The Grays by Whitley Strieber

Author:Whitley Strieber
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Tor Books
Published: 0100-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

PART SIX

CHILD OF HALLOWS

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting:

The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,

Hath had elsewhere its setting,

And cometh from afar:

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come . . .

—WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

“Ode on Intimations of Immortality Recollected from Early Childhood”

SEVENTEEN

CONNER HAD WAITED ON THE steps for Paulie to leave school. Usually, they would be carpooled home by Mom or Maggie, but that had obviously ended.

The thing was that Paulie, leader of the Connerbusters though he was, also remained the only real friend he’d ever had. He had to reach him somehow, and he thought that the way to do it was still through the idea of the aliens, despite what had happened. If they were real, then maybe he could contact them somehow and get them to come back, with Paulie as a witness.

It was an audacious, insane idea, but there were more than a few Web sites out there put up by folks who were doing just that, and posting video of the UFOs that had turned up. He’d communicated with one or two of them and gotten detailed instructions about how to do it using, as one of them had put it, “a flashlight, patience, and a serious interest in meeting them.”

All day at school, he had kept to himself. There was nothing else he could do, not without triggering some sort of additional humiliation. As it was, everybody had gotten up from the table and moved when he sat down for lunch. He had eaten alone, ostentatiously and purposely reading a book none of them could begin to understand, Physics from Fisher Information, a rather basic text, actually.

He had considered going the total eccentric route, perhaps refusing to speak anything except Latin and dying his hair purple or something. But that would just justify his isolation, and he did not really want to be isolated. Faint though it might be, there remained the possibility that some girl might some day do just slightly more than run screaming when he drew near. Amy, for example. After all, they had an embarrassing past in the woods, did they not? It had, when he was ten and she was eleven, involved the revelation of body parts, back where the little stream flowed and the bluebells nodded along its banks.

He had been thinking fairly carefully this past couple of days about what actually had happened the other night. What did the Keltons’ video really show? The answer to that question, he thought, might be far less obvious than it seemed.

It was possible that the legendary grays of Internet fame actually were involved, but only very remotely.

Although the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence people claimed that the chances of finding a signal from another world was vanishingly small, that was incorrect. They were actually pretty good—about 0.4 percent a year.

He thought that, if somebody actually had appeared here from another planet, they must be desperate. It would take vast resources to cross interstellar space, and huge amounts of time.

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