And I Can't Hide

by Galen Peoples

Alt. eps. 16 to 21: Angst, suspicion, superpowers, and cosmic awe in the desert. The Six have the artifact, but what is it?, some lose or gain a parent, Topolsky & Nasedo are back, Valenti & Amy are on again...and there are people out there who k n o w.

1. Parts 1 through 3

...And I Can't Hide

by Galen Peoples

Prefatory

MEMO

TOP SECRET

From: TSJ

To: JK

The rights to the characters and situations of Roswell are the property of Warner Brothers, Jason Katims Productions, Twentieth Century Fox, Fox, Regency Television, and Melinda Metz.

...but I don't have to tell you that, right? No, the reason for this memo is to alert you to a containment breach: the bird has flown the coop—or the alien flown the pod.

I allude to the first-season scripts we ditched—those the network had deemed "too soft." They wanted woowoo, so we gave 'em woowoo: that new character, wassername— Bathsheba? Eustacia?—and a mutated story arc.

Remember what I said then: Shred the scripts! Destroy all copies! You don't want the fans getting wind of them.

Well, bad news: somebody's broken that wind. We had a fan interning here (I know it's policy not to hire them, he lied), and he crept into the crypt—um, vault—found the scripts, and downloaded them. And by the time he was peached on, he was gone. Now my spies report he's turning them into fan fiction stories. Which means more of what we didn't want—

Readers of the lost arc.

Episode 1.16X

When the Going Gets Tough

"Grounded," Liz Parker wrote in her journal (which most sixteen-year-olds would have called a diary) under the date Wednesday, March 1. "Grounded on top of being grounded. Hmm, wonder what the technical term for that is." She considered. "Fresh-grounded? No, that sounds like coffee."

She felt her mind straying, and sucked on her gel pen to help herself focus her thoughts. As often, they turned to Max Evans, her boyfriend (though she hardly ever called him so: the designation seemed not to fit somehow). Her parents and his had split them up for several days by grounding them both; he had served his sentence, but hers remained in effect through the end of the week—three more days. Then they would be together for good. Or so she hoped; in the past there had been problems.

This was their second grounding in a row. The act that had occasioned it was having sneaked out while being grounded already. But it had been worth the additional punishment. On their excursion, they had found something wonderful: an artifact of another world. It was a black stone, or something like a stone, with a strange inlaid symbol, almost a spiral—two nearly contiguous arcs with a spot in the middle. At first it shone icy blue, but soon the light died out, and so far it had stayed out. They had seen the same symbol before: once on a cave wall, and once in the form of a pendant that Max's sister now had in her keeping.

Liz did not know how to record all of this in her journal. And she did not want to; the book had been stolen once, and might be stolen again. Last time the thief had been one of her friends; next time it might be—whoever was out there, watching them.

Before having met Max and since having grown old enough to choose, she had lived science: biology mainly. The worlds the microscope revealed to her fascinated her more than the one she saw unaided. The operations of those worlds seemed enigmatic until they were explained—those that had been explained. Those that had not, she planned to make her life's work. Her future was clearly mapped out.

—until the previous September. Then an unlooked-for event had added a bend to her intended course: she had died. While waitressing at the Crashdown Cafe (the family business), she had taken a bullet in the stomach; the wound had been fatal. But she was not dead now. Max Evans had given her a jump start.

Max was one of the loners in her class, a boy many girls wondered and, sometimes, daydreamed about. He had reached out to her as God reached out to Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and she had reawakened to see him gazing down at her full of worry, and more than worry. He warned her to keep quiet, doused her with ketchup to account for the bloodstains, and was then pulled away by the others who were like him (as far as anyone could be like him): Isabel, his adoptive sister, and Michael Guerin, his best friend—his only friend except Liz.

She kept quiet, almost, about her resurrection. When questioned by her parents and Sheriff Valenti, she said nothing. But when her two best friends, Maria Deluca and Alex Whitman, began pressing her, the secret began to bite at her like a flea. By then it had expanded to include the fact that Max and the others were, as he put it, "not of this Earth." And soon she told all. This relieved her of her itch, but stung her with regret for violating the trust Max had placed in her. In any case, now they were six: those who knew.

Roswell, NM was famous for aliens, but none of its other residents had ever met one—or not knowingly. A hot, dry, drowsy little city (pop. 44,975), Roswell had stirred to life of a kind one hundred thirty years earlier, popping up in the middle of the flat desert like a popcorn kernel in a frying pan. From its boundaries the desert extended vastly far in all directions, a cosmos unto itself. And from out there, or from something that lay out there, one hundred twenty years after the city's birth, the three children appeared. Six years old, their charts read, but that was a guess; no one, including themselves, knew their ages. Or their place of origin; that was for them yet to discover.

At the school they attended now, West Roswell High, where the social order was sharply defined, Max and Isabel, along with a majority of the student body, occupied the higher tiers. But the district also encompassed the trailer park where Michael lived, as well as a section of trailer-like houses on the outskirts, so that the kids from that side of the tracks rubbed shoulders with those from the other. And Earth kids, unbeknownst to them (that is, all but three), were doing the same with their extragalactic counterparts.

That Wednesday at the Crashdown, shortly before closing, the six were clustered in and around the booth nearest the rear door labeled "Employees Only." Three of them were leaning over the seat; one of these had on a chef's apron, and the others had antennae (artificial, not real), which bedecked the tiaras that accompanied their servers' uniforms. Shielded by the backs of these three, by a row of Tabasco sauce bottles, and by the shoebox housing it, the artifact Max and Liz had found was sitting on the table.

Alex had been studying it for nearly five minutes while the others watched. Finally he sat back.

"What do you make of it?" asked Max.

"Material's like nothing I ever saw before."

Isabel made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "Why would you? Have you been to our home planet? Have you been anywhere?"

Alex threw her an aggrieved look. "Hey, your set, okay?"

"Sorry. Guess I'm on edge."

"But what is it?" asked Liz. Nobody volunteered an answer. "Okay, we'll take turns. I'll start." She did not have to inspect the object further; she had examined it thoroughly while she and Max were bringing it back. "I think—it's a guide," she said finally. "When you're lost, it shows you the way." Again nobody had any comment. Liz turned to Michael, who was standing next to her. "You go next. What's your guess?"

He answered without hesitation. "A weapon."

"No, just the opposite," countered his girlfriend. "It's a—harmonizer."

"Harmonizer?" Isabel repeated. "As in music?"

Maria shook her head. "Don't know, it just came to me. Alex? What do you say it is?"

"A gold mine—if it could be mass-produced. Imagine what a great novelty item it'd make."

Isabel shook her head. "Alex, seriously."

"I am being serious."

Max, the next in line, deliberated for half a minute before giving his diagnosis. "I think it's a database. With information on where we came from and why we're here."

"Which doesn't include me, I bet," Liz said glumly.

Max reached up and squeezed her hand. "Wrong."

Last up was Isabel. "It's a generator, all right?" she said, sounding sure of herself but not happy about it.

"Like an electrical generator?" asked Alex.

"Exactly like. It can boost our powers to the nth degree. I'm surprised you don't feel it, Max." She felt more than that, but was reluctant to put her feeling into words. The artifact was more than a power booster; it was an agent of change, and it would bring about the end of the life they knew. She was not ready to face that.

"If we can only figure out how to get it working," Michael mused.

Isabel shivered. "I hope we never do."

Her brother looked at her in surprise. "Why?"

She did not answer him. But to Alex she said, "Walk me home, will you?" Though technically a question, it was more in the nature of a command.

Alex seemed not to mind, however. "My pleasure!" he exclaimed—and he slid out of his seat so fast he bumped his knee on the table.

Isabel got up rather more cautiously. "But by the back alley," she added, "so no one sees us." This dimmed Alex's glow a little, but he faithfully limped out after her regardless.

There was a shout from the front. "Yo, anybody on duty in this joint?"

The servers rotated their antennae in that direction. "I'll take it," offered Maria. And with her departure, the group broke up.

Max removed the artifact from its box and slipped it into a pocket of his jacket. "You're keeping it?" said Michael.

Max had not expected a challenge on that front. "I was the one who found it."

"You and Liz," Michael reminded him.

"I can ask her. If it's an issue."

"No, no." Michael threw up his hands. "Whatever you say, Maximilian."

Max sighed. "Why do you do that?"

Michael stopped on his way toward the kitchen. "Do what?"

"The file extensions. Maximilian. Maxwell. The name's Max. Plain and simple Max."

"Didn't know it bothered you." He disappeared through the staff door.

"Of course he does," Max muttered, "otherwise he wouldn't do it. Make it sound like I'm letting on to be more than I am. Like I think I'm better than he is. Oh, he knows what he's doing, all right. You can bank on it."

Liz, who was the only one left to listen, nodded slowly. "And the mature way to confront the problem is to work yourself into a state over it." This fetched a grudging smile, which she answered with a willing one. Then she reverted to the former topic of conversation. "So what are you going to do with that thing?"

Max picked up the empty shoebox and turned it over and over, as if searching for instructions. "Isn't that what we were all in disagreement about?"

"Not all—" Suddenly her eyes grew big. "Oh, my God!" She felt like yelling, but managed to keep her voice down to a whisper. Inside his jacket pocket, and filtering out through the cotton shell, a blue light shone. "Max, look!"

"What?"

He looked but saw nothing. It had disappeared even before Liz had finished speaking. "Must be seeing things," she murmured. But she knew she was not prone to that.

Looking up, she saw something else, which was certainly not imaginary: her father had just entered by the main doors. She fleetingly wondered whether this was connected to the phenomenon she had just observed (if she had observed it), but the thought was wiped out by her more pressing concern; Jeff was glaring back at the two of them, and Liz knew why.

"I'm not supposed to be talking to you," she whispered to Max. This had been a condition of her grounding. She grabbed a rag from the sideboard and applied it to an imaginary spill on the table. Max slumped down in his seat and retracted his head into his jacket, turtle-like.

But the camouflage came too late; Jeff had seen them. "Have you been hanging out with this boy the whole time I was gone?" he asked as he walked up.

"He's a customer too," his daughter said innocently.

"And the kid who got you grounded—which you still are, in case you've forgotten."

"Not likely," came the muttered reply.

Jeff ignored it. "Time to start closing up," he said. A second later he disappeared and the staff door swung to behind him. Liz knew from experience that he did not mean for her to evacuate the place immediately but to begin the preparations for locking up, which would take her almost until 8.

Michael and Maria had been auditing the conversation from opposite sides of the order window. "Glad he's not my dad," Maria whispered.

"Me too," said Michael, but he sounded a little wistful, as Maria had also. He returned to scraping the grill. "'course, your mom is practically your dad," he added.

"Hey, you think that was her choice?"

"Easy! Her and me are buddies now, remember?"

Crossing in back of Max as she shuttled a tray of glasses from one sideboard to the other, Liz bent near to his ear. "Don't look now," she murmured, "but you're being watched."

She flicked her eyes toward a customer at a table on the other side of the room. Glancing over, Max recognized a former regular from his own place of employment, the UFO Center, who had made trouble for the two of them in the past, and now looked as if he might be working himself up to do it again. He was staring fixedly at Max through thick glasses beneath a mop of unruly hair. "Thought that guy left town," said Max.

"He's back now."

"We better start hanging out at the park." Max had been of that mind for some time anyway.

"Why there?"

"Not as public."

Liz began to laugh, and then saw by his face that he was not joking. Very solemn he could be, when he was not being airy. But then so could she; they were a good match that way.

He was still on her mind later as she made her journal entry, into which a little of the evening's conversation found its way. She bethought her also of her best friend, not grounded, and free to hang out with her boyfriend; she was no doubt at his place at that very moment. Liz sighed in envy.

But tonight Maria wished she had not come. She was sitting in a corner deprived of tv or radio while Michael concentrated on the map in front of him. The gooseneck lamp beside it on the coffee table cast the only light in the apartment. Dim as this was, she could make out the yellow gemstones which formed roughly a V on top of the map. They were artifacts also, from the same place as the first—a place far beyond Roswell; Michael had set them over the larger map symbols as aids to concentration. The rows of smaller symbols between, Maria could not see from her chair, but she remembered that they looked like words from an alien alphabet, probably describing the sites under the stones.

There were five stones, five sites, and five symbols for the sites: a spot enclosed in parentheses, a set of concentric circles and half circles that might describe a solar system, a pair of diagonal lines with extensions like whipcords, a row of boxes (almost) with a spot inside each, and the same spiral Maria and the others had seen on the artifact. In addition, there was a sixth symbol outside the V: a pair of crisscrossing lines with a box at each end and a half circle in each box.

The map was an accurate replica of the one they had seen in the cave on the Mesaliko reservation southwest of town. They had been led there by an old Apache called River Dog; he it was who had given them the stones. But it was Michael who had discovered recesses in the wall, and known to fit the stones into them so that they radiated a luminescent glow by which the symbols had been revealed plainly. He had seen in a vision that they represented not only one set of locations but two, in the identical configuration: one in the sky, the other on the earth, in and around Roswell—but where were those earthly sites? He had borrowed Max's replica map to study in hopes of figuring it out.

"This is tougher than I thought," he said, half glancing at his guest. "Maybe that thing Liz and Max found can help translate." That was one reason he had hoped to be its keeper, instead of Max. He pointed to the spot in parentheses. "This symbol's definitely the library. Thought I knew what the others were too, but once I started looking, come to find I didn't. Like when you've had a dream and you think you remember it, but when you try to tell somebody, it's gone."

And maybe sometimes you should let it go, Maria thought. But she would not say so, would not burst his bubble. She walked up behind him and rested her hands on his shoulders. "They must have something in common, something unique, don't you think? Why else would they have been singled out?"

Michael had no insight to offer. The identification of the library had come to him unbidden, as had most of the facts he had acquired in his life, but when he tried to extrapolate others, as he had been trying for the past hour, the effort hurt his head and he soon gave it up. "Wonder if one of them's the trailer park?" he mused. If the map was limited to Roswell and the top equated to north, he figured the park would be situated near the spiral.

Maria felt all at sea, not for the first time (or the last) in their discussions. "Why would it be?"

Michael smiled wryly; it had been a private joke. All his jokes were private ones, but Maria could usually recognize them, if not understand them. "You're right," he said. "That's one place that wasn't written in the stars." This signaled the end of his mental exertions for the evening. He reached for her hand and pulled her down toward him until she was close enough to kiss, though her lips were upside-down to his, and for the next hour, her small silken surrenders pushed away his memories of the place where he had grown up.

After she had left they returned, as they always did. He sat awake in the corner armchair remembering his ten years of captivity in the dingy white trailer with the short thick-set man who had brought and held him there. He had hated it as much as it was possible to hate any place. And still he yearned to see it again.

"Old Chisholm Trail Trailer Park," read the sign. The posts supporting it were half rotted; Michael was always surprised to find them still standing. In the early morning haze the dust lay where it had settled the night before. A rooster crowed; a dog barked; there were no signs of higher life. The "home" that had been Hank's was obviously unoccupied: no vehicles were parked out front. But it was wearing a shiny new coat of yellow paint.

Michael tried the door and found it unlocked. The inside smelled of disinfectant. He had advanced as far as the hall when he heard the screen door creak open behind him. "Who's in there?" a voice growled; one human was stirring, at least.

Michael turned to see a broad, mustached face he had known since childhood. "Easy, Borry. It's just me."

"Mike?"

"Who else?"

Boris Nazarian stepped inside. He had the reserved and suspicious air of a private security guard—which he had been before he bought the park to see him through his retirement. "What you doin' here, Mike? Your old man's long gone."

"Had to visit the old homestead one last time. You know how that is."

"No, not really. Not the way Hank treated you. I shoulda reported him to the sheriff, but you—"

"Wouldn't have changed anything, would it? Except make him madder—and I woulda caught most of the mad."

"You were bigger than him. He was more scared of you than the other way around. Why didn't you haul off and let him have it?"

"Only one place that road leads. And that's a place I don't ever want to see again."

"Again?"

Michael let the question slide. "Things turned out okay, once I escaped from here." He added, after a pause, "No offense meant."

"Then why are you back? Why would anybody come back?"

