by Kate Wilhelm

Kate Wilhelm is the author of more than forty novels and collections of short stories and novellas including Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, The Infinity Box, The Clewiston Test, and Children of the Wind. She has won the Hugo, the Nebula, and the Locus awards, among others. For twenty-seven years, she and her late husband, Damon Knight, taught at the Clarion Writers’ Workshop in Fantasy and Science Fiction, an intensive writing program for which they received an honorary degree from Michigan State University in recognition of their years as instructors. Kate’s book Storyteller covers writing lessons from the workshop. She has also written a series of novels featuring defense attorney Barbara Holloway, the latest of which, Heaven Is High, will be published by St. Martin’s Press early next year. Her newest story takes a chilling look at the cost of . . .

Melvin H. Toomy. He typed in the words, sat back and studied them, then deleted them. Since it was his confession, he didn’t need to add his name up front like that. He started over.

It began the day I overheard my wife and daughter talking about me.

He remembered the conversation all too clearly. Penny and her husband Ryan were visiting for the weekend. They had been married for one year, were still in the honeymoon phase, and Penny had little sympathy for anything or anyone who disturbed the roseate glow that enveloped her. Ruth was speaking when he happened to draw near the open kitchen window.

“He’s just so aimless these days. It worries me.”

“Mother, he’s driving you crazy is what he’s doing. Why doesn’t he go play golf or something?”

“He sold the clubs. He said thank God he’d never have to spend another hour with another idiot chasing a little white ball around in the blazing sunshine.”

“Oh, great. He won’t go fishing or hunting, or take up glass blowing or something, or volunteer for anything, so he’s bored. It’s not your problem, Mother. It’s his.”

“It must be terribly hard for him. You know, the big office, secretary, expense account lunches, and now all of it’s gone. Stock options worthless, 401(k) practically worthless. You start out thinking you’ll do great things, change the world or something, and suddenly you’re sixty years old, it’s all gone, and you wonder what happened. He’s put out feelers, but no one will hire a sixty-year-old man. . . .” The words trailed off.

He grimaced as the words played in his head. He couldn’t stand having his wife pity him or his beautiful daughter dismiss him that way. And God knew he never had thought of changing the world or anything else. He closed his eyes, remembering the weekend from the past April and how it had changed his life.

That night at dinner Ruth talked about one of her staff at the high school. “She took the laptop home with her, left it in her car while she ducked into the store for milk, and it was stolen. Students’ personal information, personnel information. We have backups, of course, but still, someone has that information now.”

“Happens all the time,” Ryan said. “Everyone should have an external hard drive and carry it if they have to take work home.”

“How does that work?” Ruth asked. She was principal of the high school and loss of the files had been a worry all week.

Ryan explained external hard drives, and the following day he and Mel had gone out to buy one. He installed it on the home computer that Mel rarely touched, but that Ruth often used.

“See,” he said, when they were done transferring files and programs. “Take it out, and there’s the whole computer in a gadget hardly bigger than a deck of cards. Keep it in your purse or your pocket, plug it in a home computer and you’re all set.”

“If confidential information is on it, does that mean no one can find it on the main computer, or even know it’s been there?” Mel asked, thinking of the many times he had read that investigators had seized someone’s computer and found damning information. They had seized computers at his company. His late company, he corrected. It had gone bankrupt two months earlier.

Ryan shook his head. “Not just like that. The computer has a record of the external drive, so searchers would know about it. And the original data is still recoverable, of course.”

Mel would have asked more questions, but Ruth said lunch was ready. As they ate, she asked how the visit with Ryan’s parents had gone.

Penny and Ryan exchanged glances and she ducked her head, played with an olive on her plate and remained silent. Mel watched her with a pang, recalling how she used to play with olives or peas, rolling them around, chasing them, and both he and Ruth had pretended not to notice.

“It was fine,” Ryan said without inflection. “We showed them around the city, they did some sightseeing on their own, then back to JFK and Orlando. I doubt they’ll ever visit New York City again. They don’t like it.”

“They want us to have children,” Penny said in a strained voice. “We said we planned to, just not yet.”

