Chapter 3
Later, after the shooting, the people that had sat beside the man in the balcony of the auditorium where Dr. Everett Scarborough gave his presentation described him as a “man in black.”
That was what Alfred and Gertie Hopper remembered mostly, that the man was dressed entirely in black: black tennis shoes, black polyester chinos, black belt, wrinkled black banlon shirt, black coat, even a black hat that he didn’t wear, but carried crumpled in one hand with nails bitten down to the quick.
“A raincoat. I thought that was weird. It was a nice night outside,” said Gertie Hopper later. “I definitely thought that was weird. But then, I guess I expected to see weird people there. I mean, flying-saucer speeches bring ‘em out, don’t they? I’ve seen some odd-lookin’ people before at some of the symposiums, so I guess that guy kinda blended in. Maybe he just wore that long black coat to hide the gun. And you know, funny thing, now that I think of it ... that was black too!”
Alfred and Gertie Hopper were from Charles County, Maryland. Alfred had a liquor store in Waldorf, and a motor boat docked at Chesapeake Beach, with which he liked to go out crabbing in the bay on nice Sundays or Saturdays. Gertie worked in the store, and was very active in the local Baptist church. They had two sons, both grown, and shared an interest in flying saucers. They had both seen UFOs years before. Gertie’s had been hovering above a tobacco field. Alfred’s had been during a late evening fishing trip. They belonged to MUFON and avidly read all the magazines and books on the subject. They were not at all obsessed, nor did they hunger for contact with aliens from distant planets. They just agreed that it was damn interesting stuff, that people should pay more attention, and that the government should start up some kind of sequel to Project Blue Book to investigate the phenomenon. Alfred had somewhat of a reputation as a letter-hack to the flying-saucer publications. One of his favorite authors was Doctor Everett Scarborough. While he didn’t agree with Scarborough that all UFO reports were hokum, he savored the way the man skewered the wild and wacky fringe weirdos that UFO study attracted. When they had heard that Scarborough was speaking on the campus of the University of Maryland as the beginning of a national tour to publicize his new book, Above Us Only Sky, they had decided to go. They had seen him twice before, once at the Prince George’s Community College, and once at the Sheraton Park in Washington D.C. at the MUFON National Convention. They both agreed that Scarborough was a fascinating speaker, and besides, he gave a damn good show.
This “man in black” by whom they had sat had one other feature they’d noticed and recalled easily. “Pop-eyes,” Alfred Hopper told the police later. “You know ... bug-eyes? Like, what’s the term? Oh, yeah. Hyperthyroid. You know, you’ve seen them, it’s like their brains are too big and pushing at the backs of the eyeballs.” Otherwise, he was nondescript enough, with a limp, long hair, dark eyes. Late thirties, maybe early forties.
“Sat through the whole show, quiet as you please, still, listening to Dr. Scarborough’s talk, watching the slides, listening to the music, maybe stirring a bit when Scarborough did his demonstrations. Wasn’t until the end, with the question-and-answer period, when Scarborough was talkin’ ‘bout the Zeta Reticuli Connection—that was when he started gettin’ twitchy. And when that guy came up on the stage and started arguing with Scarborough, that, of course, was when he pulled out the gun.”
Dr. Everett Scarborough stood at the podium, letting the applause wash over him, savoring the fruits of a most successful lecture and demonstration. God, he loved this! When he started doing the speaking engagements, fifteen years before, after the publication of his very first book criticizing the UFO phenomenon, he’d reluctantly accepted that first lecture offer before a library reading group, only to wet his feet. He’d been nervous then—and, in fact, a touch of stage fright always occupied those first minutes before a lecture—but as soon as he’d launched into his song-and-dance, as he called it, unsuspected wings of oratory had unfurled and he had flown off into a most successful side-career.
“Thank you, thank you,” he said into the microphone, the words booming out over the auditorium like the pronouncements of some demigod over his minions. “But the best is yet to come. I understand we have some saucer clubs in our midst. The Believers are amidst us!” He smiled out over the audience, a taunting cast to his head. “Surely you Ooo Foo freaks aren’t going to take my words of wisdom, logic, intelligence, and truth without lobbing some pseudoscientific offal and ill-reasoned opinions into the pure and unsullied waters of this evening’s discussion! “
His biting delivery and self-mocking diction sent a wave of laughter through the audience—but it also performed its other function splendidly. It ticked off the fuming UFOols royally. Doubtless stunned by the sheer intensity and weight of his talk that evening, they would be speechless for a time. It took a nice slap across the chops, a challenge, to make them rise to the bait.