Michael stared toward the sanitized living room and saw past it to what it had looked like in his day. "If I tell you, you'll think I'm crazy."

"Will I?" Boris leaned against the wood paneling, causing it to creak alarmingly. "Never told you this, Mike. I had an old man whaled on me too. Hadda join the Navy to get away from him—and get me some cojones. After I was through training, I called him and told him when I come home I was gonna beat the bejesus out of him. Not on my first leave, or my second. I wanted to make the bastard sweat. But come my third..." He sighed. "I come home like I promised."

"And then you pounded on him?"

"I was gonna. But you know what? He said, go ahead, it'd be a mercy. He was dyin'. Son of a bitch. I couldn't whale on a guy who's dyin'." He shook his head. "I was there at the end, and I felt for him, you know, the way you would for anybody. But I couldn't forgive him. Never will. But—"

"You still miss him?"

Boris took this as a challenge. "Yeah, what of it?"

"It's crazy! A guy who abused you, and kept on abusing you. Why would you miss him? Why?"

Boris knew Michael was not only talking about him. "'cause they was all we had, Mike. Back when we needed somebody. And you wanna know the punchline? Now we ain't even got them." He stepped up to his former tenant and laid a hand on his shoulder. "You don't wanna be here, Mike. There's nothin' for you here." But Michael had known that before coming.

He did not speak on the way to school the next morning. But he was not silent either. He was bumming a ride in the Evans Jeep as usual; today Max was driving. In back, Isabel was giving thanks for the seat backs that divided her from Michael and damped the sound of his voice as he sang along with the radio:

"Teen-a-gers from out-er space

Well, we're just teen-a-gers from out-er space

I say, teen-a-gers from out-er space

With this place

On our case..."

"Must you do that?" he heard from the back seat. Max switched the radio off without touching the knob. "At last," said his sister, over Michael's protest. "Peace in our time."

Max turned to Michael. "I need to ask you something anyway." He reached into his jacket.

"Hope that's nothing illegal you're carrying." Michael nodded over to their left, where a beige Range Rover with an official insignia on the door was cruising alongside them at the same speed. Max took his hand away from his jacket. The driver gave him a nod, which he returned nervously. Damn that Valenti, he thought.

After two blocks, the sheriff turned off, but by that time they had reached the school. "I'll have to ask you later," said Max.

Their human allies had arrived a few minutes earlier and were waiting at their usual gathering spot by the big school sign at the top of the steps. "Oh, my God," said Maria, and then quickly covered her mouth.

"What?" said Liz, looking in the direction of the couple that had just passed by.

Her friend moved to block her view. "Nothing! Less than nothing. A sub-factoid in the sub-nothing universe." But Liz had already seen: the sheriff's son had been arm in arm with a girl who was not one of Liz's favorites, and had cast her in passing what might have been interpreted as a smirk. "Sorry," said Maria.

"You mean Kyle's being with Pam Troy? Yeah, I'd heard that." She continued staring after them. "But this is the first time I've actually seen them."

"You are over him, correct? I mean, you are with Max now."

"Maria, there was nothing to be over! It's just—I don't understand what he sees in her, that's all. I mean, even Kyle has standards."

"Well," Alex offered hesitantly, "you have to admit she's very—" The two girls flashed him identical cold looks. "Okay," he conceded. "After all, what do I know? I'm just a sophomore."

"Junior," Liz corrected him. "This is our junior year."

"I do that a lot, don't I?"

"All last year," said Maria. "You kept telling people we were still freshmen. Very diminishing." Her voice faded with the last words, and Alex saw she was no longer looking at him. Michael and the Evanses had appeared at the foot of the steps.

"Who's that watching us?" asked Isabel.

The two boys followed her eye to a window of the gym building. "Coach Clay," Michael replied, waving to the figure standing there. Clay—if it was he—turned away without acknowledging him.

"Warm guy," Max observed.

"He's a coach. He's supposed to be tough."

"Friday he gave me ten laps. For nothing!"

"Uh-huh. What was nothing?"

"Talking during roll call."

"It's against the rules. You knew that when you did it."

"When did you suddenly become his champion, Michael? He hasn't spared you, that I recall."

"That's his job. Making us into men."

"Which, given your biological profiles—" Isabel began.

"If you're too much of a wuss to take it—" Michael continued.

"Who's a wuss?"

He gave Michael a shove, and Michael was prepared to return the favor with interest when Isabel stepped between them. "Boys, boys! None of that in my saloon."

The quarrel had gone farther than Michael had intended; now he took a step back, both figuratively and literally. "I'm just saying you got no call to dump on him," he offered. "That's all I'm saying."

Max had a sudden insight, or what he believed to be one. "Michael, he's not your dad." Michael flashed him a glare, confirming his guess.

Then they reached the big sign and the three waiting by it. Below the school's name, writ large, stood forth its motto: "Pathway to Excellence and Integrity." Michael read it but gained no encouragement thereby. He felt neither excellent nor integrated; he felt alone, even in familiar company. Maria waited for him to show her some attention but got only a grunt, and could not even be sure it had been meant for her. She watched glumly as Liz and Max locked lips. Alex was watching them too—and then glanced tentatively at Isabel, the glint of a suggestion in his eyes. Isabel caught it but pretended not to.

Michael perceived a space between the six of them and the other students walking past. He was certain he was not imagining it; the others were steering clear of them, if not on purpose, then instinctively. Michael knew he was in the wrong place, in more ways than one. So were Max and Isabel, maybe—but at least they had a "home." Maria accosted him, in a bid for a hug. "Gotta go," he said abruptly. As he left, he threw another glare at Max identical to the one before; Max had had no call to say that about his father—but no, he had been talking about Clay.

"Wait!" Max called after him.

Maria sensed that he was somehow responsible for the quick departure. "What was that all about?"

Max did not hear her; he was too wrapped up in his own immediate concern. "I wanted to talk to him," he said, a little petulantly.

"Yeah," said Maria, staring at him, "me too. See you, Liz." She headed off, hugging her books disconsolately.

"Nice going, Max," remarked his sister; not for the first time, he found himself a target of blame without quite knowing why. Then she left too. "Alex," she said; it was almost a goodbye.

Alex was used to almosts from her. "Hey, Is?" he called. "What do you say later on we—" But Isabel did not look back. He accepted this at his lot; after all, she had almost said goodbye, and he did not want to be greedy. "Another time, then. That's fine. Perfectly fine." He nodded as if to convince himself. "You know," he said to Max, "your sister—"

"Yeah, isn't she?" The reply came automatically. After a moment Max realized Alex had probably had a different sentiment in mind.

The object of Alex's affection having removed herself, he had no further reason to stay, and with his exit Max and Liz were left to themselves. "Your turn," Max said dourly. "Have at me."

"Max! Right here on the steps?" The mischievousness of her answer caught him by surprise (she was able to do that sometimes). He smiled a little.

Michael's dark mood followed him into first-period P.E., but he trusted to the coach to knock him out of it. Light fell from the arching windows onto him and the other boys as they lined up along the length of the basketball gym and Clay paced down the line, clipboard in hand. "Fenton," he called. "Franzese. Garfield. Gomez. Gottlieb. Guerin." He glanced at Michael's sweatshirt. "Not regulation, Guerin." Standard issue was blue with gold lettering.

"Sorry, I tore the—"

"No excuses!" He lifted the ballpoint that was chained to the clipboard and made a check by Michael's name. "Grey mark for today."

"But, Coach—"

"No back talk! Or you'll get a second one." And he proceeded down the line.

Michael did not mind the grey mark; he knew he had earned it and he had protested mainly out of a regard for form. But the coach had spoken to him so coldly! As if he had never shown an interest in Michael's well-being, as if he had never offered advice on how to handle his foster father... But now it seemed as if that was all in the past.

A few minutes into the period, after the boys had chosen up sides, Michael noticed one of his shoelaces dangling, and had stepped to the sidelines to repair it when Clay descended on him. "Guerin! What do you think you're doing?" The other boys postponed their play to listen.

Michael stood up to face the coach head on. "I'm tying my—"

"You're slacking! I don't allow slackers on my court." Clay lifted his ballpoint. "Another grey mark."

"I was tying my shoes!" He pointed down. "See? Left, right. Like Mister Rogers."

"You trying to be a smart-ass, Guerin?"

Michael resorted to the age-old defense of young people unjustly accused. "But I didn't do anything!"

"Yeah, you did. Know what it was? You got born—if that's the right word for it." Michael flinched; what had Clay meant by that? "You know something, Guerin? I don't like you. I never have. Don't like your mouth—don't like your attitude—don't like your face. What do you say to that?"

Michael did not know what to say. Clay always imposed strict discipline on the boys, but always impartially, impersonally. And he had never once demeaned them; Michael had believed it was not in his character. "I thought—" he began.

"You thought what?"

"Forget it." He started out onto the court.

"Don't walk away when I'm talking to you!"

Michael stopped. "Still here. So?"

Clay took a step closer. "Got no father, have you?"

"You know I don't."

Clay stepped closer still. "Boy without a father's got nobody to show him how to be a man. He'll never be anything but a girl. That's what you are, Guerin. A pretty little girl. Aren't you? Aren't you?" Michael felt like smacking him but swallowed the impulse and kept his cool. Then Clay smacked him—on the shoulder, and hard.

"Don't touch me!" Michael warned.

"What's the matter? Little Miss Guerin doesn't like big bad man touching her?" He doled out another smack.

"Do that once more and I'll—"

"You'll do what?"

"Report you," Michael finished weakly.

"Report me. Just like a girl." Clay drew his hands back. "Okay, Miss Guerin. No touchy feely." He picked up a basketball from the floor. "Report this—maggot." Spinning on his heel, he hurled the ball at Michael, hard. Michael batted it off with his forearm. Clay retrieved it and hurled it again. This time Michael caught it in both hands and flung it away, high into the bleachers.

"Stop it!" he pleaded.

"Stop it!" Clay mimicked him.

"I mean it!"

"I mean it!"

The ball had rolled back to him somehow. He took it up and began dribbling it, pacing out a circle around Michael. "The other guys know, don't they? Know you're not one of them. That's why they stare at you—why they talk about you behind your back. It's why your girlfriend won't give you squat."

He hurled the ball again, this time at Michael's head, and so fast that Michael had no time to dodge or think how to defend himself. So he did the only thing he knew to do: a foot from his face, the ball turned into a red balloon, but only for a second, before it exploded with a pop. Now a limp wad of plastic, it dropped to the floor, where it regained its original leather shell.

Only Clay had been close enough to see the transformation. But he did not seem surprised by it. "Destroying school property," he said. "Another grey mark, Guerin. That makes three strikes. Know what the penalty for that is? Life, with no possibility of parole." Michael could not help reflecting that this would describe his entire experience on Earth; Clay's bullying was just one example.

And what could he do about it? His pride would not let him just stand there and take it, but he could not fight back without revealing himself (and maybe the others along with him). The only action he could take was to take no action, to back away. He had done so times enough before, with Hank, but he had not expected the coach to put him in the same strait jacket. Hurt and confused, powerless to understand or to act, he did the only thing left to him: he ran away, back to his locker, while the other boys watched, every one wondering if he would be Clay's next target. Those closest to him saw him smile after Michael with satisfaction. It was as if he had planned it that way.

Michael was still trying to make sense of the whole incident when he returned to his locker at break time. He found Maria waiting there. She moved to kiss him; he shook her off as he had earlier. "Not in the mood." She tried again more forcefully. "I said no, I meant no!" Max and Liz walked up to find them facing away from each other, with scowls on both their faces.

Liz moved to Maria. "You okay?"

"Ask Doctor No."

"Something wrong, Michael?" Max asked. And then again, "Michael?"

The answer came reluctantly, for a variety of reasons. "The coach. He was being a real sadist this morning."

"This comes as a shock."

"Okay, okay, you were right about him. But this was just weird. He kept throwing the ball at me and wouldn't stop."

Maria saw that his feelings had been hurt more than he wanted to reveal. "Sorry, I didn't realize." She gave his side a squeeze, which this time he permitted. She looked at Max. "Shouldn't you or Isabel have sensed the problem? I thought whenever one of you gets hurt—"

"Only in extreme cases. And with Michael, there's not a lot to sense. He likes to bite the bullet. True grit."

"Yeah, tell me about it."

Michael was not amused by this exchange but let it pass. "What did you do?" Max asked. "When Clay went after you?"

"What I had to." The others waited. "Rang the changes." He added, before anyone could object, "He didn't leave me any choice!"

"You think he saw you?"

"I don't know. If he did, he didn't say anything. Like I said, it was weird."

"Sounds like he was baiting you on purpose."

Liz sighed. "Yes, Max, we get that. The question is why."

"Is there any doubt?" said Maria. The others turned to her. "He tricked you into exposing yourself—and not in the way you all are thinking. Does this remind you of anybody?" They looked blank. "Ms. Topolsky? Careers day?"

"FBI!" said Liz.

"Yes, Liz, we get that," Max said pointedly, earning a scowl from her. "That's why he's been posing as your mentor, Michael. It wasn't that he really liked you."

"Oh, of course not. Because that would be totally outside the realm of possibility, right?"

"I didn't mean that."

"Yeah, you did. But it's okay." He said the next words so quietly the others could hardly hear them. "I know better now."

"What'll you do if he goes for you again?" Max asked.

"Eat it. What else, assassinate him?"

Max appeared to consider the idea carefully, but in the end he shook his head. "Draw too much attention to ourselves."

"Which disposes of the ethical dilemma," Liz observed. Max shrugged; she did not pursue the point, but made a note to have a serious talk with him later. "English is in the library today," she reminded him. "You coming?"

"I have to talk to Michael first." This clearly came as news to Michael. Liz went off alone, and Max pointed him toward the rest room. "In there."

"And this isn't weird," said Maria.

"Stand watch out here," Max ordered her.

"I have class!"

"So do we. Don't worry, you'll get there on time, or almost." He ushered Michael inside. "Remember," he said to Maria, "don't let anybody in till we're done."

"How do I stop somebody from taking a leak?"

"Use your imagination."

"It's an area I'd rather not focus my imagination on, thanks all the same. And may I point out that legally—" But by then Max had gone, having shown no sign of hearing her. With reluctance she took up her post at the door.

Two people who passed gave her funny looks, as she had feared; she improvised an explanation. "My boyfriend's in there," she said, "doing his business. I want to be sure I don't miss him coming out. I've lost too many that way." This did not seem to help; if anything, it elicited looks that were even funnier. Any subsequent attention she garnered from passers-by, she ignored without comment.

Inside, Michael waited impatiently while Max checked the stalls to make sure they were unoccupied. "So what's the big deal?" Michael asked.

Max reached into his jacket and pulled out the artifact. "My mom nearly found this when she made my bed yesterday."

"Your mom makes your bed?"

"It's a thing moms do." He extended it to Michael. "I want you to keep it for a while."

"Now you say that."

"You live on your own. It's safer with you." Then he remembered the exception. "So long as you don't mention it to Maria."

"Why?"

"Because—Maria." Michael needed no more explanation than that. He took the object Max offered. "Handle it gently," Max warned, and Michael did. "For all we know, it might be a nuclear detonator." Michael stared at it as though with new eyes. "Probably not," Max admitted. "But it doesn't come with a manual. So we should be careful till we can find out more about it."

Michael was rotating the object slowly so as to study it on all sides. "Yeah, that's a plan."

"What is?"

"What you said."

While Max tried to recall any statement of his that could be described as a plan, a boy whose name Maria had never been certain of was trying to maneuver around her into the lavatory, with no success. "You can't go in there," she stated flatly. "—Roy, isn't it?"

"Ray. But this is urgent!"

"Roy—"

"Ray."

"I know how you feel, believe me, I do. When you're sitting waiting for the bell and your entire being is consumed with the strain of holding in a bladderload—" She noticed that Roy, or Ray, was evincing more interest in the picture she was painting than she thought desirable. "Okay, enough sharing," she said. "You'll have to wait."

"Why?"

"Because the rest room's flooded. Water an inch deep. Whew." I have never heard anybody use that word before, she reflected, and I will probably never use it again.

"How come there's no sign?" Ray asked.

"They ran out of signs and put me here instead."

He looked at her crookedly. "That doesn't sound very believable."

