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  Prologue

  The night Harry Reynolds was abducted by the aliens, he was sitting on his toilet with a copy of the Weekly World News and a bad case of constipation.

  Even so, Harry Reynolds was ready for ‘em.

  He figured the little buggers would eventually get around to picking him up. Harry knew they were around—had known since the big flap started in the early fifties. Harry Reynolds had seen a few of their saucers from time to time, zipping over cornfields or rising up from behind trees, but that wasn’t what made him sure that creatures from outer space were buzzing around earth, checking out missile silos, playing chicken with commercial airliners, and poking instruments up horror—writers’ assholes.

  He knew, because he’d heard them on his shortwave radio.

  Harry was a ham—radio operator, had been since the fifties, when he’d gotten out of the army with his right leg left behind in Korea. Back then, he’d done a lot of sitting; they didn’t have artificial legs as good as what they had now, and he just wasn’t real used to his wooden one. So he tinkered with electronic gadgets a lot, built himself a sweet little shortwave radio from a Heathkit, and started broadcasting and intercepting broadcasts like a regular deejay of the night sky, bouncing his handle—Aardvark—through the airwaves. Even then he’d been interested in flying saucers, so when he started getting strange broadcasts, unusual beeps and hums, weird chatterings that sure as hell weren’t English or any foreign language Harry had ever heard—he pegged ‘em quick. Regularly, he’d even do special broadcasts for the UFOs, giving them his address and inviting them over for beers, trying to explain this and that—things they might not understand in easy American. That gave him a reputation amongst other ham operators. Pretty soon, he was Klatuu—named after the Michael Rennie character in The Day the Earth Stood Still. Harry didn’t mind. It got him a lot of attention.

  Unfortunately, no little green men in shiny suits ever came by for some Bud and bullshitting.

  Still, Harry knew they’d come. They were out there, sure as hell—all the fancy brains in the world had worked hard to prove that there were no such things as flying saucers, but they’d failed. Harry still heard their messages on the band, and he believed lots of the people who’d seen them, who’d talked to them. Harry read the UFO journals, and he checked out the UFO books from the Dubuque Library System, so he was up on the latest, which seemed to be that his Long Distance Audience—that was what Harry called the extraterrestrials—had taken to picking people up in the flying saucers, doing tests on them, sometimes even making them pregnant. Fascinating stuff, yes sirree, Bob, and too bad that they hadn’t made that Whitley Strieber feller or that Maximillian what’s-his-name pregnant. Now that would be a story!

  No, Harry Reynolds figured the aliens would get around to him eventually, and he figured that when they did he had a pretty good chance to get some proof that they really existed. Wouldn’t that make the other ham radio boys at the lodge sit down with their jaws between their knees!

  So, when the aliens finally did get around to abducting him, old Harry was ready for them with a device he’d constructed in the basement workshop of his little house just outside of Dubuque. Harry knew there was no telling when the aliens would take him, so it was no good hauling the thing around in his pocket, or around his neck. ‘Sides, they’d see it and take it off, real quick.

  Instead, he designed it special, just the right size and weight to fit inside his hollow, fake right leg.

  Then, when the aliens came for Harry Reynolds and plucked him from his white—tiled bathroom right outside Dubuque, Iowa, they had no way of knowing what was in store for them.

  As soon as he’d driven home from his printing shop in his ‘76 Chevy station wagon, Harry Reynolds knew that something weird was going on.

  He pulled into his garage, got out of his car and, in the spring dusk, went to his front yard checking to see if he’d seen what he thought he had.

  There seemed to be some kind of aura around his house.

  Now, standing in the grass (that needed cutting—he’d have to fire up the old Toro this weekend) he looked at his boxy cinderblock-and-brick home, squinting real hard at the edges, where chimney and roof and siding and tall radio antennae gave way to grass and trees and the gentle cobalt of the fading sky. Here, he’d fancied he’d seen, as he pulled up in the driveway, a periphery of light—a shifting gentle spectrum of light, as though some pixie had just zapped 3210 Elmore Drive with a magical spell.

