was silent for about ten thousand years.
Was she abashed at finding herself inside the actual and literal Pentagon, standing in front of a largely though not entirely male group of highly important governmental personages and asked to describe the wholly improbable, even absurd, events that had befallen her? Was she still befuddled and bewildered by her strange experiences among the Entities, or by the sedatives that had been given to her afterward? Or was she simply your basic inarticulate early-twenty-first century American, who had not in any way been equipped during the thirty years of her life with the technical skill required in order to express herself in public in linear and connected sentences?
Some of each, no doubt, the Colonel thought.
Everyone was very patient with her. What choice was there?
And after that interminable-seeming silence she said, “It was like, mirrors, everywhere. The ship. All metal and everything shining and it was gigantic inside, like some sort of stadium with walls around it.”
It was a start. The Colonel, sitting just beside her, gave her a warm encouraging smile. Lloyd Buckley beamed encouragement at her too. So did Ms. Crawford, the Cherokee-faced Secretary of Communications. Carlyle-Macavoy, though, who obviously didn’t suffer fools gladly, glared at her with barely veiled contempt.
“There were, you know, around twenty of us, maybe twenty-five,” she continued, after another immense terrified pause. “They put us, like, in two groups in different rooms. Mine was a little girl and an old man and a bunch of women around my age and then three men. One of the men had been hurt when they caught him, like, I think, a broken leg, and the other two men were trying to make him, you know, comfortable. It was this giant-sized room, like maybe as big as a movie theater, with weird enormous flowers floating through the air everywhere, and we were all in one corner of it. And very scared, most of us. We figured they were, like, going to cut us up, you know, to see what was inside of us. Like, you know, what they do to laboratory animals. Somebody said that and after that we couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
She dabbed away tears.
There was another interminable silence.
“The aliens,” Buckley prompted softly. “Tell us about them.”
They were big, the woman said. Huge. Terrifying. But they came by only occasionally, perhaps every hour or two, never more than one at a time, just checking up, gazing at them for a little while and then going away again. It was, she said, like seeing your worst nightmares come to life, whenever one of those monsters entered the chamber where they were being kept. She had felt sick to her stomach every time she looked at one of them. She had wanted to curl up and cry. She looked as though she wanted to curl up and cry right this minute, here and now, in front of the Vice President and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and all these Cabinet members.
“You said,” Buckley reminded her, “that one woman in your group experienced some sort of communication with them?”
“Yes. Yes. There was this woman, who was, like, a little strange, I have to say—she was from Los Angeles, I guess about forty years old, with shiny black hair, and she had a lot of fantastic jewelry on, earrings like big hoops and three or four strings of beads and, like, a whole bunch of rings, and she was wearing this big wide bright-colored skirt like my grandmother used to wear in the Sixties, and sandals, and stuff. Cindy, her name was.”
The Colonel gasped.
The hair was just like hers, Anse had told him, dark, cut in bangs. And big earrings, the hoops she always wears. The Colonel hadn’t believed it. The police would have had the site cordoned off, he had said. Not likely that they’d be letting rubberneckers near the alien ship, he had said. But no: Anse had been right. It was indeed Cindy that Anse had seen on the television news early yesterday morning in
Was she abashed at finding herself inside the actual and literal Pentagon, standing in front of a largely though not entirely male group of highly important governmental personages and asked to describe the wholly improbable, even absurd, events that had befallen her? Was she still befuddled and bewildered by her strange experiences among the Entities, or by the sedatives that had been given to her afterward? Or was she simply your basic inarticulate early-twenty-first century American, who had not in any way been equipped during the thirty years of her life with the technical skill required in order to express herself in public in linear and connected sentences?
Some of each, no doubt, the Colonel thought.
Everyone was very patient with her. What choice was there?
And after that interminable-seeming silence she said, “It was like, mirrors, everywhere. The ship. All metal and everything shining and it was gigantic inside, like some sort of stadium with walls around it.”
It was a start. The Colonel, sitting just beside her, gave her a warm encouraging smile. Lloyd Buckley beamed encouragement at her too. So did Ms. Crawford, the Cherokee-faced Secretary of Communications. Carlyle-Macavoy, though, who obviously didn’t suffer fools gladly, glared at her with barely veiled contempt.
“There were, you know, around twenty of us, maybe twenty-five,” she continued, after another immense terrified pause. “They put us, like, in two groups in different rooms. Mine was a little girl and an old man and a bunch of women around my age and then three men. One of the men had been hurt when they caught him, like, I think, a broken leg, and the other two men were trying to make him, you know, comfortable. It was this giant-sized room, like maybe as big as a movie theater, with weird enormous flowers floating through the air everywhere, and we were all in one corner of it. And very scared, most of us. We figured they were, like, going to cut us up, you know, to see what was inside of us. Like, you know, what they do to laboratory animals. Somebody said that and after that we couldn’t stop thinking about it.”
She dabbed away tears.
There was another interminable silence.
“The aliens,” Buckley prompted softly. “Tell us about them.”
They were big, the woman said. Huge. Terrifying. But they came by only occasionally, perhaps every hour or two, never more than one at a time, just checking up, gazing at them for a little while and then going away again. It was, she said, like seeing your worst nightmares come to life, whenever one of those monsters entered the chamber where they were being kept. She had felt sick to her stomach every time she looked at one of them. She had wanted to curl up and cry. She looked as though she wanted to curl up and cry right this minute, here and now, in front of the Vice President and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and all these Cabinet members.
“You said,” Buckley reminded her, “that one woman in your group experienced some sort of communication with them?”
“Yes. Yes. There was this woman, who was, like, a little strange, I have to say—she was from Los Angeles, I guess about forty years old, with shiny black hair, and she had a lot of fantastic jewelry on, earrings like big hoops and three or four strings of beads and, like, a whole bunch of rings, and she was wearing this big wide bright-colored skirt like my grandmother used to wear in the Sixties, and sandals, and stuff. Cindy, her name was.”
The Colonel gasped.
The hair was just like hers, Anse had told him, dark, cut in bangs. And big earrings, the hoops she always wears. The Colonel hadn’t believed it. The police would have had the site cordoned off, he had said. Not likely that they’d be letting rubberneckers near the alien ship, he had said. But no: Anse had been right. It was indeed Cindy that Anse had seen on the television news early yesterday morning in
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