"No, you know, it doesn't, and that's because—it's a lie. The fact is, there's a—transaction going on in there."

"What kind of transaction?"

"Highly personal.."

"I want to see for myself!"

At that moment Max and Michael emerged together. "On second thought..." Ray emended. He hurried past them and inside.

"What were you doing in there all that time?" said Maria—and then, immediately, "I can't believe I just asked that."

"See you later," said Max. He was really speaking to Michael, but out of politeness he pretended to include Maria.

When he had left, she turned to Michael. "What's up with Max?"

Michael shook his head. "He said not to tell you."

"Uh-huh, so?"

Michael heaved a sigh; he should have known he could not hold out. "He gave me this to hang onto," he said, taking the artifact from his jacket. Just as he did so, Ray came out the door behind him in time to get a glimpse. His eyes went wide, and Michael quickly returned the artifact to his pocket. Ray dropped his eyes again and hurried off up the hall. "Suavé," said Maria, in two syllables. "Now he'll think it's a gun."

"So let him. Who cares?"

"What if he reports it to Principal Wiley?"

"I'll show Wiley it isn't."

"What will you say it is?"

"Nerf football?" He slid the object out an inch or two.

"Right, like he's gonna believe—" Then she saw for herself. "Oh-h, yeah."

A thought from a few minutes earlier floated to the front of her brain: wasn't she supposed to be somewhere? Then she remembered. "Oh, my God, I'm late for class!" The hall was almost empty now; a boy sprinted past them. She started off.

Michael was late too, but seemed less perturbed about it. "See you at lunch," he said, "under the bleachers." And she knew just where. But not why.

At two minutes past noon, she was following Michael back They arranged to meet in the stadium at lunchtime. Two minutes later, he was leading her down to the chain link fence behind the football stadium. The fence separated the campus from the golden brown hills to the north. "Then don't come," Michael said, looking over his shoulder, in answer to the various protests she had raised. "Same difference to me either way."

"It can't wait till after school?"

"It can. I can't." He lifted his hand up to the fence. The section before him faded from grey to white, and crumbled to powder as he passed through. On a hunch, Maria swiped the edge of the aperture with her finger and tasted what clung to it. The powder was what it looked like: sugar. Michael was now several yards ahead of her. She slipped through after him.

The two of them climbed a hill, and then another, and came to a halt on the far side of the second. They were within hearing of the loudest sounds from campus, if either listened hard, but these did not interfere with Michael's concentration. While the thing was in his possession, he wanted to test it in every way he could imagine. The first, most obvious test to try was to find out if he could use it. His intuition, as well as his common sense, told him it was intended to be used. But by what means, and to what end, they did not disclose.

He and Maria were on a flat with hills fore and aft. Michael walked to the far end and swung about like a movie gunslinger, holding the artifact at his hip. From the side, where she was sitting cross-legged, Maria watched with amusement. "¡Oye, vaquero!" she cheered. Michael drew his weapon from its imaginary holster and aimed it at the hill behind them, telling it—willing it—to bore a hole through to the other side. He did not know if that was the kind of thing it could do; it seemed as likely as any. But no matter how hard he tried, it made no difference: the hill remained intact.

Maria was watching with her chin on her fists. "What are you trying to do exactly?" she shouted.

"Drill a hole in the hill."

"Uh, excuse me, why?"

"Some other program you'd rather watch?"

She realized she had not made herself clear. "But that isn't what you do, is it? Your thing's more, like, chemical engineering."

"Not at all," he replied, in a patronizing tone that made her want to step on his foot. "What we do is transform the molecular struct—" He stopped. "Chemical engineering. That's what it is."

"The Nerf ball's probably a tool to help do that." Michael stared at her; how obvious now that she had said it. "I do make sense once in a while," she observed drily. "Hard to believe, I know."

Michael was too busy to answer. He was doing a repeat of the previous experiment, this time with a new object: changing the dirt of the hill to salt. Again he concentrated with all his might, striving, straining...

And again he failed. He wiped the sweat off his forehead. Ringing the changes took a lot out of a guy—especially when he was standing out under the noonday sun in southern New Mexico.

Then he got a new idea. This one took him back to the school, to the metal shop, which was housed together with the wood and auto shops at one end of the physical sciences building. The door was locked. Michael passed his hand over the lock, and the door popped open. His companion glanced around nervously. No one was close by, but she was sure that at any minute a teacher would appear around a corner. "You realize this constitutes breaking and entering?" she said.

"What'd I break?"

"Okay, entering." And he did enter, in spite of Maria's disapproval. She wanted to leave him to his fate, but it was too late for that, by several months. So she scurried in after him.

The shop was a big high-windowed room containing masses of machinery for drilling, soldering, brazing, arc welding—every basic job in metal working that could be taught. To Maria the place summed up all the least attractive characteristics of the male sex. But to Michael, today, it was a gold mine.

First he tried the drill. Maria covered her ears to shut out the shrill whir. She had not guessed what he had had in mind to do; it seemed imprudent even for him. "Is this really such a good idea?" she shouted.

Michael shut the drill off and examined the artifact. It was unblemished. "I'll be damned," he said. "It's so dense nothing penetrates."

"What am I reminded of?"

"Ha ha."

Next he took down a welding torch. "And I ask again..." Maria remarked.

But again her worries were unnecessary. The torch had no more effect than the drill had. Michael then stuck the object under a vertical press, with the same result, or lack of result; it could not be punctured, burned, flattened, dented, scratched, or otherwise marred. Even more strangely, it did not react to the attacks by beeping or glowing, as it had done when Max and Liz had first found it; for Michael, it would not perform at all.

"Now what?" Maria asked.

Before Michael could make up his mind, a figure stepped out from the shadow of a wall. "Coach!" Michael exclaimed. How he had gotten in, neither could fathom, since no one had been there when they entered and no one had entered after them.

"What are you kids doing here?" He did not wait for an answer; just as well, since they did not have one. "Guerin, what are you hiding behind your back?"

"Nothing."

"Show me." Michael tried to devise a way to avoid doing so, but had not time or freedom to think of one. "Show me!" Clay repeated. So Michael showed him.

Clay's eyes registered recognition. "Give it to me."

"It's not—not mine," Michael stammered.

Maria had the cooler head. "It's mine," she said, grabbing it away from him. "It's a—beeper. Reminding me to take my medication."

Clay was looking skeptical. "What are you on medication for?"

"For stressful situations. Like this." The bell rang. "Proverbial," Maria commented. "Michael—walkies!" She pushed him toward and out the door.

However, no sooner had they turned into the central hall than two boys stepped out into their path, as if they had been watching for them. Michael knew them from P.E. class, but did not remember having ever spoken to them. He remembered their names: Rick and Scott.

"Hey, you," said Rick. Michael started to return the greeting. "—freak," Rick added. For a second Michael's face showed a flicker of what might have been disappointment. Then it settled into a solemnity of resignation Maria had seen before. He straightened up, squared his shoulders, and waited.

"Ignore him," said Maria, hopefully. She began to steer Michael around the other two, but they moved to block her.

"And so much for plan A," said Michael. He faced Rick eye to eye. "You want something from me, jerk?"

"Not from you." He looked to Maria with a smirk. "Olla, mamacita. What you doing hanging out with this loser?"

"You can do better than him," said his friend. "You're not a total dog." The two began to close in on her.

"Lay a hand on me and you're dead men."

"Come on, chica," Rick begged. "Give us a sample of what the freak's getting." He outstretched a hand.

—only to have it grabbed up by Michael. "Man," he said, "you are worse than dead." He ran his eyes up the arm. Frost began to appear on the skin where it showed. Rick yelped in pain. "You like that?" Michael demanded. "Do you—chica?"

"Let me go! Please!"

"Michael, don't!" Maria clutched at his shoulder, trying to pull him away—not as much for Rick's good as for Michael's own. What he might do if he let himself go—what he might be seen to do—was anybody's guess; it might be murder, or worse, and it might be the end of him too.

Scott was becoming panicky. "Listen, it wasn't our idea. It was coach!"

"Coach?" Michael paused to hear more.

"Coach Clay. He told us to pick a fight with you so you'd get in trouble. It's the truth, I swear!"

Michael bent close to Rick. "What about that?"

"Coach," Rick gasped out. Michael thought about it for a second or two, and then let go of the arm.

Rick began patting and squeezing it. "I can't feel anything!"

Michael shrugged. "It'll pass. With luck."

Scott was shrinking back from him. "What'd you do to him?" he asked.

Gratifying as their subjugation was for Maria to witness, it only aggravated her fear of public notice. She did some more fast thinking. "Tai chi," she said. "Along with some feng shui and jet li. He's mastered them all."

The boys seemed to accept this, or at any rate did not seem inclined to argue. The confrontation was over, and Maria was feeling optimistic that it would be forgotten in a few days, when out bellowed a voice that made her jump. "What exactly is going on here?" Principal Wiley was standing outside his office door. He pointed a finger at Michael. "You, in here."

"But, Mr. Wiley—" Maria began.

"You too, miss," he said. "Since you're so eager to have a word."

—and from the moment of her sitting down, Maria found herself playing paralegal on Michael's behalf, answering the principal's questions because he would not, and angry at them both for it.

"Why did you start that fight?" Wiley asked Michael, for the third time.

"I told you before," said Maria, "it wasn't—"

"And I told you to keep your nose out of it."

"How come you didn't call the others in here? Why only Michael?"

"Because their files"—he tapped a manila folder lying on the desk—"don't show a record of infractions dating back to their freshman year." He wagged a finger at Michael. "You realize this incident is all the justification I need to have you suspended permanently?"

"That isn't fair!" This was Maria answering again.

"However," Wiley added, "as a believer in equal opportunity I'm offering you one last chance to mount a defense. Starting now."

And at last Michael spoke. But his answer was like nothing Wiley had expected. "Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth, I never will speak word."

Wiley ran it through his mental mill a second time to be sure he had not missed something. "What am I supposed to make of that?"

"It's Shakespeare."

"Shakespeare! You're a great proponent of the Bard, are you?"

Michael sighed. He had been right to begin with: there was no point in letting himself be drawn in. He had made that mistake out in the hall, and see where it had gotten him.

"Oh, yes," Wiley continued snidely, "I can see from your academic performance what a reader you are."

"Actually he reads a lot," said Maria, perhaps unwisely. "Off the syllabus. The things he likes, he can quote back word for word."

"Can he?" Wiley's tone was skeptical.

At Maria's urging, and only then, did Michael demonstrate. "Thou told me thou didst hold him in thy hate," he began. "Despise me if I do not—"

"Aw, that's a load of crap."

"Now Othello's crap."

"Tell me something in words I can understand!" Michael could not help chuckling at this. "Well?" said Wiley. Michael thought immediately of several figures of speech that would meet the requirement, but their use would certainly make his own position worse. "Why do I make the effort?" Wiley sighed. "Your kind always dig your own graves. Strictly trailer-made."

Maria was surprised at the blatancy of the insult. She saw Michael stiffen in his chair. "What was that?" he asked.

"Easy, babe," she murmured. She lay a hand on his arm.

Wiley had opened a drawer of his desk, taken out a form, and now began filling it out. Maria knew what it was. "You're not kicking him out of school for this?"

"You'd rather I wait for the next session of the fight club?"

"He was defending me!" she protested. Then she felt obliged to add, for the sake of her own pride, "Not that I required defending, mind you. Because—"

Her ingratitude, as Michael heard it, provoked him out of his silence. "You think you could have handled them?" he said. "Fine, next time I'll let 'em lay on, Macduff." He glanced at Wiley. "Which is also Shakespeare, incidentally."

Wiley stopped writing and looked up with a changed expression on his face. "Hold on now. Are you claiming those boys were making unwelcome advances toward you?"

Duh, thought Maria. "Michael stopped it before it got started—which, at the time, I admit I appreciated." She decided she owed him that much. "They weren't mounting a—well, weren't mounting, period." Wiley pursed his lips. "They were just trying to piss Michael off. And succeeded, obviously."

"Why would they want to do that?"

"It wasn't their idea. They—" Michael gave her a split-second shake of the head.

Wiley had not seen it. He waited. "Yes?"

"The devil made them do it," Maria finished weakly.

"The devil. I see." Wiley assumed she was too much embarrassed to discuss the incident, and so he let it pass. "But there's still this matter of sneaking off campus. And not for the first time either." He tapped the folder on the desk.

"I did the same thing!" said Maria. "I'm as guilty as he is."

"It's obvious to me you were induced to accompany him, if not by force, then verbal persuasion."

"Oh, yeah, his silver-tongued charm. A quality he's known widely for." Michael shot her a dirty look.

Wiley ignored her sarcasm. He scrutinized first one and then the other of them. "What need was it, I wonder, that drove you beyond the campus confines? A craving for some controlled substance perhaps?" His look lingered on Maria. "One of those herbal remedies of yours?" Her jaw dropped. "Oh, I know all about them from the sheriff."

"Mr. Wiley, I swear to you—"

"Enough. This is Mr. Guerin's hour of judgment, not yours. Just remember, I have my eye on you too."

"Eye," Maria repeated, "noted."

"Well," said Wiley, with an air of finality, "in view of what appear to have been extenuating circumstances, I'm willing to ignore today's roughhouse." He tore the suspension form in half and dropped it into his wastebasket. "But for playing hooky" (Maria and Michael had not heard that word since grade school, and mouthed it at each other in disbelief) "Mr. Guerin has earned himself a detention this Saturday."

"I've got work," Michael objected, truthfully.

"Not this Saturday you don't," Wiley snapped back. "Report to the gym at 8 sharp."

"The gym?"

"The gym. By a strange fluke of poetic justice, the teacher assigned that morning is the same one who reported you as AWOL this afternoon—and called my attention to the fight in the hall."

"And that teacher would be?" asked Maria, guessing in advance what the answer would be.

And it was. "Coach Clay." The reaction she saw written on Michael's face approximated her own. She was anxious to compare notes, but restrained herself until Wiley dismissed them and they were well out of his hearing.

"Now we know his plan," she announced. "To have you to himself without witnesses."

"Don't blow it all out of proportion," said Michael. But she could see she was not the only uneasy one.

Then she remembered something he had done earlier, or omitted to do, that had been bothering her. "Why didn't you tell Wiley those two guys were playing for Clay?"

"Would he believe me over a teacher?"

"They'd have backed you up."

"And come down on Clay's wrong side? I don't think so. One thing I've learned about you humans—give you an excuse to wiggle out of dong the right thing, you'll take it. Every time."

"Well, thanks for the compliment." It might be true, but he did not have to say so.

"Nah, I don't mean you," Michael said, and Maria felt better—for a moment. "That is, not especially. You're not as bad as some."

"No? Then how bad am I?" Michael answered with a back-and-forth tilt of the hand—sign language for "so-so." This elicited from Maria an open-mouthed recoil of a type which by Michael's observation was unique to teen girls: an expression which conveyed that the indignity or inequity under which they were laboring so far exceeded anything anyone else had ever undergone that language would not serve to express their disbelief.

Michael did not get what the big deal was. "You wanted the truth, didn't you?" he asked—in respect of which Maria, infinitely offended, turned on her heel and marched out of the building. Michael did not have time to go after her then; she might have the day off, but he did not, and he was already late for his shift.

Standing over the grill at the Crashdown, he reviewed all he had said to her, and he found no fault in it. He looked across at Liz, waiting on the outer side of the order window. He would have been the first to admit that it had taken him a great while to appreciate her merits, and since doing so he kept discovering new ones all the time. He smiled out at her. "You know, I never did thank you for getting me this job."

"You got it for yourself."

"Okay, then I take it back." Liz laughed. "You laugh. Maria'd get mad. She's weird that way." Liz did not reply; she had a feeling there was more to the story than he was telling. "You know, it should have been me and you together. Woulda made more sense."

Liz was unexpectedly touched. "That's extremely flattering of you, Michael, but I'm not sure—"

"You, I can understand," he said. "You're like books—you explain things. But Maria..."

"Oh, nobody understands Maria. Or Max," she added, for good measure. "It's just the way they are. Either you accept that, or..." Or what? she wondered.

"Then why are we with them?" Michael asked, almost pleadingly. "Instead of each other?"