A young man wearing thick eyeglasses stood up from near the front, waving his hand for attention.
“Yes! The first question of the evening. In case you all haven’t noticed, I’m just full of answers!”
Light laughter. The audience was in the palm of his hand. They had loved the innovations in tonight’s show— the lasers, the magic exhibition, the new jokes, and the specially commissioned music. His hunch was paying off. Broaden the entertainment value of his lectures, and he’d broaden his audience. More people would hear his arguments, and he’d make more money speaking—to say nothing of selling lots of books in the lobby after the show.
“Dr. Scarborough, on the Carson show last week, and even tonight, you’ve been addressing the recent phenomenon exclusively, particularly the sort of UFO contact experienced by such people as Whitley Strieber and Maximillian Schroeder—namely abduction. But you’ve not addressed the fact that throughout history and especially since 1947, mankind has experienced a rash of UFO experiences of various kinds. Something is going on, Dr. Scarborough, and I really can’t buy your slick and glib explanations.”
“Something is going on, all right,” Scarborough said, pausing to time his punch line properly. “People are just high-teching broomsticks and black cats!” Chuckles. “I’m serious! Some brains in this vast sea of humanity are still bobbing and drooling in the Dark Ages. Aren’t you listening to me, numb nodes?” He raised his hands as though to direct a symphony orchestra, keying his already established refrain of the evening. He started to recite, and half the audience—his faithful, and those he’d just won over—echoed along with him: “People believe because they want to believe.” He pulled the mike from its holder and walked forward to the edge of the stage, smiling at the young man, who was already withering with embarrassment.
“Were you out buying popcorn when I went over this...? When I did those magic tricks the Amazing Randi taught me, and then showed you how they were done, were you out visiting the little boy’s room? Let me summarize just for you ... the power of suggestion. I say to you now: Hey, wouldn’t an ice cream sundae taste good after the show? Maybe vanilla with some hot fudge and thick rich whipped cream! And don’t forget some crunchy nuts and a tart maraschino cherry. I guarantee you that a healthy percentage are going to forget I made that suggestion to you, walk out of here, drive past a Baskin-Robbins and be damn tempted to wheel in for a treat. And I’m no hypnotist, and I’m no dairy flack either ... I’m just pointing out the hidden currents that can run in our minds. The human mind is a lot more than just the thoughts you have. It can play some damn odd tricks on you, and it’s the thing that’s attached to your eyes, your ears, your whole sensory apparatus! For instance, ever just lay on your back and stare up at cloud formations? Hmm? Sure, everybody has. Some people see ghostly galleons of white and grey coasting through the sea of a sky. But if you’re a horny young male—or even a distinguished older man with a taste for feminine company like yours truly—you tend to see naked female bodies!”
He let the laughter play itself out, and die to silence as he dramatically stared out at the audience.
“I admit I’ve been talking a lot about one aspect of the UFO phenomena tonight. But as a surgeon of logic and truth, it’s my duty to cut out the biggest cancers of contemporary thought first. In case you haven’t noticed, sir, abduction is the hot ticket these days in the UFO sweepstakes!”
“Hey, pal! You’re not hurting in this business!” a heckler called out in the audience.
Scarborough shrugged. “I guess you’re right. But still, when I heard about a one million dollar advance for Communion and two million for Max Schroeder’s Star Son—well, I walked out into my backyard, and held my arms up to the starry sky and cried out, ‘Please ETs. Take me!’ “
The audience loved that one. They roared. Nothing like money jokes to get a U.S. group going.
Everett Scarborough smiled upon his congregation benevolently.
He was a tall man, (six foot two) with dark hair and beautiful dark eyes which he’d gotten from his Italian mother. His chiseled good looks though, were from his father, a descendant of English settlers in Massachusetts. Some people said he looked like a British Roy Scheider, but Scarborough preferred to think of himself as an Italian Cary Grant. Regular bouts with free weights kept his stomach trim and his shoulders and chest big. He cut a striking figure tonight in his London tailored three-piece suit. The jacket was long gone, and the vest was unbuttoned, now. It was said that at some points in his fiery oratory Everett Scarborough resembled nothing less than a superb preacher of the Gospel. Only in this case, the god proclaimed was Isaac Newton, and Scientific American the bible that was thumped.
