Dreamcatcher

were really no brain behind them at all. Perlmutter had heard of the thousand-yard stare,
but Kurtz’s seemed to go on for a
million
yards, maybe light-years.
Yet somehow Perlmutter held Kurtz’s gaze. Looked into the absence. He was not off
to a good start here. It was important-it was
imperative-
that the slide be stopped before it could become an avalanche.
“All right, good. Better, anyway.” Kurtz’s voice was low but Perlmutter had no

problem hearing him despite the overlapping chunter of the helicopters. “I’m going to say
this to you Just once, and only because you’re new to my service and you clearly don’t know your asshole from your piehole. I have been asked to run a phooka operation here.
Do you know what a phooka is.
“No,” Perlmutter said. It caused him almost physical pain not to be able to say No
sir
.
“According to the Irish, who as a race have never entirely crawled from the bath of

superstition in which their mothers gat them, a phooka is a phantom horse that kidnaps travelers and carries them away on its back. I use it to mean an operation which is both
covert and wide open. A paradox, Perlmutter! The good news is that we’ve been developing contingency plans for just this sort of clusterfuck since 1947, when the Air Force first recovered the sort of extraterrestrial artifact now known as a flashlight. The bad

news is that the future is now and I have to face it with guys like you in support. Do you
understand me, buck?”
“Yes, s… yes.”
“I hope so. What we’ve got to do here, Perlmutter, is go in fast and hard and utterly
phooka. We’re going to do as much dirtywork as we have to and come out as clean as we
can clean yes, Lord, and
smilin
…”
Kurtz bared his teeth in a brief smile of such brutally satiric intensity that Perlmutter

felt a little like screaming. Tall and stoop-shouldered, Kurtz had the build of a bureaucrat.
Yet something about him was terrible. You saw some of it in his eyes, sensed some of it in

the still, prim way he held his hands in front of him… but those weren’t the things that made him scary, that made the men call him Old Creepy Kurtz. Perlmutter didn’t know exactly what the really scary thing was, and didn’t want to know. What he wanted right now-the only thing he wanted-was to get out of this conversation with his ass on straight.
Who needed to go twenty or thirty miles west to make contact with an alien species?

Perlmutter had one standing right here in front of him.
Kurtz’s lips snapped shut over his teeth. “On the same page, are we?”
“Yes.”
“Saluting the same flag? Pissing in the same latrine?”
“Yes.”
“How are we going to come out of this, Pearly?”
“Clean?”
“Boffo! And how else?”
For one horrible second he didn’t know. Then it came to him. “
Smiling
, sir.”
“Call me sir again and I’ll knock you down.”
“I’m sorry,” Perlmutter whispered. He was, too.

Here came a school bus rolling slowly up the road with its offside wheels in the ditch
and canted almost to the tipover point so it could get past the helicopters. MILLINOCKET
SCHOOL DEPT was written up the side, big black letters against a yellow background.
Commandeered bus. Owen Underhill and his men inside. The A-team. Perlmutter saw it
and felt better. At different times both men had worked with Underhill.

“You’ll have doctors by nightfall,” Kurtz said. “All the doctors you need. Check?”
“Check.”
As he walked toward the bus, which stopped in front of Gosselin’s single gasoline
pump, Kurtz looked at his pocket-watch. Almost eleven. Gosh, how the time flew when you were having fun. Perlmutter walked with him, but all the cocker spaniel spring had gone out of Perlmutter’s step.

“For now, Archie, eyeball em, smell em, listen to their tall tales, and document any Ripley you see. You know about the Ripley, I assume?” “Yes.” “Good. Don’t touch it.
“‘God, no!” Perlmutter exclaimed, then flushed. Kurtz smiled thinly. This one was no more real than his shark’s grin. “Excellent idea,
Perlmutter! You have breathing masks?” “They just arrived. Twelve cartons of them,
and more on the w-”Good. We want Polarolds of the Ripley. We need mucho

documentation. Exhibit A, Exhibit B, so on and so forth. Got it?” “Yes.” “And none of our… our guests get away, right?” “Absolutely not.” Perlmutter was shocked by the idea,
and looked it. Kurtz’s lips stretched. The thin smile grew and once more became the shark’s grin. Those empty eyes looked through Perlmutter-looked all the way to the center
of the earth, for all Perlmutter knew. He found himself wondering if anyone would leave

Blue Base when this was over. Except Kurtz, that was.
“Carry on, Citizen Perlmutter. In the name of the government, I order you to carry on.”
Archie Perlmutter watched Kurtz continue on toward the bus, where Underhill-a
squat jug of a man-was climbing off. Never in his life had he been so utterly delighted to
see a man’s back.
2
“Hello, boss,” Underhill said. Like the rest, he wore a plain green coverall, but like

