Jesse Keys felt the wind in his hair. He was moving fast, pedaling rapidly, the bike speeding along. He felt his teenage legs pumping hard, but the bike seemed to float beneath him, surging ahead under its own power, as if it were alive.
He wheeled into the alley, braking slightly at the sight of an old truck. The truck was pulled over to the side, and as Jesse went around it, he noticed its painted sign, TRAVELING ATTRACTIONS.
A carnival van, Jesse thought. He pumped the pedals and glided past the cab of the truck, where a man sat behind the wheel. The carny turned to Jesse, nodded briefly, and offered a dark smile.
Jesse pumped again, harder this time, and the bike lurched ahead. From behind, he heard the engine of the truck, glanced back and saw that it was following him.
He slammed down on the pedals, his legs pumping fiercely now, but the truck continued to bear down upon him, the roar of its engine growing louder and louder as it closed in.
He wheeled around, and gasped as two orbs of light swept toward him from the far end of the alley. He glanced back, and the truck was gone, replaced by a third light. Frantically he whirled around, then back again, all the lights closing in. He could feel them like arrows, coming at him faster and faster, the light building to a blinding radiance that suddenly engulfed him and lifted him, the world falling away as his bike rolled down the alley, staggered and finally collapsed, riderless and abandoned, its front wheel spinning in the fading light.
Owen sat at his desk. Marty and Howard stood in front of him, waiting to hear the results of President Kennedy’s visit.
“He doesn’t think our visitors are a threat,” Owen sneered. “We have one month to prove to him that they are. If we don’t, he’ll shut us down and give our money to the space program.” He sat back for a moment and considered the years of effort that were about to go up in smoke, the two sons he barely knew, the wife who’d become a drunk and a pill-popper he dreaded seeing at the end of the day.
“There’s this couple,” Marty began cautiously.
Owen looked at him. “Go on.”
“Named Betty and Barney Hill,” Marty said. “Encounters in 1961. On their way back from Niagara Falls. He’s a postal clerk. She’s a child welfare worker. Very solid people, both of them.”
“Very solid people who claim they were taken aboard a craft,” Howard added.
“Taken?” Owen asked. His eyes brightened. “What else?”
“They’re being treated by hypnosis,” Marty said. “Like they use on amnesia victims.”
Owen nodded. “This could be what we’re looking for.”
Marty handed Owen a picture of the couple.
Owen’s face soured. “No Negroes,” he said as he handed it back. “That clouds the issue.” He glanced from one man to the other. “Keep trying. There must be somebody else.”
Russell Keys pulled himself out from under the ‘56 Buick Special. His boss, Mr. Kennelworth, was already headed home for lunch. Over the past five years, he’d gotten the man’s trust, proven that he wasn’t a bum or a criminal, just a middle-aged guy who needed steady work, and was willing to stick to it.
He walked to the workbench, where he’d left a can of soda before climbing back under the Buick. He took a sip, and suddenly felt a searing blade of pain across his brow. He placed the can against his head, hoping the cold would help, and closed his eyes.
When he opened them again Jesse stood before him, tall and slender, as handsome at sixteen as Russell had been at the same age.
Russell felt his eyes grow moist. “Hey, Jesse,” he said. “How did you know I was here?”
“I heard Mom talking to Bill. She said you’d gotten a job as close to us as you were legally allowed.”
Russell looked at Jesse, a sad smile on his face. “You grew up.”
Jesse was quiet for a moment, then seemed to remember his purpose. “I’ve been reading these books where the government knows about flying saucers and they’re afraid if they tell us there will be a panic.” He drew the book from his pocket and handed it to Russell.
Russell glanced at the book. On the cover, two shadowy men faced an illustrator’s version of a flying saucer. The title was equally melodramatic:
Russell glanced up from the book and saw it in Jesse’s eyes, an unbearable dread. “They started taking you again,” he said.
“Yes.”
Russell drew his son quickly into his arms.
For a time, Jesse remained in his father’s embrace. Then, like one returned to his purpose, he pulled himself out of it. “It says it’s mostly the Air Force that knows about this sort of thing,” he said. “I was thinking. You were a pilot, so why don’t we go talk to them?”
It was a naive idea, Russell knew, the desperate hope of a frightened young boy who’d suddenly found his world dissolving around him. It was born of a need to find the truth, and Russell suddenly felt in league with his son, no less desperate to try anything, even the most far-fetched connection. “Yes, why don’t we,” he said with a quiet smile. “We can start with the son of my old bombardier. He’s in the Air Force. We can go talk to him.”
They’d done just that a few days later at Hill Air Force Base in Ogden, Utah, and with the result Russell could have easily predicted. Lieutenant Wylie had been nice enough, polite and open until the first talk of flying saucers. He’d tried to be indulgent after that, but Russell had seen the dreadful conclusion in his eyes, falling like a hammer: Wylie’s certainty that Russell and Jesse Keyes were a father-and-son nutcase. Still, Wylie had kept listening, and even offered to make a report. But there would be no report, Russell knew. Nor should he have expected Wylie to react any differently than he had. The problem was that there were moments when your own loneliness and desperation made you briefly hope that something might change, that someone, somewhere would believe you. Jesse had roused that hope in him. But Wylie’s response had returned him to reality, the sheer fact that only those who had truly been taken knew the truth, and that it was this anguished certainty that kept them in permanent isolation from their fellow man.
“He didn’t believe us,” Russell said now as he and Jesse sat in a local diner. “No one ever believes us.”
“Then what can we do?” Jesse asked.
Russell started to answer, but the searing pain in his head abruptly returned, silencing him. It was like a fire moving through his brain, a blade of boiling steel. “I… I…” He felt the room close in and then expand, the walls tip and slide. The last thing he saw was Jesse reaching for him as he fell.
It was night when he awoke again. Jesse stood beside his bed, along with a tall man in a white coat. He could see the worry in his son’s face.
“Tell me,” he said to the doctor.
“You have a brain tumor,” the doctor said. “In the frontal lobe.”
“Can you take it out?”
The doctor shook his head. “I’ve never seen one quite like it,” he said.
Jesse’s face tightened, and Russell realized just how deeply and permanently his son’s world had changed. Fear was the ever-rising water Jesse swam in now, fear and bafflement and the overwhelming sense that the visible world was little more than a whirling montage, film on film, the flickering windows of a passing train.
“What is it, Jesse?” he asked. “What are you thinking?”
“That if you have a tumor, I may have one too,” he said. He looked at the doctor. “Can you give me the same tests you just gave my dad?”
The doctor seemed to see Jesse’s fear and desperation. “All right,” he said.
The tests were conducted the same afternoon, the results displayed in stark black and white a short time later: two brains, each with identical spots at the front.
“Exactly the same size,” the doctor said. He seemed hardly able to believe his own eyes. “And in exactly the same place.”
