people were gathering around now, crowding around him, jostling for position.
Jabba crunched noisily into another chip, then asked, “So what do you think?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, as if in a daze. The crowd oohed as an airborne camera gave a closer look at the unexplained apparition. “How are they doing this?” he asked, cupping the phone’s mike area to cut out the noise around him. As a technology researcher and a scientist, his mind was instinctively skeptical and was immediately trying to figure out ways this could be done.
Jabba was obviously thinking along the same lines. “Must be some kind of laser effect. Remember those floating beads of light those guys were working on at Keio—”
“Laser-induced plasma emissions?” Bellinger interjected. They’d both seen press coverage of the recent invention at the Japanese university, where focused bursts from a laser projector heated up the air at specific points above the bulky device, causing tiny bursts of plasma emissions that “drew” small, three-dimensional shapes of white light in midair.
“Yeah, remember? The guy with the weird goggles and the white gloves—”
“No way,” Bellinger countered. “You’d need a generator the size of an aircraft carrier sitting right under it for something this big. Plus it wouldn’t explain the sustained brilliance or the way it’s so clearly defined.”
“All right, forget that. What about other kinds of projections? Spectral imagery?”
Bellinger stared closely at the screen. “You know something I don’t? ’Cause except for the droid in—which one’s the white one that looks like a fire hydrant?”
“R2-D2.” The roll of the eyes came through in his mocking tone as clearly as if they’d been using high-def webcams.
“Except for R2-D2, I don’t think 3-D projectors actually exist.”
Which was true. Something that could achieve a free-floating, un-contained, three-dimensional moving image, like in Princess Leia’s seminal “Help us, Obi-Wan” moment—of any size, let alone something this big—still eluded the best brains in the business.
“Besides, you’re forgetting one pesky little detail,” Bellinger added, feeling slightly more uncomfortable now.
“I know, dude. It’s daylight.” Jabba sounded spooked at having that realization reaffirmed.
“Not exactly projector-friendly, is it?”
“Nope.”
Bellinger felt uncomfortable having that discussion out there, surrounded by people, his gym bag and laundry inches from getting trampled. But he just couldn’t tear himself away.
“Okay, so we can forget about lasers and projectors,” he told Jabba. “I mean, look at it. It’s not contained within any kind of framework, it’s not boxed in, there’s no dark backdrop behind it, no glass panes around it. It’s just there, free-floating. In daylight.”
“Unless there are a couple of monster mirrors on either side of it they’re not showing us,” Jabba mused. “Hey, maybe it’s generated from space.”
“Nice idea, but how exactly?”
Jabba bit noisily into another chip. “I don’t know, dude. I mean, this thing doesn’t compute, does it?”
“No. Hang on,” Bellinger told him, as he jammed the phone between his ear and his shoulder, grabbed his belongings, and inched back a few steps, out of the ever-growing crowd.
He and Jabba bounced around several other ideas, throwing everything they could think of at it, trying to pin some sensible, plausible explanation on it, but nothing stuck. Bellinger’s excitement, though, soon gave way to a sense of unease. Something else was bothering him. An uncomfortable feeling that something buried deep within him was clawing for attention.
Suddenly, the fixed camera got jarred as an altercation took place on the ship’s deck. Jabba lapped it up, as did the crowd at the mall, whooping and joking as the people on the ship filming the sighting scuffled, then the aerial camera came back. It closed in on the apparition, which then faded away, only to then suddenly reappear directly over the ship. The crowd around Bellinger shrieked and recoiled in shock as the shaky upward shot from the handheld camera on deck sent a shock wave crackling through them.
“Son of a bitch,” Jabba blurted. “Is it turning?”
Bellinger focused on the apparition, now aware of a growing lump in his throat. “It’s spherical,” he marveled. “It’s not some kind of projection. It’s actually physical, isn’t it?”
On the screen, Grace Logan was having trouble keeping calm, clearly rattled by the apparition that was just hovering there, directly over the ship. The crowd in the mall was echoing her reaction, visibly stiffening and going quiet.
Jabba’s crunching had also stopped. “I think you’re right. But how . . . ? It’s not an object, and yet . . . It’s almost like the air itself is burning up, but . . . that’s not possible, is it? I mean, you can’t light air up, can you?”
Bellinger felt a sudden rush of blood to his temples. Something clicked. It just rushed in on him, unannounced, out of nowhere. Long-forgotten, dormant neurons buried deep within his brain had somehow managed to reach out and find each other and make a connection.
An unhappy one.
He went silent, his mind racing to process that link and take it to its natural conclusion, lost in the dread of the possibility just as the sign faded from view and the sky above the ship went back to normal.
“Dude, you there?”
Bellinger heard his voice go distant, as if he were on the outside watching himself answer. “Yeah.”
“What? What’re you thinking?”
He felt his skin crawl. “I’ve got to go. I’ll call you when I get home. Let me know if you come up with anything.”
“Dude, hang on, don’t just—”
Bellinger hung up.
He stood there, his feet nailed to the cool tiled floor, the commotion around him fading as he turned his thoughts inward. Only minutes earlier, picking up the colorful linen shirts, all folded up and ready for packing, had conjured up a pleasant, warm feeling inside him. With the Christmas holiday days away, the sea, the sun, and the wide blue skies of the Dominican Republic beckoned—his annual pilgrimage, a welcome respite from the claustrophobic, windowless life he led at the research lab. Any feeling of warmth was now gone. A cold, crippling unease had taken its place and, Bellinger knew, wasn’t about to let go.
He just stood there for a few long minutes, contemplating the disturbing—and, he hoped, surely unlikely— idea that had clawed its way out from the darkest recesses of his mind.
But he couldn’t shake the thought.
He stayed there as the TVs replayed the whole thing, lost in his thoughts as the crowd dissipated. He finally tore himself away from the screens, gathered his things, and drove home in silence.
He dumped his bags in his front hallway, decided to try and let it go and move onto other things, and headed for his fridge. He got himself a beer and went back to the hall and rifled through his mail, but it was no use.
He couldn’t shake it away.
He switched on his TV. The images it threw back at him were spine-tingling. Snarled traffic in Times Square, where a crowd of people had just frozen in place, mesmerized by the images of the sighting on the Sony JumboTron; people in bars and stadiums, on their feet, their eyes peeled on the screens; and similar chaotic images from around the world. He moved to his desk and fired up his laptop and spent a couple of hours scouring Internet chat rooms while flicking around various news reports, trying to get a clearer picture of what was going on, hoping to come across some ammo to dismiss his theory.
It was insane, outlandish . . . but it fit.
It just fit.
Which brought up an even bigger problem.
What to do about it.
His primal instinct told him to forget about it and leave it alone. Well alone. If what he was imagining was
