Inside the hangar, several men and women lay unconscious on stretchers, while other people, mostly in street clothes, catalogued them in preparation for removal.

Eric gave the scene a quick glance, sizing up the level of activity, who was working efficiently, who was not, and on that basis instantaneously deciding who would keep his job and who would lose it.

But he was not here to evaluate this part of the project, and so moved on, the heels of his boots clicking loudly across the concrete floor, until he reached his destination, a white room where Dr. Chet Wakeman waited.

“I have our people taking the test subjects out across the desert to avoid the… amateurs at the gate,” Wakeman said with the hearty laugh of a man in his element- obviously feeding off the bustling amosphere’s kinetic energy.

“The crowd gets bigger every day, Chet,” Eric said as he stepped up to the table. “Like a damn circus.”

Wakeman grinned. “Well, if you’re going to be in a circus, best be in the center ring.” Suddenly his tone became matter-of-fact. “We had to open up half a dozen people today before we got one,” he said. “Like looking for pearls.” He smiled proudly. “But what we did find is quite amazing.” He turned to the right, where a glass wall looked out onto an observation room furnished with a single table upon which rested a small lead box. He reached for a microphone and spoke into it. “Send in the soldier.”

The door to the observation room opened and a young Army private stepped inside.

Eric estimated the soldier’s age at eighteen, his experience minimal, his mental attitude profoundly naive. Perfect, he thought, as the soldier moved farther into the room, peering about until the door abruptly closed behind him and he startled visibly, then returned to himself and gazed about without concern, his attention not in the least drawn to the table or the lead box in which the specimen rested.

Suddenly he began to laugh, the laughter growing as the seconds passed, becoming ever more frantic and oddly desperate, the laugher of the madhouse. Then the laugher stopped, as if on command, and the soldier charged toward the booth where Eric stood watching. He crashed his head into the glass, then lifted it and slammed it against the glass once again and then yet again, turning his head into a bloody pulp blow by suicidal blow.

“In Buddhism we are taught that enlightenment is best attained through hardship and struggle,” Wakeman said calmly. “A man will, for example, make himself angry because he seeks the energy of anger.”

The soldier’s head slammed loudly against the glass, but Wakeman remained oddly unconcerned. “We know that our little pals from the stars have found a very deep and very real correlation between thought and energy.” He looked at Eric. “Seven seconds. That’s how long it took for exposure to that thing to completely destroy this young man’s brain.” He tapped the blood-streaked glass of the observation room. “That’s what the implants do. They pull out any thought, any memory, and play it for us to see.”

The soldier collapsed in a crumpled, lifeless mass.

“Of course, these devices can short-circuit in truly fabulous ways,” Wakeman continued. “But that’s a byproduct of what they are.”

“Which is?” Eric asked.

“Tracking devices,” Wakeman answered without hesitation. “Tags. A sort of neurological fingerprint.” He shrugged. “We don’t know how they work exactly. We don’t even know why the glass is keeping us safe.” He took a glass vial from his lab coat and poured a half-dozen tiny implants onto the table. “We found these in a sampling of brain tumor patients we’ve been monitoring for the last couple of years.” Eric stepped away from the table nervously. Wakeman gave a dismissive wave of the hand. “These particular devices are dead.”

“Dead?” Eric asked.

“Like old batteries. They can’t transmit anymore.”

“Why did they stop transmitting?”

“My guess is that they stopped when the ‘lab rat’ was no longer useful to our… visitors.”

Eric studied the dead implants. “What if they come back on?”

Wakeman smiled in a way that struck Eric as unset-tlingly boyish and carefree. “Then we party hardy,” he said.

Jacob stared out the window as Becky pulled a blouse out of her mother’s closet and held it up to Tom. “Remember this one? Her favorite. She wore it to my graduation. Went all the way to Fort Worth to buy it.”

“You should keep it,” Tom told her.

Becky drew the blouse into her arms as if it were her dead mother. “I’ve been thinking about what the preacher said at Mom’s funeral,” she said. “About how a cruel death makes you wonder about God.”

Jacob turned from the bleak landscape beyond the window, the vast sky that hung above the dry fields. “The ways of God are not the ways of man,” he said. “That’s a distinguishing tenet of modern science.”

“How do you mean?” Tom asked.

“Science is just like religion,” Jacob explained. “Only without the comfort. We tell you there’s a plan, but part of that plan is for you to turn to dust.”

Becky nodded. “Dust,” she repeated, her eyes now on her mother’s blouse. “I just wanted her around to talk to a little longer,” she said as she began to cry.

Tom hugged her gently. “I know,” he said.

Jacob stood up, the grief closing in on him, driving him from the room. He walked out onto the porch and stood alone until Tom joined him there.

“You okay?” Tom asked quietly.

“Just a little tired.”

“Is it what you did for Mom?”

“I’ll be all right,” Jacob replied. He looked at his brother closely. “You don’t want to believe what happened to me, do you? Or to Mom?”

“No, I don’t want to believe it, Jake,” Tom answered quietly.

“But you always kind of did, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” Tom answered. “Kind of ironic. The country’s number one debunker turns out to have a half-alien half-brother.”

“What are you going to do now?”

“I want you to come forward.”

Jacob turned away, now watching Carol and Lisa as they strolled along a line of crumbling fence. “I can’t do that.”

“But, Jacob,” Tom argued, “this is something the world has a right to know. You are the proof that it really happened.”

“What do you want me to do, go on TV and bend spoons? It would be a freak show.”

“But after that, people would know.”

“What would they know?” Jacob asked. “Not why they came. Not what they want,” He shrugged. “Besides, I’m not the only one.”

“How do you know that?”

“I don’t really,” Jacob admitted. “It’s just a feeling I get sometimes. That there’s… someone else.”

“Like you?”

Jacob peered out over the barren land. “They’re playing catch-up. The government. They’re trying to figure out the same things.” He looked at Tom darkly. “Owen Crawford knew about me,” he said. “Maybe he knew about whoever else there is.”

“Jesse Keys,” Wakeman said excitedly, like a prospector who’d just stumbled onto a vein of gold.

Eric stared without enthusiasm at the black and white photograph of a teenaged boy Wakeman displayed on his computer monitor. “One of my father’s many failures,” he said dully.

“Failure?”

“I’d call it that,” Eric said harshly.

“Your father couldn’t have known what would happen when they took out Russell Keys’ implant,” Wakeman noted. “After all he…”

“I don’t want to talk about my father,” Eric interrupted sharply “Tell me about this one. This Jesse Keys.”

“One thing’s for sure about him.”

“Which is?”

“That he mattered to them,” Wakeman answered authoritatively.