“Seriously,” he said, the picture of solemn sincerity. “I address all aspects of the UFO phenomena in my books, and I want to thank you, sir, for pointing out the heavy contemporary obsession of this evening.
“Nonetheless we stand now at a point in history where we can look back and easily see just how relevant my comments this evening on suggestion are!
“Let me give you two quick examples,” he said, pacing the stage, to keep more movement in the act, a trick he learned from watching Jimmy Swaggart before that evangelist self-destructed in his own sexual juices.
“In my book, History of a Delusion, I cover not only modern sightings, but ancient evidence of Unidentified Flying Objects as well. Now, we all know that the Wright brothers made the first engine-driven vehicular flight in 1901 at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina; a feat which had been called an impossibility less than a quarter-century before. But did you know that there was a rash of UFO sightings in 1897 and 1898? Now, a lot of opportunistic writers on the phenomena jump on this fact, much as they jump on all those biblical quotations about wheels of fire and such. But let’s take these sightings in context.
“First of all, they dealt with flying machines not at all saucer-shaped. In fact, they allegedly looked more like boats of the air. The favorite story was about anchors dropping from the sky and men in Victorian outfits climbing down from vessels straight from Jules Verne novels. No little men in shiny suits, no bald heads and slanted eyes, and certainly no free proctology examinations! ‘ ,
They laughed at that one too, and Scarborough permitted himself a smile. He realized that his underarms were soaked in sweat.
“But we can’t take these experiences—mostly American, by the way—in a vacuum. In fact, flying machines were starting to become a possibility. They were the stuff of dime novels, and while science fiction was in its infancy at the time, plenty of writers imitated Verne, and the young H.G. Wells was just beginning to write his famous scientific romances. A lot of international tension existed—doubtless the denizens of these wood-and-bolt UFOs had German accents.
“But consider—the average American’s subconscious mind was just absorbing these fantastic scientific endeavors. There must have been a great deal of psycho-projection at the time. Now, as we all know, it’s a scientifically proven fact that the sky and the world, to say nothing of the universe, are simply full of weird phenomena. In fact, as I always say at these occasions and as I’ll say again, if people were merely looking for odd facts, they’d be quite content with the continued study of natural science, to say nothing of the other realms of scientific pursuit. And if you really want to get bizarre, just get involved with what’s going on in quantum mechanics. Indeed, in my opinion, a few of my colleagues are far weirder than your average alien contactee who’s had tea with the king of the Rings of Saturn—and they’re dealing with scientific fact! But as Alexander Pope said, the proper study of mankind is man. People are interested in other people. This is why, when people observe the many possible natural phenomena of the skies, they superimpose subconscious information onto the occasion.”
Scarborough sketched and elaborated for a while, detailing the history of UFOs, threading in his theme of suggestion. When he finished, he made a joke about saucer clubs, which earned a rousing round of laughter.
“Look,” said Scarborough, winding things down. “I have had a lot of fun with the people called UFOols, granted. I must be pretty fascinated with the whole subject to study it so much, right? I guess I don’t have much room to talk. We’ve all got to explore this mysterious world we inhabit and I applaud everyone who does. Curiosity is a wonderful thing. But I guess if I have a single message that I’m trying to drive into the international consciousness, it’s that we have developed an absolutely wonderful and useful tool with which we can study the unknown. It’s called the scientific method and it’s derived from logic. This is the yardstick we can use to measure what we know. It’s the sword that can separate knowledge from ignorance. And if I can communicate the value of this incredible tool to the masses by applying it fiercely and unmercifully to the modern mythology of flying-saucer hokum, then I can feel that this life has been worthwhile.”
Thunderous applause met those words. People actually stood up, clapping wildly. Not more than a handful, but it was enough. Scarborough stood, accepting the accolade, wearing a serious and somber expression.