Ruth’s lips tightened, but she did not comment, which Mel thought was commendable. Neither of them liked Ryan’s parents. Too reactionary, too authoritarian, too sanctimonious, they had agreed, adding more and more pejoratives to follow the too until they were both laughing.

“I don’t think any allegation voiced yet has been too screwy for them to swallow,” Ryan said in the same flat tone he had used before. “I can’t imagine how crazy it would have to be before they would draw the line.”

“Some of the teachers are caught up in a kind of madness,” Ruth said in a tight voice. “They listen to the same talk radio, that Bob Fellowes, or television programs all parroting the same message, and just accept whatever is said.” She shook her head and changed the subject.

Those three little scenes, Mel thought, did it. Any one of them alone would have been forgettable, but the three coalesced, merged, and his world changed.

The alarm he had set went off. Ruth would be home in an hour and he planned to have things started for dinner. His confession would have to wait. He exited his word processor, closed the program, and shut down the external hard drive which he had named X. He unplugged the X drive, slipped it in his pocket, and plugged in one hardly bigger than a cigar, one he thought of as X2, but was also named X. It held their passwords, email addresses, a few other things, enough to justify its existence. The hard drive Ryan had plugged in was named H, and it backed up the entire computer.

So now he had three external hard drives, Mel reflected, and derisively added, thus I embrace the digital age, better late than never.

He had been the general manager of publications, the official newsletters, shareholder reports, and such that were routinely published. With a secretary and several staff members there had been no need for him to learn to use a computer at work, and he had not even attempted to explore it. In the last six months, however, he had come a long way, he thought with satisfaction. He had discovered search engines, blogs, Google, Wikipedia . . . Very early on, he had decided he needed to hide what he was finding on the Internet and he had bought X, the big second hard drive, to save Ruth’s peace of mind.

After that April visit by Penny and Ryan, he had begun listening to Bob Fellowes, and he had started watching television in a way neither he nor Ruth had ever done in the past. He had been curious about what messages were turning teachers into people who made Ruth roll her eyes and change the subject, what kind of messages made Ryan imply that his own parents were ripe for crazy talk.

That constant drumbeat of conspiracy theories, hate talk, fear-mongering had been too much for Ruth to bear, and if he had been driving her to distraction by inactivity, his new activity had made her doubt his sanity. He was finding more and more of the same kind of madness on the Internet, but his computer usage was all stored on his personal external drive he had named X, and their household remained peaceful. After a month he stopped listening to Fellowes, and he stopped watching the television shows she despised. He had seen and heard enough, and now he simply tuned in occasionally to see if they were still doing it. They were, louder all the time.

In the kitchen he whistled softly as he put potatoes on to start cooking. Although his dinners were simple comfort food that he remembered from his childhood, Ruth was appreciative and, to the surprise of both of them, something had been rekindled that had been dormant. Her eyes sparkled, and to his eyes she looked younger and prettier than she had just a few months earlier.

Not long after the visit by Penny and Ryan, he had begun to mull over the question Ryan had raised: what allegation would be crazy enough to make his parents draw the line? At first Mel doubted there could be such an allegation, since the ones being voiced appeared to be more than enough to have that effect already.

A thunderstorm in July supplied an answer to the question. Both he and Ruth came awake when thunder shook the house, followed almost instantly by lightning. He patted Ruth’s shoulder and got up. “I’ll see to the windows. Go back to sleep.” She murmured something, pulled her pillow over her head, and remained in bed.

Standing at a window watching lightning flare repeatedly, it came to him. Lights in the sky. UFOs. But it had to be different from the many UFO sightings and visitations reported and debunked over decades. He began to smile, then chuckled, and by the time the storm blew over, he had decided to do a little research and then launch his own conspiracy theory and put the idiots to the test.

First, he needed some cover, a reason for his newfound cheerfulness. The house had a partitioned-off section of the basement where a previous owner had set up a woodworking shop that would serve his purpose. He bought a few tools, wood, several books with plans for home projects, shellac, varnish, paints, thinners, and a box of surgical gloves.

Everything he purchased during that period was simply to account for the gloves. Ruth never questioned any of it, and even expressed her satisfaction to Penny that finally he had latched onto a hobby.

