An Agent of Utopia

by Andy Duncan

  “Gravimeter checks out.”

  “Thank you, Isabel. Wallace, how about that spectrum analyzer?”

  “Powering up, Doc. Have to give it a minute.”

  “We may not have a minute, or we may have ten hours. Who knows?” I steered toward this voice, which was older than the others. “Our visitors are unpredictable,” he continued.

  “Visitors?” the girl asked.

  “No, you’re right. I’ve broken my own rule. We don’t know they’re sentient, and even if they are, we don’t know they’re visitors. They may be local, native to the place, certainly more so than Wallace here. Georgia-born, aren’t you, Wallace?”

  “Company, Doc,” said the boy.

  “Yes, I see him, barely. Hello, sir. May I help you? Wallace, please. Mind your manners.” The flashlight beam in my face had blinded me, but the professor grabbed it out of the boy’s hand and turned it up to shine beneath his chin, like a youngun making a scary face, so I could see a shadow version of his lumpy jowls, his big nose, his bushy mustache. “I’m Harley Rutledge,” he said. “Might you be Mr. Nelson?”

  “That’s me,” I said, and as I stuck out a hand, the flashlight beam moved to locate it. Then a big hand came into view and shook mine. The knuckles were dry and cracked and red-flaked.

  “How do you do,” Rutledge said, and switched off the flashlight. “Our mutual friend explained what we’re doing out here, I presume? Forgive the darkness, but we’ve learned that too much brightness on our part rather spoils the seeing, skews the experiment.”

  “Scares ’em off?” I asked.

  “Mmm,” Rutledge said. “No, not quite that. Besides the lack of evidence for any them that could be frightened, we have some evidence that these, uh, luminous phenomena are . . . responsive to our lights. If we wave ours around too much, they wave around in response. We shine ours into the water, they descend into the water as well. All fascinating, but it does suggest a possibility of reflection, of visual echo, which we are at some pains to rule out. Besides which, we’d like to observe, insofar as possible, what these lights do when not observed. Though they seem difficult to fool. Some, perhaps fancifully, have suggested they can read investigators’ minds. Ah, Wallace, are we up and running, then? Very good, very good.” Something hard and plastic was nudging my arm, and I thought for a second Rutledge was offering me a drink. “Binoculars, Mr. Nelson? We always carry spares, and you’re welcome to help us look.”

  The girl’s voice piped up. “We’re told you’ve seen the spooklights all your life,” she said. “Is that true?”

  “I reckon you could say that,” I said, squinting into the binoculars. Seeing the darkness up close made it even darker.

  “That is so cool,” Isobel said. “I’m going to write my thesis on low-level nocturnal lights of apparent volition. I call them linnalavs for short. Will-o’-the-wisps, spooklights, treasure lights, corpse lights, ball lightning, fireships, jack-o’-lanterns, the feu follet. I’d love to interview you sometime. Just think, if you had been recording your observations all these years.”

  I did record some, I almost said, but Rutledge interrupted us. “Now, Isobel, don’t crowd the man on short acquaintance. Why don’t you help Wallace with the tape recorders? Your hands are steadier, and we don’t want him cutting himself again.” She stomped off, and I found something to focus on with the binoculars: the winking red light atop the Taum Sauk Mountain fire tower. “You’ll have to excuse Isobel, Mr. Nelson. She has the enthusiasm of youth, and she’s just determined to get ball lightning in there somehow, though I keep explaining that’s an entirely separate phenomenon.”

  “Is that what our friend, that reporter gal, told you?” I asked. “That I seen the spooklights in these parts, since I was a tad?”

  “Yes, and that you were curious about our researches, to compare your folk knowledge to our somewhat more scientific investigations. And as I told her, you’re welcome to join us tonight, as long as you don’t touch any of our equipment, and as long as you stay out of our way should anything, uh, happen. Rather irregular, having an untrained local observer present—but frankly, Mr. Nelson, everything about Project Identification is irregular, at least as far as the U.S. Geological Survey is concerned. So we’ll both be irregular together, heh.” A round green glow appeared and disappeared at chest level: Rutledge checking his watch. “I frankly thought Miss Rains would be coming with you. She’ll be along presently, I take it?”

