The other father stopped dead and wheeled around to face Jesse. “He’s not your father,” he said to Charlie.
“Don’t listen to him,” Jesse cried.
Charlie looked from one to the other.
“Charlie, it’s me,” the man who held his hand said.
“He’s not me,” Jesse called to him desperately. “It’s going to be all right. Charlie, he’s not me.”
“Charlie, I’m your dad,” the man holding his hand said firmly.
“No,” Jesse shouted. “He’s making me from your head, from your picture of me.”
Charlie glanced back at the man who stood a few yards away begging him not to go into the field.
“Remember last month?” the man called to him loudly. “I cut myself shaving and I didn’t know it. I came down to the breakfast table with blood all over the side of my face, and you and mom…”
Charlie glanced up at the man who still held his hand. Blood had begun to drip from a cut on his cheek. “You’re not…” Charlie began, then stopped, as a group of men suddenly emerged from the wheat.
“Dad!” Charlie screamed, trying to tug free of the man’s grip.
But the man held him tightly.
“Leave my boy alone!” Jesse screamed. He drew the pistol and fired, the blast so loud it shook the earth and seemed to tear from the sun a blinding orb of light.
Jesse came to in a hospital room, his eyes barely able to focus, as if they’d been seared by the light. Through the blur he made out Amelia and Charlie beside the bed.
“They’ll be coming for Charlie now,” he said weakly. He felt a trickle of blood ooze from his nose, then a small sliver of something carried on its flow. The sliver dropped to his chest in a small pool of blood, and he knew it was the thing they’d planted in his brain when they’d taken him years before.
Amelia looked at the device, then frantically at her husband, and Jesse felt a deep wave of vindication pass over him. For he could see that at last she knew that he was not some hopeless paranoid, locked in an insane vision, but simply a man who’d always, and in everything, told his wife the truth.
He started to speak, but a squeal of tires silenced him. He glanced out the hospital window, and they were there, several men in sweatshirts, all of them rushing toward the hospital. He turned to Amelia and with his eyes told her what she had to do.
“Charlie,” she said, acting now on his unspoken command. “Come on.”
He saw her press Charlie urgently out the door, then from the window, watched her emerge again, dressed as a nurse, pushing Charlie in a wheelchair while the men in sweatshirts darted back and forth among the cars. She gave them no notice, but simply moved forward determinedly, this woman he had loved and married and dared to tell the truth, a truth she had at last understood and acted upon, and thus, in the hour of her departure, granted him the hope that his son might yet live an earthly and unbroken life.
Eric could not believe what he saw. Tom Clarke and Becky standing in the middle of the road, facing him squarely, a squad of reporters behind them, ready with their camera. And so he had failed, he realized. Becky had never truly surrendered to him, and he was hit with the surprising fact that for a moment he had surrendered to her.
Eric got out of the truck, walked over to Tom and faced him sternly. “You and your friends here will be driven to Las Vegas. You’ll be detained for seventy-two hours, then released.” He looked at Becky and understood that despite himself, he still loved her, that the full power of that kiss still held him in thrall.
“Detained for what cause?” Tom asked.
Eric returned his attention to Tom. “Detained because you’re interfering with a scheduled movement of Air Force personnel.”
“Bastard,” Becky snapped.
Eric couldn’t bear to look at her and so continued to stare directly at Tom. “It’s over. Get in the damned trucks.”
Tom’s eyes shifted to the right, and peered just over Eric’s shoulder. “Still don’t know how it flies, do you?”
Eric turned around to see four helicopters hovering in the distance, the spacecraft hanging between them, nearly motionless in the dark air.
“How much longer do you think you can hide this kind of evidence?” Tom asked.
Eric wheeled around. “For as long as I have to,” he said sharply. He nodded, and a crowd of armed men suddenly appeared, the two groups now facing each other, both equally determined to stand their ground.
A silence fell over them as the two groups glared at each other.
Then a soft hum sounded in the distance, barely a rustle of air at first. But its steady drone grew louder with each passing second, as the lights of the enormous craft engulfed them. They stood frozen, staring upward in stunned amazement, as the humming craft held weight-lessly above them, encasing them in a light more radiant than earthly light, their ears vibrating with the steadily building hum of an engine without gears or straining levers, the sound of pure propulsion, unhindered and streaked with light, the cosmic energy of a foreign cosmos.
Then both light and sound vanished and they stood, watching in astonished silence as the air went black around them with such blinding speed that all the world suddenly seemed no larger than a cramped, windowless cell in which the last candle had abruptly guttered out.
Eric’s lips parted in stricken awe, leaving him mute, deaf, and very nearly blind, as if he’d been stripped of all sensation save wonder.
Then, slowly, the world returned to him in little particles of sound and vision, and he saw the milling crowd again, the trucks and soldiers, Tom and Becky as they were led away, and finally Wakeman beside him.
“They took your proof,” Wakeman said. “The bodies and the craft. Every bit of proof.”
Then Wakeman walked away, and Eric stood alone in the darkness, watching as the men and women Tom and Becky had brought with them were loaded onto trucks and driven away. When the last of them had been taken, he walked to his jeep, glanced about, careful that no one was nearby, picked up his briefcase and opened it.
The artifact winked up at him from the dark interior of the case. “Not everything,” he said as he gazed at the only proof of unearthly worlds that still remained on earth.
PART SIX. Charlie and Lisa
Chapter One
In the solitude of his study, Eric thought of Becky Clarke, the unexpected love he’d felt for her, the willing gift of her body, then the bitter reality of her betrayal. He knew there was no explanation for the feeling that had swept over him during that one evening he’d been with her. It had been a new experience, and it had shaken him to the bone. Now he thought of her as a part of life he’d missed, a treasure lost and irrecoverable. At times, when he sat alone in his study, the irony was almost more than he could bear, the painful and irreducible fact that he’d spent his life in search of an alien presence when it was a human presence he most powerfully desired.
In the other room his daughter Mary was busily working on a scientific paper for school, but for Eric, the whole vast world of science was reduced to the one thing he could truly claim as his, the one thing that had not been taken from him either by aliens or by humans. The artifact.
The artifact was the unassailable evidence that he had not lived in vain. The artifact was the solid ground in which his life was rooted, and if he gave up his search to decipher it, he felt that his soul would shatter, and he would be as empty as the space from which it had come so many years ago.
He walked to the safe, dialed the combination and removed the artifact. In the gloomy half-light he preferred now, he stared at the indecipherable markings inscribed upon it in the language of another world. This much I have, he thought, this much is mine.