Beyond the Veil of Stars

by Robert Reed

  Cornell removed a few photographs, then replaced the album. Then he began in the basement, opening cabinets and finding files arranged by date, sometimes, and sometimes by location. And sometimes by no clear method at all. It was astonishing how many cases he could remember. A salesman in Dover saw a dozen saucers flying in formation; a waitress at a truck stop had been buzzed by a brilliant light; an elderly couple across town had seen a glowing something land smack dab in their geraniums. All were witnesses to oddities, explainable or not. Cornell remembered their nervousness and their curiosity, their willingness to talk and their bouts of silence, thoughtful or worried. They were the most ordinary people he could imagine, some bright but none remarkable. Yet something remarkable might have happened to them, causing them to reflect. If they had seen an alien spacecraft, then what else in their lives could be as thrilling or important? One witness, according to Dad’s handwritten transcript, had wished aloud that she hadn’t been so scared, or she would have approached the ship, seen more, and perhaps even met its pilots face-to-face. When would she get a second chance?

  Cornell moved to the files about the black glass disks, having an agenda but unable to put it in concrete terms. He studied the clear crisp photographs of disks in parks and horse pastures, farm fields and woodlands. He found the disk they’d visited on the Change Day, complete with Dad’s summary of the farmer’s testimony. There was a surety of detail that wasn’t true—the farmer hadn’t claimed there was a light, for instance—but the records had their own existence, their own muscular life. At the end, Dad wrote there were signs of heat, perhaps in excess of several thousand degrees. He hypothesized how a tiny black hole might have created it, the disk to serve as a marker. Which struck Cornell as being an inelegant, overblown way to make bad glass, and probably physically impossible, too.

  Buried in the file, neatly wrapped in wax paper and arranged in order, were the photographs Pete and Dad had taken in the cornfield. Cornell saw himself and the farm boy at the center of the disk. He felt pity for his twelve-year-old self, and empathy, and when he touched the face a surge of electricity ran up his arm. He wept for a little while, for no real reason, then quit as suddenly, wiping his eyes dry with his shirt. Then he replaced everything but one picture of him, adding it to the ones of Mom.

  What time was it? After dark, which meant after eight o’clock. An entire day had evaporated, and he had too much left to do. Standing in the basement, feet apart, he fixed his eyes on his father’s long workbench, a million concerns flowing through his mind.

  Mrs. Pete heated up leftovers in the sonic oven, then sat opposite him at the kitchen table, in her house, lights bright and the whole place feeling clean. Everything had a shine, even her, and she watched him eat, finally risking the question:

  “So why are you here?”

  “Got in the mood, I guess.” A noncommittal shrug. “Some time off, and I knew nobody was home—”

  “Pete’s sick about that dinner,” she interrupted, sympathetic eyes watching him. “He hoped he could get you two talking.”

  “How’d he like the scallops?”

  “Pete? He didn’t mention them.”

  Both laughed softly, without energy. Then Cornell asked, “How is my father lately? In a general way.”

  “Honestly,” she told him, “he’s odder than ever.”

  That was obvious.

  “Except when Pete says so, you know it’s true.” She shook her head sympathetically, a finger teasing the mole on her cheek. “In fact, they’ve had arguments. A few good long ones, and you know how hard it is to make Pete angry.”

  “The old man’s paranoid.”

  “More and more,” she agreed. “And those two government men didn’t help, I’m afraid.”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “Why? How could you know?” She waited for a moment gathering her thoughts or letting the drama build. “Or maybe he hasn’t changed. Not really. Everyone has weird ideas. Maybe in your father’s case, he’s just become more obvious about them.”

  “Obvious,” he echoed.

  “He watches us. Watches everyone.”

  “But he left you a key,” Cornell observed. “Does he trust you?”

  “It’s Pete’s copy,” she replied. “Pete gave it to me, in case of emergencies.”

  “I got in without one.”

  “Anyone can,” she agreed.

  Cornell was done eating. He looked at the last cold bites of casserole, thinking how greasewood nuts would be the perfect dessert.

  “Pete worked on your father for an age, convincing him to go on this trek of theirs. It’s their last one, a final taste of youth and all that.”

  “Chasing saucers and bigfoot.”

  “They’re still children.” She laughed.

  He stood, and Mrs. Pete asked if he wanted a comfortable bed. “The guest room has everything but the guest.”

  “No, I’ll be fine.” He thought of the old sofa, recoiled and decided to try the living room floor. After a few passes with the vacuum. “I might keep some odd hours anyway.”

  She walked him outside. It was a warm night, earthshine masked by the thin clouds and haze. Kids were up late and playing in the street riding bikes in weaving paths, always shouting.

  Cornell asked, “Whose are they?”

  Mostly the Lynns’, she said. Although one boy was from down the street, and another was a stranger. There were too many children now, and they grew up too fast.

  Cornell was amazed by the kids’ energy.

  “If Pete calls, do I mention you?”

  “Maybe not. Not yet.”

  “Sure.”

  There was something binding in being coconspirators. Binding and pleasant, too.

  “Good luck,” she told him. “With whatever it is.”