  “Damnedest thing!” he said, staring a moment longer, then giving up. He was going to have to put this on his shortwave radio show tonight. Course, he put near about everything on his radio show, and then would gab into the wee hours if some fellow ham operator was unlucky enough to get buttonholed by his signal. “Mebbe the Centaurans did it.”

  Harry shrugged, then stumped back to the wagon to get the bag of groceries he’d picked up at the Val-U-Mart, the limp of his false leg only slightly evident. The cats were waiting for him at the side door, meowing up a storm.

  “Whoa there, Joker! Hang onto your bonnet, Bessie!” he said, as they performed their evening feline come-ons with Harry’s legs. “You happy to see me ... or you just hungry?”

  Both, actually. He kept his cats inside when he was away, letting them roam outside only when he was at the house. It wasn’t that he didn’t figure they could take care of themselves—he just liked to know where they were when he got back, otherwise he’d worry and ruin the evening. He’d had cats run off when his wife was alive, never to return, and it hadn’t been too bad. But now that Carolyn was never going to return, well ... maybe he just liked to know that somebody was home waiting for him.

  Harry opened up a can of Figaro Seafood Supreme, and divided it up amongst the black Manx and the female striped tabby, wincing at the awful smell. Then he changed their water dish, and set it carefully down onto the kitty smiley—face place mat in the corner where the cats huddled and gorged. Later, he’d spill some Meow Mix into their communal dry—food bowl, but only when they got peckish. Cats appreciate you more if they have to work a bit to get their food.

  Then Harry put away his groceries, fired up some burgers under the broiler, and got his mail. Bills, Fate Magazine, the latest Weekly World News, but nothing from his children, Hattie and Ted, married now and living on opposite coasts. He’d hear from them on Father’s Day, and that was about their only spring ritual communication. Oh, well ... They had their own lives to lead. They regarded their father as a bit of a crank— an unfortunate box of peculiarities, stacked away in the Midwestern closet of their childhoods.

  Harry ate his burgers with a can of Hormel Hot Chili dumped on them, while he perused Fate. Good magazine, but not the magazine that good ol’ Raymond Palmer had started up years ago. Too much goddamn psychic nonsense, for one thing. This issue had an article on the lost continent Lemuria, a piece on dowsing and a long previously unprinted interview with the late J. Allen Hyenk which looked interesting, but all the rest was either crystal-brained New Age garbage or Harry’s perpetual bugaboo, psychic predictions and the like. Bad as astrology. Goddamn stuff just didn’t make sense, but people ate it up like Post Toasties!

  Finished with dinner, he put the dish in the sink, and belched loudly. “Beans already workin’, cats!” he said, addressing his startled pets. “Bet
ter let you out. Goddamn beans are mighty tasty, but they make the only gas I know that sinks to lower extremities! But maybe we’ll dynamite the blockages and get the mail movin’ again, huh?”

  He turned to run some water over the dish so the chili stains wouldn’t dry, (wash the sucker later) and was staring out the back window, when he thought he saw a flash of light in the trees behind his house, and thought he heard a faint confluence of whispers that died away almost soon as they had begun.

  A shiver raised the hackles on the back of his neck. What the bejesus was goin’ on out there?

  He let the cats out, and he followed them into the backyard. The sun was long since gone, and deep Iowa night had set in. It had gone cold with a brisk spring chill already, and Harry shivered as he stepped out past the rusted swing set and the broken barbecue into the smell of new grass.

  “Anybody out there?” he called. But the light was gone and the only sounds were from leaves rustling and branches clicking with the breeze. “If it’s you Centaurans, come on out. I’ve been waiting for you and I ain’t gonna hurt you, you should know that.”

  Harry was sure that the extraterrestrials probably didn’t come from either Alpha or Beta Centauri, but he liked the sound of the word, so that was what he called them. Up above him now, only a few clouds obscured the stars. Harry Reynolds looked up at them for a moment, and got that shiver again, that shiver of wonder ...