“Thank you. Thank you very much. But as time is running out, let’s have another question, at the most two. And then you can all rush out to the lobby where pre-signed copies of my new book, Above Us Only Sky, await your purchase.”
He returned to the podium, poured a glass of ice water. Ice cubes tinkled, and he could hear the murmur of the crowd. He took a long cool drink, then took the linen handkerchief from a shelf below the podium and wiped the perspiration off his brow. One of these days, he thought, they’re going to invent stage lighting that doesn’t turn a suit into a steam bath. Still, he wondered if he cared to give up the effect that simple sweat contributed to a performance. It was like a soggy underline of passion—a much needed complement to a message that was, after all, meant to be cold and clear reason.
Scarborough was reminded of the story that James Randi told him about the revival-tent preacher who would paint a cross on his forehead with a special type of invisible paint. When the preacher got to sweating hard toward the end of his sermon, the cross would begin to glow a fiery red, and the congregation would proclaim a miracle of God.
No such tricks tonight. Oh, certainly, tricks and subtleties of persuasion and argument and rhetoric—but all in good cause. Science. Logic. Even that good old American staple simple common sense.
Putting the half-empty glass down, he looked back at the audience. Several arms were raised, but he was immediately attracted to the hand raised by a young female student in jeans, standing out in the aisle toward the front. She reminded him of his daughter, Diane, and so on a whim he called on her, remembering that spring break was just around the corner and Diane would be visiting soon.
“Yes! The lovely young woman in the front! You look like an intelligent person. You have a question?”
“Yes, I do!” she said adamantly. “You know, Dr. Scarborough, you’re a most entertaining speaker, and you’re a very intelligent and learned man, and I’ve enjoyed myself very much tonight. In fact, I understand you’re single—“
“Please ... I like to keep these speaking engagements purely business. I am very flattered, miss, but—“
“Actually,” she said, her voice loud enough for most of the hall to hear, “I was thinking of introducing you to my widowed mother!”
Scarborough affected a Jack Benny “Well!” stance, staring out at the audience with contrived exasperation. They erupted into laughter. Excellent! Everett Scarborough had learned to use all kinds of humor to his advantage, and gentle self-mockery without loss of dignity was absolutely classic. The laughter lasted hard and long. He’d learned very quickly that the public figure that could not make fun of himself was soon called “arrogant” and “obnoxious.” Everett Scarborough knew that he certainly had his moments of both qualities—but thanks to Phyllis, he’d at least learned not to take himself too seriously. His scientific opinions, of course, were sterling—but being human, he knew he had a few foibles.
When the laughter had died down a bit, he said, “My dear, I’m sure your mother is as beautiful as you, and I’d love to meet her, as long as she has a book for me to sign. Now, if we can return to the less serious business at hand—flying saucers!”
“Sorry. But really, Doctor, has it ever occurred to you that you believe what you want to believe too?”
“It’s not a matter of belief, my dear, nor faith. I use a system constructed specifically to deal with empirical facts.”
“Okay, you won’t accept that ... Let me ask you another one. You’ve been talking a lot about the recent abduction experiences. I was watching a film on the late show the other night. It had James Earl Jones in it and it was about a couple who were abducted in 1961!”
“Yes. That would be The UFO Encounter ... A TV movie from the seventies, I think.”
“Right. But even the movie was made before all this business ... And Dr. Scarborough, the things that happened to the Hills ... They were a lot like what’s been described in the past few years! Maybe this has been going on for a long time, and it’s just coming to light!”
Scarborough stroked his square, clean-shaven chin for a moment. “I’m glad you brought that case up. Don’t think that I’m not familiar with it. The book to read on the subject is John Fuller’s Interrupted Journey. And I address the matter from chapter five through chapter ten in my second book, Unidentified Flying Oddballs. It just focuses further on my previous theory of suggestion, actually.
“But for those who aren’t familiar with the case, let me summarize it briefly.”
He turned to face the audience fully.
“Betty and Barney Hill were returning from a vacation in Canada to their home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. They observed a UFO. For some reason, Barney Hill pulled into a side road. The next thing they knew, it was several hours later.
“They tried to continue in their normal lives, but were deeply troubled by that night, both of them, and they sought professional counseling. When the matter of the observed Unidentified Flying Object was brought into the forefront, Dr. Benjamin Simon, a specialist in hypnotherapy who enabled his patients to relive forgotten experiences, was brought in. Dr. Simon hypnotized the Hills and this was the story that they relived—with a great deal of angst and melodrama, actually.”
