Marty stared at him, stunned.
Eric motioned the two MPs forward. “These men will hand you over to the civilian authorities in Carson City,” he added. “I’m sure your fear of my father will be taken into account, as well as your service record.”
“And you’ll be stepping up to take over the project,” Marty said.
Eric nodded. “Who better?”
“The acorn doesn’t fall far, does it?”
Eric’s smile lay like a dagger across his lips. “Not this time, no.”
PART FIVE. Maintenance
Chapter One
Jacob Clarke felt his boyhood return to him as the old Pacer joggled along the dirt road that led to his mother’s house. His brother Tom was at the wheel, and in the backseat, Carol, his wife, and their seven-year-old daughter, Lisa. A warmth came from each of them, one that reached out and touched him, palpable as a hand. A normal life, he thought. A normal life was a treasure beyond price, a life where things came and lingered for a time, then passed away according to the iron laws of earth. A life punctuated by the usual triumphs and misfortunes, within a fixed range both predictable and unpredictable, a life where darkness brought only night, and light brought only morning. It was all he wanted or had ever wanted, and briefly, as he closed in upon the old home place, he thought it might actually lie within his grasp.
“What are you listening to?” Tom asked cheerfully.
“What?” Jacob said.
“I was talking to Lisa,” Tom said. He glanced toward the backseat, where Jacob’s daughter sat, listening to a first-generation Walkman.
Carol laughed. “She can’t hear you,” she said, pointing to the headphones.
Tom mouthed the words slowly and with maximum expansion.
“The Ramones,” Lisa answered brightly.
Tom turned back to the road and nodded toward the old farmhouse as it came into view
“Look like you remember it?” he asked.
Jacob nodded. “Exactly. It doesn’t change much.”
Once they parked, Jacob got out of the car and stared silently at the house. The years had taken their toll, as time… and experience… always did. It needed paint and new screens for the windows and the rusty gutters no doubt leaked badly. It looked like a thousand other run-down houses, and thus gave no hint of the unearthly things that had happened in its rooms, or within the old, tumbledown shed that still stood in the distance, or beneath the trees that edged its dusty grounds.
Becky rushed out of the house, the screen door slapping closed behind her, ran over to Jacob and hugged him fiercely.
“Mom’s just waking up,” she said. She looked at Carol. “I’m glad you guys came. Mom really wanted to see Lisa before…”
“I know,” Carol said softly.
Sally lay in her bed, hooked up to an oxygen machine.
Jacob had never seen her this way, so wasted, and for a moment it left him unable to speak, so that he only stared at her, this woman now grown old and withered, but who’d once been so bold and determined, built “con- tactors” and yearned with all her heart to speak with other worlds.
“You grew up nice,” Sally said weakly, her voice rattling with each word. “You all right?”
Jacob nodded.
She smiled, then closed her eyes for a moment, as if the nearness of her son after so many years was a pressure she could hardly bear. When she opened them again, Carol stood before her, Lisa huddled shyly at her mothers side.
“Mom, this is my wife, Carol,” Jacob told her. “And this is Lisa, your granddaughter.”
Sally struggled to rise, urging herself up in bed. “Lisa, let me look at you,” she said.
Lisa stepped up to her grandmother’s bed.
“Say hello,” Jacob told her.
“Hello, Grandma,” Lisa said.
Sally peered into Lisa’s face, and for a moment seemed to return to the past. “She has your father’s eyes,” she said to Jacob.
Jacob took Sally’s hand, and watched as she lifted her eyes upward longingly, still searching desperately for the one who’d appeared that night so long ago, lingered briefly, then vanished. The effort appeared to exhaust her, and she sank back down into the rumpled bed.
“She never stops thinking about him, does she?” Jacob said later that night as he sat in the kitchen with Tom.
“I know who he was, you know,” Tom said.
Jacob looked at him doubtfully.
“Back in the Cold War, the government experimented with soldiers,” Tom explained. “It’s all in documents you can get with the Freedom of Information Act. They were giving drugs to soldiers. I think your dad was one of them. He escaped from an Army base in Roswell. Owen Crawford came to get him.” He leaned forward earnestly. “Your ‘abilities’ came from your father, Jake. From whatever drugs they gave him. Not because he came from outer space.” His voice grew more grave. “The problem is, they’re doing it again, with civilians this time. Same experiments. Mind control. Processing. Some of these people, they think they’ve been abducted by aliens, but that’s just what the government wants them to believe.”
“Alien abduction as a cover story?” Jacob asked skeptically. “It seems a little far-fetched, Tom.” He drew in a cautious breath. “I mean…”
Just then Becky came into the room. “Mom’s in a lot of pain,” she said. “The morphine doesn’t seem to be helping.”
Jacob got to his feet and rushed to his mother’s side. He took her hand and held it softly. “It’s all right, Mom. It’s all right.”
Sally looked at him wearily. “I’m going now, aren’t I?”
“Soon,” Jacob answered.
“I want to sit up a little,” Sally said weakly.
Jacob carefully supported her back as she rose, then fluffed the pillow behind her, before gently placing his hand on her brow. Then he concentrated on the vision, determined to bring it to her during these final seconds of her life. He knew the vision was forming as her eyes filled with wonder. She reached for her ear, plucked something from it, invisible to Jacob and the others but as real to her as the breath she drew. “John,” she whispered.
Jacob knew that she was seeing him in her mind, Jacob’s father as he’d been in 1947, perhaps the moment when she’d known absolutely that she was in love with him, the moment when she’d drawn her grandmother’s lone-star earring from her ear and placed it in his hand.
Jacob reached to take Tom’s hand, and Tom, too, turned in the direction of Sally’s gaze. Tom placed his other hand in Becky’s, and the vision was visible to them all now, not just to Sally. A figure emerged from the blinding radiance, a visitor to earth who had miraculously returned.
The figure stretched out his hand. “Come on, Sally.” Jacob looked at Tom and Becky and knew that they saw him, too. Then he looked at his mother, and saw that she had gone, her eyes closed now, her expression, for