Kurtz, he also wore a sidearm. Sitting in the bus were roughly two dozen men, most of them just finishing an early lunch.
“What have they got there, buck?” Kurtz asked. At six-foot-six he towered above
Underhill, but Underhill probably outweighed him by seventy pounds.
“Burger King. We drove through. I didn’t think the bus would fit, but Yoder said it
would, and he was right. Want a Whopper? They’re probably a little on the cold side by

now, but there must be a microwave in there someplace.” Underhill nodded toward the store.
“I’ll pass. Cholesterol’s not so good these days.”
“Groin okay?” Six years before, Kurtz had suffered a serious groin-pull while playing

racquetball, This had indirectly led to their only disagreement. Not a serious one, Owen Underhill judged, but with Kurtz, it was hard to tell. Behind the man’s patented game-face, thoughts came and went at near light-speed, agendas were constantly being rewritten,
and emotions were turning on a dime, There were people-quite a few of them, actually-who thought Kurtz was crazy. Owen Underhill didn’t know if he was or not, but he knew

you wanted to be careful around this one. Very.
“As the Irish might put it,” Kurtz said, “me groin’s foine.” He reached between his
legs, gave his balls a burlesque yank, and favored Owen with that teeth-baring grin.
“Good.”
“And you? Been okay?”
“Me groin’s foine,” Owen said, and Kurtz laughed.
Now coming up the road, rolling slowly and carefully but having an easier time than
the bus, was a brand-new Lincoln Navigator with three orange-clad hunters inside, hefty

boys all three, gawking at the helicopters and the double-timing soldiers in their green coveralls. Gawking at the guns, mostly. Vietnam comes to northern Maine, praise God.
Soon they would join the others in the Holding Area.
Half a dozen men approached as the Navigator pulled up behind the bus, with its
stickers reading BLUE DEVIL PRIDE and THIS VEHICLE STOPS AT ALL RR

CROSSINGS. Three lawyers or bankers with their own cholesterol problems and fat stock
portfolios, lawyers or bankers pretending to be good old boys, under the impression (of which they would soon be disabused) that they were still in an America at peace. Soon they would be in the barn (or the corral, if they craved fresh air), where their Visa cards
would not be honored. They would be allowed to keep their cell phones. They wouldn’t

work this far up in the willywags, but hitting REDIAL might keep them amused.
“You plugged in tight?” Kurtz asked.
“I think so, yes.”
“Still a quick study?”
Owen shrugged.
“How many people in the Blue Zone altogether, Owen?”
“We estimate eight hundred. No more than a hundred in Zones Prime A and Prime
B.”
That was good, assuming no one slipped through. In terms of possible contamination,
a few slips wouldn’t matter-the news, at least so far, was good on that score. In terms of

information management, however, it would not be good at all. It was hard to ride a phooka horse these days. Too many people with videocams. Too many TV station
helicopters. Too many watching eyes.
Kurtz said, “Come inside the store. They’re setting me up a “Bago, but it’s not here
yet.”
“
Un momento
,” Underhill said, and dashed up the steps of the bus. When he came back down, he had a grease-spotted Burger King sack in his hand and a tape recorder over

his shoulder on a strap.
Kurtz nodded toward the bag. “That stuff’ll kill you.”
“We’re starring in
The War of the Worlds
and you’re worried about high cholesterol?”
Behind them, one of the newly arrived mighty hunters was saying he wanted to call
his lawyer, which probably meant he was a banker. Kurtz led Underhill into the store.
Above them, the flashlights were back, running their glow over the bottoms of the clouds,

jumping and dancing like animated characters in a Disney cartoon.
3
Old Man Gosselin’s office smelled of salami, cigars, beer, Musterole, and sulfur-
either farts or boiled eggs, Kurtz reckoned. Maybe both. There was also a smell, faint but
discernible, of ethyl alcohol. The smell of them. It was everywhere up here now. Another

man might have been tempted to ascribe that smell to a combination of nerves and too much imagination, but Kurtz had never been overburdened with either. In any case, he did
not believe the hundred or so square miles of forestland surrounding Gosselin’s Country
Market had much future as a viable ecosystem. Sometimes you just had to sand a piece of
furniture down to the bare wood and start again.

