The Grays

just have to do it.”

“And what if I can’t?”

“You’ve passed the test.” He went to a small keyboard and keyed in a combination. “I’ll be in the control room. You’ll be able to see and hear me, and vice versa. If you get into trouble, I’ll pull you out. But obviously things can happen fast in there.”

He left the dressing room, closing the heavy outer door behind him. A moment later, his voice returned, tinny, coming out of a ceiling speaker. “You reading me?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, the door’s opening now.”

There was a loud click, then a whirring sound, and the wall of the little chamber slid back. She saw before her a room lit by what appeared to be ultraviolet light. It reminded her of the Animals of the Night exhibit at the Cleveland Zoo, where the vampire bats and things were deceived into thinking it was dark during the day. “Are there any lights?”

“Don’t worry about seeing him. You won’t. If you get so much as a glimpse, count yourself lucky. Pay attention to the corners of your eyes.”

“The corners of my eyes… you mean use my peripheral vision?”

Then the air hit her. It was dry—real dry. She could feel her face shriveling, it was so dry, feel her lips starting to crack. The function of the Vaseline was now clear, and she grabbed another handful of it right in the glove and slathered it on.

The room open before her was not large, maybe twenty by twenty. It looked like it had rubber walls. There was a window on the far side, and Andy could be seen sitting there at a control panel. His face glowed green from the instruments before him.

Suddenly something shot past so fast she lurched back waving her hands. It felt like nothing so much as being buzzed by a fly—but not a small fly, no. More like the size, say, of a buzzard.

There was also a voice: groaning, howling, wailing, and it was the strangest voice she had ever heard, because of the way it echoed in her ears and her mind at the same time, as if she was hearing both sounds and thoughts that were the same as the sounds.

A thud, bzzzt, thud, bzzzt, thud, bzzzt, shot around the room, and with it the wailing, mourning voice, its howl thin and pitiful now.

She saw something—a flash of something that gleamed black. It was big, the size of a hand, and slanted. It was also brilliantly alive—a big, gleaming eye. A sound came out of her that she knew, objectively, was a scream. Sharp, intense, made of pure fear.

The wailing at once increased. Now it was desolated, like he’d been instantly aware of her revulsion and her fright and it was making him feel really, really miserable.

“Hold on,” she said. Dimly, she was conscious that Wilkes was now standing beside the tech at the control panel.

Suddenly, the buzzing stopped. There was no sound now but the hissing of the powerful air- conditioning.

“Sit down in the chair,” Wilkes said over the intercom.

“Where is he?”

“He moves with your eyes, so he appears totally still. The eye doesn’t see anything that’s totally still.”

“Yeah, like a rock or a mountain.”

“No,” Wilkes explained, “when you look at anything at all, you’re in motion, so you see it. Since Adam is constantly making micromovements to match your eyes’ own natural flickering, he doesn’t register in the optic nerve at all.”

“What in hell is this about?”

“Tell you what. If you want to see him, make a very sudden move. As you do that, concentrate on the corners of your eyes, not your central vision. You’ll see him.”

She sat, took a deep breath, tried to concentrate on her peripheral vision, and leaped to her feet.

Not a foot away, there was a shadow. Then it was gone again.

“He’s right here! He’s right on top of me!”

Then he started wailing again, and she could feel him whizzing around the room. More and more, he was racing past her face at the distance of what felt like about an inch. Dad had gotten scratched. She sat frozen, terrified.

“Stay with it. You’re doing marvelously.”

She could see Wilkes nodding and smiling at her. “This is one hell of a sucker play,” she yelled. “False damn pretenses!” She got to her feet. Adam whizzed past so close she was forced to sit back down. She jumped up again. Same thing happened.

“He likes you, Lauren,” Wilkes said.

It felt a lot like getting a bat in her hair or something. How had Dad ever stood this, it was just way, way too weird.

“So what are we doing with an alien?” she screeched. “How in the world did we capture an alien?”

“We got two of them in a crash in New Mexico. They may have been given to us, we’re not sure.”

Bzzzt! Whooosh!

“Get away!”

“He wants to touch you. Let him touch you.”

She began waving her arms around her head. “No way, I’ll bleed out!”

“Remember, that was an accident. He’s in an agony of grief, that’s why he’s like this. Now you settle down, young woman, and follow your orders.”

Pictures of Dad kept flashing through her mind like photographs. With them came emotions of grief and the most acute regret. It was clear that they entered from the outside, although she could not say how she knew that. It was sort of like breathing a kind of emotional smoke.

“Shh,” she whispered, “now, baby…” She looked toward the control room. “The buzzing stopped again.”

Something brushed her cheek.

“I think he just touched me. I know you’re sorry,” she whispered, “I know…” She looked again toward the figures in the control room. “What am I supposed to do now?”

No response.

So she comforted him. She went through her mind, seeking for the words of some song from childhood, some sort of comforting song. Dad had not been a big singer. Mom had her Elvis, but this did not appear to be your basic Elvis moment.

Then a sort of hallucinatory flash took place. In it, the light in the room was deep red and there was a man at the table, sitting across from Adam. On the table, a bright green light like a laser that hopped up and down in the air. The man was her dad.

It was so real, it was so good to see him again, that the tears were immediate. And then she heard inside her head, oohhhhh, and she knew that Adam had realized who she was.

“Yeah,” she said, “yeah, he was my dad.”

Ohhhhhh! Ohhhhh!

“Oh, yeah,” she managed through her own tears, “I miss him, too, I miss him bad.”

She saw next a glowingly beautiful woman, her face surrounded by a halo of golden light. It was, she knew, herself as Adam saw her.

Empath. One who empathizes. Turned out it was in the blood. No training needed. Genetic thing, she supposed. Maybe their ancestors had been psychics or witches or something. Dad’s grandfather had come from Ireland, that was about all she knew of their bloodline.

In the control room, Colonel Wilkes and Specialist Martin exchanged looks. “He’s got her wrapped around his little finger,” Wilkes said.

“For sure, sir.”

“He knows how to handle ’em, the little bastard. That is one smart piece of work in there.”

They said no more. Lauren Glass had been captured. She would not escape, never, not until she followed her father and his predecessor, both of whom Adam had killed with a scratch.