Dreamcatcher

We’re going to do it because they came to the wrong neighborhood and knocked on the wrong fucking door. This is not Germany in 1938 or Oxford Mississippi in 1963. Now, Mr Melrose, do you think you can
spread that message?”
Melrose’s eyes rolled up to the wet whites and his knees unhinged. Perlmutter once
more grabbed his shoulder in an effort to hold him up, but it was a lost cause this time; down Melrose went.

“Pearly,” Kurtz whispered, and when those burning blue eyes fell on him, Perlmutter
thought he had never been so frightened in his life. His bladder was a hot and heavy bag
inside him, wanting only to squirt its contents into his coverall. He felt that if Kurtz saw a
dark patch spreading on his adjutant’s crotch, Kurtz might shoot him out of hand, in his
present mood… but that didn’t seem to help the situation. In fact, it made it worse.

“Yes, s… boss?” “Will he spread the word? Will he be a good messenger? Do you
reckon he took enough in to do that, or was he too concerned with his damned old
foot?’
‘I… I…” In the doorway, he saw Underhill nod at him almost imperceptibly, and Pearly took heart. “Yes, boss-I think he heard you five-by.” Kurtz seemed first surprised
by Perlmutter’s vehemence, then gratified. He turned to Underhill. “What about you,

Owen? Do you think he’ll spread the word?”Uh-huh,” Underhill said. “If you get him to
the infirmary before he bleeds to death on your rug.”
Kurtz’s mouth turned up at the comers and he barked, “See to that, Pearly, will you?”
“Right now,” Perlmutter said, starting toward the door. Once past Kurtz, he gave
Underhill a look of fervent gratitude which Underhill either missed or chose not to acknowledge.
“Double-time, Mr Perlmutter. Owen, I want to talk to you

mano a mano,
as the Irish
say.” He stepped over Melrose’s body without looking down at it and walked briskly into
the kitchenette. “Coffee? Freddy made it, so I can’t swear it’s drinkable… no, I can’t
swear,
but…”
“Coffee would be good,” Owen Underhill said. “You pour and I’ll try to stop this
fellow’s bleeding.”
Kurtz stood by the Mr Coffee on the counter and gave Underhill a look of darkly

brilliant doubt. “Do you really think that’s necessary?” That was where Perlmutter went out. Never before in his life had stepping into a storm felt so much like an escape.
4
Henry stood at the fence (not touching the wire; he had seen what happened when
you did that), waiting for Underhill-that was his name, all right-to come back out of what
had to be the command post, but when the door opened, one of the other fellows he’d seen

go in came hustling out. Once down the steps, the guy started running. The guy was tall,
and possessed one of those earnest faces Henry associated with middle management. Now
the face looked terrified, and the man almost fell before he got fully into stride. Henry was
rooting for that.
The middle manager managed to keep his balance after the first ship, but halfway to a
couple of semi trailers that had been pushed together, his feet flew out from beneath him

and he went on his ass. The clipboard he’d been carrying went sliding like a toboggan for
leprechauns.
Henry held his hands out and clapped as loudly as he could. Probably not loud
enough to be heard over all the motors, so he cupped them around his mouth and yelled:
“
Way to go shitheels! Let’s look at the videotape!”
The middle manager got up without looking at him, retrieved his clipboard, and ran
on toward the two semi trailers.

There was a group of eight or nine guys standing by the fence about twenty yards from Henry. Now one of them, a portly fellow in an orange down-filled parka that made
him look like the Pillsbury Dough Boy, walked over.
“I don’t think you should do that, fella.” He paused, then lowered his voice. “They shot my brother-in-law.”
Yes. Henry saw it in the man’s head. The portly man’s brother-in-law, also portly,

talking about his lawyer, his rights, his job with some investment company in Boston. The soldiers nodding, telling him it was just temporary, the situation was normalizing and would be straightened out by dawn, all the time hustling the two overweight mighty hunters toward the barn, which already held a pretty good trawl, and all at once the brother-in-law had broken away, running toward the motor-pool, and boom-boom, out go
the lights.

