A battered Subaru pulled up at the store, and two old men got carefully out. One clutched a black cane in a weather-chapped hand. Both wore red-and-black-checked hunting overshirts. Both wore faded caps, one with CASE above the bill and the other with DEERE. They looked wonderingly at the contingent of soldiers that descended upon them. Soldiers at Gosselin’s? What in the tarnal? They were in their eighties, by the look of them, but they had the curiosity Kurtz lacked. You could see it in the set of their bodies, the tilt of their heads.
All the questions Kurtz had not voiced. What do they want? Do they really mean us harm? Will doing this bring the harm? Is it the wind we sow to bring the whirlwind? at was there in all the previous encounters the flaps, the flashlights, the falls of angel hair and red dust, the abductions that began in the late sixties-that has made the powers that be so afraid? Has there been any real effort to communicate with these creatures?
And the last question, the most important question: Were the grayboys like us? Were they by any definition human? Was this murder, pure and simple? No question in Kurtz’s eyes about that, either.
5
The snow lightened, the day brightened, and exactly thirty-three minutes after ordering the stand-down, Kurtz gave them a go. Owen relayed it to Conklin and the Chinnies revved hard again, pulling up gauzy veils of snow and turning themselves into momentary ghosts. Then they rose to treetop level, aligned themselves on Underhill Blue Boy Leader-and flew west in the direction of Kineo. Kurtz’s Kiowa 58 flew below them and slightly to starboard, and Owen thought briefly of a troop of soldiers in a John Wayne movie, bluelegs with a single Indian scout riding his pony bareback off to one side. He couldn’t see, but guessed Kurtz would still be reading the paper. Maybe his horoscope. “Pisces, this is your day of infamy. Stay in bed.”
The pines and spruces below appeared and disappeared in vapors of white. Snow flew against the Chinook’s two front windows, danced, disappeared. The ride was extremely rough-like a ride in a washing machine-and Owen wouldn’t have had it any other way. He clapped the cans back on his head. Some other group, maybe Matchbox Twenty. Not great, but better than Pearl Jam. What Owen dreaded was the Squad Anthem. But he would listen. Yes indeed, he would listen.
In and out of the low clouds, vapory glimpses of an apparently endless forest, west west west.
“Blue Boy Leader, this is Blue Two.”
“Roger, Two.”
“I have visual contact with Blue Boy. Confirm?”
For a moment Owen couldn’t, and then he could. What he saw took his breath away. A photograph, an image inside a border, a thing you could hold in your hand, that was one thing. This was something else entirely.
“Confirm, Two. Blue Group, this is Blue Boy Leader. Hold your current positions. I say again, hold your current positions.”
One by one the other copters rogered. Only Kurtz did not, but he also stayed put. The Chinooks and the Kiowa hung in the air perhaps three quarters of a mile from the downed spacecraft. Leading up to it was an enormous swath of trees that had been whacked off in a slanted lane, as if by an enormous hedge-clipper. At the end of this lane was a swampy area. Dead trees clutched at the white sky, as if to snatch the clouds open. There were zig-zags of melting snow, some of it turning yellow where it was oozing into the damp ground. In other places there were veins and capillaries of open black water.
The ship, an enormous gray plate nearly a quarter of a mile across, had torn through the dead trees at the center of the swamp, exploding them and casting the splintery fragments in every direction. The Blue Boy (it was not blue at all, not a bit blue) had come to rest at the swamp’s far end, where a rocky ridge rose at a steep angle. A long arc of its curved edge had disappeared into the watery, unstable earth. Dirt and bits of broken trees had sprayed up and littered the ship’s smooth hull.
The surviving grayboys were standing around it, most on snow-covered hummocks under the upward-tilted end of their ship; if the sun had been shining, they would have been standing in the crashed ship’s shadow. Well… clearly there was someone who thought it was more Trojan Horse than crashed ship, but the surviving grayboys, naked and unarmed, didn’t look like much of a threat. About a hundred, Kurtz had said, but there were fewer than that now; Owen put the number at sixty. He saw at least a dozen corpses, in greater or lesser states of red-tinged decay, lying on the snow-covered hummocks. Some were facedown in the shallow black water. Here and there, startlingly bright against the snow, were reddish-gold patches of the so-called Ripley fungus… except not all of the patches were bright, Owen realized as he raised his binoculars and looked through them. Several had begun to gray out, victims of the cold or the atmosphere or both. No, they didn’t survive well here not the grayboys, not the fungus they had brought with them.
