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.
There was knock at the front door, but he left Julie to answer it. It was Chet Wakeman, and he could tell that Mary was suddenly excited, her voice pealing though the house as she greeted her “Uncle Chet.”
After that, he listened to the usual greetings, then Wakeman’s inevitable question.
“So, where’s Eric?”
“In his study,” Julie answered. Eric hurriedly returned the proof to the safe and closed the door just as Wakeman came into the study.
“Hey, Eric,” Wakeman said brightly. “Jesus, turn on some light in here, will ya?” He hit the switch beside the door and the shadows retreated into the far corners of the room. “That little girl of yours is really something,” he said. “You should check in with her once in a while, Eric. She’s a great kid.”
Eric slumped down in the chair behind his desk.
Wakeman gave him a penetrating look. “Whatever happened to you, you need to get over it.”
“You have news?” Eric asked, almost curtly.
“As a matter of fact, I do,” Wakeman said. “They pulled the plug on the project, as expected.”
Eric’s eyes reflexively shot to the safe, then back to Wakeman. “Because all our evidence… all our research is gone.”
“That’s right,” Wakeman said. He laughed. “I thought I had a pretty good argument. Told this senator that the reason we didn’t have any evidence is because it was all taken by a flying saucer. He said when they brought it back, he’d restore the funding.”
“It’s too bad we could never find Charlie Keys,” Eric muttered.
“And you know what really burns my ass?” Wakeman said. “That if we had had any funding at all, I could have gotten that positioning system running, and we’d have tracked Charlie Keys by that thing in his head. We could have found him, or anybody else who’d been taken, in twenty-four hours.”
Eric nodded dully. “So what do you do now?”
Wakeman plopped down in the chair across from Eric’s desk. “I thought I might go out to California. Couple of buddies of mine from Yale are going into bio tech.”
Eric’s face soured. “I keep picturing Tom Clarke smiling that smug smile of his and saying ‘Still don’t know how it flies, do you?’” He looked at the safe again. “I want to know what made Tom a believer all of a sudden.”
“You were supposed to get that out of his sister, weren’t you?” Wakeman said with a wink.
“But I didn’t,” Eric said.
Wakeman looked at his friend knowingly. “What you keep picturing is Tom’s sister dumping you. I think that’s what turned you all gloomy, old buddy.”
Eric’s stare was lethal. “My personal life is none of your business, Chet. But just for your information, I’m not finished yet. Becky or no Becky, I still want to know what changed Tom Clarke’s mind.”
The baseball in his hand felt like a small, densely packed planet, so heavy Jacob Clarke could barely lift his arm. But he had to lift it. Lisa was at the plate, bat in hand, waiting to swing. And so he summoned his strength, made his mind and will provide the power his body lacked, wound his arm, and sent the ball hurtling toward his daughter.
She swung and with a loud crack the ball lifted higher and higher, into the vast blue where Jacob followed it with his eyes, a terrible weariness falling upon him again, like a long-distance runner at the end of his run, with the finish line retreating from him as quickly as the rising ball, impossible to reach.
The ball hit the fence, and Jacob saw the disappointment in Lisa’s eyes.
“It’s a game of inches,” he explained.
Lisa shook her head. “I swung too late. I thought it was going to sink.”
“That’s why I like baseball,” Jacob told her as he came over and knelt beside her. “You can never make assumptions.”
Lisa punched him playfully. “I thought you liked it because it was impossibly hard and there were all these useless statistics to memorize.” She gave him her best “gotcha” look.
“Well,” Jacob admitted. “That too.”
He returned to the mound, picked up another ball, no less heavy than the first, closed his eyes, as if in a prayer for strength, then felt the weight descend upon him, wrap around him like a leaden shroud, leaving him strangely encased and immobile within his own body.
“Are you all right?”
It was Carol’s voice, and with all his strength he managed to pry open his eyes.
“We’d better get you home,” Carol said gently.
Yes, Jacob thought, home.
At the car, he suddenly stopped before getting in. He felt an urgency in his blood, something deep within him crying out a last instruction. He reached into his pocket, pulled out the small jewel box, and opened it. “It was your grandmother’s,” Jacob told his daughter. He drew out the lone-star earring and placed it around his daughter’s neck. “I love you, honey,” he said. “Every day and twice on Sundays.”
Lisa peered at the star, and watching her, Jacob saw that she sensed its importance, the legacy it bore, the terrible mission she had just been given.
“Some guy will meet you one day,” Jacob told her. “And with one look, he’ll tell you that there’s no other place he wants to be.”
Lisa caressed the earring, her eyes upon it wonder-ingly. Then she looked up and nodded, and at that instant Jacob knew that he had passed it on, done what remained of his duty. And on that thought, his legs buckled under a heaviness beyond human weight and he fell to earth like a dying star.
The lights of the pizza parlor burned garishly, flooding into the car, the passenger seat where Charlie Keys should have been, where his mother had left him sleeping soundly only minutes before.
Amelia stared helplessly at the empty seat, the pizza dropping from her hand and slamming down upon the pavement as she searched the darkness of the parking lot, peeling back the shadows, looking for her son.
Then suddenly, he was there, standing behind her, looking strangely dazed, like one awakened from a deep sleep.
“Charlie,” she said, “you can’t just go off like that. Where were you? Where did you go?”
Charlie peered at her silently, his hand lifting to his throat where she saw three small scars in a triangular pattern.
“What happened to me?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” Amelia answered.
“The men we’re running from… does it have to do with them?”
Amelia shook her head. “I really don’t know, Charlie.”
Charlie stared at her worriedly, a look of terrible abandonment in his eyes, like a boy who’d been left behind on the street on in the railway station, and who could not find his way home. “Dad could tell us,” he said.
Amelia drew her son into her arms. “I don’t know if your dad will ever be able to tell us anything,” she said.
Eric stood next in line as Tom Clarke scribbled his name hastily into the book, while the line of people twining through the bookstore’s cramped aisles steadily grew longer.
“Why do you think the aliens took all their stuff back?” the man in front of Eric asked.
Tom grinned. “How do you know they took it all?” He grabbed the next book from the stack and signed it as the man moved away.
Eric stepped up to the table. “Quite a turnout.”
“What do you want?” Tom asked dryly.