  “You suckers are up there,” he whispered. “I know you are. You may wait to come down and not show yourself until next century, when I’m six feet under ... but people that remember me will say, Goddamn. Crazy ol’ Harry Reynolds was right!”

  With only a short-sleeve shirt on, no undershirt either, Harry got cold fast and retreated back into the house.

  He was in the mood, no question.

  He was in the mood to broadcast!

  A wisp of acrid smoke coiled up, wreathing the round fluorescent work-lamp for a moment, then disappearing into the cellar darkness. Harry examined his soldering work carefully through a magnifying glass, then fitted the circuit board carefully back into the bulbous box that was his shortwave radio. A minor repair. You had to expect this kind of thing when you built your own radios from the get-go. He applied screwdriver to screws, putting the casing back together.

  Around him in his basement hung his tools, arranged like bats hanging from a cavern ceiling. Harry had built all this himself, and he kept it neat and orderly. From time to time, he dabbled with inventions. Nothing serious. Better mousetraps, a new kind of catalytic converter for old cars, an electronic cat-door, stuff like that. Mostly, he enjoyed the electronics, playing with resistors and capacitors, transistors and wire, like a kid with Legos.

  Harry hauled his shortwave set up from the basement, balanced it on a knee as he switched off the workshop light, then carried it on up to where he spent most of his widowed time: the attic. When he and his wife and kids had moved here in ‘59, this had been a normal A—frame attic, insulation between the rafters and all. Above Carolyn’s objection that they needed the space for storage, Harry had claimed it, and then applied his carpentry know-how to create a study. He’d always found his basement a little oppressive. The pounding of kids’ feet and intrusions of his wife for laundry chores, along with countless other bothersome things all intruded upon his concentration and privacy terribly. But up here. ...

  Even now, with everyone gone but his cats—when too late he realized those interruptions were cherished reminders of companionship—when he pulled down the folding stair steps and clambered up into Contact Central, he was in another world.

  He put the squat radio down, plugged in the AC, jacked in the mike, and put on his headset. His swivel chair whined metallically as he leaned forward to fiddle with the controls and fine-tune the frequency for tonight’s transmission. Signals beeped and slurred at various volumes across the band as he turned the dial, like “Saturday Night Live from Babel.” His favorite channel, though, was free.

  He switched open the mike, leaned back in his chair and began.

  “UFOs, alert! UFOs, alert! All Centaurans and you other human and humanoid hangers-on, listen up! This is Klatuu, broadcasting at a frequency of 51.2 milahertz. FCC License Number ... shit, I can’t remember. Well anyway I’m legal, boys, and you’re not!”

  He swiveled a bit, leaning toward the mike, hand against his head and a finger in his ear, better to appreciate and adjust the resonance of his voice. It had a tendency to squeak out of its baritone when he got excited. His fellow ham operators used to call him “Klatuu the Mouse” back in the sixties when this was a real problem.

  Harry was sixty years old, but he’d never smoked, he didn’t drink much more than beer, and that just on weekends, and he’d always done his own physical work, so he was in pretty good shape all-in-all. He had a stubby nose and big brown, owlish eyes that now sprang open incredibly wide as he talked. When he was younger, he’d worn a goatee, because he’d seen a lot of UFO experts wearing them, but now his chin was bare, except for evening stubble.

  “I know you’ve been sniffin’ around my house, I’ve seen your lights, I’ve heard you—hell, I sense you’ve been here. I just wanna make sure you know that the invitation’s still open, like it’s always been, ever since my first broadcast to you from Contact Central. Come on over, and let’s talk a while, real personal. I know you don’t want most folks to know that you’re around, but you can trust Harry Reynolds.” Harry looked up at the star-chart he’d tacked onto the tilted ceiling, just one of the posters and maps and photographs papering the room, all related to UFOs. “I’ve been waitin’ to talk to you guys for a loooong time! ‘Cause I knnnnnooooooww you’re ouuuuuut there.”