  “Don’t ask me,” I said, trying to see the tower itself beneath the light. Black metal against black sky. I’d heard her name as Hanes, but I let it go. “Maybe she got a better offer.”

  “Oh, I doubt that, not given her evident interest. Know Miss Rains well, do you, Mr. Nelson?”

  “Can’t say as I do. Never seen her before this morning. No, wait. Before yesterday.”

  “Lovely girl,” Rutledge said. “And so energized.”

  “Sort of wears me out,” I told him.

  “Yes, well, pleased to meet you, again. I’d better see how Isobel and Wallace are getting along. There are drinks and snacks in the truck, and some folding chairs and blankets. We’re here all night, so please make yourself at home.”

  I am home, I thought, fiddling with the focus on the binoculars as Rutledge trotted away, his little steps sounding like a spooked quail. I hadn’t let myself look at the night sky for anything but quick glances for so long, just to make sure the Moon and Venus and Old Rion and the Milky Way was still there, that I was feeling sort of giddy to have nothing else to look at. I was like a man who took the cure years ago but now finds himself locked in a saloon. That brighter patch over yonder, was that the lights of Piedmont? And those two, no, three, airplanes, was they heading for St. Louis? I reckon I couldn’t blame Miss Priss for not telling the professor the whole truth about me, else he would have had the law out here, to keep that old crazy man away. I wondered where Miss Priss had got to. Rutledge and I both had the inkle she would be joining us out here, but where had I got that? Had she quite said it, or had I just assumed?

  I focused again on the tower light, which warn’t flashing no more. Instead it was getting stronger and weaker and stronger again, like a heartbeat, and never turning full off. It seemed to be growing, too, taking up more of the view, as if it was coming closer. I was so interested in what the fire watchers might be up to—testing the equipment? signaling rangers on patrol?—that when the light moved sideways toward the north, I turned, too, and swung the binoculars around to keep it in view, and didn’t think nothing odd about a fire tower going for a little walk until the boy Wallace said, “There’s one now, making its move.”

  The college folks all talked at once: “Movie camera on.” “Tape recorder on.” “Gravimeter negative.” I heard the click-whirr, click-whirr of someone taking Polaroids just as fast as he could go. For my part, I kept following the spooklight as it bobbled along the far ridge, bouncing like a slow ball or a balloon, and pulsing as it went. After the burst of talking, everyone was silent, watching the light and fooling with the equipment. Then the professor whispered in my ear: “Look familiar to you, Mr. Nelson?”

  It sure warn’t a patch on Bob Solomon’s spaceship, but I knew Rutledge didn’t have Bob Solomon in mind. “The spooklights I’ve seen was down lower,” I told him, “below the tops of the trees, most times hugging the ground. This one moves the same, but it must be up fifty feet in the air.”

  “Maybe,” he whispered, “and maybe not. Appearances can be deceiving. Hey!” He cried aloud as the slow bouncy light shot straight up in the air. It hung there, then fell down to the ridgeline again and kept a-going, bobbing down the far slope, between us and the ridge, heading toward the lake and toward us.

  The professor asked, “Gravitational field?”

  “No change,” the girl said.

  “Keep monitoring.”

  The light split in two, then in three. All
three lights come toward us.

  “Here they come! Here they come!”