He invented a whistleblower from a never-to-be-named top-secret government agency, and named him Cyrus Cornwall. By September Cyrus was ready to write his first letters, to be accompanied by several highly redacted, top-secret government memos and other documents.

I AM EMPLOYED IN A UNIT OF [REDACTED]. OUR UNIT IS COMPOSED OF THREE TIERS OF INVESTIGATORS: TIER 1 RECEIVES A COPY OF EVERY SIGHTING OF UNIDENTIFIED FLYING OBJECTS (UFOS) REPORTED IN THE UNITED STATES. MOST OF THESE SIGHTINGS ARE READILY DISMISSED AS NATURAL PHENOMENA: COMMERCIAL AND PRIVATE AIRCRAFT, ARMED FORCES CRAFT, PLANETS, SWAMP GAS, REFLECTIONS OF LIGHTS ON CLOUDS, AND SO ON. A NUMBER OF THEM ARE SENT TO TIER 2 FOR FURTHER INVESTIGATION BY OPERATIVES WHO GO INTO THE FIELD TO QUESTION OBSERVERS, EXAMINE ALLEGED LANDING SITES, AND OTHERWISE SEEK TO PROVE OR DISPROVE THE AUTHENTICITY OF THE SIGHTING. AMONG THE REPORTS ESCALATED TO TIER 2 ARE SOME THAT ARE SEALED AND IMMEDIATELY ESCALATED TO TIER 3.

FOR A NUMBER OF YEARS I WAS ASSIGNED TO TIER 2, BUT IN RECENT YEARS I HAVE WORKED IN TIER 3. THE SEALED REPORTS OUR GROUP RECEIVES ARE EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS OF UFOS LANDING, AND OCCUPANTS EMERGING. IN EACH AND EVERY ACCOUNT IN THIS GROUP THE SPACE TRAVELERS ARE DESCRIBED AS “LOOKING JUST LIKE US, LIKE NORMAL PEOPLE.” SEE ADDENDA 1-5.

He saved the work, pocketed his X drive, and went to the workroom to spend a little time on the birdhouse he was making. He had found to his surprise that he enjoyed doing it and that he even recalled some of what he had learned in his ninth grade shop class. The shop proved to be a good place to think of his next move. Codes, he thought, sanding a piece of cedar. He would code each letter so that he would know who to follow up with if any of his recipients responded. A classified ad in the New York Times would do. A response on a Sunday in the Times would bring the lucky one more material.

He invented observers for the landings he had chosen from the vast number of references he had found on the Internet under UFOs. His observers were from 1946, 1953, 1961, 1988, 2000 in widely separated areas of the United States. Two college boys camping, a housewife in her back yard, a doctor, three hunters, a retired pilot; good sober, law abiding citizens with no agenda of their own. He had thought of trying to duplicate newspaper accounts of their reports, gave it up, and decided to simply summarize the reports and the follow-up accounts of the deaths and or disappearances of each and every one of them within days of going public with what they had seen.

Writing as Cyrus Cornwall, he summarized the sightings.

DR. JEROME HENDERSON, VACATIONING ON THE SHORE OF LAKE ONTARIO WITH HIS FAMILY, STEPPED OUTSIDE LATE AT NIGHT AND SAW A UFO LAND A SHORT DISTANCE FROM HIS CABIN. A BRIGHT MOONLIT NIGHT PERMITTED HIM TO SEE CLEARLY WHEN A HATCH OPENED AND PEOPLE APPEARED, DESCENDED, AND WALKED TO A WAITING BUS THAT LOOKED LIKE A TOUR BUS. HE ESTIMATED THAT FORTY TO FIFTY PEOPLE LEFT THE SPACE CRAFT. HE STATED, “THEY WERE JUST ORDINARY PEOPLE, A MIXTURE OF TYPES ONE MIGHT SEE ON ANY STREET IN ANY CITY, AND PROBABLY ALL WERE UNDER FORTY YEARS OLD. THE BUS DEPARTED WHEN THEY WERE LOADED, AND THE SPACE CRAFT ROSE SILENTLY, MADE A SHARP TURN, AND VANISHED.” THREE DAYS LATER, ONE DAY AFTER DR. HENDERSON MADE HIS REPORT, HE WAS KILLED IN A ONE-CAR TRAFFIC ACCIDENT.

