Close Encounters of the Third Kind Read Free Page B

during that close pass.”
    Harry Crain turned to his team supervisor and said softly, “Those I’d like to see.” Then, speaking again into the microphone, he said, “Allegheny Triple four turn right to intercept J-8. Resume normal navigation. TWA is level at three one.”
    The team supervisor left Harry, disappearing again into the dimness. The tension sifted out of the center.
    Harry’s coordinator asked, “What’s in the book about this kind of thing?”
    “Hell if I know,” Harry Crain said. “The Air Force started writing it thirty years ago. Let them finish it.”

4  

    A ireast 31 passed over Roy Neary’s home about nine o’clock that night. Its jet engines sounded only faintly inside the house, and none of the occupants seemed to notice.
    Roy had confiscated the family room of the suburban house and made it into a workroom that looked like a hobby room run by the Salvation Army. Mechanized and electrical inventions hung and lay abandoned along the walls and in the corners, and there were enough adult toys lying around to rob the children of their childhood.
    The most prominent object in the room was an HO gauge railroad laid out on the family ping pong table. The tracks ran through elaborate Tyrolean terrain, complete with mountains and lakes.
    That night Roy Neary and his eight-year-old son, Brad, were alone in the room, sitting side by side. Roy was trying to help Brad with his math. Brad, a pile of arithmetic books at his feet, was considerably less interested in addition than in electric trains.
    Neary had carefully explained to Ronnie, his wife, who enjoyed a game of ping pong now and then, that a model railroad was a necessity when there were growing boys in the family.
    “A necessity for the father,” she had pointed out. “Like ping pong is for the mother.”
    Roy had finessed the potential confrontation by promising to dismantle the railroads on weekends, but somehow, over the months, instead of being dismantled, it had grown in complexity, until it now took most of Neary’s leisure time simply to keep it running.
    “How about a drawbridge over that underpass?” Brad asked.
    Neary frowned at his son. “I thought you were supposed to be doing your homework.”
    “I hate arithmetic.” The eight year old threw down his pencil and stared challengingly at his father.
    “You’re not trying.”
    “Train engineers don’t need arithmetic.”
    Neary picked up the pencil and put it back in the boy’s hand. “Suppose,” he said, “the stationmaster assigns you eighteen cars. Then he says, ‘Make up two trains with the same number of cars in each.’ What do you do?”
    Brad threw the pencil down again and reached into his rear pocket. Out came a Texas Instruments pocket calculator. “It won’t matter,” the boy said. “ ’Cause I’ll have one of these.”
    Roy sighed and looked heavenward. The long moment of silence between them was fractured by Toby Neary, six years old and a tornado, who carved a path of destruction into the room and yanked to a halt in front of his father. Toby was very angry. His blue eyes blazed, and he stuck a not-very-clean finger in Roy’s face.
    “You stole my luminous paint,” Toby shouted.
    “I didn’t steal anything.”
    “I don’t steal stuff of yours,” Toby went on relentlessly.
    Roy was distracted from this argument when he noticed Ronnie moving slowly into the room, eyes shut, hands out before her, groping the air like a sleepwalker.
    She was, normally, a whimsical woman, with long blond hair and an oval face that came to a soft, pointed chin. Her eyes were usually wide open, often under brows raised at one of her husband’s weird ideas. Now she was moving like a blind person, and a miniature replica of her seemed to be tagging along as a caboose. Three-year-old Sylvia had hold of Ronnie’s long skirt and was lifting her feet up high and putting them down ever so slowly, her eyes shut tight, too.
    “Ronnie,” Neary started to