Warren Murphy: Encounter Group

"We're hoping for a Close Encounter of the First Kind tonight," Orville told Amanda with a broad, toothy smile.

"Close encounter? You mean like in that movie?"

"That's right. A Close Encounter of the First Kind is a visual sighting, a Close Encounter of the Second Kind means a landing, and a Close Encounter of the Third Kind— which is the best of them— is actual contact with alien beings from another world."

"We're talking about flying saucers, right?"

"Well," Orville said in his aw-shucks voice, "we don't call 'em that. We like to refer to them as Unidentified Flying Objects— UFOs for short." He pronounced UFOs as "U-foes."

"There's been a heap of sightings in this area the last few days. That's why we're here."

"I don't believe in that crap," said Amanda, who had a distinct knack for relating to new friends.

"Look! I see one," a female voice called out suddenly.

Through the open patch of night sky directly overhead, a cluster of red and white lights could be seen moving against the stars.

"I don't hear any sound," one person whispered. "It must be a spaceship flying by magnetic power."

"I never saw anything like it before," someone in a jogging suit added, while the others scrambled to adjust the big telescope. Before they got organized enough to see that the lights belonged to a 747 flying to Nashville, the object had passed from sight.

"You people do this every Thursday?" Amanda asked.

"That's what I said," Orville grinned. "We're the Little Rock Chapter of FOES; there's dozens all over the country, though. But, zowie, wasn't that the most exciting thing you ever saw in all your life? That was the first genuine sighting in the sixteen years of our chapter— unless you count the one back in August 1975, which the Air Force claimed was the planet Jupiter."

"That's great," Amanda said. "How far to the nearest town?"

"Oh, about three miles due north. Why?"

"Because that's where I'm going. Thanks. Good-bye."

* * *

Amanda Bull never made it to town. She had barely covered three-quarters of a mile when the black Arkansas night seemed to close in on her. At first that was all she felt. A strange sensation of pressure, as if the trees were crowding close like living creatures. Then there was a heaviness in the air, but that might have been the warmth of the night.

Amanda really didn't become concerned until she heard the humming sound. Then, as it grew louder, she realized that the humming was connected with the oppressive feeling that had come over her.

She ran.

Running brought her to an open space before she could react to the sudden absence of trees. Somehow she knew that one thing she didn't wish was to be caught in a clearing. But one minute Amanda was tearing blindly through the forest and the next there was a hundred-foot clearing, and above that, suddenly, there was light.

A thousand arc lights might have generated such illumination. But she knew arc lights weren't red and green and blue and brilliant white, and they didn't cluster together like soap bubbles suspended in the air. But that was exactly what Amanda saw. A cluster of bright, globular lights floating at treetop level above her.

Amanda Bull screamed. Then the lights moved aside with a wobbling motion, and began to descend. Without a sound they descended, for the humming had stopped. There was no flame or rush of air to indicate propulsion. And through fingers held in front of her eyes, fingers that helped screen out some of the awful brilliance, Amanda saw the shape behind the lights— the dark shape of a squashed-down basketball.

Then the lights dimmed, and she made out the rodlike projections as they touched the ground, digging into the earth, and supporting the gently settling object.

When the object was at rest, Amanda thought she heard a voice, and the voice, she was certain, came from within the thing that had landed. The thing that looked like a flying saucer.

"Greetings," the voice called out reedily, as if the words were translated through a wind instrument, like a flute.

"Ummm... I don't believe in flying saucers," Amanda said in a strange voice.

"I am the World Master," the voice said, ignoring her remark.

"My— my name is Amanda Bull."

"Yes. I know," the voice said musically.

"You do?" Amanda said, her gray eyes wide with surprise.

"Yes, Amanda Bull. I have looked into your mind and seen confusion and unhappiness, but I have also seen beauty and honesty and truth."

"You have?"

"You have been chosen, Amanda Bull, to prepare the world. You shall be the instrument by which the Earth will enter into a new age."

And then Amanda Bull saw the lighted rectangle, like a window in the object's side, and the shadowy figure behind it. The figure's head didn't look quite the way a human head is supposed to. When the smooth hull beneath the figure cracked and let out golden light along three edges and a section of that hull fell forward, the voice issued from the golden interior with greater clarity.

"Enter, Amanda Bull. And discover your destiny."

And Amanda Bull walked into the beautiful light with the musical voice vibrating deep in her soul, the voice that seemed to speak the very language of her soul, and she smiled for the first time in weeks. As she disappeared into that light, she spoke two words very softly:

"I believe..."

?Chapter Two

His name was Remo and shoes annoyed him.

He was standing on the burning roof of a burning building. Tar on the rooftop was bubbling from the heat, and now the soft live leather of his shoes was starting to give off little puffs of steam, and the soles were sticking into the tar. Like strolling through quicksand, he thought.

So he kicked off the soft Italian loafers, stood in the hot tar in his bare feet and looked around through the thick haze of smoke for the man he had chased up to the roof.

He saw him on the far edge of the building. D. Desmund Dorkley was poised on the roofs edge, looking over, looking for some way to escape being roasted alive.

He obviously hadn't counted on Remo Williams. No one ever counted on Remo Williams. Who would count on a dead man?

Once he had been patrolman Remo Williams, a beat cop in Newark, New Jersey, who expected to retire on a police pension if he made it to age 55. Until he became one of the last persons to be sentenced to die in the electric chair, for the murder of a drug pusher Remo hadn't killed. He had been framed, and it wasn't until he woke up with slight electrical burn marks on his wrists and was informed that the chair had been rigged not to kill him, that Remo Williams learned who had set him up.

It had been the United States government— or, rather, a secret organization within that government known only as CURE. Remo had been chosen as America's secret enforcement arm to handle an out-of-control crime situation before that situation swamped American democracy.

"Then I'm not dead?" Remo had asked.

"Yes, you are," he was told. "For all intents and purposes."

And he was. Remo Williams, an orphan, had officially ceased to exist. He became just Remo, whom CURE had code-named "the Destroyer," and so began intensive training designed to make the ex-cop a human weapon. Remo had had no choice, but he went through with the whole deal, and it had changed him in ways even Remo didn't always understand. But all that was long ago, and all D. Desmund Dorkley knew was that a skinny guy with very thick wrists was running barefoot toward him, and there was no expression of pain in the man's eyes as there should have been. The eyes just looked dead.

For D. Desmund, it was to have been an ordinary torch job. A pile of rags in a corner of an old warehouse, a can of gasoline and a flick of a Bic. No problem.

Until the unexpected Remo Williams stepped out of the shadows and asked, "Got a light, pal?"