He brought his horse to a halt at the edge of a rocky precipice, then waited as Anne drew up to him.
“I was afraid you wouldn’t come out with me,” Owen told her.
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Your father. He’s dead set against you seeing me.”
“I’m not my father,” Anne said determinedly.
“I know that,” Owen said.
He knew the moment had come, leaned forward and kissed her. “You’re the sun and the moon to me, Anne,” he said. He could feel her surrender to him, and in her surrender, the greater victory he sought.
Colonel Campbell studied the projected slide, a cross-section of cell tissue. All around him scientists and military officers peered at the same slide. For the last few minutes, the experts had argued about the nature of the tissue. It had certain characteristics that seemed essentially animal, and others that resembled a fungus. Still others were convinced that the cell tissue actually changed from animal to vegetable, that it could be… anything.
Suddenly the door opened and Dr. Helms walked in. “I think you need to see this,” he said urgently.
Colonel Campbell and the others followed Helms down the corridor to an observation room.
On the other side of the glass Dr. Goldin stood facing the alien. The alien was silent and gave no hint of movement. It was Dr. Goldin who was doing all the talking, his body swaying forward and backward repetitively as he spoke.
“What’s he saying? Is it German?” Colonel Campbell asked.
“Goldin would never speak German,” Helms replied. “It’s Hebrew. He’s reciting from the Haphtorah.”
Colonel Campbell peered at the alien, and for a moment seemed to lose himself in the unfathomable depth of its eyes. Then he shifted his attention back to Dr. Goldin. A small trickle of blood had suddenly emerged from the scientist’s nose.
“My God,” the colonel whispered as the trickle became a red torrent and Goldin slid to the floor. “Get him out of there!”
Guards rushed into the room, picked Goldin from the floor and brought him hurriedly into the observation room.
“How long was he in there?” the colonel demanded.
“Ten minutes,” Helms answered. “Maybe less.”
Dr. Goldin lay on a table a few feet away. He looked pale, exhausted. “I was there,” he whispered.
Colonel Campbell leaned closer to Goldin. “Where?”
“At my bar mitzvah in Dresden,” Goldin answered. “If I could have stayed a little longer, I could have spoken to my father.” He grabbed the colonel’s lapel. “My father,” he cried desperately. “I could have spoken to my father.” His eyes shifted to the observation window, where the alien stood, staring silently. “I want to see my father,” Goldin pleaded.
The colonel trained his gaze on the alien. For an instant their eyes locked. Then the alien turned and faced the wall, entirely motionless, save for the rippling undulation of its back.
Owen knew that something had happened, something… important. All morning scientists and military people had gone in and out of the colonel’s office. During that time, only Dr. Helms had remained with the colonel. The reasonable assumption was that whatever the colonel knew, Helms knew it too. The question was how to get Helms to talk. Owen considered various plans, chose the most direct one, then put it into operation.
A few hours later, he signaled as he saw Dr. Helms’ car approach, and obedient to Owen’s earlier instructions, the policemen hit the light and the siren. Just as he knew it would, Dr. Helms’ car pulled over. Owen got out, walked to the driver’s window and pulled out his ID. “Captain Crawford, Army Intelligence. This a routine debriefing, Dr. Helms. Nothing to be alarmed about.”
“Routine?” Helms asked. “Why couldn’t you just…”
“There’s a leak in the project, Doctor,” Owen said authoritatively. “We don’t suspect you of leaking anything but…”
Helms looked at Owen nervously. “Does this have anything to do with what happened to Dr. Goldin yesterday?”
“In part,” Owen answered, though he had no idea that anything had “happened” to Dr. Goldin.
“I don’t see how Dr. Goldin’s death could have anything to do with a leak…”
“Why don’t you tell me what you think happened,” Owen said.
There’d been an “incident,” Helms said. Dr. Goldin had had a strange encounter with “the one that was alive.” Goldin had gone into some kind of trance, Helms went on, and during the trance he’d spoken Hebrew and believed himself to be thirteen again, reciting in the synagogue while his long-dead father looked on.
“This first encounter nearly killed Dr. Goldin,” Helms said.
“First encounter?”
“Last night he went back into the room,” Helms said. “I guess he wanted to see his father again. So he went back into the room. Of the… visitor.”
“And the experience killed him,” Owen said, careful not to phrase it as a question.
“It killed them both,” Dr. Helms said.
Owen felt a jolt of excitement. “You’ve been a lot of help,” he said. “And, Doctor, I’m sure you can appreciate how important it is that you mention our discussion to no one.”
Sally Clarke sat in her living room, reading the paper while Tom and Becky slept upstairs. According to the lead story, a trucker had been murdered on the state highway, and as she read the details of the killing, Sally once again felt how cruel life on earth actually was. Here was a working guy who’d probably picked up the wrong hitchhiker and ended up dead. The simplest thing could turn on you, an act of kindness flip around and bite you like a snake.
She didn’t like to think too long about the darker aspects of life, and so she folded the paper and picked up the magazine she’d been reading at the diner and read the last of its fantastic mystery stories. The story was a little creepy, but Sally liked that. She liked to feel the tingle of something strange, something unexplainable. So much of life was predictable. You got up each morning and the world looked the same, the air smelled the same. You went to the same job and did the same things once you got there. But in these fantastic stories nothing was predictable. Weird things were commonplace, and the world was always turning a blind corner or displaying some strange new design.
She heard a heavy thud. The shed door, she thought. It was always coming unlatched and banging in the wind. If she let it go it would wake the children.
She retrieved a flashlight from the kitchen and walked out into the night, the yellow beam nosing along the green lawn, casting the distant shed in a hazy light. The door was flapping against the side of the building in hard, rhythmic thuds, and suddenly Sally felt a tingle of dread pass over her, as if the world had abruptly changed, become not the predictable thing it had been moments before, but instead that other world she’d read about, dark and mysterious, where nothing was as it seemed.
She drew in a long breath, steadying herself. Don’t be ridiculous, she thought. There’s nothing in the shed. Nothing lurking there, crouched in a dark corner… waiting.
She moved forward boldly now, persuaded by her own argument, secure in the knowledge that the world was as it had always been.
At the door, she paused and shined the flashlight into the shed’s dark interior. She heard a rustling, and knew that it was not the wind in the trees, but something inside the shed. A mouse, perhaps. She aimed the light at the ground, then moved it slowly to the right, the beam crawling along the edge of the wall until it came to a figure
