The Grays

of tears, he backed up to the ladder.

The child scrabbled at his hand in agony. An odor of urine rose from her twisting, struggling body.

All in one motion, he dropped the girl and climbed into the ship. He jammed at the remote, but not fast enough, he had a cop on the damn ladder. The man was looking up at him, trying to bring his gun to bear.

Mike fired directly into his face, which exploded like a smashed pumpkin when the jacketed magnum bullet blasted it. The body dropped away and the ladder came up as Mike slid to the cockpit and dropped into the seat.

He hammered buttons, preparing one of the twelve diversions the plane carried. It would eject in ten seconds. Outside, he heard a shot. The plane was not armored in any way and that would do damage, for certain. Immediately, he got an alarm on one of the sixteen exhaust fans. As Mike took the ship up two hundred feet at a sharp angle, the damaged fan shut down.

The diversion ejected. This was an extremely bright plasma, which would draw the eye of everybody in the area. Gunfire erupted as the cops, deceived into believing that the glaring orb was the ship, shot into it.

Resistant to the Earth’s natural electrical charge, the coherent plasma shot off into the sky faster than a bullet.

“Holy God,” a voice yelled.

“That was a Goddamn UFO!”

Every eye was scanning the sky in the direction the diversion had gone. Mike turned the ship and moved off, quietly working his way out of town.

THIRTY

ON THE OTHER SIDE OF the building, where the main fire deployment was under way, the firemen continued unrolling and charging hose. A burning grain elevator wasn’t going to be extinguished. It was a matter of standing by, making certain it didn’t spread, and letting it burn itself out with as little damage to its surroundings as possible. So their main interest was the roof of Martin’s Feed Store nearby, and the John Deere tractor dealership across the street, not the elevator, which was sending flames at this point well over a hundred feet in the air.

“Captain, we gotta go in there,” one of the firemen said.

“Don’t do it, Harry, that’s an order. You’re gonna see the walls go any minute.” He grabbed his bullhorn. “Okay, folks, back it up! Get those cars outa there!”

CHARLES GUNN CALLED THE WHITE House. “Mr. President, I need that scalar pulse, sir. I don’t understand why it hasn’t gone in.”

“I don’t want to do it, Charles.”

Charles’s heart quietly skipped a beat. “Excuse me?”

“Charles, I’m not going to pull the trigger on Americans just on your say-so. It’s not enough, Charles.”

It was as if he was talking to a different man. “Mr. President, the whole future of mankind is riding on this.”

“You didn’t tell me the truth, Charles. I know the kind of damage this is going to cause, and I’m just not going to do it. How dare you lie to me like that.”

“Sir, I didn’t—”

“You lied and you were willing to destroy the lives of millions and wreck the country! You’re gonna have to find another solution, Charles, this one’s too expensive, and I have to tell you, I’ve got a problem—a major problem, Charles—with your even recommending such a course of action. You don’t walk in here and do a thing like this, ask me to wreck my country and try to trick me into doing it.”

Charles hung up the phone. He had to take a tremendous personal risk if he was going to cut false orders. There was plenty of precedent for it. Dean Bracewell had done it in back during the cold war when he’d moved elements of the Sixth Fleet from the Mediterranean to the Black Sea in violation of detente in order to pull an asset out of Roumania. The problem was, there was no real way to accomplish it without getting caught. Reagan had been furious at Bracewell, yelling at him, “The next time you try to start World War Three, mention it to me, first!”

Given the magnitude of what Charles was going to do, there would be more than a White House tantrum. At the least, he’d go to jail for life. Maybe he’d even suffer the death penalty.

So he’d get Henry Vorona to do it. It would be easier for him, anyway, given that he was active CIA. He’d tell Vorona that the president approved, but wanted the orders to flow this way.

Problem solved.

DRIVING TOWARD TOWN, KATELYN AND Dan had fallen into another silence. Despite Conner’s pleas, she was beginning to feel that Dan had just sort of slipped out of her soul. She should have found forgiveness for him, but she simply had not been able. Halfway to town, with the smoke now towering before them like a storm in the evening sky, Dan silently took her hand. She let him, but could not think why.

IN THE WARNERS’ CAR, CONNER tried to keep the thoughts of others out of his head, but it was hard. He kept feeling like somebody else, also. One moment he was himself, the next he seemed to have a huge, complicated memory of things that had never happened to him, of flying in the stars, of being hideously lonely, of something that was terribly, terribly wrong. Except one thing was not wrong: he remembered Amy who was sitting right beside him, as if he’d known her for a thousand years. He remembered her in life and between lives, in the green rambles of death, planning this life together.

He shuddered. How could he be thinking about things like this? He knew the secrets of the dead and the ages, knew them certainly. In a flash, he could see back huge distances in time, to bright inexplicable fortresses and death-serpents swarming ancient skies.

And he could see the people around him, really see them, and it was wonderful and terrible, it was very terrible, because their secrets were as much a part of him as were his own.

It was like spying on their souls, he decided, looking across the walls they had built around their soft central needs.

“That is so awesome,” Paulie said, looking at the rising smoke.

“Yeah,” Conner agreed. It was an act, though. To appear to be himself as he had been, he had to pretend.

His memories of last night were foggy but he knew that something very incredible had happened.

“Dad, can you step on it please?” Paulie asked.

“We gotta watch the snow.”

At least they weren’t all full of hate. They were thinking about the grain elevator. Mr. Warner was worried about not getting there in time for Paulie to take pictures. Mrs. Warner was making plans to keep the boys from going too close. She was telling herself that she’d yell at them if she had to. In Paulie’s mind there was nothing but smoke, fire, and eager excitement.

Conner put his hands over his face and totally relaxed, blowing out a long breath. His bones seemed to tickle, and the feeling of the air on his skin changed. He had to learn to tune this stuff out. He’d messed up with Mom and Dad, shouting at them about their marriage secrets.

He could hear their inner voices especially well, Dad’s perfectly. He knew that this was because of Dad’s implant, and he felt a question now: somebody—was it called the collective?—was asking him if he wanted others implanted. They would implant anybody he wished, and he would be able to hear their thoughts perfectly, no matter where they were.

He shook it off. It hadn’t been a voice, but more thoughts entering his mind that were not his own, like smoke joining other smoke.

He tuned in to Dad by simply wanting to hear him. There came a tremendous burden of woe, a river of Mom’s face and her skin, long streams of memories, such happy memories, of walking down Oak Road in the summertime, of moments in bed that he modestly turned away from, of a train trip they must have taken before he