“She’s clearly important,” Mary said. “In fact, I’d say, she’s the point of this.”
“Definitely.”
“So pick her up. Take her.”
Wakeman shook his head. “They’d just take her back… and they’re way better at that than we are.”
“So what do we do?”
“We watch and wait,” Wakeman told her. “And we work on a way to take her that will work.”
“‘Watch and wait,’” Mary repeated. “That sounds a lot like my father.”
Wakeman chuckled. “I’m nothing like your father.”
Mary kissed him softly.
“I have a theory about who she is,” Wakeman said. “Want to hear it?”
Mary nodded.
“Evolution tends to eliminate, or at least, subjugate emotion,” Wakeman said. “The limbic brain is still down there.” His eyes slid over to Mary. “Imagine their… abilities combined with the energy of our strong emotions.”
“They’d be cherry bombs,” Mary said, her eyes lifting toward the ceiling as if picturing the terrible force of such a combination. “But she’d be a thermonuclear weapon.”
PART SEVEN. God’s Equation
Chapter One
Charlie lay naked on the bed, his body glistening with sweat. Or was it sweat? In the dream he’d been suspended in a tank of translucent liquid, floating upside down, his arms spread. Through the thick liquid he’d seen figures scurrying about, slender, with elongated arms, their pear-shaped heads and almond eyes continually glancing toward him.
He sat up and stared around the room, his gaze moving over the vast amount of testimony he’d gathered over the years, tapes and transcripts, printouts from alien abduction sites he’d found on the Internet. None of that seemed as real as the dream, however, none of it actual proof of what had happened to him, or that it had ever happened to anyone else, proof that he wasn’t crazy, proof that he was not alone.
Allie knew that they came to her because they sensed that she could calm them, give them direction, Denny and Milo and even Nina. Her eyes moved silently from one face to the next, all of them in a circle around her. There was something about them that made her think of the fairy tales her mother had read to her. People were like characters in those tales. They were abandoned in the woods. They were locked in towers. They couldn’t reach each other. They went after things they thought were valuable or important or would last, but they couldn’t be sure that the things they went after had any of those qualities. Half the time they seemed lost and desperate, as if some horrible monster were chasing them, and they were growing tired, and it was closing in.
“You guys want to get enlightenment, or you want to play some rock and roll?” Lisa asked as she came into the room.
Denny and Milo got to their feet and headed for their guitars. Allie took her place near Denny, who’d told her that his rhythm improved when she was near him. She wasn’t sure this was true, but during her nine short years of life, she’d gotten used to people saying strange things to her, expecting strange things from her. She had a power, people said, and she knew that this was true.
She recalled the time, three years before, when her mother had taken her to see the dolphins, how she’d stood before the tank, lifted her arms without knowing why, then stood, oddly unsurprised, as the dolphins had turned and drifted toward her, their many faces finally near hers, their noses nearly touching the glass, suspended there, as if waiting for instructions. She had a power, yes, but all she really wanted was just to be a little girl.
The video showed a soccer field, kids frantically at play, Allie in the forefront, pursuing the ball.
“That’s Lisa Clarke’s daughter, and yes, she can block a shot on goal,” Eric said. “But other than that, she hasn’t demonstrated anything like the kind of power we were expecting. Which is good, because once she demonstrates, we might not be able to pick her up.” Eric held his eyes on the video, Allie now closing in on the ball. “Lisa has joined some kind of therapy group for people who claim they’ve been taken. We’ve placed an agent in that same group.” He shrugged. “Just a way of keeping an eye on things.”
Wakeman and Mary continued to watch the video until it froze with Allie still on the soccer field, her eyes sparkling with competitive drive.
“She’s still a little kid,” Wakeman said. “Give her time.”
“Chet’s right,” Mary said. She gave Wakeman a curiously charged glance. “A lot of genetic traits don’t demonstrate until right before adolescence. Schizophrenia, for example.”
She smiled at Wakeman, and Eric caught a glimmer in her eyes. It was no longer the look of a little girl who admired her “uncle,” he realized, but of a woman flirting with a man.
“Well, we can’t pick her up anyway,” Eric said with a shrug. “They’ll just take her back, like they did when we tried for Lisa.”
Wakeman returned Mary’s flirtatious smile, then turned to Eric.
“That used to be the case,” he said.
“Used to be the case?” Eric asked.
Wakeman could hardly contain his billowing self-confidence. “Want to see what we can do?” He pressed his hand at Mary’s back and gently urged her over to a small microwave oven attached to a computer.
“Microwave radiation,” he said as Eric joined them at the oven. “Part of the light spectrum.” Wakeman stared at the small hamster that scurried about inside the oven. “In the case of the oven, twelve point five centimeters to be exact.” He hit the oven’s switch. “Don’t worry, my dear,” Wakeman added with a laugh. “We’re not going to fry our furry little friend.” He smiled. “At least… not yet.”
Eric watched as the hamster continued to move about inside the oven, ears up, whiskers twitching, large round eyes peering back at him from the other side of the glass.
“When we block that wavelength, our little friend is on easy street,” Wakeman said. He reached down and tapped a command on the computer keyboard beside the oven.
Instantly, the hamster exploded, its hair and entrails slammed against the glass in a gooey, red mass.
“In meditation we learn the oneness of all things,” Wakeman said, his gaze on the bloody pulp that was all that remained of the hamster. “The harmony that flows through nature. These are the same ideas, only stripped of the comforting notion of divinity that we get from science, and more specifically, from mathematics.” He took a pad from the desk, scribbled a few numbers and handed the pad to Mary.
“The Fibonacci sequence,” Mary said. “Each number added to the one before it makes the next number in the sequence.” She looked at her father, she now the teacher, he the student. “The Fibonacci sequence gives us the golden mean,” she told him. “They’re everywhere, these numbers. Shells. Nebulae. The spiral of a pinecone. Beehives. DNA.”
“Is this going somewhere?” Eric asked impatiently.
Wakeman turned to him. “Their crafts hold five,” he explained. “The number of confirmed sightings in Mexico last year was 1,597. They have three fingers and one thumb.”
