into the quarry and kissed the face of the ice itself.
âWhat was that?â Zeeko said shakily somewhere behind Benji. âEllie, I canât see anything, bring back my glasses!â
âBenji Lightman,â said Ellie, coming down the embankment, âI donât love this.â
What is âthisâ? Benji started to say.
But the junkyard spoke before he could.
Up there in the dark beyond their cars, colossal pipes began to vibrate, to issue musical tones like harmonic ghosts.
CRâs truck throttled to life, its headlights igniting, the light beams spearing across the lake, striking the ancient torpedo-shaped gas tanks on the opposite shore.
The barrel of CRâs rifle lifted from the ground beside Benji, looking like a finger trying to scrape the sky. Then, as the chair had done, the gun flung itself into the air toward the lake.
With an athletic instinct alien to him, Benji raised his hand and snatched the rifle in mid-flight. He looked back to CR and Ellie, who had come down to the shore and were watching inconfused fear. âYou see that?â was all Benji could say, heart surging with wonder.
The cloud had grown, obscuring the sides of the quarry. The gas tanks, which had glittered on the far shore, were all but invisible.
Itâs not âgrowing, â he thought. Itâs just coming closer. Itâs coming at us.
Thatâs stupid. Clouds donât do that.
Clouds donât glow, eitherâ
At that moment, the cloud-light winked out.
It happened all at once, like when someone trips on a cord and unplugs the Christmas tree. The junkyard became still and silent; the truckâs headlights snapped off.
A horizontal seam opened in the fog.
Slowly, a silhouette clarified from the mist.
âWhat the ass is that . . . ?â whispered CR beside Benji.
Goose bumps flew across Benjiâs whole body, and a wild memory flared through his mind.
As a boy, heâd loved the Wizard of Oz. Not the book or even the movie, but the Wizard himself, that titanic head that floated in space. Benji hadnât seen the whole movie until he was older, only the scene when Dorothy met the Wizard, so for years he didnât know there was âa man behind the curtainâ; to him, the Wizard and his sorcery were real. And right now, gazing from the abandoned lakeshore as the silhouetted shape emerged and took charge of the night, the Wizard was what lit up in Benjiâs mind. He thought of that dreadful, enchanted face. He thought of the Great and Terrible.
âThatâs a flying saucer,â Benji said.
The disc.
The disc.
The disc whirled fifty yards from the shore. It spun in thebright and soundless night above the false starscape of the lake. Lights, trillions of eerily beautiful green lights, blinked on the underbody of the craft. They illuminated its shape, which looked for all the world like two silver Frisbees whose lips had been fused.
Benji felt a hand on his shoulder, heard CR say, âLeaving, holy shit, weâre leaving, letâs leave!â Ellie nodded and began retreating up the shore.
A portal opened on the bottom of the saucer. A circular beam of atomic-green light blazed out and hit the lake. It had the effect of lightning: The ice glowed, then shattered with a sound like a thunderclap. Shards of ice floated upward in the light.
Tractor beam.
âOh my God!â Zeeko cried. âWhat is that? Ellie, please , give me my glasses!â
Suddenly, as if realizing it was not alone, the saucerâs portal closed, cutting off the beam. The ice crashed down into the freshly opened crater in the lake.
And the saucer began approaching the shore.
âBenjiâ CRâ Get up here!â Ellie shouted, her voice shaking.
Thirty feet out now, the portal on the saucerâs belly opened again. Benji took a step backward, stumbled over his bootlaces, fell on his butt. CR lifted him to his feet, saying in the most frightened voice