Becky rushed out of the house, the screen door slapping closed behind her, ran over to Jacob and hugged him fiercely.
“Mom’s just waking up,” she said. She looked at Carol. “I’m glad you guys came. Mom really wanted to see Lisa before…”
“I know,” Carol said softly.
Sally lay in her bed, hooked up to an oxygen machine.
Jacob had never seen her this way, so wasted, and for a moment it left him unable to speak, so that he only stared at her, this woman now grown old and withered, but who’d once been so bold and determined, built “con-tactors” and yearned with all her heart to speak with other worlds.
“You grew up nice,” Sally said weakly, her voice rattling with each word. “You all right?”
Jacob nodded.
She smiled, then closed her eyes for a moment, as if the nearness of her son after so many years was a pressure she could hardly bear. When she opened them again, Carol stood before her, Lisa huddled shyly at her mothers side.
“Mom, this is my wife, Carol,” Jacob told her. “And this is Lisa, your granddaughter.”
Sally struggled to rise, urging herself up in bed. “Lisa, let me look at you,” she said.
Lisa stepped up to her grandmother’s bed.
“Say hello,” Jacob told her.
“Hello, Grandma,” Lisa said.
Sally peered into Lisa’s face, and for a moment seemed to return to the past. “She has your father’s eyes,” she said to Jacob.
Jacob took Sally’s hand, and watched as she lifted her eyes upward longingly, still searching desperately for the one who’d appeared that night so long ago, lingered briefly, then vanished. The effort appeared to exhaust her, and she sank back down into the rumpled bed.
“She never stops thinking about him, does she?” Jacob said later that night as he sat in the kitchen with Tom.
“I know who he was, you know,” Tom said.
Jacob looked at him doubtfully.
“Back in the Cold War, the government experimented with soldiers,” Tom explained. “It’s all in documents you can get with the Freedom of Information Act. They were giving drugs to soldiers. I think your dad was one of them. He escaped from an Army base in Roswell. Owen Crawford came to get him.” He leaned forward earnestly. “Your ‘abilities’ came from your father, Jake. From whatever drugs they gave him. Not because he came from outer space.” His voice grew more grave. “The problem is, they’re doing it again, with civilians this time. Same experiments. Mind control. Processing. Some of these people, they think they’ve been abducted by aliens, but that’s just what the government wants them to believe.”
“Alien abduction as a cover story?” Jacob asked skeptically. “It seems a little far-fetched, Tom.” He drew in a cautious breath. “I mean…”
Just then Becky came into the room. “Mom’s in a lot of pain,” she said. “The morphine doesn’t seem to be helping.”
Jacob got to his feet and rushed to his mother’s side. He took her hand and held it softly. “It’s all right, Mom. It’s all right.”
Sally looked at him wearily. “I’m going now, aren’t I?”
“Soon,” Jacob answered.
“I want to sit up a little,” Sally said weakly.
Jacob carefully supported her back as she rose, then fluffed the pillow behind her, before gently placing his hand on her brow. Then he concentrated on the vision, determined to bring it to her during these final seconds of her life. He knew the vision was forming as her eyes filled with wonder. She reached for her ear, plucked something from it, invisible to Jacob and the others but as real to her as the breath she drew. “John,” she whispered.
Jacob knew that she was seeing him in her mind, Jacob’s father as he’d been in 1947, perhaps the moment when she’d known absolutely that she was in love with him, the moment when she’d drawn her grandmother’s lone-star earring from her ear and placed it in his hand.
Jacob reached to take Tom’s hand, and Tom, too, turned in the direction of Sally’s gaze. Tom placed his other hand in Becky’s, and the vision was visible to them all now, not just to Sally. A figure emerged from the blinding radiance, a visitor to earth who had miraculously returned.
The figure stretched out his hand. “Come on, Sally.” Jacob looked at Tom and Becky and knew that they saw him, too. Then he looked at his mother, and saw that she had gone, her eyes closed now, her expression, for once, utterly serene.
Eric sat back in the LTD as it sped toward Groom Lake. The voice at the other end of the bulky car phone was scratchy, but not so lost in distortion that he couldn’t understand what was being said to him… and be angered by it.
“Listen to me,” he fired back. “I need that funding shifted into biological research, Ted.” He paused and listened impatiently for a moment. “Find the resources. What? None of your goddamned business. Ted? Listen to me. Do your job or lose it.”
He slammed the phone into its cradle and glared out the window.
There they were again, the usual crowd, the nation’s inexhaustible supply of gooney birds, all of them focused on Roswell now, the crack in every crackpot, America’s number one lightning rod for morons and geeks and…
He shook his head at the hopeless idiocy of it. “We ought to put up a gift shop,” he snapped. “Sell little bobbing alien heads for the jerks to take home.” His mocking laughter held a bitter edge.
At the Groom Lake Facility, he leaped from the LTD and strode quickly through its growing field of Quonset huts and hangars to where he knew they waited for him, the scientists and technicians who belonged to him now, belonged to the project he oversaw, and which, unlike his father, he would never allow to slip from his grasp.
Inside the hangar, several men and women lay unconscious on stretchers, while other people, mostly in street clothes, catalogued them in preparation for removal.
Eric gave the scene a quick glance, sizing up the level of activity, who was working efficiently, who was not, and on that basis instantaneously deciding who would keep his job and who would lose it.
But he was not here to evaluate this part of the project, and so moved on, the heels of his boots clicking loudly across the concrete floor, until he reached his destination, a white room where Dr. Chet Wakeman waited.
“I have our people taking the test subjects out across the desert to avoid the… amateurs at the gate,” Wakeman said with the hearty laugh of a man in his element- obviously feeding off the bustling amosphere’s kinetic energy.
“The crowd gets bigger every day, Chet,” Eric said as he stepped up to the table. “Like a damn circus.”
Wakeman grinned. “Well, if you’re going to be in a circus, best be in the center ring.” Suddenly his tone became matter-of-fact. “We had to open up half a dozen people today before we got one,” he said. “Like looking for pearls.” He smiled proudly. “But what we did find is quite amazing.” He turned to the right, where a glass wall looked out onto an observation room furnished with a single table upon which rested a small lead box. He reached for a microphone and spoke into it. “Send in the soldier.”
The door to the observation room opened and a young Army private stepped inside.
Eric estimated the soldier’s age at eighteen, his experience minimal, his mental attitude profoundly naive. Perfect, he thought, as the soldier moved farther into the room, peering about until the door abruptly closed behind him and he startled visibly, then returned to himself and gazed about without concern, his attention not in the least drawn to the table or the lead box in which the specimen rested.
Suddenly he began to laugh, the laughter growing as the seconds passed, becoming ever more frantic and oddly desperate, the laugher of the madhouse. Then the laugher stopped, as if on command, and the soldier charged toward the booth where Eric stood watching. He crashed his head into the glass, then lifted it and slammed it against the glass once again and then yet again, turning his head into a bloody pulp blow by suicidal blow.