The summaries were similar in most respects; sometimes a bus was reported, or several large vans, once a closed truck. All the observers died or disappeared within a day or two of reporting the landing. Mel knew his accounts were too amateurish, too non-specific to be taken seriously. But wasn’t that the point? he argued with himself. Crackpot stuff, crazy talk, unverified and unverifiable was exactly his point.

Many of the memos he worked on were from Major [REDACTED] to Colonel [REDACTED], and in one instance to General [REDACTED].

One was so heavily redacted that the only legible words left in the memo were urgent, immediate action, highest classified priority, seizing such visitors alive, deniability, Project Skylight, FOIA.

He bought a ream of paper and envelopes in Middletown where he was unknown, thirty miles from Port Jervis, where he and Ruth had bought their house years before and he was well known. When he printed out his material, he made eight copies, and he wore surgical gloves. He used a moist sponge to seal the envelopes; the stamps were self-sealing. He was careful not to leave a fingerprint on anything, not to leave any DNA on anything.

In mid September he was ready to mail eight messages, each coded in such a way that he would know who, if anyone, responded. He took the train to Manhattan, an hour and ten minutes away, to mail them. While there, he bought some deli salami and corned beef, the kind he couldn’t find in Port Jervis. That night, to Ruth’s delight, he prepared Reuben sandwiches for dinner.

It took three weeks for one of the bloggers to post a nearly complete copy of Mel’s original mailing, and it went viral within minutes.

Bob Fellowes was next to refer to it in an hysterical rant:

“They’re here among us, and have been since the forties! Maybe longer! What’s their purpose? What are they after? How many have come? Forty or fifty at a time! Year after year! For decades! There could be many thousands of them walking among us! Call your congressmen! Call the president’s office! Call your governors! America, we demand answers! They’ve had time to be assimilated, to have families, to infiltrate every level of government! Who’s in charge, us or them?” His voice became more and more shrill as he raved.

Mel was both fascinated and alarmed at the way conspiracy theories were advanced by mid October. The invasion had to be worldwide, else why had the Soviets launched Sputnik? Had they been starting a search for extraterrestrials on the moon or Mars, or possibly a mother ship in orbit out there? And why had the United States launched a desperate push to get to the moon and to Mars if not to conduct such a search? And now, international cooperation on a space station. Advanced nations were cooperating in an unprecedented way. Searching for extraterrestrials?

A panel of experts in an hour-long television broadcast discussed the difficulty of detecting them. If they existed, they repeated often. DNA samples might possibly identify them. Autopsies were the only conclusive method, of course. One Harvard professor said: “Keep in mind that such advanced technology that allows them to navigate interstellar space would allow them to conceal their identities in a manner that we are unable to imagine.”

Another panel discussed what possible threats hostile extraterrestrials could pose, with the most obvious one being the release of a pathogen to which they had immunity and humans didn’t. Were they waiting for a predetermined critical moment of their own—sufficient numbers, for example—to launch an attack? Or were they waiting for sufficient infiltration of all levels of government and industry?

Mel had sent his original material to one senator and two representatives along with the others. The senator responded, as he had expected him to. A serious legislator, no doubt he had turned the matter over to one of the intelligence agencies. One representative, two bloggers, and Bob Fellowes also responded. Mel sent them all identical messages, taking the same care he had shown before, and mailing his answers in Manhattan again. His message was simple and short: “No more until I feel safe. The Whistleblower Protection Act can’t protect me. My life is in danger.”

A week after he mailed his response, two congressmen demanded hearings in the House of Representatives. One of the bloggers demanded all memos, communications, records, reports, etc. regarding Project Skylight through the Freedom of Information Act. It wasn’t clear exactly which agency he petitioned. And Bob Fellowes became even more hysterical.

By November Mel knew it was time to reveal the hoax, to prove to the country, possibly to the world, that the populace had been primed to believe any nonsense that was presented.