Could this stuff actually spread? He just didn’t believe it.
“Blue Boy Leader?” Conk asked. “You there, boy?”
“I’m here, shut up a minute.”
Owen leaned forward, reached under the pilot’s elbow (Tony Edwards, a good man), and flicked the radio switch to the common channel. Kurtz’s mention of Bosanski Novi never crossed his mind; the idea that he was making a terrible mistake never crossed his mind; the idea that he might have seriously underestimated Kurtz’s lunacy never crossed his mind. In fact, he did what he did with almost no conscious thought at all. So it seemed to him later, when he cast his mind back and reexamined the incident not just once but again and again. Only a flip of the switch. That was all it took to change the course of a man’s life, it seemed.
And there it was, loud and clear, a voice none of Kurtz’s laddie-bucks would recognize. They knew Eddie Vedder; Walter Cronkite was a different deal. “-here. Il n’y a pas d’infection ici.” Two seconds, and then a voice that might have belonged to Barbra Streisand: “One hundred and thirteen. One hundred and seventeen. One hundred and nineteen.”
At some point, Owen realized, they had started over counting primes from one. On the way up to Gosselin’s in the bus, the various voices had reached primes in the high four figures.
“We are dying,” said the voice of Barbra Strelsand. “On se meurt, on creve.” A pause, then the voice of David Lettertman: “One hundred and twenty-seven. One hundred-”
“Belay that!” Kurtz cried. For the only time in the years Owen had known him, Kurtz sounded really upset. Almost shocked. “Owen, why do you want to run that filth into the ears of my boys? You come back and tell me, and right now.”
“Just wanted to hear if any of it had changed, boss,” Owen said. That was a lie, and of course Kurtz knew it and at some point would undoubtedly make him pay for it. it was failing to shoot the kids all over again, maybe even worse. Owen didn’t care. Fuck the phooka horse. If they were going to do this, he wanted Kurtz’s boys (Skyhook in Bosnia, Blue Group this time, some other name next time, but it always came back to the same hard young faces) to hear the grayboys one last time. Travelers from another star system, perhaps even another universe or time-stream, knowers of things their hosts would never know (not that Kurtz would care). Let them hear the grayboys one last time instead of Pearl Jam or Jar of Flies or Rage Against the Machine; the grayboys appealing to what they had foolishly hoped was some better nature.
“And has it changed?” Kurtz’s voice crackled back. The green Kiowa was still down there, just below the hanging line of gunships, its rotors beating at the split top of a tall old pine Just under it, making it ruffle and sway. “Has it, Owen?”
“No,” he said. “Not at all, boss.”
“Then belay that chatter. Daylight’s wasting, praise Jesus.” Owen paused, then said, with careful deliberation: “Yes, sir.”
6
Kurtz sat bolt-upright in the Kiowa’s right seat-“ramrod-straight” was how they always put it in the books and movies. He had donned his sunglasses in spite of the day’s niild gray light, but Freddy, his pilot, still only dared to look at him from the corners of his eyes. The sunglasses were wraparounds, hipster-hodaddy shades, and now that they were on, you couldn’t tell where the boss was looking. You certainly couldn’t trust the way his head was pointing.
The Derry News lay on Kurtz’s lap (MYSTERIOUS SKYLIGHTS, MISSING HUNTERS SPARK PANIC IN JEFFERSON TRACT, read the headline). Now he picked up the paper and folded it carefully. He was good at this, and soon the Derry News would be folded into what Owen Underhill’s career had just become: a cocked hat. Underhill no doubt thought he would face some sort of disciplinary action-Kurtz’s own, since this was a black-ops deal, at least so far-followed by a second chance. What he didn’t seem to realize (and that was probably good; unwarned usually meant unarmed) was that this had been his second chance. Which was one more than Kurtz had ever given anyone else, and one he now regretted. Bitterly regretted. For Owen to go and pull a trick like that after their conversation in the office of the store after he had been specifically warned…