Scarborough paused for effect. The great thing about discussing saucer tales was that even though they were generally the sheerest gobbledygook, they made for great storytelling. Most of the audience had been persuaded tonight that UFOs were the stuff of fairy tales—but still, he could see their eyes trained on him in fascination, leaning forward slightly in their chairs, listening to the suspenseful tale unfold.
“According to the Hills, a group of humanoid creatures about four feet tall intercepted them, and used some kind of hypnotic method to make them get out of their car and accompany them to their vehicle—a landed saucer-shaped vehicle, of course—deeper in the woods. Inside the saucer, the Hills were subjected to a number of tests. Skin was taken from Mrs. Hill’s arm. Mr. Hill claimed that a semen sample was taken from him. At first, the Hills were quite frightened, but then they began talking to the visitors and calmed down somewhat. Then they were released and returned to their car, and told they would not remember the experience.
“Now, this is the first documented case of creatures doing biopsies and taking sperm and perhaps egg samples, and we don’t get a great deal of that through the late sixties and early seventies. But notice—immediately after that film was shown on nationwide television to millions of people, these cases of alien physical tamperings after abductions began to be reported. You know, that makes me wonder if I shouldn’t do a private study of just how many of the people who report this kind of experience saw that TV film.
“Of course, we can’t just blame that particular film. For thirty years you haven’t been able to get through a grocery line without being regaled with tales of alien sexual encounters and kidnappings. Maybe that Julie Brown song ‘Earth Girls are Easy’ is a galactic hit!”
The audience laughed. But then a man walked down the aisle, holding a book in one hand. He stood patiently near the stage until the noise died down, and then cried out, “You edit your stories for your own purposes, Scarborough.”
Scarborough recognized the man and cringed a bit. The fellow had accosted him earlier. He was a plump man with short hair, and thick, horn-rimmed glasses through which myopic eyes glared like those of an angry turtle. He had a Roman nose, and classic nerd-garb, all the way from untied shoes to white short-sleeve shirt and a plastic pocket-protector crammed with pens. This was a man far past the UFOol stage—he was what Scarborough termed an Unidentified Flying Oddball. He couldn’t remember his name, but he knew that the man held some position with the local office of MUFON, the flying-saucer investigation organization.
“Oh dear. What did I leave out?” said Scarborough, giving a martyred expression to the audience.
“The most important part of the Hill abduction case. How can you have forgotten! The Zeta Reticuli connection!”
“Oh my goodness,” said Scarborough, “The Zeta Reticuli connection! How could it have slipped my mind?”
Someone from far back in the audience cried out, “What the hell is a Zit Ridicule connection?”
“I’ll tell you what it is!” said the man, holding a book above his head. “It’s one of the most important proofs that exist that we are being visited by creatures in ships from some other planet! If you’ll just let me use your overhead projector, Dr. Scarborough, I’ll be glad to prove my point.”
Scarborough shrugged. “By all means, Mr. . ... “
“Tamowitz, Jacob Tamowitz, vice president of the local MUFON group.” He started up the steps to the stage while Scarborough used the mike to make sure that the audience didn’t think his knowledge of UFOs was less than encyclopedic.
“According to Betty Hill, when she asked the creatures where they were from, they showed her a three-dimensional map depicting a constellation of stars. Some of these stars were connected by thick lines that the aliens claimed were ‘star routes’ between the stars. When this fact came out during hypnosis, Dr. Simon asked if Mrs. Hill could reconstruct that map. She did. It wasn’t until several years later, after the publication of Fuller’s book on the Hills’ experience that anything came of it—and I believe Mr. Tamowitz here wants me to show you a picture of that map.”
Indeed, Mr. Tamowitz did. He was standing by Scarborough, glaring balefully, his face an indelicate shade of red, clutching the book, opened, to his chest. He was so close that Scarborough could smell a cloying mixture of Right Guard and Brut emanating from the angry saucer-freak.