  He thanked her for dinner, then walked down to the street on his way home, moving slowly, studying an impromptu race of bikes. The kids passed him, once and again and again, sweeping past and with such noise, going nowhere with a ceaseless, giddy joy.

  Cornell didn’t sleep. Instead he went into the files about the Change. Dad had kept every clipping and purchased tapes of the news coverage. He had also interviewed the neighbors. Cornell had forgotten the interviews. Using his sudden credibility, Dad had asked everyone what they were doing and how they had reacted. With surprise? Fear? Awe? And he’d done followups on most of them, the last entries from three years ago. “Underhill thinks it was God’s will,” he had written with scorn. “Which is why he’s such a drab man. That’s God’s will, too.”

  Cornell collapsed after four in the morning, then woke at seven and was working by ten after. He existed on coffee and nerves, moving backward in time, searching out every account of humanoid pilots. Cornell was five when Dad interviewed a truck driver who had claimed to have been abducted, the story almost laughable from the start. The man talked about being stripped and examined, the details clinical and rather painful. Wrote Dad: “It seems unlikely that star travelers would employ such methods. Proctology must have advanced by now.” Then he concluded: “An hallucination, perhaps brought on by a blow to the limbic system.”

  Cornell ate lunch—barley chips and microwaved stew—then pored over the oldest files. They were thinner, less thorough. A younger, less patient man had done them. But Cornell found part of what he wanted, a file including photographs of burned grass and samples of soil and ash, the stink of diesel fuel long gone. Mom stood in the foreground of one photograph, hands on hips and eyes fixed on the camera. She was so pretty, small but never frail, her dark hair worn in a ponytail and the face tanned and those eyes never young. He had never seen such coldly certain eyes. Except on another planet, he realized. Mom had High Desert eyes, made for hardship and solitude: He read everything in that file, rereading every mention of her and her long-dead father.

  “A clear alcoholic,” Dad had decided. “I dislike him. I don’t trust him. If he told me it was day, I’d look for the sun before believing him.” And ab
out Mom: “She suffers. I feel sorry for this girl and wish I could help her. She’s alone on this ranch. I suspect abuse. Today, helping me collect samples, she remarked, ‘I think it’d be wonderful to be taken to some beautiful alien world.’ I’ve been telling her about the real aliens, and she listens. She does seem to believe me.”

  Later, in summation, Dad wrote, “An obvious fake. I only hope the man never sees a real spacecraft, because I won’t believe him.”

  And on the same page, with a different pen:

  “I’m in love. In love, and I’ve never been so scared.”

  Mrs. Pete had a full dinner for both of them, Cornell exhausted and happy to be thinking about ordinary things. There was gossipy talk about the neighbors. Fun talk. The Lynns had had troubles, Mrs. Lynn running around with young men. And Mrs. Underhill had become Mrs. Pete’s best friend, which was a big surprise to both women. “I told her you were here. Go over and say hello sometime.” The Talbots down the street had been robbed twice in two months, which had everyone scared. The local curmudgeon was Old Man Fraizer—Dad was a teddy bear next to him—but she suspected he wouldn’t live here much longer. “Bitter old farts don’t last. Have you noticed that?”

  Cornell looked out back. Houses once new and modern had gone shabby, becoming more interesting. Swing sets and elevated playhouses were painted candy colors. Looking between two houses, he remembered being able to see farm fields. But not anymore. Houses covered the world right up to the horizon, then came the dusk-shrouded glow of the distant Pacific.

  “Does it bother you?” he asked. “Living alone like this?”

  Mrs. Pete shrugged and said, “But I’m not.” Then a wise smile, and she added, “Thirty-five years in this house, how could I be alone?”

  That next day, in chaotic fashion, Cornell studied the records of the glass disks, using Dad’s maps of the state and region, the continent and the world as a whole. He read every analysis of the glass, particularly those done in professional labs, and nothing was particularly odd or interesting. Glass was glass. Heat had turned local materials into disks, some shallow and a few several feet thick. There wasn’t any apparent pattern to their appearance, either. They were as likely to have formed in India as they were in the States. In California as much as here.

  “But they mean something,” Dad kept writing. “I know they do. They’ve got to have some clear and certain purpose.”

  “Some things don’t,” Cornell whispered to himself. “Sometimes, Dad, they just don’t.”

  “How is your new job?” Mrs. Pete asked the question while dishing up dessert. Apple pie, frozen yogurt. Very American. “I hope it’s going well, whatever it is.”

  “It’s all right.” He shut his eyes, feeling the alien’s presence again. With his mind’s eye, he stood above the ancient city, marveling without being certain it was real. A hallucination brought on by fatigue? By wishful thinking, perhaps? Then he said, “No, it’s ordinary enough. Some stress, but a lot of boredom, too.”

  She nodded and watched him, almost smiling.

  Yogurt melted against his tongue, cinnamon in the French vanilla.

  “I keep forgetting,” she said, “what exactly do you do?”

  Cornell blinked, then said, “It’s a secret.” No cover story, but no confessions, either. “I can’t talk about it. Sorry.”