"Because in the first place we'd have to be in love, which we're not. And in the second place, if we were we'd be in the same boat we are now." Michael nodded in resignation. "You know what they say. Love's—the b-word."

"Bull—"

She smiled. "Not that b-word. The other one. And you know it isn't."

"No," Michael agreed. "That'd be too easy." And he knew life was never easy.

Max would have agreed with Liz's diagnosis of inscrutability as it pertained to him. His behavior was often unfathomable even to himself, and on the occasions of his greatest puzzlement he would take long walks while he tried to work out why he had done as he had. Roswell's sidewalks were pleasant to wander, with their brick paving and their lines of trees, each encased in its own trimly curved iron fence. This evening he was heading for Summerhaven Park, where he had arranged with the other not-ofs to meet after dark but before curfew. The route he was taking was also his way home, that is, the way to the Evans house, which lay opposite the park.

He appeared not to notice the man who was following him, a stocky man with glasses and an unkempt mop of hair, or the woman with shorter hair and dark lipstick who was following the man in turn. "Larry, please!" she called after him. "Let's go back."

"I just want to talk to him, Jen. Just talk, that's all." He waved to Max. "Hey, man, wait up!" Max pretended not to hear, but this only caused Larry to accelerate to a trot, while Max maintained his customary slow canter, so that within a few seconds Larry was able to pass him and circle around in front of him, blocking his way. "Gotta talk to you," he said.

Max tried to slip past him. "Sorry, in a hurry."

Then Jen appeared. "Larry," she said Jen, with a tug at his shirt, "don't do this. Let's just go. Please."

Larry put his arm around her. "Meet Jen, the wife. We just got back from our honeymoon. In Las Vegas."

"Congratulations." Max felt he had to say that.

"Didn't do a lot of gambling while we were there. Mainly—well, mainly, we were on our honeymoon." He gave a snicker.

"Larry, he doesn't care about that."

"Oh, right, right." Larry returned to his point. "Listen, I hate to be a nudge, last thing in the world I want to do is annoy anybody, but I had to tell you I was wrong about you."

Max received this intelligence with uncertainty as to its import. "Were you?"

"Of course you know I was. I mean, you know you're not—what I thought you were. And now I know too. That's great, isn't it?"

"Great," Max agreed. "Listen, I—"

"What it was was, I had this thing about aliens. I used to see them everywhere—at work, at the market—"

"On tv?" Max suggested.

"That too. And I was sure you were one of them. Wasn't I, Jen?"

"Larry—"

"But she set me straight. There are no aliens out there. It was all up here." He pointed to his head. "You're a normal, red-blooded guy, just like me. The two of us are just alike."

Max smiled wanly. "That's reassuring, thanks."

"Just wanted to tell you."

"And now you have. See you around."

Max walked on. "You got nothing to fear from me!" Larry reiterated. Max kept walking. Jen started to pull Larry in the other direction. Then he stopped. "Shoot! Something I forgot."

"Larry, you said enough."

"But this is the most vital thing!" He turned around and took after Max again, and Jen had no choice but to follow.

A block ahead of them, Michael was also on his way to the park. His mind was so preoccupied with his upcoming detention that he was insensible to what was happening around him, including the activity of the small boy farther up the block, who was bouncing a ball and running after it to retrieve it when it had bounced too far. His slightly older sister was walking alongside and a little ahead, but she was paying him no attention either, so that when the ball bounced into the street and he darted out after it, the first his sister knew of it was when she looked up to see a Ford truck bearing down on him.

She screamed, and her scream brought Michael out of his funk. There was no time to pull the boy out and no time to weigh other options. He would have to ring a change, or do nothing. So he did the first thing that came to him: he changed the rubber of the truck's tires to chewing gum—that is, to the chemical compound popularly referred to as such; it was easiest to focus on when he thought of it by its common name. It had never been meant to be made into tires; they locked, and the truck skidded around in an arc, narrowly missing the boy. His sister ran out and swept him up onto the sidewalk. But now the truck was sliding sideways, toward one of the fenced trees. Seeing it, Michael panicked. His mind stalled; he could do nothing.

Luckily, however, Max was at hand. He had arrived just in time to see what was going on, and to know what to do. He changed both the tree and its fence to rubber, so that when the truck hit them they bent backwards harmlessly. The truck veered off and grated to a halt.

The driver was rattled, but basically unhurt. He climbed out to inspect the tires, then the tree, and saw nothing out of the ordinary. Max had changed it all back—except that the tree was now bowed in half. There were probably ways to correct this, but he would have had to think of one, which would have taken too long, and anyway, it was too late.

—because the boy had seen what had happened, and was now staring at him pop-eyed; his sister had not seen it, but he had. Max raised a finger to his lips and held it there. The boy nodded solemnly. Max knew kids, and knew that his secret was safe.

But there had been a second witness, halfway down the block. He turned to the woman with him. "Did you see that?" he said, in a tone of awe mingled with gloating. "Did you?"

Jen had not. "You mean the accident?"

"The alien! He changed things I was right about him all along!"

"Larry, we've been through this—"

"I know what I saw!"

"What you think you saw."

"You're in it too! You're part of the conspiracy!" He gazed at her in horror. "And I'm married to you!"

"That was my error. I thought you were someone I knew." And she walked away—away from him, away from the accident, away from it all. She had had it with this alien nonsense.

"Jen, wait!" Larry looked from her to the scene half a block up. He knew he had to make a choice, and he did, but reluctantly. "Jen!" he called. "Wait for me!" And he hurried after her.

By then other bystanders had begun to collect, and Michael had begun to wish his powers included invisibility. He heard a cat-like wail, and saw a familiar beige Rover pull in at the curb. The sheriff stepped out, surveying the crowd at the same time. He made a mental note of the tall kid who was hurrying off down the block. Max was standing farther back, and was able to slip away unobserved while Valenti was busy interviewing the driver of the truck.

The two boys and Isabel held their meeting, a little later than planned, while perched on one of the concrete benches at the rear of the park. From there they could survey the whole lawn by the clusters of spotlights on the steel poles that were planted along the gravel paths every few yards. Apart from themselves, the park was nearly empty.

Max had intended to further discuss the artifact, but the events immediately preceding dictated a change of topic. He apprised Isabel of all that had happened. "That was careless," she told Michael untactfully.

"Not to mention stupid," Max added.

Michael was already duly aware of his failure and did not try to minimize it. "I choked. Everything happened so fast."

"What about our pact?" asked Max. "The pact never to reveal ourselves?"

He was surprised to hear Isabel say, "Come on, Max. That ended when you brought Liz back from the dead. We're still dealing with the fallout from that."

"I should have let her die?" He looked from one to the other of them.

Michael shrugged. "People die."

"Neither of you is exactly in a position to point fingers," Isabel said. "You've both powered up in public before. I've seen you. And if I did, then how many others?"

"And I suppose you've never cheated?" her brother asked.

"Of course I have. It was an impossible promise to keep. But I stopped—except for the little things."

Max began to tick them off. "Lipstick, nail polish, perfume..."

"They don't count." Both boys immediately thought: Typical girl.

"Why did you stop?" asked Michael.

"Because I didn't like how it made me feel. I was never sure that what I was doing was right. Or necessary. Or that no one had seen me. And as for mind-binding with humans, that just seemed—distasteful."

"When did you ever do that?" Max challenged. "Except in a dream."

"Dreams are different."

"Oh, so they don't count either?"

"I stopped that too. I stopped everything. Cold turkey." She turned to Michael. "And you did too. You must have, or I'd have seen you."

"Yeah, until tonight." He glanced sheepishly at Max. "And now you see why. I try to help, but I only make things worse. Then I don't know how to fix what I've done."

"Because you don't work at it," said Isabel.

Michael began to object. "She's right," Max chimed in. "It's your whole approach to life. You only do what makes you happy."

Michael answered quietly. "You think I'm happy?"

"He did heal River Dog that time," Isabel noted.

"Thanks," said Michael, "but"—he hesitated—"I'm not sure that was me."

"Who else could it have been?" asked Max.

"Maybe River Dog himself. I don't know. It felt like the time you healed me. Like something was passing through me into him." They took this in silently. "Weird, huh?"

"Everything's weird with us," said Max. "Maybe some day it'll all make sense."

"You stopped too, Max," said Isabel. "After Liz."

"Yeah," Max admitted. The others waited. "It was too much responsibility, all right? Take Liz. Sure I brought her back—but what about all the others out there who need help? Who am I to decide which ones deserve it and which ones don't?"

"So what do we do?" Isabel demanded. "Go somewhere else? Hide?"

"No, I won't go. And I can't hide."

"What, then?" Michael asked sullenly. "You tell us, since you know so much."

Max always felt sad when Michael made cracks like that; it was as if he had not heard a word Max said. "I don't know. I don't pretend to. But as far as I can see, the only thing we can do is accept who we are, and figure out how to make the best use of our"—the word caught on his tongue—"superpowers."

The others looked troubled. Max saw he had expected too much of them. "You can't do it, can you?"

"Some day," said Michael. "Somewhere else."

"Where? Our home planet?"

Max had not meant the question seriously, but Michael took it that way. "Maybe so. Anyway, not here. Not when it's just the three of us."

Isabel rarely agreed with Michael, but this time she backed him up. "If we came out even to that extent," she said, "it would mean giving up our whole life."

"And if our life is a lie?" Max mused.

"Are our parents a lie? Is Liz?"

Max lowered his eyes. "Then I guess we're not ready. Not yet."

"This might help," said Michael, pulling out the artifact. "If we can ever figure out how to operate it."

Isabel huffed at him. "Put it away!" she ordered. "We can't even control the powers we have."

"Maybe we could," said Max, "with that."

Isabel shook her head, but in disapproval rather than in contradiction. Michael was regarding the object with some disgust. "I haven't been able to get it to do anything. I tried a drill, blowtorch, vertical press—"

Max stared at him aghast. "You did what?"

"Aw, don't worry. None of them fazed it."

Max was beyond words. "You're—you're—"

"Irresponsible?" Isabel suggested.

"Irresponsible," Max agreed. "Who knows what harm you might have done to it? Give it back!" He made a grab for it.

Michael held it away from him. "Nothing doing. I'm not done with it yet."

"What next, dynamite?"

"Coach Clay. I want to show it to him again."

"'Again'?" It just kept getting worse.

"Michael, he's FBI!" protested Isabel.

"So what? He knows what it is. I could see he did. Maybe I can trick him into telling me." This sounded a little harebrained even to himself, after he had spoken it aloud.

"They're the last people we want laying hands on it," Max declared. "Give it to me!" He made another grab, and this time clasped hold of one end while Michael clung onto the other. The two struggled for ownership.

They did not notice it at first when the thing started to beep, as it had before in the desert. Then all at once it emitted a crackling burst of light, and an electric shock peppered their insides; both let go at the same time, and the artifact dropped to the earth.

Max looked at Michael questioningly. "It never did that," said Michael. "Even when I used the tools on it. Or when some guys picked a fight with me."

This was a new worry Max knew nothing about. "What guys were these?"

"Doesn't matter. Clay put them up to it."

"So they weren't really angry. And neither were you when you did your—tests. But I was. It must have picked up on that, and that's why it reacted. What else can it do, I wonder?" He picked it up gingerly.

"Michael!" cried Isabel. "Isn't that the coach?"

"Where?" said Michael. Isabel pointed to a man who had been standing by a thick pine tree (the oldest in the park) but was now retreating up one of the paths. He glanced back long enough to show his face. "Nah," said Michael, "that's not him."

"That's not the man I saw," said Isabel. She looked around. "But there's no one else." She felt a sudden chill, which she attributed to the artifact. "Put that away, will you?" Max obediently tucked it into his jacket, and this time Michael did not object.

The sheriff was still musing over the incident outside the park when he came home. A blare of music and voices directed his attention to the living room, where Kyle was stretched out on the brown leather sofa in front of the tv. "You'll melt into that sofa some day, you don't watch it," Jim cautioned him.

"Yeah, how you doin' yourself, Dad?"

His father stopped and stood at his back long enough to assess the quality of the entertainment. "Movie," Kyle volunteered. "Title's Stranger on My Pillow."

"Women's channel?"

"What else?"

"Is it any good?"

"Nah, but the wife in it takes a whole lot of showers."

Jim watched with rather more interest than before. "Kyle," he said, as if it had just occurred to him and he had not been planning it all the way home, "how well do you know this kid, what's-his-name, Guerin? Friend of Max Evans?"

"Michael Guerin? I don't know him at all except through Liz. Why?"

"Thought maybe you could invite him over some time, so me and him could have a chat."

Kyle was silent for a long moment. "So it's him you're shadowing these days?"

"Hey, I'm not shadowing anybody. I just asked, was all."

"Uh-huh. And if I was to ask why you're asking?"

"No reason," Jim said innocently.

Kyle did not have to turn his head to know the look that went with that tone. "Uh, yeah, Dad, reason." He got to his feet. "Make you a deal, okay? The day you start sharing with me, I'll start sharing with you." He nodded at the tv. "Leave it on?"

"Nah, I'm going out again."

Kyle clicked it off with the remote. "But you just got in!"

"I'm going for a drink with Amy at the Reata."

"Amy? Maria Deluca's mom?" Kyle rolled his eyes. "Jeez, Dad."

Valenti looked down at the hat in his hands. "And you wonder why I don't share more." With a shake of the head, he went to change.

Kyle wished now he had not made the comment. I'm one to talk, he said to himself. But it was too late to do anything about it, except apologize—and where was the point in that?

His father and Amy had their date, but Jim had her home by ten; both of them had things to do the next day, and besides, Amy was hoping to get in before her daughter, who had not been home when she left. As it happened, Maria was back, but had gone to bed early—which was almost as good for Amy's purpose. She knew Maria disapproved of her (or perhaps any adult) dating, and especially dating the man she was; she had broken it off with him once and had now resumed, but had not yet acquainted her daughter with the later fact. Not that she was trying to conceal it, exactly; she was simply not going out of her way to tell, or to give any hint.

When Jim brought her back home, the house was dark, but there was someone standing in the drive. Maria did not know this, and Amy never found out; as soon as the headlights appeared, but before they could show him up, he slipped into the side yard and hid behind the shrubs. Earlier in the day he had made it up with Maria (mainly so he could beg a ride from her to his detention the following morning), but had ended the evening early, determined to study the map again. He had soon tired of it as usual, and decided he would rather go and be with her, after all, but had arrived to find the place dark. That had been only a couple of minutes before.

He waited for the car to pass him, but it never did. Finally he peered around the wall to see a vintage black Mustang parked at the curb, its rear window sporting a decal that read "Support Your Local Sheriff." His breath caught in his throat.

The passenger door opened, and he quickly pulled back into the bushes. Amy stepped out. She shut the door gently, so as not to disturb her daughter (if she was stirring), and walked up the drive, a few feet from their visitor. He could have revealed himself to her, could have explained his presence, but he had a feeling she would have been as embarrassed as he would. And the sheriff was still lingering, probably to make sure she got inside safely; the lurker did not want to have to account to him for his being there. So he remained hidden.

Amy's was not the only tryst to occur that Friday night. But Liz's was not planned, or at least not by her. She was standing at her floor mirror in a close-to-new negligee, assessing the figure that it draped so flatteringly (as even she had to admit) when she happened to look toward the window and saw a face looking back at her. She gave a start—and then, a second later, recognized whose face it was. "Max!"

He ran his eye along her unconcealed lines, in unconcealed admiration. Liz was far more pleased than embarrassed, but tried not to show it. Immediately—but not all that speedily, Max noticed—she took a robe from the closet and covered herself with it. "May I come in?" he asked. Liz weighed the risk against the reward, and beckoned him inside. As he bent to fit through the window, she became conscious of her heart thumping; now why was that?

In a minute Max had gained the floor and was standing upright. "I need something from you," he said.

Liz's heart was still at it. "Oh?" she said, her breath almost overpowering her voice.

Max took from his jacket a now-familiar object. "Will you keep this for a while?" he asked. "And hide it where no one can find it?"

Liz felt obscurely disappointed. "But why me?"

"It's not safe with me. And even less safe with Michael." Liz stared at it without enthusiasm. "Please?" said Max.

