Majestic

by Whitley Strieber

  Abruptly the adults stood up. They began walking like robots. Down the porch they went and into the living room. They stood staring at the floor like tongue-lashed children.

  "Mother and Father are marching," Monica said happily. But as her parents passed her she fell silent. She was not afraid, just confused. Why was everybody marching into the living room?

  When she got up to follow, carefully cradling Ricardo, she found herself looking into a pair of huge, black eyes.

  She experienced a burst of extreme dizziness and reeled back, twisting as if a bullet had hit her in the face.

  She lay still, her doll beside her. There was a movement too rapid even to perceive and the being had twined its arms and legs around her.

  She knew it too. It must be understood that she was totally conscious during this ordeal. Her mind was not in any way altered. She felt, heard, saw everything that happened to her. And she suffered. It was the first of the secret, stifled memories that would in the end destroy Monica Stone.

  With a loud, droning buzz she was taken off into the sky.

  I had stopped running my toy firetruck and was staring at the creatures that now stood around me. I was completely calm. It had not occurred to my three-year-old mind to be afraid.

  "Monkeys," I said brightly. I suppose that I smiled.

  And then there was somebody else there, somebody very much more graceful than the men with the bobbing heads. One instant this person arrived on the porch, a fleeting shadow. The next she was standing before me.

  She was perhaps five feet tall, with a long, narrow face and slim arms and legs. Her skin was the texture of baby-leather, even more fine than that of children.

  "My momma went inside," I said.

  "Come with me."

  She embraced me. I remember next a whirl of roof and clouds and sky.

  Then I saw gray. There were buzzings and scrabbling noises and the frequent rush of wings. I did not know where I was and for the first time I felt fear.

  I saw Monica staggering, being hit by flashes of light so bright that I thought they were knives. She screamed and jerked when the light hit her.

  I tried to help her but the thin lady held me back. I fought the frail arms but they were as hard as steel, and I remember how she breathed with a hissing burr. Monica was being hurt! Her screams were terrible to hear, so loud they hurt my ears. In my young life I had never heard anything like it before.

  The light would hit her and she would throw up her hands and bellow and try to run away. Then it would hit her again from another direction and she would turn and run. On and on it went.

  Something was jammed down on my head, ground into my temples. It hurt terribly, I had to get it off but she was holding me and hissing and then I saw a vivid image of my mother when I was very young, reaching down as if from heaven and lifting me with hands that made my whole body tingle with delight, and all was gold.

  Monica shrieked. I saw her in a blaze of light and smelled burning hair and burning cloth.

  In 1977 my sister died in a bedroom fire. A sleeping pill worked faster than she had expected and her last cigarette of the day dropped from her fingers into the sheets. Or perhaps it was more than one sleeping pill.

  We were returned to the porch amid a great clamor of buzzing wings. They sat me in my father's chair and poured out his glass of whiskey in the grass. Monica they returned to her doll.

  A moment later they were gone, and the gray object had become nothing but a glittering white dot, and then nothing at all.

  The farmer's wife let fly with a boisterous "Ooooeeeeeee!" The cows mooed and went trotting up the path to their barn. Monica said, "Now, Ricardo, what woke you up?" Birds began to sing, katydids and cicadas to chatter, and the snake got its rabbit. Trout and sunnys fluttered again in the clear streams.

  Nobody noticed that fifteen minutes had been stolen from their evening. Why should they? They had gone inside and discussed the news. What news? Well, wasn't that funny, they couldn't remember.

  But that was quickly forgotten, because a problem presented itself as soon as they returned to the porch.

  I had apparently swallowed my father's highball and gotten drunk.

  "I seed de moon comin' up over de bally," I said. "Them monkeys come show Willy—"

  "Oh, Herb, you left your highball!" Our mother was amused and annoyed at the same time.

  "You could call Dr. Hovermanns, darling, but I think he'll just tell you to let him sleep it off."