  “A secret,” she repeated. Then a sly, knowing smile, and she noted, “That’s right up your family line, isn’t it?”

  His old bedroom was full of newer files and an assortment of recent, oddball periodicals. The last trace of Cornell was the map of Mars, still tacked to the wall but hidden behind cabinets and stacked boxes. Of all places, here he most felt like the intruder. The periodicals were cheap and clumsy, practically screaming oddball as he glanced through them. There were articles about bigfoot and the Change, religious visions and strange disappearances. Dad never used to approve of low-rent researchers, particularly if they were called Madam Madam or the Astral King. His stance was one of professional disgust, asserting a pecking order in the oddball community. He was saying, in effect, “I’m not like the weird ones. I’m a different creature entirely.”

  One magazine opened itself, the binding cracked from use, and Cornell saw highlights and cryptic notes in the margins. The title—“They Walk Among Us!!!”—shouted at him. Yet the tone of the piece was sober, even stilted. The author’s vague biography implied that he was someone inside the U.S. Census Department. The bulk of the article concerned discrepancies in the last several censuses: too many people versus too few births. Something like a million extra citizens, he read, and where did they come from? What did they want? There was a hyperbolic epilogue, obviously written by someone else, and every inflammatory possibility was explored. Invasion was a central theme. And in the margins, Dad had written, “Too simple…one million seems unlikely…but what, pray tell, if????”

  There was a journal inside a locked cabinet, buried in the front and dogeared by use. It was older than the magazine, its first entry from the Change Day three-plus years ago. Dad had written:

  “Something obvious occurred to me this evening.

  “Frankly, I’ve never held much credence to the idea that aliens move among us, disguised as mortal humans. Yet during the cul-de-sac’s annual get-together, something obvious and ripe struck me. I gave out a little moan, in astonishment. Pete had to ask if I was all right, the poor man. The poor sweet simple man. All these years, and I hadn’t once considered one blatant possibility.

  “It would be easy for them. Cosmetic surgery married with their superior minds. Why not?!! Couldn’t they move among us, if they wished? Indeed, they could occupy any position in our society. If so, I’m absolutely certain that I’m of interest to them. That’s why I’m beginning this new study. As an enlightened citizen on this otherwise backward world, I’m sure their operatives are close, studying me with relish.

  “I am my own bait!!!!!!”

  “So,” Cornell asked, “do you still do the Change Day picnics?”

  Mrs. Pete nodded. “Always. Of course.”

  “How are they?”

  “The same.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “The adults drink too much. Except this adult.” A laugh. “The kids stay up too late, and usually there’s a fight. And your father brings out his telescope after dark—”

  “Still?”

  “It’s a tradition.”

  “But how’s he act?”

  “Distant, most of the time.” A long, thoughtful pause. Then she added, “We look at the earth, and he’s busy watching us.”

  “The neighbors?”

  “Me,” she said. “Particularly me.”

  The rest of the journal was filled with broad speculations about aliens and their motives, none of them taken as the final conclusion. In the same drawer were files about the neighbors. The Petes. The Underhills. Even the people behind the cul-de-sac, men and women and children named and photographed over the last few years. Dad had done a thorough, embarrassing job of it, recording behaviors with a zoologist’s eye, using a parabolic sound mike to eavesdrop on private moments. Cornell listened to a couple of tapes, in trimmed doses. Fights and sex were interspersed with banality. A lot of them involved Mrs. Pete, and it made no sense. She came across on the tapes as being absolutely ordinary, worried about her gardens and her teaching job and her husband’s weight. What was the obvious thing that Dad had seen? And how did it involve this ordinary woman?

  In the back of the drawer was a worn spiral notebook, its cardboard cover patched with strapping tape. Inside was a list of names, some familiar and some famous.

  Elaine Forrest was written at the top of the first page, in bold red letters.

  Lane Underhill was second.

  And C. was third. Just C. Which had to mean Cornell, he realized, although it took him several moments to comprehend what everyone here shared in common. “Oh, God…of course…!”

  “Remember when we saw the Change
?”

  Mrs. Pete looked at him, laughed and said, “Am I that old already?”

  He didn’t mean it to sound that way.

  “You were sitting,” she said. “I was walking.”

  He shut his eyes, and she added:

  “I remember it perfectly. All of it.”

  There were celebrities on the list. There were ordinary people and high-ranking politicians, and everyone’s name was accompanied with a specific coded number. Their files were inside a different drawer, everyone belonging to that honored club that had seen the Change. Astronomers had their names in green, not red. Because they watched the sky for a living? Because they were expected to see it? In the first journal, in an entry dated two years ago, Dad wrote, “It stands to reason that the aliens would have had foreknowledge of the Change. And wouldn’t they want to watch it? Which is how I can identify all of them!”

  In C’s file he read: “He was with Elaine. I’ve gone over his testimony a million times, and I’m sure he is wrong. He looked skyward because she did. He was mimicking her, nothing more.”

  Yet later, in ominous oversized lettering: “What if C isn’t human? He could be an agent of theirs. Perhaps my real son was abducted years ago. Shortly before the Change? It would explain much…!”