The portly man was telling Henry some of this, his pale face earnest in the newly erected lights, and Henry interrupted him.
“What do you think they’re going to do to the rest of us?” The portly man looked at
Henry, shocked, then backed off a step, as if he thought Henry might have something contagious. Quite funny, when you thought about it, because they
all
had something contagious, or at least this team of government-funded cleaners

thought
they did, and in the end it would come to the same.
“You can’t be serious,” the portly man said. Then, almost indulgently: “This is
America, you know.”
“Is it? You seeing a lot of due process, are you?”
“They’re just… I’m sure they’re just…” Henry waited, interested, but there was no
more, at least not in this vein. “That was a gunshot, wasn’t it?” the portly man asked,
“And I think I heard some screaming.”

From the two pushed-together trailers there emerged two hurrying men with a
stretcher between them. Following them with marked reluctance came the middle
manager, his clipboard once more tucked firmly beneath his arm.
“I’d say you got that right.” Henry and the portly man watched as the stretcher-
bearers burned up the steps of the Winnebago. As Mr Middle Management made his

closest approach to the fence, Henry called out to him, “How’s it going, shitheels? Having
any fun yet?” The portly man winced. The guy with the clipboard gave Henry a single dour look and then trudged on toward the Winnebago.
“This is just… it’s just some sort of emergency situation,” the portly man said. “It’ll
be straightened out by tomorrow morning, I’m sure.”
“Not for your brother-in-law,” Henry said.

The portly man looked at him, mouth tucked in and trembling slightly. Then he
returned to the other men, whose views no doubt more closely corresponded to his own.
Henry turned back to the Winnebago and resumed waiting for Underhill to come out. He
had an idea that Underhill was his only hope… but whatever Underhill’s doubts about this
operation might be, the hope was a thin one. And Henry had only one card to play. The
card was Jonesy. They didn’t know about Jonesy.

The question was whether or not he should tell Underhill. Henry was terribly afraid
that telling the man would do no good.
5
About five minutes after Mr Middle Management followed the stretcher-bearers into
the “Bago, the three of them came out again, this time with a fourth on the stretcher.
Under the brilliant overhead lights, the wounded man’s face was so pale it looked purple.
Henry was relieved to see that it wasn’t Underhill, because Underhill was different from

the rest of these maniacs.
Ten minutes passed. Underhill still hadn’t come out of the command post. Henry
waited in the thickening snow. There were soldiers watching the inmates (that was what they were, inmates, and it was best not to gild the lily), and eventually one of them strolled
over. The men who had been stationed at the T-junction of the Deep Cut and Swanny Pond
Roads had pretty well blinded Henry with their lights, and he didn’t recognize this man by

his face. Henry was both delighted and deeply unsettled to realize that minds also had features, every bit as distinctive as a pretty mouth, a broken nose, or a crooked eye. This
was one of the guys who had been out there, the one who had hit him in the ass with the
stock of his rifle when he decided Henry wasn’t moving toward the truck fast enough.
Whatever had happened to Henry’s mind was skitzy; he couldn’t pick out this guy’s name,

but he knew that the man’s brother’s name was Frankie, and that in high school Frankie
had been tried and acquitted on a rape charge. There was more, as well-unconnected jumbles of stuff, like the contents of a wastebasket. Henry realized that he was looking at
an actual river of consciousness, and at the flotsam and jetsam the river was carrying along. The humbling thing was how prosaic most of it was.

“Hey there,” the soldier said, amiably enough. “It’s the smartass. Want a hot dog, smartass?” He laughed.
“Already got one,” Henry said, smiling himself And Beaver popped out of his mouth,
as Beaver had a way of doing. “Fuck off Freddy.”
The soldier stopped laughing. “Let’s see how smart your ass is twelve hours from
now,” he said. The image that went floating by, home on the river between this man’s ears,

was of a truck filled with bodies, white limbs all tangled together. “You growing the Ripley yet, smartass?”
Henry thought:
the byrus. 7lat’s what he means. The byrus is what it’s really called.
Jonesy knows.
Henry didn’t reply and the soldier started away, wearing the comfortable look of a man who has won on points. Curious, Henry summoned all his concentration and
visualized a rifle-Jonesy’s Garand, as a matter of fact. He thought:

I have a gun. I’m going
to kill you with it the second you turn your back on me, asshole.
The soldier swung around again, the comfortable look going the way of the grin and
the laughter. What replaced it was a look of doubt and suspicion. “What’d you say, smartass? You say something?”
“Just wondering if you got your share of that girl-you know, the one Frankie broke in.
Did he give you sloppy seconds?”