"Well—since you said 'please.'"

Relieved, he handed it over. "Oh, one word of advice. Try to avoid having any—intense feelings in its vicinity."

Liz's antennae went up—not the ones on her Crashdown uniform, but her invisible, intuitive ones. "Why, exactly?"

"They could induce a sort of"—he searched for the right term—"energy burst."

"Is that another way of saying 'explosion'?"

"Tiny one. Nothing to worry about." Then he remembered. "As long as you don't make any sudden movements in its direction."

"Like a pit bull. I don't want this in my room!"

She thrust it back at him, but he dodged her. "The cafe, then." He thought again. "But probably not in the kitchen. On account of the heat."

"Max, I really don't think—"

"Have to be getting home now. Thanks, Liz." He darted out the window and across the deck to the fire ladder.

"Yeah," she muttered, "you too—Maximilian." For once Michael's nickname seemed to suit. She looked at the object with distaste. Then she carried it to the hiding place in the wall, where she laid it (very carefully) alongside her journal. She started to make an entry about it but then changed her mind; for now, it had best remain an unwritten secret.

Though no longer in charge of the item, Michael had not given up the idea of finding out more about it, somehow, from the coach. His detention, he hoped, would give him the opportunity; he was almost looking forward to it. So he was in unexpectedly good spirits when he arrived on campus early the next morning. Maria wheeled Amy's red Jetta onto an access road that ended near the gym. As Michael swung the door open, she clutched his arm. "You sure you want to go through with this?"

"No choice. You heard Wiley."

"You've told Max and Isabel, right?"

"No need. And don't you go telling them. I can take care of myself."

"Yeah, taking care of yourself was what got you into this in the first place."

"Clay got me into this. Might as well see what else he's got up his sleeve. And what he knows that we don't." Maria's face showed her misgivings, and he shared them. But he was also feeling a confidence in himself she apparently lacked; it might not go deep or last long, but it might suffice to enable him to get what he needed out of Clay—if Clay did not get him first. "You go on to work," he told her. "I'll walk back."

Maria watched unhappily as he disappeared around a corner of the building. How would she be able to work today with such an awful gnawing in her stomach?

The side door was standing open. Michael stepped in to survey the room and, seeing no one there, entered farther. He heard a ball bouncing and turned to the sound. The coach was now behind him, standing in the corner by the door. He had a basketball and was dribbling to a slow beat, like the beat of a tom-tom: Donk. Donk. Donk. He left his corner and began pacing deliberately toward Michael. Donk. Donk. The rhythm seemed to take over Michael's heartbeat. Donk. "Where is it?" Clay asked.

"Where's what?" Maybe he would learn its name, if it had one.

"You know," Clay said.

"Haven't got it on me. See?" He opened his arms wide.

"It's foolhardy to cross me, stripling. As you'll learn before we're through."

He talks weird for a coach, Michael thought, or for an FBI guy. "Yeah? Do I lose my free throw or what?"

"You trying to be funny?" This sounded more like Clay. He was now holding the ball in his hands; suddenly he hurled it at Michael's head—faster than before, faster than seemed humanly possible. The volley caught Michael off guard, but his own reflexes were so quick he was able to elbow it aside. "What, no balloon this time?" said Clay. As before, the ball somehow came back to him, and he continued his advance.

Michael retreated. "You really don't want to do this, Coach."

Clay smiled. "Oh, yes. I do." Then he dropped the smile. "Where is it?"

Michael tried not to sound scared, or to be scared. "First you tell me what you know about it. Then maybe we can work a deal."

Clay detected the genuine curiosity that underlay the bluff. "You really don't know. I thought—" The discovery seemed to have thrown off his calculations, and he hesitated.

"I know who you are," Michael boasted, trying to sound less ignorant than he was. "I didn't before, but I do now."

Clay regarded him with a slight change of expression. "Good for you."

"You shouldn't have showed your hand so soon, you know. Topolsky was smarter."

"Who's Topolsky?"

"Don't try to b.s. me."

"Why should I bother? I don't give a damn about this Topolsky, whoever he is."

Michael, strangely, believed him. "Guess your section chief should have briefed you better. What'd he tell you about that thing, anyway?" He still had hopes of finding out something about it, though he knew this attempt was weak.

Clay gave a contemptuous laugh, but for another reason. "You think I'm one of them? Them? They couldn't recover a missing dog. Their only achievement is to run about in circles—and the circles grow ever wider."

"Sounds to me like you know plenty about them."

"I should. They've been tracking me since 1959."

Michael stared at him: this, he had not foreseen. Clay (to grant him the identity he had most recently stolen) directed his gaze to the floor. A spot appeared on it and lengthened into a curving line an inch deep, with rough edges, as if it were being etched into the varnished wood by an invisible finger of fire. It expanded into a circle and was then joined by two more lines, one on each side, like parentheses. Michael recognized the symbol from the map, the same one he had burned into the library lawn to attract the attention of the person, or being, whom he had been waiting for, the only other known emigré from their home planet—who was now standing before him. He stared up at Clay again. "That's right, Michael," he said, smiling, almost gloating. "You summoned me." He stepped into the figure he had etched. "Now deal with me."

Unknown to either, Maria was listening from the hall. She had changed her mind about going, and now she was glad of it. One of the row of doors was half-open; the sign on it identified the office as Clay's. She could phone Liz from there. But Liz would be at work, and powerless to help anyhow; Max could, but he would be working too, and might prefer not to reveal himself to someone who was not an ally, as Michael had expected, but an enemy.

Beneath the sheet of glass that covered most of the desktop Maria spied a phone list; Wiley's name was included. He was now her best bet, strange as that seemed. On punching in his number, she got a recorded instruction to leave a message at the tone. "Mr. Wiley?" she said. "Pick up if you're there." He did not. "Okay, then come to the basketball gym right away. There's going to be trouble between Michael and the coach. Get here soon. Please." When she spoke the last words, she had already hung up.

On the desk sat a stack of unopened mail and a stack of untouched papers, both dating back two weeks. Maria began searching the drawers for a weapon, or some object to distract Clay, as well as to gratify her own curiosity. In the upper right drawer she found two unlabeled pill bottles, one half empty, the other one full. Of course, they might have belonged to the real Clay, but she did not think so; West Ros had a zero-tolerance policy respecting drugs, one that applied to the faculty as well as the student body, and Clay was, or had been, a by-the-book type. Maria was sure she knew whose pills they were—and she gathered they must be important for him to keep a spare in reserve. Whatever their function was, he needed them.

Inside he and Michael stood facing each other. Michael could hardly believe that the encounter he had looked forward to for so long had turned out to be another ordeal, another persecution, another fight. He waited for the next move.

Then he heard a loud pop overhead. And another, and another—many of them in quick succession, like the noises of popcorn popping. He raised his eyes to the ceiling, which was festooned with baby spotlights; they were changing, one by one, to basketballs, or spheres that were like basketballs, but bigger and heavier, so heavy that one of them snapped loose from its mount and crashed to the floor, making a small crater. Then they were all doing it, breaking off, raining down, and Michael was shifting this way and that to dodge them. As their popping spread across the ceiling, it was drowned out by the thunder of their landings.

At last came one Michael could not dodge; it was plummeting straight toward him. With scarcely a moment's thought, he changed it to a soap bubble, which broke harmlessly over his head. Now that he had discovered the trick, he used it on the others as they fell, one by one, and made of them a whole sea of bubbles; hardly had it appeared when it dissolved.

"That's the best you can do?" Clay mocked him. "And you claim to be one of us?"

The basketball in his hands changed to a meteorite, and gained in color until it glowed red-hot. He raised his arms for a throw, and Michael fled to the bleachers. "Best run, cub," he heard below and behind him, "or I'll finish you!" The projectile whizzed past his ears into the rows above, where it exploded in a tussock of flame. A second later the steel he was standing on changed to glass, cracked under his weight, and then shattered, sending him from the third tier up to the floor, which he met with a hard bump. "Why are you doing this?" he cried out.

"Because you're weak, like the humans. And the weak must be eliminated."

They heard a girl's voice from the hall door. "Hey, you! Mork from Ork!" Maria was back.

Michael attempted to wave her off. "Get out of here!" he shouted.

Maria ignored him, as she was accustomed to doing. While he with an effort picked himself up, she strolled out to the center of the court, her hands behind her back. "If you're so all-powerful," she asked, in her most innocent voice, "then what are these for?" She brought out her hands, with a pill bottle in each.

As often, her hunch paid off. "Give them to me!" Clay ordered.

"What, these? No, you know, I don't think so." She twisted the lids off both, upturned them and poured out the contents, shook it empty, and then called into play her best dance step to grind the litter into the heavily dented floor.

"Stop her!" Clay ordered Michael, who was ten yards away from her, to Clay's thirty. Then he turned his own eyes on her. Almost immediately her top and jeans began to sizzle; wisps of smoke rose from them. She could feel their heat scorching her.

"Stop him!" she ordered Michael.

"What do you owe humans?" Clay countered. "Except sixteen years of grief."

"Says the guy who just tried to kill you."

"Only to bring you to life!" This was a switch from the abuse he had been doling out, an obvious attempt to win Michael to his side. And yet...

Michael did feel alive. More alive than he ever had before. In fighting for his survival, he had shown what he was made of; he had been a hero—a superhero, almost a god. So this was what it was like to be himself as he was born to be, unhampered by humans or his own incapacity (which he was inclined now to blame on humans and their planet); this was what it felt like to be—him.

"Decide, Michael," Clay said. "Her kind or your own."

"And preferably sooner rather than later," she put in, "or her kind will be no kind."

Michael stood immobile for what seemed like an eternity. Then he turned toward her. But he did not stop what Clay was doing; he stopped what was being done. Maria felt her clothes grow wet as they hung on her; they began to sweat water. Within a few seconds they were clinging to her body, cold and clammy.

Then her feet gave way; an oil slick was gushing across the floor and she found herself lying in it—and then sliding in a beeline toward Clay. She tried uselessly to brake herself. Another basketball had appeared in his hand. He began to twirl it, and as he twirled, it changed to a ball of lightning that sparked and crackled and spun and continued to spin, faster and faster. And it was getting bigger and bigger with every second, until it was almost her own size.

Her slide on the oil had brought her almost to Clay's feet. He drew his arm back to hurl the lightning down on her, like Zeus from Olympus. Maria cringed. But then Clay halted, rocking a little on the soles of his feet, as if the strength had been suddenly drained from him.

Before he could recover, a voice sounded out: "Let those kids be!" The voice was Wiley's. It seemed to revive Clay to an awareness of what he was doing—and in an instant all was back to normal: he was holding a plain basketball; the ceiling lights and the bleachers were intact. The only marvel remaining was the symbol gouged into the floor, but a moment later the wood had healed over and it was gone too. Maria had never seen the changes rung on such a scale or at such a tempo; she felt as if she were dreaming the whole thing. Wiley was clutching his head as if to keep his brains from falling out. He had confidence that a sensible explanation existed for what he had just witnessed, but it was opaque to him at present.

Clay was fleeing for the front doors. "Get back here, mister!" Wiley barked. Clay did not stop.

Maria picked herself up with a groan. She was still sore where she had fallen; Clay had neglected to change that back. Michael approached her. "You all right?" he asked. Maria shook her head, but not in answer to his question; the denial was more extensive. She was looking at him in a way she never had before—somewhat as if he had left her stranded in the dead of night on an unfamiliar street corner, on an unfamiliar planet.

Wiley joined the two of them. By then he had recovered his composure a little. "Tell me what happened here."

Maria sidestepped the task. "Guess you got my message. You got here so fast."

"I don't know anything about any message. I just felt a—kind of need to look in. Outside, I met Pete—the new man." He looked toward the side door, where a tall, bearded man was standing, wearing a grey maintenance uniform. Neither of the students could recall having seen him before. "Under control now, Pete," said Wiley. The man slipped away. "Never saw the coach behave like that," said Wiley. "I can't figure it." He surveyed the room again. "Just can't figure it."

Michael found the phrase to sum it up. "Coach hasn't been himself lately."

At the park that evening he described for the others, as well as he could, all that had happened. Maria was not on hand to assist him; after the incident she had gone home alone, called in sick to work, and had not been seen since. Liz, however, was there, having escaped her house arrest by inventing a task that would keep her in the kitchen after her parents had retired upstairs. Eventually if they did not hear her come up they would check on her; she could not risk being gone for more than a few minutes.

After Michael finished his account, everyone was silent for a few moments, taking it in. "You're sure it was Nasedo?" said Max.

"Isn't that what I said?"

"It's not like he told you his name."

"He didn't need to—"

"Excuse me," Liz interrupted, "technically Nasedo isn't a name. It's more of a title—it means 'visitor.' And, strictly speaking, you're all visitors in that sense, so—"

The others were staring at her. "Liz," Max whispered, "it's not that important. In the circumstances."

"I suppose not." Max started to put another question. "I mean, if accuracy isn't important to you. But in that case, you might as well—"

"Aren't you supposed to be at home?" Isabel inquired pointedly.

"I asked her to come help," said Max.

"Then help," said Isabel, "or keep quiet."

"Sorry," said Liz, more meekly than before.

Michael had been waiting impatiently to answer Max's question. "It is like he told me his name. He said I summoned him here. He knew the symbol."

"But why would he try to kill you?" said Isabel.

"Well, that's what he does, right? Isn't that what you all have been trying to tell me this whole time? Only I was too stupid to get it before."

"He doesn't kill his own kind," said Max.

"That we know of." The qualification came from Liz. "He might have, and then disposed of the bodies, mightn't he?"

Max reflected. "He didn't do that with the others. The humans."

"Except Coach," said Michael.

Max frowned. "Do we know that for sure?"

"Nobody's seen him, have they? Since Nasedo took his place?"

"Of course not," said Liz. "To impersonate him successfully, he'd have to get rid of the original. If it was me I'd use a lye bath. And for the bones, a chainsaw..."

She realized the others were staring at her again, and she shut up. "You're scary sometimes," said Max.

He turned back to the group. "He usually leaves a trail. And I think it's deliberate. He wants people to know he's out there. Wants them to be intimidated by him—that is, by us. Aliens.."

"You're assuming he's sane," Liz observed. As they all considered this, she gave Max a peck on the cheek. "Better get back before someone decides to check up on me."

"Thanks," said Isabel, grudgingly. Liz smiled at her as she hurried off.

Michael was not smiling. "So this is the great Nasedo. This is the whole deal. Figures."

"Sorry," said Max. "I know you'd been hoping—"

"Yeah, hope is great. But other people have a way of screwing it up."

"I think you'd be wisest to stay out of his way until..."

"Until when?"

"Don't know," Max confessed.

"Ditch gym for the rest of the semester? Then I will be suspended. Guaranteed."

"He may not come back," suggested Isabel, "now that Wiley's seen him in action. I hope he didn't see you."

"Wiley doesn't know what he saw. By the time he locked up and went home, he'd half convinced himself he never saw anything."

Isabel laughed. "Typical human reaction."

"If he does come back," said Max, not referring to Wiley now, "we'll face him together. The three of us."

"And then what?" asked Isabel.

"We do what we have to. Or what we're able to. Since he's not—local, there'll be no complications."

"Complications?" repeated Michael. "What complications?"

Max was reluctant to use the word. "Survivors."

Michael had not quite understood until that moment what Max was talking about. Now that he did, his whole being—at least the part of himself he knew—rebelled against it. "No!" he shouted. "You can't!"

His reaction surprised them. "He'd do the same to you," Isabel pointed out.

"Why not?" asked Max. Michael did not answer. "You can't still believe he's—" Michael's eyes grew wide, and for that moment his face lay as open as a baby's for others to read. Max had not realized. "You do. Oh, Michael..."

Feeling exposed and confused, helpless to cope with so much trauma at once, Michael did the only thing he knew to do: to run away. "Come back!" Max shouted, to no avail. He turned to his sister. "Now what do we do?"

"Wait for him to see sense," she said, "and hope he doesn't get himself killed in the meantime." Max nodded. "The usual," Isabel added.

When Michael got back to his apartment building he found Maria waiting at the side door. "You coulda gone in," he said. "Why didn't you?" He had made her a key himself (manually), and knew she carried it with her on a separate chain—one of her mother's creations, with a flying-saucer fob.

