“So we show Mom her hero is a fraud,” Becky said. “Then what… we leave her with nothing?”
Tom glanced over to the front porch. Jacob stood there, his face expressionless.
“Hey, Jacob,” Tom said, taken aback by his brother’s sudden appearance.
“I don’t want to go away to school,” Jacob said. “If I go, who will take care of Mom?”
Becky walked over to Jacob and knelt beside him. “Jacob, you’ve got to try to understand… you’ve got a gift, an insight into…”
“I got it from my father,” Jacob said stiffly, his voice in the usual monotone, despite the odd thing he’d said.
“Jacob, you need to be in a place where people understand you…” She stopped and glanced across the lawn to where Sally waved to her from the entrance of the shed.
“Hey, kids,” Sally called. “It’s finished.”
Tom and Becky glanced at each other apprehensively, then walked to the shed where Sally swung open the door with a cheerful sense of accomplishment.
“I call it a contactor,” she asked. “What do you think?”
Tom stared at what appeared to be some kind of Buck Rogers contraption made of tinfoil and bristling with antennae.
“It’s like a radio,” Sally announced. “I can send messages into space.”
“Why do you want to send a message into space?” Becky asked.
“I miss Jacob’s father,” Sally answered. “I want to tell him that we’re all right and ask him to come get us.” She glanced into the night sky. For years she had kept it all to herself, the strange man she’d found in the shed, his odd power to see into her soul, the sympathy and generosity he had offered her, and the love she had given him in return. “I want him to know that we’re ready to go with him.”
“Go where?” Tom asked.
Sally continued to search the star-spattered sky. “Home,” she said.
The light awakened him, and startled by its blinding radiance, he knew that they had come for him… or Jesse.
“Jesse!” Russell cried as he bolted up from his place on the floor of the boxcar. “Jesse!”
A figure stepped into the light, blocking his path.
“Hold it right there, Russell.”
He could see Bill’s stern face, rock-hard and determined. “Where’s Jesse?” Bill demanded. “What the hell have you done with Jesse?”
Over Bill’s shoulder, Russell saw the line of police cars, their lights beaming brightly in the darkness that surrounded the boxcar. Scores of police officers had taken up positions among the cars, all of them poised to fire, a hundred guns aimed at him.
“Where’s Jesse!” Bill cried.
Russell glanced about the empty boxcar searching. “He’s… gone.”
Bill glared at him. “You’re going to jail, Russell,” he said. “And you’re going to stay there until you tell me what you did to Jesse.”
But Russell knew he couldn’t tell him, and later, as he sat in a holding cell, his mind searched for some explanation of what had happened to his son. If they had taken him, they had done it differently, taken him without the shocking light and the numbing noise and the paralyzing terror.
“Russell.”
He looked over to where Kate stood outside his cell.
He got to his feet. “Kate, you have to believe me. I came back to save Jesse, not to…”
“Save him? What are you talking about?”
“They’re done with me, Kate,” Russell told her. “I was too weak and so when they first took me…”
“I don’t want to hear this,” Kate snapped. “What did you do with Jesse?” She glared at him for a moment, then her face softened and she began to cry.
“They took him,” Russell told her gently. “I think they want to know if he’s… ready.”
“Ready for what?” Kate asked.
In his mind, Russell suddenly saw Jesse hanging upside down, his body paled by the harsh lights of the craft, a single tear coursing down his cheek. And he knew that this had actually happened, that Jesse had already been taken. He shook his head brokenly. “That’s something I still don’t know,” he said.
Sally loaded her contactor into the back of her truck while Becky and Tom looked on disapprovingly. A cold wind blew over the flat Texas landscape, but her mind was on the stars.
“Mom,” Becky began cautiously, “we don’t think Jacob should go with you to this… what… this New Year’s Eve party you’re…”
Sally continued loading. “You don’t think he should be exposed to all these crazy people.”
“That’s right,” Tom said without hesitation.
Sally continued to load the truck. “You’re not going to sneak Jacob off while I’m gone, are you Tom?”
“Of course not,” Tom answered exasperatedly. “We’re going to just stay here and do card tricks, I promise.”
Sally laughed. “The poor kid. He’d be better off with the loonies who think they’re going to Venus.” She stopped loading and looked Tom dead in the eyes. “Okay,” she said. “He can stay.”
Tom smiled with relief. “I’ll go tell him.”
Sally glanced to where Jacob stood on the front porch. She could see it in his eyes. “I’m sure he already knows,” she said.
Owen sat at his desk, reviewing the data while Marty and Howard waited.
“So, there were about two hundred sightings in central Illinois on Christmas Day,” Owen said as he glanced up from the folder. “But it’s all nutty. A guy sees six hundred yellow discs hovering over Duluth. A woman believes television broadcasts are from outer space.” He closed the folder. “You’re not helping me.”
“We have the surveillance photos in from the Quarrington lecture in Amarillo,” Marty said with a slight laugh. “The guy’ll say anything we tell him to say. Trips to Venus. ‘Space brothers.’ ”
Howard turned on the slide projector. The first picture showed the audience at the Amarillo convention. “These people call themselves ‘contactees.’ A bunch of them have built machines to talk to their ‘space brothers.’ They’re getting together on New Year’s Eve.”
Howard continued moving through the slides, faces of old people, middle-aged people, even children. Most were dressed casually. Some looked certifiably insane, while others could not have appeared more normal. Owen studied the slides, concentrating on the faces as Marty and Howard continued with their jokes.
“Maybe we could borrow one of their machines and call a spaceman,” Marty said with a chuckle. “Ask him to come fly the ship for Ike.”
Suddenly, one of the pictures drew Owen’s attention. “Maybe we don’t need to call anyone,” he said. “Go back one.”
Marty instantly obeyed.
Owen leaned forward and peered at the slide of a woman whose face he recognized. A young boy was sitting next to her. Ah, Sally, he thought, looking for your lost love.
Chapter Three
A hush moved over the crowd the moment Quarring-ton stepped onto the stage. All movement stopped, and even the newspaper reporters, only seconds before so boisterous, fell silent.
For a moment, Quarrington’s gaze moved over the assembly. He seemed to see each face in turn, judge it according to some unfathomable system of measure, pick one face from the multitude of faces, then speak to all as if he spoke only to that one.
“Those of you who have contactor devices,” he said, “turn them on.”
The people in the audience sprang into action, pulling levers and turning dials and adjusting antennae, their movements the only sound the area seemed capable of holding.
Some of the machines appeared enormously complex, bristling with tubes and spidery coils, but as he approached, Owen noticed that Sally’s contactor had only a single toggle switch and a set of rabbit ears.