For a moment, the soldier’s face was idiotic with surprise. Then it filled in with black Italian rage. He raised his rifle. To Henry, its muzzle looked like a smile. He unzipped his
jacket and held it open in the thickening snow. “Go on,” he said, and laughed. “Go on, Rambo, do your thing.”
Frankie’s brother held the gun on Henry a moment longer, and then Henry felt the
man’s rage pass. It had been close-he had seen the soldier trying to think of what he would

say, some plausible story-but he had taken a moment too long and his forebrain had pulled
the red beast back to heel. It was all so familiar. The Richie Grenadeaus never died, not
really. They were the world’s dragon’s teeth.
“Tomorrow,” the soldier said. “Tomorrow’s time enough for you, smartass.”
This time Henry let him go-no more teasing the red beast, although God knew it
would have been easy enough. He had learned something, too… or confirmed what he’d

already suspected. The soldier had heard his thought, but not clearly. If he’d heard it clearly he would have turned around a lot faster. Nor had he asked Henry how Henry knew about his brother Frankie. Because on some level the soldier knew what Henry did:
they had been infected with telepathy, the whole walking bunch of them-they had caught it
like an annoying low-grade virus.

“Only I got it worse,” he said, zipping his coat back up again. So had Pete and Beaver and Jonesy. But Pete and the Beav were both dead now, and Jonesy… Jonesy…
“Jonesy got it worst of all,” Henry said. And where was Jonesy now?
South. Jonesy had hooked back south. These guys” precious quarantine had been
breached. Henry guessed they had foreseen that that might happen. It didn’t worry them.
They thought one or two breaches wouldn’t matter.

Henry thought they were wrong.
6
Owen stood with a mug of coffee in his hand, waiting until the guys from the
infirmary were gone with their burden, Melrose’s sobs mercifully reduced to mutters and
moans by a shot of morphine. Pearly followed them out and then Owen was alone with Kurtz.
Kurtz sat in his rocker, looking up at Owen Underhill with curious, head-cocked
amusement. The raving crazyman was gone again, put away like a Halloween mask.

“I’m thinking of a number,” Kurtz said. “What is it?”
“Seventeen,” Owen said. “You see it in red. Like on the side of a fire engine.”
Kurtz nodded, pleased. “You try sending one to me.” Owen visualized a speed limit
sign: 60 MPH.
“Six,” Kurtz said after a moment. “Black on white.”
“Close enough, boss.”
Kurtz drank some coffee. His was in a mug with I LUV MY GRANDPA printed on

the side. Owen sipped with honest pleasure. It was a dirty night and a dirty job, and Freddy’s coffee wasn’t bad.
Kurtz had found time to put on his coverall. Now he reached into the inner pocket and brought out a large bandanna. He regarded it for a moment, then got to his knees with

a grimace (it was no secret that the old man had arthritis) and began to wipe up the splatters of Melrose’s blood. Owen, who thought himself surely unshockable at this point,
was shocked.
“Sir… Oh, fuck. “Boss…”
“Stow it,” Kurtz said without looking up. He moved from spot to spot, as assiduous
as any washerwoman. “My father always said that you should clean up your own messes.

Might make you stop and think a little bit the next time. What was my father’s name, buck?”
Owen looked for it and caught just a glimpse, like a glimpse of slip under a woman’s
dress. “Paul?” “Patrick, actually… but close. Anderson believes it’s a wave, and it’s expending its force now,
A telepathic wave. Do you find that an awesome concept, Owen?”
“Yes.”
Kurtz nodded without looking up, wiping and cleaning. “More awesome in concept

than in fact, however-do you also find that?”
Owen laughed. The old man had lost none of his capacity to surprise.
Not playing
with a full deck,
people sometimes said of unstable individuals. The trouble with Kurtz, Owen reckoned, was that he was playing with
more
than a full deck. A few extra aces in
there. Also a few extra deuces, and everyone knew that deuces were wild.
“Sit down, Owen. Drink your coffee on your ass like a normal person and let me do

this, I need to.”
Owen thought maybe he did. He sat down and drank the coffee. Five minutes passed
in this fashion, then Kurtz got painfully back to his feet. Holding the bandanna
fastidiously by one comer, he carried it to the kitchen, dropped it into the trash, and returned to his rocker. He took a sip of his coffee, grimaced, and put it aside. “Cold.”
Owen rose. “I’d get you a fresh-”
“No. Sit down. We need to talk.” Owen sat.