"Wasn't sure I'd be welcome," she said. Michael did not know how to answer; for her, that was answer enough. But she went on regardless. "I never thanked you today. For saving my life and that."

"We're even."

There was a pause. Michael had in his hand the key to the door but made no move to open it. And Maria made no move to leave. "You know"—he hated himself for what he was going to say—"it's late and—"

"Why did you hesitate?" She said it quietly, but hurt throbbed in every word; Michael could not pretend he did not hear, or understand. "When you had to choose sides, you hesitated. Why?"

Now he hesitated again. "Maybe he was right."

"Right how?"

"If it comes to a showdown—may as well say use the word, a war—I won't get to choose. The choice will be made for me." He looked away. "It won't be the choice I made today."

"And what about us?" asked Maria. She found that for some reason her voice would hardly serve her.

"Which 'us' are you talking about?" Michael could tell that this affronted her, and he had not meant it to; he made a last effort to explain. "If other humans find out what I am and what I do, you think they'll let me keep wandering around loose? I'll end up in a cage—or on a slab. Max and Isabel too. That's how it is between your people and mine."

Maria saw a gulf between them which until then she had imagined to be no more than a pothole that could easily steered around. "So no matter how much any of us put out for you—I'm speaking metaphorically here—in your mind we're still the enemy. All of us." She waited. "Tell me I'm wrong."

He looked more severe than she had ever known him to. "I don't think I can," he said. "Because I don't think you are." He let himself in and pushed the door shut behind him, without a goodbye or any other word.

Maria felt as if she had been punched in the gut. She stood for another minute or two—or five, she could not tell afterwards—until she had recovered sufficiently to be certain of being able to guide the Jetta safely out of the carport. Michael listened to it from his window. The sound of it was like breathing, and faded as it grew more distant: soon he could not hear it at all.

If Maria had been asked, she would have sworn that nothing could make her feel lousier than she had at Michael's. But that was before she reached home and found a beige Range Rover filling the drive. Displaced to a parking space on the street, she was feeling resentful on this count alone when she went in. Almost at once, her eyes were met with the sight of the vehicle's authorized keyholder reclining in the lounge chair and looking more at home there than Maria liked. He promptly sat up, as if he had been caught doing something illicit.

"Sheriff," she said, trying to strike a balance between sounding surprised and not at all surprised.

For his part, Jim tried to sound easy and comfortable with her, which he clearly was not. "Maria. Hey there. Your mom's just getting ready."

It took Maria a moment to absorb the import of this. When she did, she gave forth with what Jim would have described as a wail: "Mo-o-om!"

Amy was at her bedside mirror threading a pair of hoop earrings when her daughter marched in to demand of her, "Okay, what's going on?"

"Going on?" she echoed, in as innocent a tone as she could muster on such short notice. "Why, what could be going on?"

"What's the Lone Ranger doing out there?"

Amy had known this moment would come sooner or later. "You mean Jim? Well, the two of us have a dinner date, if that meets with your approval." In back of her own reflection she caught sight of Maria's, peevish and sulky. This got Amy's back up. "No, you know, actually it doesn't matter if you approve or not, because I'm the parent here." She grabbed her coat from a chair.

"You told me you'd stopped seeing each other."

"Did I? I suppose I did. Well, we've started again. We've been out for drinks a couple of times."

"You didn't tell me."

"No," Amy said. With that, she walked out. Maria followed her out to the front, where Jim was waiting. He rose as she entered. "All ready, steady?" she said, winking at him. "Let's do it."

Jim grinned. "You look mighty apprehendable."

Amy gave the appearance of blushing (except for the actual blush). "Oh, I bet you say that to all the felons." Eeew, thought Maria. She made a silent vow never to flirt past the age of 30.

Jim turned his grin on her. "Some day soon, you and I'll have to sit down and have us a chat."

"Preparing my alibi already."

Jim chuckled unconvincingly. He and Amy moved together to the door. "Don't wait up for us," Amy enjoined Maria. When did I ever? thought Maria—and then she thought, Us? The two went out, and Maria watched through a window as Jim held the car door open with the smooth air of a Southern gentleman. Amy made little flirting gestures with her fingers and dangled them for him to kiss, which he did with the same genteel air while she giggled and simpered. Eeew, Maria thought again. How did people become grown-ups, anyway? Was it due to some kind of virus? Could she escape somehow?

Michael had gone for a walk, partly to shake her from his mind, but also with a larger purpose, for which he had planned it in the first place. His first destination was the public library. The distance to it was not so great (compared with what was to follow), and he covered it in about an hour.

On arriving, he stopped in front of the building and crouched down on the lawn. With a wave of his hand, he changed a section of the grass to unplanted dirt, and with a second wave he made it level. He took from his jacket the replica map and unfolded it on the ground. Then he took out a small canvas sack and poured into his hand what it contained: the five yellow stones.

Only now they were glowing blue. Am I doing that? he asked himself. But he knew better instantly. "It's the place, isn't it?" he said. "You guys are picking up something from it." From having them with him most of the time, he had formed a habit of talking to them as companions (though the conversations were inevitably one-sided.) "Yeah, I feel it too. Something here plugs into the Balance. Or is the Balance—whatever the Balance is. That's what these places have in common." Maria had said there was something, and had been right; momentarily Michael looked forward to sharing the discovery with her, and then remembered.

Above him hung the shining V that he had earlier identified, by an intuitive flash, as the constellation of Aries. He kept meaning to confirm this identification with Liz, who was taking astronomy, but he had not gotten around to it yet. Looking from the map to its celestial original above, he re-oriented it so that the two were in the same alignment. Of the six sites on the map, all located in and around Roswell, and all (he now believed) having to do with the Balance, the library was the only one that was known; tonight he would go hunting for the others.

He reviewed the map again. The symbol with the parentheses marked where he was; the one nearest it was the miniature solar system, which lay south southwest. Whatever it was, if he walked far enough in that direction he would hit it. But how far would he have to walk? He had no way of gauging the scale of the map. "But Roswell ain't all that big," he said. Nor was it—by the measure of, say, Santa Fe or Albuquerque.

Suddenly he glimpsed something out of the corner of his eye—a flicker, a shift of light—which prompted him to look at the big library sign: "Basic Binary," it read. That's wrong, he thought. He looked away and then back. "Public Library," it read now; the words were back to normal. He must have been seeing thing—and no wonder. He returned the stones to their sack, pocketed it along with the map, and then began walking as the crow flies, or nearly. Passing below a row of twin-headed street lamps in their identical curlicued holders, he did not notice that each pair in turn flared up and dimmed as he moved into their light and out again—no doubt the work of the stones, still charged, still as if alive.

Two blocks on he came to a row of houses that lay squarely in his path. Such a possibility had never occurred to him. He considered blazing a trail through them (literally) but decided against it. Instead he circled around and took up his course again on the other side. Presently another row of houses blocked him, he circled around again, and then he confronted a labyrinth: the streets ran seemingly in all directions, except the one he wanted. He realized this was how it was in a city, even ain't-all-that-big Roswell. He pressed on nevertheless, trying to hold to south southwest by using the figure in the sky as a compass, but he could not tell how far he had deviated to one side or the other; for all he knew, he might have strayed outside the map's precincts altogether.

So it was a happy surprise for him when he hove into sight of a likely landing, the Roswell soap factory, which had been the site of a notorious police raid earlier in the year, and a city landmark since the turn of the century. He reached confidently for the stones—and found to his dismay that they were not glowing, even a little; this was not the right place.

In front of him stood a bronze marker on a concrete stand with a facade of cracked stone. "Roswell Soap Factory," read the inscription. "Opened 1899. Closed 1948." The building behind had reopened later as a different kind of factory, and then closed again, at least a generation before Michael, yet for various reasons had never been torn down. It stirred his curiosity—but only as a matter of local history; it was not what he was looking for tonight.

He was ready to leave, resuming his quest, when something unexpected happened: the stand began to vibrate. From vibrating, it went to quivering, and from quivering to quaking. Michael took a step back, and then another.

What happened next he would not have believed if he had been human. The stand began to swell up as if air were being pumped into it, enlarging in every direction, but from side to side the most, until it attained a width of twelve feet. And as it enlarged it also changed shape, becoming—there was no mistaking it—a giant bar of soap. Michael could almost have laughed at the sight, but it felt like nothing to laugh at. Then the monstrosity began bubbling, furiously and obscenely; lather drooled down its sides and streamed away across the ground. And Michael knew who was doing it. "Where are you?" he called out.

"Where's who?" a voice answered him. It came from a few yards behind him, and it was not Clay's voice. But then, Clay—that is, Nasedo—could be anybody. Michael swung round with his fists clenched.

When he saw who it was, he unclenched them. It was possible she was Nasedo in another form, but somehow he knew she was not. "Topolsky," he said, and then corrected himself: "Excuse me, Agent Topolsky." She was alone, and unarmed. He had not expected to see there, but that was only because he had not seen her recently; if she was now back in circulation, she would be as apt to pop up there as anywhere else. The black Impala that had brought her, but whose approach he had never heard, was standing athwart the entrance to the parking lot.

The former high school teacher and undercover agent regarded her former student and surveillance target in a strangely provocative manner, which he remembered as typical of her. "Michael Guerin," she said. "Of all people." That made it sound as if the two of them had previously enjoyed a special rapport, whereas to his recollection they had only spoken two or three times. "Who were you talking to just now?" she asked.

"Myself."

"Yourself," she repeated skeptically. "You do realize it's past curfew? You're not supposed to be here."

"Then I'll leave."

"No." She touched his sleeve lightly. "Not yet." She moved her eyes to the marker. It had returned to its former shape, but a coat of snow-white froth painted the stand and the ground around it. "Did you do this?" She answered herself. "No, I don't believe you did. What do you know about it?"

Michael smiled. "You first."

"I know nothing. Since I was relieved of my teaching assignment, the Bureau's been keeping me in the dark."

"I thought you liked the dark. Isn't that why you took the job?"

"I took the job—" She stopped. "Story for another day. And you wouldn't believe me, anyway."

"Do I have reason to?"

"Perhaps not." She faced him eye to eye. "Michael, it was never you and your friends we were after. Oh, for a while the sheriff had a cockeyed idea that Max might be this serial killer we're tracking—"

"Nasedo," Michael automatically filled in. Too late, he realized his slip.

"Nasedo? What kind of a name is that?"

"Mesaliko. But it's more like a title. It means 'visitor.'" Liz's pedantry had proved useful , after all.

"'Visitor.' Appropriate—wouldn't you agree?"

Michael deflected her probe without meaning to, by taking the discussion on a different route. "And if there are other 'visitors,' they must all be like him, right?" His accumulation of resentments was starting to show.

"No, one killer doesn't make a race of killers. Or where would humans be?" She ran her eye along the trail of foam, as if seeking a pattern in it. "You know, I've had a couple of—setbacks lately. One of them was engineered by your friends—not that I'm blaming them for it. But you owe me in a way." I owe you nothing, Michael thought. But he figured she knew that as well as he did. "You can help me recover my credibility," she concluded.

"You mean with your FBI buddies?"

"Not only that." She was speaking almost in a whisper. "And to make it work I need information—information you have, or can get."

Was she trying to recruit him to be her snitch? This was as fantastic as the metamorphosis he had just witnessed; life just kept getting stranger and stranger. He was too busy processing the discovery to do other than answer her truthfully. "Ms. Topolsky, right now I'm not sure what I know. Let alone who I can trust."

This was approximately what she had expected to hear. And she knew the feeling herself. "All right—for now. Come on, I'll drive you home."

"I'll walk."

"Can't." She tapped her wrist meaningfully. "Curfew."

Elsewhere in the area, the same city ordinance that obliged Michael to accept her offer was being applied to a different purpose: to give the sheriff exclusive domain over an area it had taken him nearly an hour to reach: a circular plateau off 285 south, named (for no reason known to anybody now living) Angels' Ground. It was the favored parking spot of the town's high school students—others too, but them mainly—and a small fleet of cars and pick-ups was to be seen there until all hours every Friday and Saturday night, in flagrant violation of the law. Usually the law looked the other way, but tonight, unexpectedly, a beige Range Rover with a county insignia on its doors appeared over the crest of the drive and wheeled to a stop.

The whole parking area, which had lain tranquil to all appearances, whatever might have been going on in the car seats, instantly sprang to life. Engines revved up, headlights blinked on, cars slunk away one by one, leaving the place entirely to the couple in the Rover, and nobody else. "So this was why you brought the squad car," said Amy.

Jim was looking pleased with himself. "Could be."

"You enjoy having this kind of power. Admit it!"

"Kinda. Don't you?" Amy nodded, laughing.

He pulled up at the edge of the rim overlooking the town and he shut off the engine. After the last of the exiles had passed out of hearing, the two of them sat taking in the quiet around them and the starry dome overhead. "Haven't been here since I was in my teens," said Amy. "Late teens—but still."

"And they still come. It's a Roswell tradition. Do you happen to know if Maria and her boyfriend...?"

"Jim! Would she tell me? And if she did, would I tell you?"

He made a sound of assent. "How much do you know about that kid?" He tried, as with Kyle, to make the question sound casual.

"Michael? I had my doubts about him, I must say. But, Jim, he's a good kid. Hard-working—supporting himself, going to school—and he cares a great deal for Maria." It was fortunate for Michael she had not heard their last conversation.

"Don't you think he's a little secretive?"

"Aren't they all? How about yours?"

"Yeah, but that one's my fault. He sees me getting like his granddad, so he writes me off, same as I wrote Senior off after he got to be such a sorehead—always fighting with everybody, always squawking. Now I'm like him. I want to know, like he did. Want it too much sometimes."

"To know what?"

Jim realized he had said more than he should have. He tried to laugh it off. "Know where to find the best-looking gal in town, is what. Hey, wait! She's right here." He reached over and touched her cheek softly.

Amy liked that. But she was about to be so easily sidetracked. "Is that why were you asking me about Michael before?"

"Was I?"

"You know, the secretive one?"

Jim made a special effort to keep his face composed. "Don't recall that. Sure you heard me right?"

Amy grew quiet. "You know, I put up with a lot in my first—" She reddened. "In my marriage," she amended. "For Maria's sake I did. But one thing I can't accept is being a—device." This elicited a quizzical look from him. "A means of getting information," Amy explained. "Especially information about my daughter and my daughter's friends. If I found out you were using me that way, I'd consider it a betrayal—of us both." She eyed him hopefully. "You're not, are you?"

He was not—or at least not in a way that mattered—but her guess was accurate enough to instill a measure of discomfort, which Jim masked with a laugh. "Come here, best-looking gal, ya." He pulled her closer to him.

"You didn't answer me," she said. But she let him kiss her. For the rest of the evening—and it lasted a long while—Michael did not figure in their thoughts again.

Back at home, he lay wishing for sleep, but memories prevented it, a swarm of them (they always attacked in swarms), too numerous to fend off all at once:

...He was out on the desert, under a moon and stars he was seeing for the first time. He was naked and cold, and knew nothing beyond what he could see and feel. Two others, who had not become Max and Isabel yet, also naked and presumably also cold, were exploring more bravely, venturing out onto the black strip that cut through the plain. On it a monster approached. He heard its roar, saw its shining yellow eyes and the beam they cast onto the other two. They cried to him, wordlessly, but he hid behind a rock and stopped his ears and would not come. When he unstopped them, he heard the roar no more. When he peered out, he saw the monster had gone, and had taken them with it...

"Come back!" he cried—cried it now, as he had not been able to then, because he lacked the words. "Don't leave me! I don't want to be alone!" The tenant in the next apartment thumped on the wall for him to be quiet.

...He was standing in the middle of the strip, waiting for another monster—waiting in hope, without understanding what it was; waiting longer than he would ever be willing to wait again. At last he saw it in the distance, galloping toward him, and he raised his arms in welcome. Its yellow eyes got bigger and bigger, brighter and brighter, until they blinded him and made the rest of the world—the only world he knew so far—disappear.