  I couldn’t keep all three in view, so I stuck with the one making the straightest shot downhill. Underneath it, treetops come into view as the light passed over, just as if it was a helicopter with a spotlight. But there warn’t no engine sound at all, just the sound of a little zephyr a-stirring the leaves, and the clicks of someone snapping pictures. Even Bob Solomon’s craft had made a little racket: It whirred as it moved, and turned on and off with a whunt like the fans in a chickenhouse. It was hard to tell the light’s shape. It just faded out at the edges, as the pulsing came and went. It was blue-white in motion but flickered red when it paused. I watched the light bounce down to the far shore of the lake. Then it flashed real bright, and was gone. I lowered the binoculars in time to see the other two hit the water and flash out, too—but one sent a smaller fireball rolling across the water toward us. When it slowed down, it sank, just like a rock a child sends a-skipping across a pond. The water didn’t kick up at all, but the light could be seen below for a few seconds, until it sank out of sight.

  “Awesome!” Isobel said.

  “Yeah, that was something,” Wallace said. “Wish we had a boat. Can we bring a boat next time, Doc? Hey, why is it so light?”

  “Moonrise,” Isobel said. “See our moonshadows?”

  We did all have long shadows, reaching over the wall and toward the lake. I always heard that to stand in your own moonshadow means good luck, but I didn’t get the chance to act on it before the professor said: “That’s not the moon.”

  The professor was facing away from the water, toward the source of light. Behind us a big bright light moved through the trees, big as a house. The beams shined out separately between the trunks but then they closed up together again as the light moved out onto the surface of the gravel pullaround. It was like a giant glowing upside-down bowl, twenty-five feet high, a hundred or more across, sliding across the ground. You could see everything lit up inside, clear as a bell, like in a tabletop aquarium in a dark room. But it warn’t attached to nothing. Above the light dome was no spotlight, no aircraft, nothing but the night sky and stars.

  “Wallace, get that camera turned around, for God’s sake!”

  “Instruments read nothing, Doc. It’s as if it weren’t there.”

  “Maybe it’s not. No, Mr. Nelson! Please, stay back!”

  But I’d already stepped forward to meet it, binoculars hanging by their strap at my side, bouncing against my leg as I walked into the light. Inside I didn’t feel nothing physical—no tingling, and no warmth, no more than turning on a desk lamp warms a room. But in my mind I felt different, powerful different. Standing there in that light, I felt more calm and easeful than I’d felt in years—like I was someplace I belonged, more so than on my own farm. As the edge of the light crept toward me, about at the speed of a slow walk, I slow-walked in the same direction as it was going, just to keep in the light as long as I could.

  The others, outside the light, did the opposite. They scattered back toward the wall of the overlook, trying to stay in the dark ahead of it, but they didn’t have no place to go, and in a few seconds they was all in the light, too, the three of them and their standing telescopes and all their equipment on folding tables and sawhorses all around. I got my first good look at the three of them in that crawling glow. Wallace had hippie hair down in his eyes and a beaky nose, and was bowlegged. The professor was older than I expected, but not nearly so old as me, and had a great big belly—what mountain folks would call an investment, as he’d been putting into it for years. Isobel had long stringy hair that needed a wash, and a wide butt, and black-rimmed glasses so thick a welder could have worn them, but she was right cute for all that. None of us cast a shadow inside the light.

  I looked up and could see the night sky and even pick out the stars, but it was like looking through a soap film or a skiff of snow. Something I couldn’t feel or rightly see was in the way, between me and the sky. Still I walked until the thigh-high stone wall stopped me. The dome kept moving, of course, and as I went through its back edge—because it was just that clear-cut, either you was in the light or you warn’t—why, I almost swung my legs over the wall to follow it. The hill, though, dropped off steep on the other side, and the undergrowth was all tangled and snaky. So I held up for a few seconds, dithering, and then the light had left me behind, and I was in the dark again, pressed up against that wall like something drowned and found in a drain after a flood. I now could feel the breeze of the lake, so air warn’t moving easy through the light dome, neither.

  The dome kept moving over the folks from the college, slid over the wall and down the slope, staying about 25 feet tall the whole way. It moved out onto the water—which stayed as still as could be, not roiled at all—then faded, slow at first and then faster, until I warn’t sure I was looking at anything anymore, and then it was gone.