Scarborough took the book and placed it atop the lens of the overhead projector, then switched the machine on. The star charts appeared on the screen: a collection of dots, dotted lines, and solid lines in various configurations, labeled at the bottom respectively, “Betty Hill’s Original Sketch,” “The Fish Interpretation,” and “The Atterberg Interpretation.”
Tamowitz grabbed the mike and proceeded to talk, explaining.
“It’s funny how you twist the facts to your own means by simply leaving out certain key information, Scarborough. The Betty Hill Star Chart is perhaps the most important fact about the Hill abduction. It not only confirms the validity of the Hills’ story—it also proves that the visitors from these flying saucers are from other planets in our universe.”
Scarborough threw up his hands, mugging to the audience. No problem, he thought. Things were still well under control. He signaled to the wings, and one of the student assistants posted to him ran out with a wireless microphone, ready and waiting for just such an eventuality as this. “Proves?” he said. “This is a new one on me! Would you elucidate, please, Mr. Tamowitz?”
“I’d be happy to! In 1968, after seeing Mrs. Hill’s chart, Mrs. Marjorie Fish—a member of MENSA—took the map and compared it to Dorrit Hoffliet’s Catalog of Bright Stars. She recognized this as the first possibility of astronomical evidence of alien visitors. She built a three-dimensional scale model of the Hill chart. After six months of searching and aligning, she discovered stars in the exact same positions! This work was continued when a new book was published, The Catalog of Nearby Stars by Wilhelm Gleiss. Mrs. Fish continued her work, built more models, and discovered that the view presented by the Hill map was from a few light years past the stars Zeta 1 and Zeta Reticuli, looking back toward our sun. The star 82 Eridani is also included. But the really startling aspect is that this pattern exists! Astronomers agree that these systems contain planets that could hold living beings, Dr. Scarborough! Mrs. Hill must have been shown an actual map! What do you say to that?”
“Well, I’d say that since there are billions and billions,” he smiled at the applause for the Carl Sagan catchphrase, “of stars out there within range of our telescopes, chances are pretty good that there’d be a pattern similar to the one Mrs. Hill drew.
“This, Mr. Tamowitz, is hardly what I would term scientific evidence. It’s more like connect-the-dots for MENSA members.”
That infuriated the man. “I’ll have you know that I am a member of MENSA, and it is a valuable and distinguished organization for people with far above-average intelligence.”
“I’ve got nothing against intelligence at all! I just wish people would use it on more constructive projects than looking for extraterrestrials where there aren’t any!”
“I’m not finished,” Tamowitz said, jabbing at the illustration with a forefinger, shaking the screen. “After Mrs. Fish published her account at a Mutual UFO network convention and it was subsequently printed in Astronomy Magazine, an aeronautical engineer and amateur astronomer named Charles Atterberg—‘ ,
Scarborough wondered why Tamowitz was bringing up Atterberg, who claimed that there was another possible area of stars that could have been charted in the Hill map. It played right into the points he had made about superimposing patterns and meaning over random facts. What was that called? He’d have to use that word in his rebuttal, if he could remember it.
But he never got the chance.
Because that was when the shots broke out.
The first shot sounded like nothing more than a backfiring truck from the parking lot. The shot echoed around in the faulty acoustics of the auditorium.
Before the echoes, though, the top of podium exploded into splinters.
In 1987, a comedian named Dick Shawn died onstage in the middle of his act, of a heart attack. He lay prostrate in front of hundreds of people who waited patiently for him to get up and continue his routine; his style of performance was such that people thought falling down and looking dead was part of the act.
The audience at Everett Scarborough’s lecture at the Tawes Auditorium on the University of Maryland took only a few seconds to realize that shots and an exploding podium were not part of the show—but since the demonstrations had included some startling magic tricks, it was understandable that for a while they were quite confused and did nothing, watching the events unfold in stunned silence. Dr. Everett Scarborough, however, certainly knew that exploding podiums were not a part of the act. Split seconds after the gunfire and the sting of the wood pieces against his cheek, he was down on the floor, less of a target.
The second bullet sang over Scarborough’s head as he crawled away for cover, smashing into the overhead projector, sending a shatter of glass across the floor. “Get down!” he cried to the paralyzed Tamowitz, who stood transfixed in the same position, like a startled deer caught in auto headlights.
“What—?” the man managed before the third bullet caught him full in the chest, knocking him down and sending a splash of blood onto the white screen behind him.
