Finch had been talking to the news desk back in D.C. and trawling through his own contacts list. “Nope. If it’s natural, no one’s seen anything like it. And if it’s not, they’re all telling me the technology to pull off something like this just doesn’t exist.”
“We don’t know that,” Dalton objected, looking up from his monitor. “I’m sure there’s a lot of stuff out there that we don’t know about.”
“Yes, but what we don’t know about doesn’t really matter in this case, because there’s nothing we know about that even comes close.”
“You lost me.”
“Technology breakthroughs—they have to start somewhere,” Finch explained. “They don’t just come out of nowhere. No one suddenly came up with cell phones. It started with Alexander Graham Bell two hundred years ago. There’s a progression. Regular phone, cordless home phones, digital phones, and eventually, cell phones . . . Stealth fighters—we didn’t know about them, but they’re just evolutions of other fighter planes. You see what I mean? Technology evolves. And that thing we saw . . . there doesn’t seem to be anything out there that we can point to and say, ‘Well, if we took that and made it bigger, or more powerful, or used it in such a way, it could explain it.’ It’s in a whole different ballpark. And everyone’s trying to figure it out. I mean, look at this.” He pulled up the latest e-mail from D.C. “It’s going ballistic,” he enthused. “Reuters, AP, CNN. They’re all carrying it. Every station from London to Beijing is running it. Same for the big news blogs. Drudge, Huffington. It’s been voted up to number one on Digg and we’ve crossed two hundred thousand hits on YouTube. And the chat rooms are just going nuts over it.”
“What are they saying?”
“From what I can see, people are in one of three camps. Some of them think it’s some kind of harmless stunt, a CGI, War of the Worlds kind of thing. Others also think it’s a con but they see something more sinister in it, and they’re throwing out all kinds of crazy ideas about how it could have been pulled off, none of which seem to hold water if you read the mocking replies they’re getting from people who seem to know what they’re talking about.”
“Is there anyone who doesn’t think we’re behind it?”
“Yep. The third group: the pro camp. The ones who believe it’s the real thing—real as in God, not ET. One of them called us ‘the heralds of the Second Coming.’ ”
“Well that makes me feel so much better,” she groaned, her chest tightening with unease. Greed and fear were tugging at her. Part of her was thrilled by the idea of being the face of the hottest story around—she couldn’t deny that—but the more reasoned side of her was clamoring for restraint. She knew what she’d seen; she just didn’t know what it was. And until she did, she was uncomfortable with how it was all spiraling out of control. If it turned out to be something less momentous than everyone was suggesting, she could already picture Jon Stewart ridiculing her into an early retirement.
Finch spun the laptop back and tapped some more keys. “And speaking of ET,” he said as he glanced pointedly across at Dalton, “a guy I know at the Discovery Channel sent me these.” He turned the screen back so it was facing them. “Some of them are the ones you’d expect, like clouds and Concorde contrails that make people think they’re seeing UFOs. I don’t know if I should be surprised, but he tells me there are over two hundred reported UFO sightings a month in America. A month. But then, there’s a whole slew of historic references to unexplained sightings going back thousands of years. We’re talking hundreds of references throughout history about bright balls of fire, flying ‘earthenware vessels,’ luminous discs. It’s not just a modern phenomenon. I mean, check out these historical records: ‘Japan, 1458: An object as bright as the full moon and followed by curious signs was observed in the sky.’ Or this one: ‘London, 1593: A flying dragon surrounded by flames was seen hovering over the city.’ ”
“Opium’ll do that to you every time,” Dalton half-joked. “Seriously. Drugs were legal back then, weren’t they?”
“Besides, none of these references are even remotely verifiable,” Gracie added.
“Sure, but the thing is, there are so many of them. Written continents apart, at a time when traveling from one to another was virtually impossible, when most of the world was illiterate. Even the Bible’s got them.”
“Big surprise there,” Gracie scoffed. A charged silence hung between them. “So what are we saying? What do you think we saw?”
Finch pulled off his glasses and used his sleeve to give them a wipe as he thought about it. “I’d have said mass hallucination if it wasn’t for the footage.” He shook his head slowly in disbelief, slipped his glasses back on, and looked up at Gracie. “I can’t explain it.”
“Dalton?” she asked.
His face clouded with uncertainty. He leaned back in his chair and ran his hands tightly through his hair. “I don’t know. There was something . . . ethereal about it, you know? It didn’t look flat, like something projected, but then it didn’t look like something hard and physical either. It’s hard to explain. There was something much more organic, much more visceral about it. Like it was part of the sky, like the sky itself had lit up, you know what I’m saying?”
“I do,” Gracie agreed uncomfortably. The sight of the bright, glowing sign, as vivid as when she first saw it, materialized in her mind’s eye. An upwelling of elation, the same one she felt when she first saw it, overcame her again as she remembered how it had formed itself out of nothing. It was as if the air itself had been summoned by God, lit up from within into that shape, she found herself thinking. Which didn’t sit well with her. She’d stopped believing in God when her mother died, ripped away from her young daughter by an unrelenting tumor in her breast. And now, here it was, this unexplained thing in the sky. As if it were taunting her.
She pushed the thought away. Get a grip. We’re running ahead of ourselves here. There’s got to be a logical explanation for it.
But a nagging question kept coming back.
What if there isn’t?
Gracie stared out the window, scanning the sky for another sighting, her jumbled mind desperate for an answer. The satphone rang, and as Finch stretched across the table to answer it, her mind migrated to a UFO hoax from a year earlier. The clip, showing a UFO buzzing a beach in Haiti, had clocked up over five million viewings on YouTube within days of its posting, hogging chat rooms and news aggregator sites across the Web and popping up on every FunWall on Facebook. Millions were taken in by it—until it turned out to be something a French computer animator had put together in a few hours on his MacBook, using commercially available software, reluctantly explaining it away as a “sociological experiment” for a movie—about a UFO hoax, natch—that he was working on. With the advances in special effects and the proliferation of faked videos of such high quality that they managed to convince even the most staunch of skeptics, a subtle question arose in Gracie’s mind: Would people recognize a “true” event of this kind when—as it seemed—it really happened? She knew what she saw. It was right there in front of her, but everyone else was only seeing it on a screen. And without seeing it with their own eyes, could they ever accept it for what it was, something wondrous and inexplicable and possibly even supernatural or divine—or would it be drowned in a sea of cynicism?
“Gracie,” Finch called out, covering the phone’s mouthpiece with his hand.
She turned.
His face had a confused scrunch to it. “It’s for you.”