Midnight by Dean R. Koontz

They were all silent.

Chrissie felt a peculiar pressure in her chest, the same feeling she always got in school when a teacher—any teacher, any subject—began to talk about something which had been previously unknown to her and which so impressed her that it changed the way she looked at the world. It didn’t happen often, but it was always both a scary and wonderful sensation. She felt it now, because of what Harry had said, but the sensation was ten times or a hundred times stronger than it had ever been when some new insight or idea had been passed to her in geography or math or science.

Tessa said, “Harry, I think your sense of responsibility in this case is excessive.”

He finally looked up from his fist. “No. it can never be. Your sense of responsibility to others can never be excessive.” He smiled at her. “But I know you just well enough to suspect you’re already aware of that, Tessa, whether you realize it or not.” He looked at Sam and said, “Some of those who came out of the war saw no good at all in it. When I meet up with them, I always suspect they were the ones who never learned the lesson, and I avoid them—though I suppose that’s unfair. Can’t help it. But when I meet a man from the war and see he learned the lesson, then I’d trust him with my life. Hell, I’d trust him with my soul, which in this case seems to be what they want to steal. You’ll get us out of this, Sam.” At last he opened his fist. “I’ve no doubt of that.”

Tessa seemed surprised. To Sam she said, “You were in Vietnam?”

Sam nodded. “Between junior college and the Bureau.”

“But you never mentioned it. This morning, when we were eating breakfast, when you told me all the reasons you saw the world so differently from the way I saw it, you mentioned your wife’s death, the murder of your partners, your situation with your son, but not that.”

Sam stared at his bandaged wrist for a while and finally said, “The war is the most personal experience of my life.”

“What an odd thing to say.”

“Not odd at all,” Harry said. “The most intense and the most personal.”

Sam said, “If I’d not come to terms with it, I’d probably still talk about it, probably run on about it all the time. But I have come to terms with it. I’ve understood. And now to talk about it casually with someone I’ve just met would … well, cheapen it, I guess.”

Tessa looked at Harry and said, “But you knew he was in Vietnam?”

“Yes.”

“Just knew it somehow.”

“Yes.”

Sam had been leaning over the table. Now he settled back in his chair. “Harry, I swear I’ll do my best to get us out of this. But I wish I had a better grasp of what we’re up against. It all comes from New Wave. But exactly what have they done, and how can it be stopped? And how can I hope to deal with it when, I don’t even understand it?”

To that point Chrissie had felt that the conversation had been way over her head, even though all of it had been fascinating and though some of it had stirred the learning feeling in her But now she felt that she had to contribute: “Are you really sure it’s not aliens?”

“We’re sure,” Tessa said, smiling at her, and Sam ruffled her hair.

“Well,” Chrissie said, “what I mean is, maybe what went wrong at New Wave is that aliens landed there and used it as a base, and maybe they want to turn us all into machines, like the Coltranes, so we can serve them as slaves—which, when you think about it, is more sensible than wanting to eat us. They’re aliens, after all, which means they have alien stomachs and alien digestive juices, and we’d probably be real hard to digest, giving them heartburn, maybe even diarrhea.”

Sam, who was sitting in the chair beside Chrissie, took both her hands and held them gently in his, as aware of her abraded palm as he was aware of his own injured wrist. “Chrissie, I don’t know if you’ve been paying too much attention to what Harry’s been saying—”