  That last was his signature ... kind of like Jack Benny’s “Well...“ or Steve Martin’s “I’m a wild and crazy guy.” The reason the other hams liked him, the reason they listened to his “show” whenever they could, separate from actually talking to him, was that Harry Reynolds had a sense of humor. He took UFOs dead serious when tit came down to tat—but in the meantime, he could joke about them, and he did.

  “Lemme see ... long as I got your ear. Last Sunday night, I was talking about...“ he eye-scanned a stack of books on the table before him. “Ooh, yeah! That goddamn new book by that goddamn Scarbaloney goof.” He picked the hardcover book out of the stack and read the title. “Above Us Only Sky, by Dr. Everett Scarborough. Yeah. Doctor of Quackology! Who does this bozo think he is? You gotta wonder from just the title! A quote from a pinko like John Lennon. Listen, I know this Scarborough jerk, I’ve read his books, all of ‘em. Yeah, yeah, I know he’s the doo-doo head who helped convince the government to wrap up Project Blue Book in ‘69. I know he’s today’s leading UFO skeptic, kinda the Amazing Randi for us saucer buffs. But ever think about it ... This garbanzo bean-head has been making a killing, writing and lecturing and consulting ... Hell, I hear some loony network is thinking about a TV show based on his so-called UFO investigation work. The dough must be rollin’ in!”

  Reynolds flipped through the book, muttering the doctor’s name over and over again, so that the Centaurans and his other listeners wouldn’t think he’d gone away.

  “Yeah. Yeah, here we go—this is the kind of attitude that really gets me miffed.” He began to quote from the book. “’Credulity. If I could sum up the entire reason for this twentieth century phenomenon, I would simply use the word “Credulity.” As a scientist, I use the rigorous standards and methods of my training as a yardstick for all my investigations. These scientific investigations reveal absolutely no shred of evidence that the earth is being visited by denizens from other planets, other dimensions, other shopping malls. People experience what they want to experience. People believe what they want to believe. And some people simply want to believe in creatures from outer space. Deep psychological problems? Inadequacies? Paranoia? Mental disorders similar to schizophrenia that our doctors haven’t categorized yet? Who knows. But the common denominator is simple. Credulity.
’”

  Harry Reynolds took a deep breath and then continued. “Now this really steams me!” The sentence came out close to soprano. Harry stopped for a second, got control of himself.

  “Centaurans, you listening? Course you are. This is the kind of dope who’s going to make things hard for you, when you finally decide to announce yourselves to the world at large. I got a real good idea. You know, we earth people, in our literature—we’ve got this interesting legend. Roman legend ... no ... GREEK. Yeah. Well, you see, the Greeks, they had a bunch of gods. Uh, like Zeus and Aphrodite and Odin. Yeah. And they made mankind, but they had a real warped relationship with humans and animals ... like old Zeus liked to come down and have sex with swans. But if a guy ... a guy like this Doctor Scarborough ... got a bee up his ass, thought he was hot stuff, the gods didn’t like it, they thought he was getting uppity, had too much ... um ... hubcapz. Yeah, it’s like pride and arrogance, only more so. So the gods would take the guy a peg or two down, put his face in the mud. Sometimes they sent the Furies after him. Sometimes they blinded him.

  “Maybe that’s what this Scarborough guy needs, huh? Pick ‘em up in one of your saucers, give ‘im a ride. Freak him out just a little bit, so he’s not such an uppity snot anymore. Do him some good, I think.” Reynolds chuckled. “Course, I want you to come see me first. ‘Cause I knooooooow your ouuuuuuuut there!“

  He continued his commentary for another half hour, finishing up his devastating book review, touching on a few entertaining highlights on the day at the printing shop, discussing his long-entertained notion of self-publishing his own book on UFOs (it had been turned down by thirty publishers). Then he finally described the aura he’d seen around his house when he’d got home and the lights and sounds he’d heard from the woods.

  “Well, gotta go, friends. My bowels are acting up—and it ain’t in no comedy!” he said, finishing.