Close Encounters of the Third Kind by Steven Spielberg Read Free Book Online Page B

stillness to pieces. The dozing attendant jerked awake. Some dude was trying to get through his tolls without paying! In the blink of an eye, the first police cruiser shot through the gates. The second cruiser whooshed past, sirens and roof lights crazy. As the attendant started out of the booth to see what the hell, the third cruiser displaced air, followed closely by Neary’s yellow DWP truck.
    “I’m closing the gap,” one of the policemen called.
    “Man, you gotta see this. They’re glued to the road!” A hairpin curve was just ahead, and for the first time since the pursuit began the objects decided not to stay glued to the road. They shot straight out over the guardrail and into the air. An instant later, the police officer, obviously locked in on the night lights and doing at least eighty-five, followed them through the guardrail and high into Ohio airspace for a sensational moment before it pancaked into the embankment and lost all its wheels and doors.
    “DeWitt! You okay, DeWitt!”
    The second patrol car seized the opportunity to save itself and, brakes on fire, sideslipped right up to the littered cliffside. Roy saw the two police officers jump over the mangled guardrail and tear down the embankment to the creamed cruiser.
    The third police car and then Neary, following, finally stopped. The other cops ran down the embankment while Neary looked up at the sky. The three firelights arced upward into a low-lying cloud bank. Once inside they turned the clouds to fire until the internal illumination gently faded restoring normal night again. Neary turned back toward Indiana. The fluorescent lighting on both sides of the tollbooths was flickering back to life. Then Roy saw on the horizon a tapestry of light. A distant city was coming back on. Tolono? Harper Valley? It seemed the blackout was over.
    As it turned out, Trooper Roger DeWitt was in better shape than his wrinkled cruiser. Sporting a broken nose, minor but multiple contusions and a possible concussion, he had strutted around the stationhouse for one hour telling everybody including DWIs, one male rape victim, and a dozen witnesses of that evening’s skyjinks his version of God’s truth. Now he was inside making his verbal report to Captain Rasmussen while in the State Highway Patrol processing room the other officers and Roy Neary were working up reports of their night to remember. It was now three thirty A.M. , and Neary was fading. A man only has so many ounces of adrenaline, Neary thought. He craved a Mars Bar but would have settled for Mounds or M&M’s. There weren’t enough typewriters to go round, so Roy worked in pencil. He had a landslide of a headache.
    “Got any aspirin?” he asked the room.
    No one paid any attention to him.
    “If Longly hadn’t been with me,” one of the troopers said to another, “I would have gone psychiatric.”
    Longly grinned. “I don’t want to file this report,” he said. “I want to publish it.”
    Just then, a door across the room burst open and DeWitt emerged, limping, from the captain’s office, closing the door behind him, but not before the captain had shoved through it. “It’s enough to outrage common sense.” The captain addressed everyone in the processing room. “Ordinary people look to the police not to make bizarre reports of this nature.”
    “My knowledge is Gods truth,” DeWitt offered in his own defense.
    “I will not see this department pressed between the pages of the National Enquirer.” Rasmussen looked at Longly and another trooper behind their typewriters. Again he spoke to the room. “When Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers are done, have them get their behinds in here.”
    Slamming back, from whence the room fell stone quiet.
    “Was he mad ’cause your car’s gonna be a taxi next week?”
    “Sweet Jesus.” DeWitt now looked dazed as well as damaged. “I told him the whole thing. I didn’t hold back nothing. The shooting stars. The speed. What the hell, I ain’t no