  The professor slapped himself on the cheeks and neck, like he was putting on aftershave. “No sunburn, thank God,” he said. “How do the rest of you feel?”

  The other two slapped themselves just the same.

  “I’m fine.”

  “I’m fine, too,” Isobel said. “The Geiger counter never triggered, either.”

  What did I feel like? Like I wanted to dance, to skip and cut capers, to holler out loud. My eyes were full like I might cry. I stared at that dark lake like I could stare a hole in it, like I could will that dome to rise again. I whispered, “Thank you,” and it warn’t a prayer, not directed at anybody, just an acknowledgment of something that had passed, like tearing off a calendar page, or plowing under a field of cornstalks.

  I turned to the others, glad I finally had someone to talk to, someone I could share all these feelings with, but to my surprise they was all running from gadget to gadget, talking at once about phosphorescence and gas eruptions and electromagnetic fields, I couldn’t follow half of it. Where had they been? Had they plumb missed it? For the first time in years, I felt I had to tell them what I had seen, what I had felt and known, the whole story. It would help them. It would be a comfort to them.

  I walked over to them, my hands held out. I wanted to calm them down, get their attention.

  “Oh, thank you, Mr. Nelson,” said the professor. He reached out and unhooked from my hand the strap of the binoculars. “I’ll take those. Well, I’d say you brought us luck, wouldn’t you agree, Isobel, Wallace? Quite a remarkable display, that second one especially. Like the Bahia Kino Light of the Gulf of California, but in motion! Ionization of the air, perhaps, but no Geiger activity, mmm. A lower voltage, perhaps?” He patted his pockets. “Need a shopping list for our next vigil. A portable Curran counter, perhaps—”

  I grabbed at his sleeve. “I saw it.”

  “Yes? Well, we all saw it, Mr. Nelson. Really a tremendous phenomenon—if the distant lights and the close light are related, that is, and their joint appearance cannot be coincidental. I’ll have Isobel take your statement before we go, but now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  “I don’t mean tonight,” I said, “and I don’t mean no spooklights. I seen the real thing, an honest-to-God flying saucer, in 1956. At my farm outside Mountain View, west of here. Thataway.” I pointed. “It shot out a beam of light, and after I was in that light, I felt better, not so many aches and pains. And listen: I saw it more than once, the saucer. It kept coming back.”

  He was backing away from me. “Mr. Nelson, really, I must—”

  “And I met the crew,” I told him. “The pilot stepped out of the saucer to talk with me. That’s right, with me. He looked human, just like you and me, only better-looking. He looked like that boy in Battle Cry, Tab Hunter. But he said his name was—”

  “Mr. Nelson.” The early morning light was all around by now, giving everything a gray glow, and I could see Rutledge was frowning. “Please. You’ve had a very long night, and a stressful o
ne. You’re tired, and I’m sorry to say that you’re no longer young. What you’re saying no longer makes sense.”

  “Don’t make sense!” I cried. “You think what we just saw makes sense?”

  “I concede that I have no ready explanations, but what we saw were lights, Mr. Nelson, only lights. No sign of intelligence, nor of aircraft. Certainly not of crew members. No little green men. No grays. No Tab Hunter from the Moon.”

  “He lived on Mars,” I said, “and his name was Bob Solomon.”

  The professor stared at me. The boy behind him, Wallace, stared at me, too, nearabouts tripping over his own feet as he bustled back and forth toting things to the truck. The girl just shook her head, and turned and walked into the woods.

  “I wrote it up in a little book,” I told the professor. “Well, I say I wrote it. Really, I talked it out, and I paid a woman at the library to copy it down and type it. I got a copy in the pickup. Let me get it. Won’t take a sec.”

  “Mr. Nelson,” he said again. “I’m sorry, I truly am. If you write me at the college, and enclose your address, I’ll see you get a copy of our article, should it appear. We welcome interest in our work from the layman. But for now, here, today, I must ask you to leave.”