“We had a little confrontation out there at the ship, you and I, didn’t we?”
“I wouldn’t say-”
“No, I know you wouldn’t, but I know what went on and so do you. When the
situation’s hot, tempers also get hot. But we’re past that now. We
have
to be past it because I’m the OIC and you’re my second and we’ve still got this job to finish. Can we
work together to do that?”
“Yes, sir.” Fuck, there it was again. “Boss, I mean.”
Kurtz favored him with a wintry smile.

“I lost control just now.” Charming, frank, open-eyed and honest. This had fooled
Owen for a lot of years. It did not fool him now. “I was going along, drawing the usual caricature-two parts Patton, one part Rasputin, add water, stir and serve-and I just…
whew! I just lost it. You think I’m crazy, don’t you?”
Careful, careful. There was telepathy in this room, honest-to-God telepathy, and

Owen had no idea how deeply Kurtz might be able to see into him. “Yes, sir. A little, sir.”
Kurtz nodded matter-of-factly. “Yes. A little. That pretty well describes it. I’ve been
doing this for a long time-men like me are necessary but hard to find, and you have to be a
little crazy to do the job and not just high-side it completely. It’s a thin line, that famous

thin line the armchair psychologists love to talk about, and never in the history of the world has there been a cleanup job like this one… assuming, that is, the story of Hercules
neatening up the Augean Stables is just a myth. I am not asking for your sympathy but for

your understanding. If we understand each other, we’ll get through this, the hardest job we’ve ever had, all right. If we don’t…” Kurtz shrugged. “If we don’t, I’ll have to get through it without you. Are you following me?”
Owen doubted if he was, but he saw where Kurtz wanted him to go and nodded. He

had read that there was a certain kind of bird that lived in the crocodile’s mouth, at the croc’s sufferance. He supposed that now he must be that kind of bird. Kurtz wanted him to
believe he was forgiven for putting the alien broadcast on the common channel-heat of the
moment, just as Kurtz had blown off Melrose’s foot in the heat of the moment. And what
had happened six years ago in Bosnia? Not a factor now. Maybe it was true. And maybe

the crocodile had tired of the bird’s tiresome pecking and was preparing to close its jaws.
Owen got no sense of the truth from Kurtz’s mind, and either way it behooved him to be
very careful. Careful and ready to fly.
Kurtz reached into his coverall again and brought out a tarnished pocket watch. “This
was my grandfather’s and it works just fine,” he said. “Because it winds up, I think-no electricity. My wristwatch, on the other hand, is still FUBAR.”
“Mine too.”

Kurtz’s lips twitched in a smile. “See Perlmutter when you have a chance, and feel you have the stomach for him. Among his many other chores and activities, he found time
to take delivery of three hundred wind-up Timexes this afternoon. just before the snow shut down our air-ops, this was. Pearly’s damned efficient. I just wish to Christ he’d get
over the idea that he’s living in a movie.”
“He may have made strides in that direction tonight, boss.”

“Perhaps he has at that.”
Kurtz meditated. Underhill waited.
“Laddie-buck, we should be drinking the whiskey. It’s a bit of an Irish deathwatch
we’re having tonight.”
“Is it?”
“Aye. Me beloved phooka is about to keel over dead.”
Owen raised his eyebrows.
“Yes. At which point its magical cloak of invisibility Will be whisked away. Then it
will become just another dead horse for folks to beat. Primarily politicians, who are best at
that sort of thing.”
“I don’t follow you.”

Kurtz took another look at the tarnished pocket watch, which he’d probably picked
up in a pawnshop… or looted off a corpse. Underhill wouldn’t have doubted either.
“It’s seven o’clock. In just about forty hours, the President is going to speak before
the UN General Assembly. More people are going to see and hear that speech than any previous speech in the history of the human race. It’s going to be part of the biggest
story

in the history of the human race… and the biggest spin-job since God the Father Almighty
created the cosmos and set the planets going round and round with the tip of his finger.”
“What’s the spin?”
“It’s a beautiful tale, Owen. Like the best ties, it incorporates large swatches of the truth. The President will tell a fascinated world, a world hanging on every word with its
breath caught in its throat, praise Jesus, that a ship crewed by beings from another world

crashed in northern Maine on either November sixth or November seventh of this year.
That’s true. He Will say that we were not completely surprised, as we and the heads of the
other countries which constitute the UN Security Council have known for at least ten years that ET has been scoping us out. Also true, only some of us here in America have

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