Phantoms

what we were looking for.”
    Arkham said, “We’re not Army Medical Corps. We’re Air Force.”
    “Project Skywatch,” Isley said. “We’re not exactly a secret organization, but… well… let’s just say we discourage publicity.”
    “Skywatch?” Lisa said, brightening. “Are you talking about UFOs? Is that it? Flying saucers?”
    Jenny saw Isley wince at the words “flying saucers.”
    Isley said, “We don’t go around checking out every crackpot report of little green men from Mars. For one thing, we don’t have the funds to do that. Our job is planning for the scientific, social, and military aspects of mankind’s first encounter with an alien intelligence. We’re really more of a think tank than anything else.”
    Bryce shook his head. “No one around here’s been reporting flying saucers.”
    “But that’s just what Major Isley means,” Arkham said. “You see, our studies indicate the first encounter might start out in such a bizarre way that we wouldn’t even recognize it as a first encounter. The popular concept of spaceships descending from the sky… well, it might not be like that. If we find ourselves dealing with trul y alien intelligences, their ships might be so different from our concept of a ship that we wouldn’t even be aware they’d landed.”
    “Which is why we check into strange phenomena that don’t seem to be UFO related at first glance,” Arkham said. “Like last spring, up in Vermont, there was a house in which an extremely active poltergeist was at work. Furniture was levitated. Dishes flew across the kitchen and smashed against the wall. Streams of water burst from walls in which there were no water pipes. Balls of flame erupted out of empty air—”
    “Isn’t a poltergeist supposed to be a ghost?” Bryce asked. “What could ghosts have to do with your area of interest?”
    “Nothing,” Isley said. “We don’t believe in ghosts. But we wondered if perhaps poltergeist phenomena might result from an attempt at interspecies communication gone awry. If we were to encounter an alien race that communicated only by telepathy, and if we were unable to receive those telepathic thoughts, maybe the unreceived psychic energy would produce destructive phenomena of the sort sometimes attributed to malign spirits.”
    “And what did you finally decide about the poltergeist up there in Vermont?” Jenny asked.
    “Decide? Nothing,” Isley said.
    “Just that it was… interesting,” Arkham said.
    Jenny glanced at Lisa and saw that the girl’s eyes were very wide. This was something Lisa could grasp, accept, and cling to. This was a fear she had been thoroughly prepared for, thanks to movies and books and television. Monsters from outer space. Invaders from other worlds. It didn’t make the Snowfield killings any less gruesome. But it was a known threat, and that made it infinitely preferable to the unknown. Jenny strongly doubted this was mankind’s first encounter with creatures from the stars, but Lisa seemed eager to believe.
    “And what about Snowfield?” the girl asked. “Is that what’s going on? Has something landed from… out there? ”
    Arkham looked uneasily at Major Isley.
    Isley cleared his throat: As translated by the squawk box on his chest, it was a racheting, machinelike sound. “It’s much too soon to make any judgment about that. We do believe there’s a small chance the first contact between man and alien might involve the danger of biological contamination. That’s why we’ve got an information-sharing arrangement with Copperfield’s project. An inexplicable outbreak of an unknown disease might indicate an unrecognized contact with an extraterrestrial presence.”
    “But if it is an extraterrestrial creature we’re dealing with,” Bryce said, obviously doubtful, “it seems damned savage for a being of ‘superior’ intelligence.”
    “The same thought occurred to me,” Jenny said.
    Isley raised his eyebrows, “There’s no guarantee that a creature with greater intelligence would be pacifistic and benevolent.”
    “Yeah,” Arkham said. “That’s a common conceit: the notion that aliens would’ve learned how to live in complete harmony among themselves and with other species. As that old song says… it ain’t necessarily so. After all, mankind is considerably further along the road of evolution than gorillas are, but as a species we’re definitely more warlike than gorillas at their most aggressive.”
    “Maybe