By the second shot, the Hoppers knew that it was the man dressed in all-black clothing who was doing the shooting. They had been so immersed in the proceedings on that stage, though, that they had not noticed the man getting up and going to the intersection of the balcony railing and the right auditorium wall. He stood there now, just squeezing off the third shot from his long-nosed .44, his longish, limp hair parted in the middle and hanging down the sides of his face. He held the gun with both hands. There was no expression on his face at all.
“Hey!” Alfred Hopper cried, getting up.
Gertie Hopper screamed and clutched at her husband frantically, pulling him back in the seat, not wanting to be the widow of a dead hero.
At the sight of the MUFON official’s blood on the screen, several other people in the audience screamed, others cried out, pointing up toward the direction of the shots.
Everett Scarborough struggled to control the panic that gripped him. His instinct told him to just get up and run, but he’d had enough time to judge the angle of the bullets, and knew that the assassin had him pinned. All he could do was crawl to the base of the podium, which provided some cover. As he reached it, he realized that he was trailing blood. He lifted a hand to his face, and his palm came away scarlet. The splinters had gouged into his face. Nearby, was the shuddering body of the man with the star charts, lying on his face. A pool of blood was slowly collecting to his left side, then rivulating down the proscenium. “Turn out the lights!” Scarborough heard himself yelling. With the lights on, he still presented a target.
The man in black clothing fired one more shot from his automatic—the bullet thunking into the wood floor just to the left of the podium—and then vaulted the balcony railing like a practiced acrobat. His raincoat belled out like the cape of Zorro as he fell, and he landed on his feet in the red-carpeted aisle fifteen feet below.
More people screamed.
“Stop him!” a man cried.
“Are you crazy? He’s got a gun!” another answered.
If he’d hoped to have a better shot from the ground floor, then he’d made the wrong move. But the man simply took one look at the stage, waved his gun threateningly at horrified nearby onlookers, and then slammed his body hard to the right, hitting the latch of a fire-exit door. There was the breath of night, the sound of cars passing by outside, and the faint flap of raincoat—and then the man in black was swallowed up by the lamp-touched darkness of trees and parking lots.
The door whooshed closed behind him, slamming hard.
From his cover behind the base of the podium, Scarborough managed to glimpse the man jumping from the balcony, like some modern day John Wilkes Booth. Unfortunately, the man did not break his leg, but escaped easily.
Scarborough could feel the panic about to break through the audience. He understood group psychology all too well—if people freaked, they’d start running for the other exit sign as though someone had yelled “Fire” at them. Swallowing his own initial and reflexive fear, aware that another killer might be just waiting for him to poke his head up to take another shot, he nonetheless took the risk. He stood, found the microphone, and began to speak to the audience, trying to calm them.
“Please! People, calm down,” he said above the tumult, making himself an easy target, but counting the lives of others as more important. “Stay in your seats!” he ordered. His authoritative baritone bellowed above the crowd, and the noise died down. Heads turned his way, as though expectant of an announcement of a hoax. Instead, he turned to the side of the stage and glared. “Haven’t we got any security around here? And a doctor. We need a doctor, a man’s been shot. Call an ambulance—now!”
His commanding tone quelled the rising panic in the crowd and they stayed in place. No one rushed for the exit. There were no fights, no trampling. They all seemed to wait for what Scarborough had to say next.
“This,” he said, wiping some blood from his face, “is real, but don’t panic. The man who fired the shots is gone.”
A pair of men moved from the side of the stage and knelt down over the fallen man. Another came out and said something to Scarborough, which he kept from the audience by muffling the mike under an armpit.
Scarborough nodded at the man. Then he spoke again to the audience. “The police are already pursuing the attacker, and we’ve got a rescue squad coming. I have been asked by the people in charge that you please stay in your seats for the time being, until proper authorities arrive to tell you what to do.”
He stared down at the fallen man. One of the stage hands dragged a length of canvas out, and covered the now-dead body and the spilled blood.
Scarborough turned back to the audience. “Ladies, gentlemen—friends,” he said, his eyes glistening a bit as realization set in, his voice choking with emotion. “I’ve received death threats before, but I never thought it would come to this. I am very sorry.”
The wail of a siren sounded outside.