...He was sitting alone on a cot, wearing a shirt that hung to his knees, in a dim room with bare concrete walls. He ran out the door into a hall with walls as bare as the room's, and headed for another door at the far end. A man in uniform grabbed him by the neck and dragged him back. He tried to struggle free, and was knocked down for his trouble; he picked himself up, started for the door again, and was knocked down again. And again and again, as many times as it took, until hope—which he now understood—was gone...

"What is this place?" he asked, ten years too late for an answer. "Where are the people who are supposed to look out for kids? How does it happen you can do this to me?"

...He was changing hands, like a package, as a roll of bills changed hands in the opposite direction. He was outside, next to a high wall with barbed wire along the top, and the man in uniform was handing him over to—Hank. He had found his monster. He ran again, and was knocked down again, this time by the man who had bought him to be his son...

"You taught me what this world is like," he said, though Hank was no longer around to hear. "It's a prison, and I'm the prisoner."

...He was doing the chores—all of them, Hank's as well as his own—and getting smacked for doing them wrong, or doing them slowly, or for any reason at all. He could not fight Hank and win—or had not yet discovered that he could. So he fought other boys instead.

...He was pinned down, being pounded on by an opponent who outsized him; pounded so hard and so fast he could not hit back. He thought of his favorite toy, almost his only toy, a floppy puppy. Hank had not bought it for him; not Hank; another family had moved out and left it behind. It was so soft, so harmless and squeezeable; if only the arm hammering at him was like that!

—and suddenly it was. The arm went limp and spongy. The older boy screamed. Michael quickly undid what he had done (though the arm was never quite the same after that). But the boy had seen, and so had the onlookers; they all backed off. And they kept backing off.

...And Michael got smacked for it—once for the fighting, once for scaring the other kids, and twice for scaring Hank. The others spread the story around school, so that soon even those who did not believe it shied away from him. Occasionally he would run into a new kid who had not heard it and would be spoiling for him, and they would fight and Michael would win, and get smacked and shunned again, until finally he stopped fighting...

"What's the point?" said the grown Michael, the final product of these tribulations. "No matter how many times you win, in the end they beat you down."

...And their faces paraded before him, the faces of all his tormentors. "You guys, it's been great," he said. "No, seriously."

Long past curfew, he returned to the place where he had left his invitation for the one he had looked to see and had now seen. Tonight he looked to see him again—and perhaps vice versa. He could not have said when the figure first appeared at the border of the library lawn; he might have been there all along.

Michael spoke to him from where he was standing, without raising his voice; he knew it was not necessary. "I waited for you," he said. "Night after night I waited, and I prayed. Didn't even know who I was praying to."

"And I came." He did not raise his voice either, yet Michael heard it clearly.

"Yeah, you came. One more disappointment in a whole line of them." He gave a laugh that sounded like the opposite of laughter. "You know who I thought you were?—you'll love this—I actually thought—"

"That I was your father? I am." And suddenly he was standing in front of him, though he had seemed not to move. "You were right, Michael. You felt it because it's so."

Michael wanted to believe, in spite of everything that had happened between them, but he also resisted believing; he did not want to be fooled another time. "Then why didn't Max feel it? Or Isabel?"

"There's nothing for them to feel. I'm your father, not theirs. You are my only son." He smiled. "In whom I am well pleased."

The scriptural reference passed Michael by, and he would have rejected it anyway. "But you tried to kill me! A father wouldn't..." He stopped, remembering Hank.

"That was to make you fight back. And you hate me for it, don't you?" Michael did not answer; he did not have to. "Good! Nurture that hatred. Use it. But not on me—on them. The ones who've been hurting you all your life—the humans." Michael wondered if Clay could read his memories, which had so recently reasserted themselves.

"You've learned to defend yourself," Clay continued. "That's good. But it's not enough. You've discovered so yourself. You have to strike first—crush them before they crush you. Because they will, given the chance." He paused. "You're right, you can't do it alone." Michael's mind had barely formed the thought. "Join with me, and persuade your friends to do the same. We'll take them on together."

"The four of us against the whole population of Earth? Yeah, that'll work."

"There are others out there waiting to be woken. Or awake but trackless—in need of a leader."

"You?"

"You and I. We'll unite them, and together we'll arm ourselves for the fight to come."

"Arm ourselves how?"

"With the object in your keeping."

"That thing Max found? What is it?" At last he was going to find out.

"A Balancer, it's called. The only one of its kind left. It can multiply our power by a hundredfold."

"Funny, Isabel said the same thing."

"Women sense power. They thrive on it."

"And that's our weapon?"

"Only the part we can see. A channeling device. The greater part lies here beneath us—and in other places, if they can only be found."

"The Balance," said Michael. And the places were those he was hunting for, those from the map; he had surmised correctly about them.

"The Balance," Clay confirmed.

"But the Balance isn't a weapon. It heals. It healed me."

"It does what's it's asked to. Heals or rends, changes water to wine or order to chaos. But you must ask in the proper way. I'll show you how—if you'll just give it to me."

Yet after all of that, in spite of all Clay's efforts, Michael found he was not ready to turn the object over—even if he had had it on him, even if Clay was his father (he could not reach a conclusion on this point).

"Make you a deal," he said. "You tell me how to power it on, and I'll test it. To make sure it's what you say." He was inventing the excuse as he went along, and sounded like it. "Meanwhile I'll let you have the stones." After all, they had been Nasedo's to start with. And in the absence of a real bargaining chip, they were the closest thing he had.

"You've got stones? A special kind of stones?"

"That's what the ladies tell me." From the upswing in Clay's voice, it had been clear he had not known about the stones, that they were not his. This meant the story was more complicated than Michael had thought, and the stones more important to it. He repented now of his offer, and so was trying to pass it off as a joke.

Clay was not amused, or fooled. "The Stones! And the one—" He censored what he had been about to say. "—and the Balancer! Give them to me!" His desire showed too plainly; realizing this, he made an effort to moderate it, and to imbue Michael with it also. "They'll be ours, yours and mine. And this human colony. We'll conquer and rule it together as father and son."

But it all came too late, and too easy, and Michael believed none of it. "Family enterprise, huh? Gee, thanks for the offer, Dad. But I'd rather stay on my own."

"And the hostiles? Can you defeat them on your own?"

"There've been problems," he admitted. "But a few people have gone out of their way to give me a hand up." He thought of Max's father, Liz's father, Maria's mother. "What have you done for me lately?"

"I've shown you the way."

"Yourway."

"The only way for all our people. As you'll learn in time."

"Not in your time." He turned to go. On the action, a wall of red fire rose up in front of him. "Again?" Michael sighed.

"The Stones! And the Balancer!"

"Not a chance."

He directed his focus to the dancing flames and changed them to fountains of water. Almost at once they changed back. He did the same again, and again they reverted. Fire. Water. Fire. Water. Fire—but this time it rose no higher than his knees; above it, all was water, and the blazing orange tongues bent beneath it. With only a little effort, Michael found he could quash them; at that moment, his power exceeded Clay's. The wall of water pressed down harder and harder on that flaming base, driving it down farther and farther, until it disappeared, leaving the grass was charred black where it had stood.

Clay was hunched over on all fours, his head bowed, his breathing labored. He sat back, took out a small bottle like those Maria had emptied, and shook a few pills into his mouth. Michael stepped up to him and regarded him with a feeling almost of pity, but not quite. "Are you my father?" he asked. "Are you anything to me?"

The answer came between deep breaths. "You have—no father."

And Michael knew it was true; he felt it as he had never felt any kinship to Clay. "Then there's no reason for me not to kill you, is there?" He said it, and he meant it. But now that it had come to this, he was not sure he could, even if he had the power: in the heat of a fight, maybe, but not in cold blood.

Anyhow, Clay seemed not to have heard. He was looking out over the lawn with an expression that might have been fear or hatred or both. Someone else was standing near where he had been standing earlier, but outside the light of the streetlamp. "Who's that?" asked Michael. On receiving no answer, he looked back. The coach was gone, as if the figure had scared him off.

From him Michael had gained some of the facts he had set out to. Some, not all. But the biggest revelation had been the one he had not sought, the one concerning his own origin. "Wouldn't you know?" he said. "I've been searching for somebody who doesn't exist." And now the obvious next question struck him: "If I never had a father, how'd I get here?"

The figure on the lawn was walking toward him. Michael now recognized who he was, and recognized his beige Rover, which was parked on the street behind. Michael did not believe it had been there before. And he did not believe the sheriff was the man he had seen; that one had been tall, like—like who? Michael could not remember. However, Valenti made him uncomfortable enough, showing up so late, and outside his normal shift. "Got a report of a fire on the lawn," he explained. "Thought I better check it out."

It might even have been true. "No fire here."

"No. But you are." Valenti was too tired to be patient. "Listen, I know something's going on." He had picked up hints of it from Topolsky and Wiley. "It feels like..." Like Nasedo, he wanted to say. "Like trouble," he substituted. "Bad trouble. Are you part of it? Or are you just an innocent bystander?"

Michael had been through too much to be intimidated so easily. "To answer that, I'd have to know what it is."

"I think you already do. And I think you better tell me."

Michael gave a shrug. "Sorry."

"You will be if it ends up hurting somebody close to you. Like Maria."

"Your sources missed the latest. We're a dead item."

"Too bad. Seems to me she was a girl worth hanging on to." Great, thought Michael, now I'm getting dating advice from the sheriff. "There has to be somebody in town you care about."

"Yeah, me," he shot back. "That's as much as I can handle right now." He smiled in a way designed to provoke. "Aren't you gonna offer me a ride? It's after curfew, you know."

Valenti let the attitude pass; with kids, sometimes you had to. "Son," he said (it was the last thing he said before returning to the Rover), "you better hope it's not later than that."

Until Valenti had mentioned her, Michael had forgotten entirely about Maria (his night's excursions had succeeded in that purpose at least). But she had not forgotten about him. In fact, she had failed so thoroughly in her efforts to put him out of her mind that he was practically the only thing in it. She had also failed to find any sleep, and the clashing floral patterns on her curtains and bedspreads had been of no help. How could she efface his image from her mind just like that? He was the only boy she had ever dated who looked good in a black leather jacket (the original of which she privately believed to be a piece of alien technology appropriated by humans); he had other positive attributes as well, but that was the one she kept returning to. She hoped against hope that he was thinking of her too.

But Michael's mind was still on the Stones. He stopped by his apartment just long enough to pick them up. "You never were his," he told them. "Somebody made a mistake there. And he's not going to have you either. I'll put you in a place where he'll never look." He laughed to think that all night long, law officers had been chauffeuring him home and ordering him to stay put, and he had been disregarding them and going right out again.

This time he ended up at West Ros, by the big school sign at the top of the steps. He dangled the sack over his head and shouted into space. "Hey, Nasty, you still want these? Then come and get 'em!" He did not expect an answer and received none. "Good. You just try showing your face here again—any one of them."

He knelt and thrust his hand, with the sack still in it, into the sign's solid cement base, which melted before him as he penetrated to its heart. Then he let go of the sack and withdrew his hand. The cement re-hardened after it, encasing what he had left behind. He read again the motto in front of him: "Pathway to Excellence and Integrity." "I could use a pathway about now," he said. Then he left for home, or the closest approximation he had been able to achieve so far in his life.

What he had not seen when he had deposited the sack, and could not see now, was that inside it the Stones were glowing a bright blue.

Episode 1.17X

The Grunewald Paradigm

Night had fallen, but the doctor could not see it, since his lab had no windows.

He slid open a drawer of the file cabinet and removed a creased brown folder, carried it to a lab table, and laid it open, exposing the thick sheaf of browned papers inside. The one on top was a medical form, a blood analysis report; attached to it was the photo of a small boy. The report was typewritten, but in the margin the doctor had penciled a supplemental note: "Non-human—further tests indicated."

As yet Liz knew nothing of the report or the file that contained it, and so for her the arrival of this day was cause for unalloyed rejoicing. It was the day of her release. She got up, bathed, and dressed before dawn and was tiptoeing downstairs quietly (as she thought) when a voice from the stairhead startled her. "Going some place, are we?"

Liz looked up. "Mom! Good morning." Her mother made a noise which was, strictly speaking, incomprehensible but might have been interpreted (and was, by Liz) as "'morning." She had her robe pulled around her, and she looked tired—but not only on account of the hour.

"Yeah," said Liz, "Max is picking me up. We made a date to watch the sunrise together."

"Romantic," Nancy said drily.

"To celebrate the end of my being grounded," Liz volunteered, feeling for some reason the need to explain further.

"Which Max was responsible for in the first place. I hope you haven't lost sight of that."

"But that—he didn't—it was consensual."

She immediately regretted the choice of word. Her mother assumed that straight-laced pose that made Liz cringe, and all the more because it was never fully convincing. "What was consensual?" she asked. "Liz, how far has this gone?"

Liz tightened all over—except in her eyes, where the ire of traduced virtue could be seen simmering. "Mom," she said, "if you really knew me you wouldn't have to ask." She clattered down the rest of the stairs, no longer even trying to be quiet.

"Liz, I'm sorry!" And she was, truly. But it was too late: her daughter was out the door that opened onto the side alley.

Sighing, Nancy returned to her bedroom and lifted a curtain to look down onto Main Street, where Max was waiting, with his motor running. She understood his appeal to her daughter; he was a good-looking kid. She watched somewhat enviously as Liz climbed in beside him and gave him a joyful hug of reconciliation, long deferred and now come to pass. After they disengaged, Max pulled out, cut a U, and sped off down the otherwise vacant street.

Nancy's husband sat up in bed. "Was that Lizzie I heard leaving? Where's she going at this hour?"

"To see the sunrise with her boyfriend."

"That Max kid?" He shook his head. "Typical adolescent goofiness."

"First love, Jeff. You remember what that was like." He looked blank. "No, of course not. How silly of me."

"Well, he'd better get her back in time for her shift. She's got responsibilities, you know."

"And then we tell her?"

Jeff looked like a trapped rabbit. "Well, sure we do, Nance. Absolutely. But we don't want to rush into—it's one of those things that has to be done the right way."

Nancy had had enough of waiting, and of hearing good reasons for it; there always seemed to be an abundance of them. She shut her eyes for a moment and then left for the kitchen, to brew herself a pot of strong coffee. Jeff stayed in bed a long time, regretting a few oversights of the recent (and not so recent) past, and trying to motivate himself to get up.

Outside the city limits, Max and Liz found themselves a comfortable seat at the edge of a low bluff with an unobstructed view of the eastern sky. The sun had not yet appeared. In its absence they watched the stars, which had already begun to fade as the sky gave the first promise of day.

Liz snuggled close under Max's chin. "We're ba-ack," she crooned happily. He bent to kiss her hair. At the same time as her senses were indulging the pleasure, her mind (which was never inactive for long) was running on a separate track. "Max?" she said. "You told me you can't shape-shift. But could you shape-shift someone else? The same way you change other things?"

"Never tried. Doubt it."

"What about changing part of someone? Like if I wanted, oh, a little more of this or a little less of that?"

He chuckled. "Do I get a say on which this and that?"

"Max, I'm serious. What are the limits on what you can change and what you can't?"

Max could tell this was one of those times she would not quit. He gave up nuzzling her for the moment to frame a reply. "We don't know. We haven't investigated. It's probably high time we did, but Isabel and Michael—" He checked himself. With Liz, he had to keep remembering not to volunteer information unthinkingly. "Why do you ask?"

"It's a natural question, isn't it?"

He supposed that for her it was. "Since you're curious, some day I'll take you to where we came from, and then you can see for yourself."

Liz noticed he had dropped the subject, but she allowed him to, since this interested her just as much. "And where is that, exactly?" she asked.

Max pointed toward the V shape overhead. "In the vicinity of Aries."

"One of its vicinities, you mean." The correction came out automatically. "But, Max, do you have any idea of the time that would be required for a trip of that magnitude? Given the propulsion systems currently in existence—"

Max was smiling. "You romantic, you."

"I'm romantic! But, I mean, realistically—"

"Did you talk to Kyle like this when you two were dating?"

Liz thought about it. "No, not for long. His face would get this kind of waxy look—" She glanced at him. "That's the one!"

Max adjusted his expression. "All men are brothers."

"Wait a minute." She had just then processed what she had heard a moment before. "Aries? Max, that isn't Aries."