Kurtz sat behind the desk and opened one of the drawers. A cardboard box with
CHEM/U.S./IO UNITS stamped on it lay within. Good for Perlmutter. Kurtz took it out and opened it. Inside were a number of small plastic masks, the transparent sort that fitted
over the mouth and nose. He tossed one to Underhill and then put one on himself, quickly
adjusting the elastic straps.
“Are these necessary?” Owen asked. “We don’t know. And don’t feel privileged; in

another hour, everyone is going to be wearing them. Except for the John Q’s in the Holding Area, that is.”
Underhill donned his mask and adjusted the straps without further comment. Kurtz
sat behind the desk with his head leaning back against the latest piece of OSHA paperwork
(post it or die) taped to the wall behind him.

“Do they work?” Underhill’s voice was hardly muffled at all. The clear plastic did not fog with his breathing. It seemed to have no pores or filters, but he found he could breathe easily enough.
“They work on Ebola, they work on anthrax, they work on the new super-cholera. Do

they work on Ripley? Probably. If not, we’re tucked, soldier. In fact, we may be tucked already. But the clock is running and the game is on. Should I hear the tape you’ve doubtless got in that thing over your shoulder?”
“There’s no need for you to hear all of it, but you ought to taste, I think.”
Kurtz nodded, made a spinning motion in the air with his forefinger Oike an ump

signalling a home run, Owen thought), and leaned back further in Gosselin’s chair.
Underhill unslung the tape recorder, set it on the desk facing
Kurtz, and pushed PLAY. A toneless robot voice said: “NSA radio intercept.
Multiband. 62914A44. This material is classified top secret. Time of intercept 0627, November fourteen, two-zero-zero-one. Intercept recording begins after the tone. If you are not rated Security 91 Clearance One, please press STOP now.”

“Please,” Kurtz said, nodding. “Good. That’d stop most unauthorized personnel,
don’t you think?”
There was a pause, a two-second beep, then a young woman’s voice said: “One. Two.
Three. Please don’t hurt us.
Ne tious blessez pas.
” A two-second silence, and then a young man’s voice said. “Five. Seven. Eleven. We are helpless.
Nous sommes sans defense
.
Please don’t hurt us, we are helpless.
Ne nous faites
-”

“By God, it’s like a Berlitz language lesson from the Great Beyond,” Kurtz said.
“Recognize the voices?” Underhill asked.
Kurtz shook his head and put a finger to his lips.
The next voice was Bill Clinton’s. “Thirteen. Seventeen. Nineteen.” In Clinton’s
Arkansas accent, the last one came out
Nahnteen
. “There is no infection here.
Il n’y a pas
d’infection ici

.” Another two-second pause, and then Tom Brokaw spoke from the tape recorder. “Twenty-three. Twenty-seven. Twenty-nine. We are dying.
On se meurt, on
creve
. We are dying.”
Underhill pushed STOP. “In case you wondered, the first voice is Sarah Jessica
Parker, an actress. The second is Brad Pitt.”
“Who’s he?”
“An actor.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Each pause is followed by another voice. All the voices are or would be

recognizable to large segments of the people in this area. There’s Alfred Hitchcock, Paul
Harvey, Garth Brooks, Tim Sample-he’s a Maine-style humorist, very popular-and
hundreds of others, some of which we haven’t identified.”
“
Hundreds
of others? How long did this intercept last?”
“Strictly speaking, it’s not an intercept at all but a clear-band transmission which we

have been jamming since 0800. Which means a bunch of it got out, but we doubt if anyone who picked it up will have understood much of it. And if they do-” Underhill gave
a little
What can you do
shrug. “It’s still going on. The voices appear to be real. The few voiceprint comparisons that were run are identical. Whatever else they are, these guys could put Rich Little out of business.”
The
whup-whup-whup

of the helicopters came clearly through the walls. Kurtz could
feel it as well as hear it. Through the boards, through the OSHA poster, and from there into the gray meat that was mostly water, telling him to come on come on come on, hurry
up hurry up hurry up. His blood responded to it, but he sat quietly, looking at Owen Underhill. Thinking about Owen Underhill. Make haste slowly; that was a useful saying.