  That night we had a dinner of ham and sweet potatoes and green beans, and afterward Father read to us for a while. Nobody seemed to notice that I was not, in fact, drunk.

  After we kids were in bed Mother and Father sat out under the stars and listened to the Victrola.

  To the strains of Beethoven's Sixth Symphony, the "Pastorale," they counted shooting stars.

  Monica was sick in the night, but it soon passed and by morning all was well.

  Chapter Seven

  As I read Will's narrative, I wondered if he was deluding himself, misleading me or telling the frank truth. One glance at his face told me that this was, in his opinion, an authentic record.

  He was terribly distressed. Being touched by them so early meant that he might all along have been nothing but a pawn. I asked him about it. "I wish it was true," he said. "It'd be a relief to find out that they were responsible for my actions." He looked at me with that sudden, sharp way of his that so effectively compelled frankness. "Do you think I'm a high-level robot of some kind?"

  I shook my head. "I'm afraid I don't."

  "No, you wouldn't. Otherwise you couldn't place blame, could you? Yours is a punitive generation."

  "That's a bit of a generalization. But I do think you're responsible for your own actions."

  A bottle of Pinch stood on a table beside his summer chair. Sometimes there would be empty sardine cans there, too. I think whiskey and sardines were his whole diet. He went for the bottle, poured a substantial drink into his glass and knocked it back. He lit another Camel.

  "Every man has to be responsible for his actions, Nick. Otherwise you're not a man. You wouldn't be human, except physically." He gave me a helpless, haunted look and returned to the bottle.

  His childhood memory was full of disturbing implications. Had the others implanted him as they apparently have so many? If so, did it mean that his entire life was lived under their influence?

  Perhaps it will never be possible to resolve that question. All I can do is redouble my efforts to be clear, to tell this story as perfectly as I can. To do that I must return to the central narrative, but this time with the knowledge that the visitors probably had Will to a degree under their influence. I do not wish to suggest that he wasn't making his own choices; I prefer to think that he was.

  They were watching him, had been since he was a child. He was their man in Central Intelligence, picked from an early age to do their work. But to do it as he saw fit.

  This understood, it is appropriate to address once again the events that were taking place in Roswell in July of 1947. These enormous events.

  The Gray file lies on my desk. I pick it up, turn to page twenty-three of his careful narrative.

  "I returned to RAAF with my detail at approximately 1330 hours on the afternoon of July 8, 1947. We parked behind Hangar B-2 and commenced unloading the debris that had been collected on the Ungar ranch."

  Major Gray was a sensitive man, and seeing the pitiful mess that was being laid out made him consider the courage of whoever had flown in it.

  "They came a long way," he said.

  Hesseltine nodded, lighting a cigarette. "Yep. And they're not going back." Everybody fell silent, looking at the debris. "I guess we'd better inform Colonel Blanchard," Walters said at last.

  "Which is going to be very interesting." "You think there'll be a problem?"

  I doubt if Gray answered. He says only that "Walters suggested we inform the colonel." What he does not add is what must already have been goi
ng through his mind. He must have known that there were going to be a number of serious problems. He would have done his thinking on the way back from the ranch.

  If he understood Air Force brass at all, and I think it is obvious that he did, he undoubtedly felt that they would try to classify the hell out of this.

  Gray had most certainly established his own very private set of priorities, and he intended to fulfill them.

  He had observed that most military officers were earnest and patriotic. They were not, however, deep thinkers. They did not see things in long perspectives.

  What he intended to do was probably going to make a lot of people very mad, and he had to be careful or he could very certainly ruin his career. He was carrying out his duties as he saw fit.

  "Mr. Hesseltine, why don't you three try to piece some of this stuff together while I get the colonel? Maybe there's enough here to get an idea what this thing looked like."

  Hesseltine touched the debris with his foot. "It looks hopeless."

  "Blanchard'll expect to see it in the best order we can manage."

  Soon Walters and Hesseltine and PFC Winters were moving pieces around on the floor.

