“How was your day with Dee?” asked Caldwell.
“It was good. We smoked some grass and went wading. How about you? What was the problem with Tacy Leggett?” “Oh, there was no problem withher . We got in her bed and pumped away for a while ... but then we fell asleep.”
“And her mother found you?”
“Her father. He didn’t say anything, but when I came out of her room, he was sitting in the living room drinking a Bloody Mary and cleaning his shotgun.”
“Jesus.”
“He made me sit down with him and talk about duck hunting. It got old real fast.”
“So Tuck picked you up.”
“Yeah. We went out to Harmony Landing and played golf. Saw some old friends. I’ve got a date with Sherry Kessler for tonight.” “A girl a day,” marveled Conrad. He ate in silence for a minute, then remembered about Skelton again.
“What time is it? I gotta watch the local news.”
“Ten to seven. Hank wants to see the news, too. He’s in his room building a radio. What are you two guys up to, anyway?”
“I’ll tell you later. It’s kind of complex.” Conrad was still a little apprehensive about telling Caldwell that he wasn’t—strictly speaking—his real brother.
“They got stoned and wentwading ,” clucked Caldwell. “These hippies don’t have enough sense to get laid.”
“How about the radio?” Conrad demanded. “Does it work?”
Hank’s face took on a strange expression. “Why don’t we go back to my room, and I’ll show you what’s happened. Just let me fill up my plate here ...”
The crystal sat on a square of pegboard, surrounded by bright little doodads: striped-sausage resistors, plastic-disc capacitors, buglike transistors, and wires of every color. The largest component was a many-finned variable capacitor from an old truck radio. Conrad remembered the day Hank had gotten that capacitor. The truck had been an abandoned hulk in a nearby quarry—Hank and Conrad often went there on weekends to look for the girlie magazines that the quarrymen sometimes left.
“Why aren’t any wires connected to the crystal?” asked Conrad. “Why don’t you even have it fastened down?”
“That’s just it,” said Hank, his voice a tense, exasperated whisper. “Look at my thumb, fucker.” He held out his thumb for inspection. There was a charred blister on it. “And the other hand, too.” Hank’s left palm was crossed by a deep, scabbed scratch. “Every time I try to do anything with that bastard-ass crystal, I get hurt.”
“The crystal attacks you?”
“No!”Hank caught himself and forced his voice back to a whisper. “I burned my thumb with the soldering gun; and I scratched my palm with the screwdriver. But it’s the crystal’s fault. You don’t believe me? Go ahead and try for yourself. It’sweird . See that masking tape? Try and tape the crystal down onto the pegboard. I dare you.”
Conrad picked up the roll of tape and stared uncertainly at the crystal. “If I try, I’ll get spastic and hurt myself.”
“Go ahead, dammit. This was your idea in the first place.”
Conrad measured out a length of tape and tried to tear it off the roll. The tape was tougher than he’d expected. He pulled harder. Just then his thumb slipped oddly. The thumbnail caught in a wrinkle of the tape—caught, bent, and snapped.
“Shit! I just broke my goddamn thumbnail!” Conrad dropped the tape and put his tongue to the wound.
“I broke it right down to the quick. I can’t believe I ...” He stopped talking then as he realized what had just happened.
“It’s been like that all afternoon,” said Hank quietly. “I suggest you pocket that crystal, Conrad, and forget about trying to build anything with it. Sooner or later, you’ll find out what it’s really for.”
“Seven o’clock!” called Caldwell from the kitchen. “Didn’t you guys want to watch the news?”
Chapter 21:
Saturday, August 6, 1966 Hank’s parents and one of his brothers were already down in the basement. “Conrad here wants to see the news,” Hank explained after the greetings. “Catch up on all the big doings.”
“The local news is the only thing on right now anyway,” said Mrs. Larsen agreeably. “We still only have two channels in Louisville, Conrad. I keep telling Hank’s father he should get us an antenna to pick up the UHF channel, but he doesn’t think it’s worth the trouble.”
“There’s no sports on that channel,” explained Mr. Larsen. He was a distant man with a deprecatory chuckle. “Just violins.”
The local news ran along uneventfully: a new candidate for mayor, problems with the sewage plant, a change in zoning, but then ...
“A bizarre robbery at a farmhouse in Louisville’s East End last night.” The newscaster was a trim young woman with heavily coiffed brown hair. “When Mr. Cornelius Skelton called police officers at 3:00A.M. , they found a broken window lock and only one item missing: a large, semiprecious mineral crystal which had rested on Mr. Skelton’s mantel. Skelton asserted that he had ‘expected the robbery.’ The crystal was coupled to an alarm system—a very special system which included an automatic movie camera!
Here is Skelton’s incredible film of the robbery taking place.”
“Cornelius Skelton,” Mr. Larsen was saying. “Isn’t he the rich fellow who has that farm down the road?”
“A jewel heist in our own neighborhood!” exclaimed Mrs. Larsen. “How exciting!”
Caldwell favored Conrad with a hard, questioning stare.
The film started: silent, black and white.
A blurred shape, jellylike in slowed time. A young man’s back. He jerks grayly, then blurs out into cloud. He’s gone? No ... there he is again, at the bottom of the screen, tiny before the looming fireplace. He’s the size of a thumb! He wears a white bandit-mask, the little scuttler, and now he hurries off out of the picture, lugging Skelton’s crystal on his tiny back.
The news show cut to Skelton’s face, in color. Old Cornelius looked as calm and gentlemanly as ever, laying down his bizarre rap in an emotionless Kentucky drawl. “I’ve said this time and again. A flahn saucer landed on my farm in the spring of fifty-six. It butchered one of my hogs and left a crystal in its place. I anticipated that the aliens might return for the crystal, and I rigged my camera accordingly. View the film with an open mind, and ask yourself if any human being couldshrink that way .”
They ran the film again in slow motion. This time Conrad could recognize himself. The arms, the eyes. All of a sudden, he was starting to feel funny.
The brunette came back on. “The incredible shrinking man? This afternoon, our WHAS news team showed Skelton’s film to Dr. Mario Turin, Professor of Astronomy at the University of Louisville.”
Cut to a black-goateed man with a sliding smile. A mellow-voiced male interviewer, off-camera, asked the questions.
“Dr. Turin, what do you think of Mr. Skelton’s assertion that his film shows an alien from outer space?”
Turin smiled and jerked his head. “Cornelius Skelton is well known for his strong beliefs in UFO
phenomena. I think it’s only natural that he would interpret his film in terms of extraterrestrial visitation.”
“No, I don’t. I think it’s more likely that Mr. Skelton is the perpetrator—or the dupe—of a hoax. The
‘shrinking’ effect could easily be produced by an ordinary zoom lens. What we have here is an unusual film ... of an ordinary robbery.”
Conrad was finding it harder and harder to pay attention. It was unsettling enough to see himself on TV—and to have Caldwell angrily elbowing him whenever the Larsens looked away—but his head was filled with a funny, dead tingling, as if he’d just gotten a shot of Novocain in the center of his brain.