aura around such people. They are not the same as the rest of us.

“The truth is that we’re in trouble with some important classified problems, and the country needs its very best minds to work on them.”

“Is it weapons?” Dan asked.

“Sir,” Colonel Langford said, “I can only repeat that we cannot go into detail.”

“Not with us,” Katelyn said, “but with our eleven-year-old son. I don’t think so.”

“Yes!” Chris said. “Way to go!”

Katelyn watched Lauren Glass grow very still, then saw her lips go into a line and her face become pale. The big eyes glittered with suppressed rage.

“Folks, I’m sorry, but I think we’re ready for you to leave,” Dan said. “Because I think that you’re here because of that UFO and aliens and abduction and all that sort of thing, and the fact that you’re trying to involve our son just plain scares me.”

“Me, too,” Katelyn said. She stood up. “So let’s just call it a night, shall we? And don’t come near our son, because if we find out you’re trying to approach him, we’re going to report you to the police.”

They gave each other frantic glances. “Ma’am, sir—we can talk to him. We can approach him. We have the right.”

“Okay, that’s it,” Dan said. He went out across the hall and upstairs, and Katelyn suddenly knew what he was doing.

“Dan!”

“Ma’am, your son is the most intelligent human being presently alive,” Lauren Glass babbled. “Please listen to us, because I am uniquely capable of teaching him what he needs to learn.”

Dan came rushing back with his hand thrust in his pocket.

“My gun is bigger than your gun,” Colonel Langford said with frightening nonchalance. “I want to see that thing on this table right now.” He pointed at the coffee table. “Right now, Dan. Do it!”

Dan took the pistol out and put it on the table.

“You’re right,” Langford continued. “This does have to do with certain extraordinary secrets.”

“At last,” Chris said.

“I remember me and Katelyn being brought together when we were kids. Being brought together in this dark, womb-like place. And I think you might know something about what this was.”

“I have some odd memories, too,” Katelyn said. “But nothing…” She trailed off. She didn’t know what more to say.

“We believe that you were abducted together, so that, by a process we don’t understand, you would inevitably later marry and have Conner.”

Katelyn’s mouth was so dry that she could hardly speak. She didn’t remember anything about any aliens when she was a kid, and she hadn’t even known Dan back in Madison, but she had gone from being furious at these people and scared because they were obviously a couple of stinking liars, to a sort of nauseated dread. From the dark, in other words, to the very dark.

“And Conner is the smartest person in the world,” she said.

“There could be others, of course. But he must be among no more than a very, very few. Certainly, in this country, yes.”

“That part doesn’t surprise me. But as far as me and Dan—I met Dan years after we lived in Madison. So that’s all conjecture.”

Again, Lauren Glass smiled. She was a person with a thousand different faces, it seemed to Katelyn. This one combined what appeared to be contempt with anger, thinly masked beneath the grin. And the more you looked at her eyes, the odder they got.

“Conner’s a staggeringly good physics student,” Chris said. “He’s doing advanced graduate-level physics at the college and his work is… well, beautiful. The grasp of math is a lovely thing to witness.”

Langford spoke, his voice dense with authority. “Dr. and Mrs. Callaghan, what has happened here is that your child is intended to be the point of contact between mankind and a very old, very brilliant, and very advanced galactic civilization.”

Katelyn felt suddenly horribly dizzy. Then a sort of bomb seemed to go off within her. Did this mean that Chris’s nonsense… wasn’t?

Something came rising up from deep within her that seemed like a kind of release, as if some part of her had been in a trap and was now free.

To her own amazement she reached up so quickly that she didn’t have a chance to check herself, and slapped the colonel across the face.

Nobody said a word. Then Dan began to shake. For an instant, it seemed as if he was having a full-bore seizure, but it emerged into silent laughter. His eyes were closed tight, tears filling them.

Lauren Glass had cried out softly when the slap had taken place. Now she sat still and silent, rigid in her chair.

Rubbing his cheek, the colonel said, “It’s an understandable reaction.”

“I’m sorry! I just—Dan, will you stop that!”

He took a deep breath. Another. “What do we do?”

“What do you do?”

“With our little boy? Who is he? Who are we?”

“Let me give you a piece of advice,” Langford said, “you just take things as they come. Don’t worry about anything happening to your boy. He’s well protected.”

“He needs to be protected?” Katelyn asked. But then it seemed a rather obvious question. Of course he needed to be protected, and so did his secret. “I don’t want anybody told this.”

“Oh, no. Not at all. We tried to avoid telling even you.”

“This should be public knowledge. It’s immoral to hide it.” Chris’s face was alight with zeal and excitement.

Katelyn had a sudden, chilling thought that he might go on TV with that stupid video the Keltons had made. “Conner’s life probably depends on hiding it,” she told him. “Think about it. Think how many different fanatic groups would want him dead. How many governments would fear his power.”

“I hadn’t considered that.”

“Announcing the most amazing railway accident in the history of this or any other century!” There stood Conner, his shirt smeared with model paint and his tattered engineer’s cap on the back of his head. He glared at them. “Doom on the railways. Come and seeeee…” Then he saw the two strangers. “Oh. I’m so sorry.” He came into the room.

“This is our son, Conner,” Dan said. “This is, uh, Mr. Langford and Miss Glass. They’re from the, from, ah —”

“We’re from St. Francis Parish, Conner,” Colonel Langford said. “Soliciting for a fund drive.”

“I don’t guess this is the right moment for a train wreck, then. It’s quite amazing, though.”