  Gray went back to the administration building. On his way up the hall to the colonel's office he stopped by to see the base press officer, Lieutenant Jack Hope. He liked Jack, and he knew that he would do his job well.

  The key thing here was to be as casual and offhand as possible.

  Hope remembers the moment vividly. I met him at his small, tidy home in Roswell. He was frank with me. I found that his story fit what was in both his file and Don Gray's.

  There is only one element of it that I question. He and Gray both very specifically claim that he never saw the debris. I find that hard to believe. It would have been so natural to go over to the hangar, if only to satisfy his curiosity.

  Nevertheless, I have recorded this as if he didn't go to the hangar, as if he cannot confirm the appearance of the debris.

  "You need to interview me," Gray said to him. "I've got something that the papers'll be interested in."

  Hearing the major's promise, Hope smiled. He had his frustrations, working for a unit that dealt with so many top secrets. Most of the really interesting things that happened at Roswell Army Air Field were classified and couldn't even be mentioned. On the day that an atomic bomb got stuck in the bay of a B-29 and created a harrowing two-hour emergency, Jack Hope had spent his time trying to place a story about the fact that the Bill Cornell Band was going to play at the officer's club on Saturday night.

  Gray told Hope his story, about how they had found the rubble, and what it meant. Hope scribbled frantically.

  He was delighted. This was a fine story. "I'll get some good play with this one."

  He read his notes back to Gray. "If you work fast, you can get it on the radio tonight."

  "Yeah. Y'know Don, I want to thank you. This is a real good piece. I appreciate it."

  "Buy me a beer manana"

  "Will do!"

  As Gray left, he heard the music of Hope's typewriter. Now the story would be out before anybody made any decisions about classification. And that was right. None of the others understood that this was the largest event in human history. It was something that every single human creature had an absolute and inalienable right to know. As Don Gray must have seen it, his obligation to the American people and to mankind superseded every other consideration.

  Well, he had informed the people. Now he would tell the brass. He entered Blanchard's sanctum. The clerk let him through immediately.

  The colonel was affable and smart. He had been an extremely successful officer, and he was next in line to take Eighth Air Force. Although he was a West Point man, the colonel seemed much more Air Force than Army. His command style was informal and consultative. Mostly, he was pleasant, although small problems could cause outbursts of temper. One morning he had chewed Hope out for tying up the base telephone lines. A few minutes later, though, he was laughing about it.

  He was a heavily decorated officer. He had the Legion of Merit, the Silver Star, the Distinguished Flying Cross with an oak-leaf cluster, the Bronze Star, the Air Medal with a cluster, and the Presidential Unit Citation for his work as operations officer of the Twentieth Air Force that had been responsible for bombing Japan.

  Gray had a simple relationship with him. He respected the colonel and made that clear. In return, Blanchard trusted his intelligence assessments. As he approached the inner sanctum, Gray wondered how the old man was going to take what he was about to say.

  Blanchard looked up at him, his eyebrows raised, a question in his face.

  There was only one way to handle the situation. Just come right out with it. "Colonel, we found the debris from a flying disk this morning."

  Blanchard stared a moment, then his eyes crinkled into a smile. "I thought Hesseltine was the practical joker," he said. "If you guys are looking for suckers I suggest you try another colonel."

  Gray looked straight into his eyes, trying to communicate the high seriousness that he felt. "Sir, I'm not kidding."

  He watched a series of expressions cross Blanchard's face. The smile became a more wary expression, then a long stare. "Was there any hostile action?" "None."

  "You have wreckage? An accident?" "Apparently."

  Blanchard pressed his intercom. "Get Payne in here," he said. He was always a man to involve his deputy. A moment later Lieutenant Colonel Payne Jennings appeared. He was a compact, intense man, a polished officer. Even though he wasn't a West Point graduate, he projected the formality and to a degree the rigidity of traditional army. Still, people liked him because he was fair and always willing to push for you with the colonel if he felt you had a good argument.

