“You guys want to get enlightenment, or you want to play some rock and roll?” Lisa asked as she came into the room.
Denny and Milo got to their feet and headed for their guitars. Allie took her place near Denny, who’d told her that his rhythm improved when she was near him. She wasn’t sure this was true, but during her nine short years of life, she’d gotten used to people saying strange things to her, expecting strange things from her. She had a power, people said, and she knew that this was true.
She recalled the time, three years before, when her mother had taken her to see the dolphins, how she’d stood before the tank, lifted her arms without knowing why, then stood, oddly unsurprised, as the dolphins had turned and drifted toward her, their many faces finally near hers, their noses nearly touching the glass, suspended there, as if waiting for instructions. She had a power, yes, but all she really wanted was just to be a little girl.
The video showed a soccer field, kids frantically at play, Allie in the forefront, pursuing the ball.
“That’s Lisa Clarke’s daughter, and yes, she can block a shot on goal,” Eric said. “But other than that, she hasn’t demonstrated anything like the kind of power we were expecting. Which is good, because once she demonstrates, we might not be able to pick her up.” Eric held his eyes on the video, Allie now closing in on the ball. “Lisa has joined some kind of therapy group for people who claim they’ve been taken. We’ve placed an agent in that same group.” He shrugged. “Just a way of keeping an eye on things.”
Wakeman and Mary continued to watch the video until it froze with Allie still on the soccer field, her eyes sparkling with competitive drive.
“She’s still a little kid,” Wakeman said. “Give her time.”
“Chet’s right,” Mary said. She gave Wakeman a curiously charged glance. “A lot of genetic traits don’t demonstrate until right before adolescence. Schizophrenia, for example.”
She smiled at Wakeman, and Eric caught a glimmer in her eyes. It was no longer the look of a little girl who admired her “uncle,” he realized, but of a woman flirting with a man.
“Well, we can’t pick her up anyway,” Eric said with a shrug. “They’ll just take her back, like they did when we tried for Lisa.”
Wakeman returned Mary’s flirtatious smile, then turned to Eric.
“That used to be the case,” he said.
“Used to be the case?” Eric asked.
Wakeman could hardly contain his billowing self-confidence. “Want to see what we can do?” He pressed his hand at Mary’s back and gently urged her over to a small microwave oven attached to a computer.
“Microwave radiation,” he said as Eric joined them at the oven. “Part of the light spectrum.” Wakeman stared at the small hamster that scurried about inside the oven. “In the case of the oven, twelve point five centimeters to be exact.” He hit the oven’s switch. “Don’t worry, my dear,” Wakeman added with a laugh. “We’re not going to fry our furry little friend.” He smiled. “At least… not yet.”
Eric watched as the hamster continued to move about inside the oven, ears up, whiskers twitching, large round eyes peering back at him from the other side of the glass.
“When we block that wavelength, our little friend is on easy street,” Wakeman said. He reached down and tapped a command on the computer keyboard beside the oven.
Instantly, the hamster exploded, its hair and entrails slammed against the glass in a gooey, red mass.
“In meditation we learn the oneness of all things,” Wakeman said, his gaze on the bloody pulp that was all that remained of the hamster. “The harmony that flows through nature. These are the same ideas, only stripped of the comforting notion of divinity that we get from science, and more specifically, from mathematics.” He took a pad from the desk, scribbled a few numbers and handed the pad to Mary.
“The Fibonacci sequence,” Mary said. “Each number added to the one before it makes the next number in the sequence.” She looked at her father, she now the teacher, he the student. “The Fibonacci sequence gives us the golden mean,” she told him. “They’re everywhere, these numbers. Shells. Nebulae. The spiral of a pinecone. Beehives. DNA.”
“Is this going somewhere?” Eric asked impatiently.
Wakeman turned to him. “Their crafts hold five,” he explained. “The number of confirmed sightings in Mexico last year was 1,597. They have three fingers and one thumb.”
“The number of breeding pairs you charted when you were figuring out who Allie was, 55.1… 3, 5… 55… 1,597,” Mary said. “They’re all Fibonacci numbers.”
“And it goes on,” Wakeman said, winking at Mary. “How many lights on board? Forty-six thousand, three hundred and sixty-seven, and with our little friend, Allie…” He wrote the number on the pad and turned the pad toward Eric. “46,368. The twenty-fourth Fibonacci.”
“So,” Mary said grandly. “How do you take our revelation and use it to make an effective block so that we can grab little Forty-six thousand, three hundred and sixty-eight, our little Allie?” She looked at Wakeman, turning the narrative over to him now.
Wakeman gestured toward a young man who lay unconscious on a gurney. “That’s Peter Miller. Mr. Miller has been taken thirteen times.” He smiled. “Don’t worry, Eric, I’m not going to splatter dear Peter all over the room. Janitorial would never forgive me.”
He pointed to the huge tracking board that covered the opposite wall, a enormous map of the United States, its surface scattered with colored lights.
“Mr. Miller has an implant,” he said. “We’re monitoring that implant. You can see by that light on the map that Mr. Miller is currently residing right here in the lovely, peaceful fishing village of Ellsworth, Maine.”
Wakeman took a five-sided device from the table and placed it like a hangman’s hood over Miller’s head. “The implants broadcast on a spread spectrum. They’re all based on the hydrogen hyperfine transition line. The most fundamental wavelength in the universe.” He took a studied, theatrical pause, then said, “Fibonacci again.” He smiled. “We block those frequencies in a way that will ensure that… shall we say… the ‘hamster’ doesn’t splatter.” He pointed to the map. “As you can see. Mr. Miller’s light is no longer shining. That means that his implant isn’t registering, and that means that we can pick someone up without having them grabbed right back.”
Eric stared at Peter Miller. “Will this work on the girl?”
“Allie doesn’t have an implant, remember?” Wakeman said. “Just that neutron spiral, if you recall. The one she no doubt inherited from her mother.”
“So we can’t…”
“Yes, we can, Eric,” Wakeman said. “Because the same principle applies. We can block her frequency, too.”
Charlie moved around the room, his camera pausing at each face. Dale Adler, a middle-aged man whose grief lay upon him like a black veil; Ray Morrison; a married couple, Ben and Nora; a tough-looking young woman named Cynthia; Dorothy, who claimed to have twelve cats; and an older man named Adams.
“Contrails are messages,” Ray said. “When they appeared in the sky above St. Paul, the incidence of severe upper respiratory infections quadrupled.”
“What are contrails?” Dorothy asked.
“Those white trails jets leave behind,” Adams said.
“Messages,” Dale repeated. “I think we’re reaching here.”
“We’re not here to judge,” Harriet cautioned. “Just to listen.”
“There is a base,” Ray went on adamantly. “A landing strip at the bottom of Lake Superior. I was taken to this landing strip on my third abduction.”