He sat at the computer to write his confession and stared at a blank screen. When the alarm sounded hours later, the screen was still blank, and he left to start dinner. Tomorrow, he told himself.

Day after day he sat at the computer and stared at a blank screen. Where to start? How to start? He felt as if his fingers had frozen, his brain had turned to stone. He had lost faith in words and had to consult a dictionary to look up the word hoax, which had become as alien as the invaders he had invented. All the phrases and sentences he thought of while sleepless in bed vanished by the time Ruth left for the high school.

PROJECT SKYLIGHT IS A HOAX! He sat back and looked at the words, deleted them. They weren’t even his own words. Day in, day out various people were saying that, to no avail. Learned people, people in authority, officials were saying that, only to be drowned out like whispers in a thunderstorm.

No matter what single word he keyed in, it continued to exist as isolated as a pinpoint island in the middle of the ocean. Nothing followed. Nothing could logically follow. The screen remained blank.

Penny and Ryan came for Thanksgiving and although Ruth prepared a traditional feast, which was as delicious as it always had been, there was an air of unease at the table. Laughter and banter, gaiety all seemed forced, as if they were amateur actors in a poorly rehearsed play.

Serving pumpkin pie, Ruth asked Penny, “Is there something bothering you?”

Penny glanced at Ryan, and her forced smile vanished. She nodded. “Ryan talked to his folks about the holidays, to let them know we’d like to visit them over Christmas for a day or two.” She looked at Ryan again, then mumbled, “You tell them.”

He appeared as strained as she did. “Mother wanted to know if you two had your DNA sample done yet. If Penny had.”

“They don’t want me to come until I do it,” Penny said in a low voice.

“Oh, for God’s sake!” Mel said. “The whole thing is a hoax. Some bored teenager having himself a joke. They aren’t buying that crap, are they?”

Ryan nodded. “They are, and a lot of others are, too. Everyone born after 1940 eventually will be tested, DNA sampled. That lets my folks out.” He put his fork down. “Do you remember my brother Jack? He was at our wedding and the reception.”

Mel had a vague memory of him. Older than Ryan, receding hair, quiet. He nodded.

“He works in the state department,” Ryan said. “He hears things, knows things. He said the government is taking this seriously, testing people, lie detector tests, trying to find a leak. He said whoever started this business has to be someone who knows, and has taken sophisticated steps to protect his identity, changing details here and there, but the gist of it is on the mark.”

Ruth gasped and made an involuntary gesture that knocked over her wine glass. Hurriedly she left the table and for a moment Mel thought it was to bring paper towels or something to soak up spilled wine, but she headed for the hallway to their bedroom. Before he could follow, she was already returning with her handbag. Ignoring the wine spreading on the tablecloth, Ruth took a folded paper from her bag and handed it to him.

“This came yesterday,” she said.

It was a memo from the superintendent of schools. Mel scanned it quickly, then read aloud the concluding sentence, “All personnel are required to submit a notarized copy of their DNA results to this office before the winter semester starts on January 4.”

Mel felt as if the world was fading, or he was fading from it, and only gradually he became aware of Ryan’s voice again.

“It’s happening all through the government. No publicity yet. But it will get out and then it will be hell. It isn’t a kid in a basement playing games, but someone who knows too much. They’ll track him down and he’ll never be heard from again, that’s for sure. Psycholinguists are studying the text. Analyzing it. Educated, proper use of grammar, repetition of words, use of certain words over others. If the guy ever wrote a thing that was published, they’ll track him down that way. Apparently he used a code that included a lot of Cs, Ys, and Os. Twice it was CY, a number, then CO. Pronounce it,” he said. Then he did so, “C Y C O, psycho. He’s mocking them. They’ve put cameras on every mail drop box in New York City. Tracking purchases of paper and stamps. Investigating photocopy shops, train and plane trips to New York. They’ve pulled out the stops. They’ll find him and he’ll have a fatal accident or disappear exactly the same way all those people who saw aliens come to earth did.”

Mel didn’t know when he had sat down again. He was in his chair, watching the blood red stain spread on the white tablecloth.