Especially when dealing with folks like Owen. How’s your groin, indeed.
You fucked with me once, buck
, Kurtz thought.
Maybe didn’t cross my line, but by
God, you scuffed at it, didn’t you? Yes, I think so. And I think you’ll bear watching
. “Same four messages over and over,” Underhill said, and ticked them off on the fingers of his left

hand. “Don’t hurt us. We’re helpless. There’s no infection here. The last one-” “No infection,” Kurtz mused. “Huh. They’ve got their nerve, don’t they?”
He had seen pictures of the reddish-gold fuzz growing on all the trees around Blue Boy. And on people. Corpses, mostly, at least so far. The techs had named it Ripley fungus, after the tough broad Sigourney Weaver had played in those space movies. Most

of them were too young to remember the other Ripley, who had done the “Believe It or Not” feature in the newspapers. “Believe It or Not” was pretty much gone, now; too freaky for the politically correct twenty-first century. But it fit this situation, Kurtz thought. Oh yes, like a glove. Made old Mr Ripley’s Siamese twins and two-headed cows
look positively normal by comparison.
“The last one is
We’re dying

,” Underhill said. “That one’s interesting because of the
two different French versions accompanying the English. The first is straightforward. The
second-
on creve-
is slangy. We might say “Our goose is cooked.”” He looked directly at Kurtz, who wished Perlmutter were here to see that yes, it
could
be done, “
Are
they cooked? I mean, assuming we don’t help them along?”
“Why French, Owen?”
Underhill shrugged. “It’s still the other language up here.”

“Ah. And the prime numbers? just to show us we’re dealing with intelligent beings?
As if any other kind could travel here from another star system, or dimension, or wherever
it is they come from?”
“I guess so. What about the flashlights, boss?”
“Most are now down in the woods. They disintegrate fairly rapidly, once they run out
of juice. The ones we’ve been able to retrieve look like soup cans with the labels stripped

off. Considering their size, they put on a hell of a show, don’t they? Scared the living hell
out of the locals.”
When the flashlights disintegrated, they left patches of the fungus or ergot or
whatever the hell it was behind. The same seemed true of the aliens themselves. The ones
that were left were just up there standing around their ship like commuters standing around a broken-down bus, bawling that they weren’t infectious,
il n’y a pas d’infection
ici

, praise the Lord and pass the biscuits. And once the stuff was on you, you were most likely-what had Owen said? A cooked goose. They didn’t know that for sure, of course, it
was early yet, but they had to make the assumption.
“How many ETs still up there?” Owen asked.
“Maybe a hundred.”
“How much don’t we know? Does anybody have any idea?” Kurtz waved this aside.

He was not a knower; knowing was someone else’s department, and none of those guys had been invited to this particular pre-Thanksgiving party.
“The survivors,” Underhill persisted. “Are they crew?” “Don’t know, but probably
not. Too many for crew; not enough to be colonists; nowhere
near
enough to be shock-troops.”
“What else is going on up here, boss?
Something
is.”
“Pretty sure of that, are you?”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Underhill shrugged. “Intuition?”

“It’s not intuition,” Kurtz said, almost gently. “It’s telepathy.”
“Say
what?
”
“Low-grade, but there’s really not any question about it. The men sense something,
but they haven’t put a name on it yet. Give them a few hours and they will. Our gray friends are telepaths, and they seem to spread that just as they spread the fungus.”
“Holy fucking shit,” Owen Underhill whispered.

Kurtz sat calmly, watching him think. He liked watching people think, if they were any good at it, and now there was more: he was
hearing
Owen think, a faint sound like the ocean in a conch shell.
“The fungus isn’t strong in the environment,” Owen said. “Neither are they. What
about the ESP?”
“Too soon to tell. If it lasts, though, and if it gets out of this pine-tree pisspot we’re
in, everything changes. You know that, don’t you?”

Underhill knew. “I can’t believe it,” he said.
“I’m thinking of a car,” Kurtz said. “What car am I thinking of?”
Owen looked at him, apparently trying to decide if Kurtz was serious. He saw that Kurtz was, then shook his head. “How should I…” He paused. “Fiat.”
“Ferrari, actually. I’m thinking of an ice cream flavor. Which f-”
“Pistachio,” Owen said.
“There you go.”
Owen sat another moment, then asked Kurtz-hesitantly-if Kurtz could tell him his
brother’s name.

“Kellogg,” Kurtz replied. “Jesus, Owen, what kind of name is
that for a kid?”
“My mother’s maiden name. Christ.
Telepathy
.”
“It’s going to fuck with the ratings of
Jeopardy
and
Wants to Be a Millionaire
, I can tell you that,” Kurtz said, then repeated, it gets loose. “From outside the building there came a gunshot and a scream. “You didn’t have to do that!”
someone cried in a voice filled with outrage and fear. “You didn’t have to
do
that!”

They waited, but there was no more.
“The confirmed grayboy body-count is eighty-one,” Kurtz said. “There are probably
more. Once they go down, they decompose pretty fast. Nothing left but goo… and then the fungus.” “Throughout the Zone?”
Kurtz shook his head. “Think of a wedge pointing east. The thick end is Blue Boy.
Where we are is about the middle of the wedge. There are a few more illegal immigrants

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