  "Don found a crashed flying disk," he said to Payne. The deputy reared back, his eyes widening. Then he burst out laughing.

  "Let's see if we can get General Ramey to buy into that when he comes down." He looked from the colonel to the major, saw they weren't laughing and pursed his lips. "This is for real?"

  "Yes, sir," Gray said. "Ray Walters and Hesseltine have the wreckage over in B-2. They're trying to piece it together."

  Without another word Blanchard and Jennings headed out to the hangar.

  Very little headway had been made putting the pieces together. "The nearest we can tell, what we have here is a part of a larger device." Hesseltine sounded very professional, and Gray was pleased.

  Blanchard picked up a piece of the parchment, ran his fingers down the columns of squiggles. "Gentlemen, I have to say that I'm a little awed."

  "I thought it was a historic occasion," Gray said. "That's what I told Lieutenant Hope." Blanchard and Jennings nodded absently. That was a hurdle jumped. They'd just agreed that this story would be given to the public. Gray was proud of them.

  Blanchard held some of the parchment up to the light. "It's like wallpaper. You wouldn't have wallpaper in a military vehicle."

  "We can't know that," Walters said. "I don't think we can assume anything."

  "This is just a pile of tinfoil and wallpaper. What I'd like to see is the rest of the thing."

  "If this was a mortal wound." Gray had thought about it, and he had his doubts. If he'd been piloting the disk and it had sustained damage, the first thing he'd have done would have been to get it into outer space where there was no gravity. Then he could make repairs at his leisure, without fear of crashing.

  "Well," Blanchard said, "if there's anything out in that desert, we can find it."

  Jennings picked up one of the wooden I-beams. "What about the Russians?"

  "A Russian blimp coming after the 509th," Gray said. "We considered that possibility."

  "And?"

  "It's a no-go, in my opinion. First, the material's just too strong. We don't have anything remotely like it, and I doubt that they do either. Second, none of the writing is in any known language. Third, that wood you're holding is too light and too hard to have come from earth. It i
sn't from an earth tree."

  "You're certain about all this, Major? You've done your homework?"

  Gray was quite certain. "Yes, sir."

  "Where is the object it came from?" asked Jennings.

  "We don't have knowledge of any other debris," Gray replied.

  "You looked?"

  "It's a big desert, Colonel."

  "True enough," Blanchard said. He glanced at Jennings. "You think an air search is warranted, Payne?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "I agree."

  Jennings started toward the door he had just entered. "I'll get it up right away. The 830th Search and Rescue Group. They're our highest-scoring search mission unit." Jennings left the hangar.

  "Private," the colonel said to PFC Winters, "get this stuff into my office on the double."

  "Yes, sir!" The PFC began gathering up the pieces.

  Gray met the colonel's eyes. His expression of sardonic good humor was gone, replaced by a grave look.

  Gray wondered if that was what Colonel Blanchard looked like when he was afraid.

  Blanchard turned and headed back to the office block. As they passed Hope's office the publicist started toward the colonel with a piece of paper in his hand. Gray intercepted him. "Not now," he said. "We're sending up a search mission. The colonel thinks we might find the rest of the disk."

  "Wow."

  "Wait a while before you release anything. I'll call you." Hope nodded and took a step back.

  "Don't leave me sitting on this, Don," Hope said. Gray thought he sounded rather desperate.

  "Wait for my call." Now Hope looked forlorn. Gray smiled. "You aren't going to lose the story. It's just that, if we find the disk, it'll be really big."

  "Big isn't the word. I'd get both papers and play on every radio station in town."

  Gray clapped him on the shoulder and left the office. If he realized just how big this really was he'd probably freeze up. He followed Blanchard and the other officers into the 830th 's briefing room. Captain Gilman was ready to brief. Three helicopters and a Stinson reconnaissance plane equipped with cameras were being prepared to go to the Maricopa area. As the navigation officer began to speak, Gray glanced at his watch.