"Sure it is. Michael said it was." This was probably the first time he had cited Michael as an authority on any subject.

"I don't care." She pointed to a spot nearer the horizon. "That's Aries—or that's where it was." Those stars had now disappeared, as had most of the others. "It's a diagonal arc." She stared up at the V, which was still shining out brightly. "I don't know what that is. It's not even supposed to be there."

"But it is," Max pointed out.

"If it were a new star cluster, it would have been in the news. And Mr. Seligman would have mentioned it in class."

Max knew from experience that she could go on indefinitely. "Liz, it doesn't affect us. Let's continue testing our propulsion systems." He began to plant another kiss, but she gently restrained him, with a nod eastward. "What?" Max asked.

"What we came to see. The sunrise."

Max gave it a second's attention. "Yeah, pretty," he said, and then he resumed his advance.

Liz rose. "Sorry, have to get to work."

Max rose after her with a grunt. "Liz, come on. You work for your dad. I'm sure he'd cut you some slack."

"Not where you're concerned. He thinks you're a bad influence on me."

"Do you agree with him?"

"Why else would I be here?" But as she gazed into his eyes she consciously held herself back. If she were not careful, she would lose herself in them—or lose the power to reason, which amounted to the same thing. She allowed him one more kiss, but that was it.

"Then after work?"

"Have to finish my science fair project. And you too, right?"

"Done." He smiled an apology. "Things like that go faster for us."

Throughout her morning shift Liz was still thinking about him, and about herself with him, but her thoughts were not romantic ones. As often happened when she was out of his presence, logic reasserted itself, and sparked a chain of observations, inductions, and hypotheses which gave form to fears she had entertained since the beginning of their acquaintance.

During a rare but welcome lull in the morning's activity, she slow few minutes, she resorted to her fellow server and best friend for advice or, at least, audience. "You think it's safe, what we're doing?" she asked.

"Before the regulars have had their coffee?" said Maria. "Touch and go there."

"No, having these—close encounters we're having. Of the alien-slash-human variety."

"Oh. Yeah." The crush of recent disappointment was evident in her tone.

But Liz was listening only to herself. "Because how much do we know about their physiology? Nothing! I mean, not to be gross or anything, but suppose Michael's—suppose his—"

"Would you stop?" said Maria. Liz had already done so, of her own volition, and was blushing for what she had not said. But Maria continued anyway, in a louder voice. "It's not something I'll ever have to worry about, okay?" Then she stamped off to the back room, leaving Liz—and those patrons close enough to hear—surprised at the heat of her outburst. Later in the day Liz tried to elicit the reason for it, but Maria would say no more.

She carried her silence into the school week, so that for Liz class was relaxing by comparison. After her last period Monday, she retired, as she often did, to the biology lab, where she would unwind by examining some find of hers under the microscope. This afternoon it was a crystal she had left over from her science fair project, and in which she had observed anomalies she had been unable to account for. So thorough was her concentration on it that she did not register the voice addressing her by name, a little more emphatically each time. At last a hand tapped her on the shoulder.

With a start, Liz looked up. Her biology teacher was standing over her. "Sorry, I didn't want to distract you. I tried to get your attention, but apparently you didn't hear."

"No, I was looking into my crystal." She heard her own words. "That sounded strange, didn't it?"

Ms. Quivers smiled understandingly. "Not to me. I know what it is to be caught up in your lab work. If things had gone the way I'd hoped..." She sighed. "But I didn't have the gift."

"What gift is that?"

"The one you have. Limitless curiosity—"

"Everybody has that, don't they?"

"At birth," Ms. Quivers replied. "Only most of us lose it as we get older. You haven't. Coupled with which, you have originality of mind. An unbeatable combination. Which is the reason"—she handed Liz an application form—"that I've nominated you to represent West Ros in the national science bowl."

"Isn't that only for seniors?"

"It's for the most able students. In biology, that's you. Will you do it?"

"Are you kidding?" But she immediately saw a conflict. "How much time does it take to prepare? Because, you know, my family has a restaurant and we're all expected to do our share."

"The school can work around that. And most of the faculty are good about easing up on assignments in the weeks just before. But you'll have to apply yourself. Beware of distractions."

"Liz?"

Both looked toward the doors. "Max!" Liz exclaimed. "I forgot I was supposed to meet you." He smiled wanly. She was aware that she owed him an apology, but she did not offer one; the awareness was swallowed up in an absorbing but impersonal curiosity that she had transferred, without knowing it, from the crystal to him—as if she were observing him through the microscope.

She was not smiling at him, and neither was Ms. Quivers, though for a different reason. Max shifted his feet nervously as Liz began to collect her things. "Don't forget about tomorrow." Ms. Quivers reminded her, pointing to the notice she had written in a corner of the chalkboard. "You're signed up as a monitor."

"Oh, right. 7:30 a.m."

"Do your other teachers know?"

"I showed them my pass." Then Liz had one of her perennial bright ideas. "Hey, Max could be one too. I could use some help."

"We have all the volunteers we can use. Ask one of them."

"Sure, I just thought—"

"No, Liz."

Liz felt rebuked, but did not quite know why. "See you tomorrow, then."

"And don't forget to fill out the application."

Liz gave a nod as she left while Max held the door for her. He considered telling Ms. Quivers goodbye, but shrugged it off as wasted effort. "I don't think she likes me much," he said, as soon as he was sure the two of them were out of her hearing. "Or doesn't like me being with you."

"She's given you A's on every test, hasn't she?"

"She had to. I got the answers right." This was met with silence; Liz seemed to be preoccupied with some other problem. So Max changed the subject to what had been worrying him all afternoon. "Have you seen Michael lately?"

He had to ask a second time before he got an answer, if one could call it an answer. "You haven't?"

"Not since this morning."

"You don't think that the coach—"

"No, he's gone. All his classes have been reassigned. I was expecting Michael to be happy about it, but he's not. He seems—more confused than usual."

"I think something happened between him and Maria."

"Ah. That explains why he's off humans at the moment. I, however..." He leaned into her. To his surprise, she shied away. "Oh, so now you're off aliens?"

Again she seemed not to hear the question. "Max, how much do you know about your body?"

This was a response he had not expected. Maybe the girls' coach had been giving them one of those talks about their bodies. "Sorry, what?"

"I mean, you've never had a thorough physical, have you?" She answered herself. "Stupid question. Because if you had—"

"Once, at the orphanage. Both of us."

"Did they find out about—? You know."

"Apparently not. Anyway, nothing came of it. The doctor left soon after that."

"So we have no reliable data on your physiological processes."

Max smiled. "Any particular process you're interested in?"

He took another bob at her; she evaded him again. "Max, I'm—"

"Serious, I know. But we've been apart for so long. I'm feeling incredibly—affectionate. Thought you would be too."

And so she would have been, if not for the mental cold showers she had been imposing on herself. "Of course," she said, not sounding affectionate at all. "But first we should make sure that we're—that our..." Her cheeks reddened.

"Bodies?" Max offered.

"Bodies," Liz agreed, "yes. That they're..." She searched for another word than the only one that occurred to her.

Max came to her aid again. "Physically compatible?" She nodded soberly. "Liz, you and I have been over this. I'm completely human—well, almost."

"Almost," she repeated significantly. "And how do we know that for sure?"

"I can feel it."

"People feel lots of things, Max. No one's done a comprehensive analysis. If your blood is abnormal, there are bound to be other abnormalities—in the circulation system, the respiratory system... These factors don't exist in isolation." She sighed wistfully. "Wish I could study you in biology lab."

"Cut me up, you mean?"

"Of course not. You can't dissect someone until they're dead." The fact set her pondering. "Which poses a serious obstacle to research because—"

"Liz!" Max waved her back. "You're not talking to me now."

"What? No, sorry." But eight tenths of her mind was still fixed on the research dilemma.

"You do still want my help tomorrow morning? To carry in your science project?"

This temporarily reclaimed her attention. "You're not backing out now?"

"No, just reminding you that you'll need me in one piece. In case you're harboring plans to the contrary."

"Funny man." She punched his arm lightly. Then she returned to her pondering, and Max left her to it.

The next morning the two of them, along with every other student who was taking science (which is to say, nearly every student), descended on the school gym bearing the fruits of their labors—some whole, some in separate pieces to be assembled on site. From the entrance to the rear ran long rows of folding tables for the exhibits; at the head of each row was stationed a monitor, like Liz, to point the entrants to the proper sections and the available tables. Each monitor wore a chest tag that identified him or her by subject; Liz's read "Biology."

Upon arriving, she searched the rows for a sign to match her own. Max followed with a cardboard box labeled as containing coffee creamer (Liz had pirated it away from the restaurant). It was so large that as he entered the aisle he could not help bumping corners with another bearer, this one in the employment of Pam Troy. "Sorry, Kyle," said Max.

Kyle's eyes moved from Max's burden to his own. "Look at us," he said. "A pair of mindless slaves at the mercy of hot-looking babes."

Max's lips thinned in disapproval. "I don't know that I'd put it exactly like that."

"Max!" called Liz. "Down here!"

"Kyle!" called Pam. "Down here!"

Kyle grinned, as if his point were proven, and the two boys proceeded down the aisle, Kyle taking the lead, to the tables the girls had picked out. These were close enough to each other so that as Liz was assembling her exhibit she heard Pam complain, "God, I hate this science stuff. It's so—scientific." Kyle flashed Liz a wry smile, of a kind she remembered from their months of dating. At his best, he was funny to be with; she just wished he were not so...guy-like.

Max had left to fetch his own project from the Jeep. As Liz returned to setting up her own, she was sidetracked again, this time by a voice in the next aisle over. She recognized it as belonging to the astronomy teacher. "What did I stress to you in class repeatedly?" he was saying. "That I'm looking for real science, not pseudo-science. No UFOs, no alien abductions, no X files—"

"But, Mr. Seligman, I thought—" a smaller voice began.

"You didn't think, Nicky. That's your problem. You realize if the papers got hold of this I'd be a laughing stock to science teachers nationwide? 'Well, he's from Roswell. What do you expect?' You've earned yourself a big fat F today. Now get this tabloid garbage out of here." He left with his head down, as if to shun being seen, so he was not looking where he was going, and ran into Liz, who had stepped out into the cross-aisle to speak to him. Mr. Seligman was much flustered by the encounter. "Liz! Oh, dear! My profound apologies. I can't imagine where my head was. Did I hurt you?"

His embarrassment spread to her, as embarrassment had a way of doing, but Liz pulled them both out of it by broaching the subject she had wanted to consult him about. "So what about this new star cluster?" she said brightly.

"New star cluster? What new star cluster?"

"The one shaped like a V. It's at the zenith right now."

"Not in this hemisphere, it isn't."

"But you must have seen it!" Yet even as she said so, she knew otherwise.

"Ms. Parker, I watch the sky faithfully every night, and I can assure you, if any new object had manifested itself I'd be the first to be aware of it. Whatever you thought you saw, trust me, it was definitely not stars."

He went on, leaving Liz more mystified than before. Was it possible the stars—no, not stars, seeming stars—manifested themselves only to teens through some hormonal hypertrophy of the senses? But Mr. Seligman would have dismissed this as pseudo-science too.

Her eye lit on the exhibit he had condemned. Curiosity, and three or four steps, brought her to a closer view of it. The heading froze her where she stood. "Space Child," it read, "Where Are You Now?" Underneath were arranged some photos and documents on midnight-blue posterboard. Liz started forward to examine them.

Almost at once a girl interposed herself—a tall, droopy-lidded girl clutching an exhibit on a wooden base, one of whose corners kept threatening to stab Liz in the eye. "You the monitor for biology?" she asked. "The guy over there"—she gestured vaguely—"said you were." Liz pointed to her tag. "Where's this go?" asked the girl. Even as Liz led the way, she could not help glancing back at the thing she wanted to examine. After finding a space for the girl's exhibit, she started back in that direction.

But the girl was not ready to let her go. "Should it have my name on it?" she asked.

"And your teacher's." Liz pointed to the next exhibit over. "That's the format you should follow." She tried to leave again.

"You got a marker?"

"Sorry, no."

"You're the monitor and you don't got a marker?"

"Ask at the front table."

"Where's that?"

"Where my finger's pointing." She left the girl only partially comprehending, but had concluded that this was her everyday state, beyond her own power to cure. She headed back toward the space-child exhibit, almost frantic by now to see what was in it.

—or had been in it: the exhibit was gone, and the space it had occupied was empty. Peering around, Liz spied it tucked under the arm of a tall, thin boy, presumably its creator, heading for the hall door, where the big trash barrel was located. She hared after him, dodging other students with armloads of their own, and caught him up at the barrel just as he was about to consign his creation to its depths.

"Don't!" Liz shouted.

The boy halted, staring at her. "Huh? Why not?"

Liz realized she knew him, a little. "Nicky—Grunewald, right? You're one of the Whits, Alex's band. We met in his garage—or somebody's garage."

"Yeah, garage is where this should have stayed too." He whacked it a hard one. "Bought me an F. Why shouldn't I dump it?"

Liz tried extemporizing, a skill at which she had never been adept. "Sorry, my mistake. I thought you had mine."

Nicky had the board positioned so she could now see it clearly: the items on it included a photo of the 1947 crash site, a photograph of a child's tracks in the desert, a blood analysis with the subject's name blacked out and the penciled note "Non-human—further tests indicated"... "Oh, my God," Liz blurted out.

Nicky took it as another slam. "This was my dad's idea, you know. How many times have I told people, you're right, he is nuts? And the one time I go along with him... I musta been nuts myself."

"He gave you these things?"

"They're just copies. The originals are in his files."

"Where did he get them?"

She was conscious that she had no business asking, but Nicky seemed willing to answer. "Where he used to work. At the old county orphanage." Liz's worry mushroomed into alarm; she knew that was where Max and Isabel had been taken after they were found wandering in the desert. "He thought a few of the kids were—well, what it says there," Nicky continued. "He won't tell me the details, so I don't ask. But he's been collecting that stuff ever since."

"Does he use it in his lectures? I know he teaches at the community college."

"Nah, nah, that's a whole other thing. This is his—hobby, I guess you'd call it. He calls it research. Every night he disappears into his lab and I don't see him till the next morning."

"He has his own lab?" Her interest on Max's behalf had suddenly merged into a wider stream—and, it must be admitted, a stronger one.

"Used to be a summerhouse, but he had it converted over. Why?"

"Oh, I'm quite the lab rat. What kind of research does he do?"

"Not exactly sure. Blood tests?" Liz felt her heart take a hop. "You'd have to ask him yourself. Doesn't mean anything to me—except an F on this project."

To a straight-A student like Liz, F was never an acceptable option. "Why don't you do another one? It'll be marked down a grade for being late, but—"

"That would take forever."

"Not if I helped you. I could come over tonight."

"But you're in biology." He pointed at her button. "This is astronomy."

Liz began to suspect him of lacking in imagination somewhat. "I'm also interested in other worlds. In fact, I've done some—field work in that area."

Nicky hunted for the catch. "Well, okay. I mean, thanks—I guess."

"But I want a favor in return from you."

His guard went up; so this was it. "Yeah, what?" he asked warily.

"I want you to introduce me to your father."

"Is that all? Why would you want to meet him for?"

"Like you said." Liz smiled. "To ask him myself."

Just then she spied Max approaching and quickly doubled over the posterboard so that only the bare side showed. "Stash this in your locker," she ordered Nicky.

"Aw, what's the point?" He stuffed it into the barrel with a vengeance as Liz watched, unable to stop him or, after he left, to retrieve it herself—because there was Max.

Fortunately he had been paying no attention. "Excuse me, Ms. Monitor?" He held out the box containing his exhibit, which concerned rabbit farming. (Liz had no idea what had led him to choose the subject; like Nicky with his father, she had chosen not to ask.) "I need you to put me in my place," he said. Liz managed a weak smile. Sometimes Max's humor was so—Max-y. As she led him to a table she cast an eye back at the discarded posterboard. She had to finish reading that blood analysis.

With the science fair continuing all day, she was unable to get to it again until the late evening. She had persuaded Alex into being her wheel man, for which purpose he had borrowed his father's red Volvo. They found the doors to the building locked as expected, but Liz had a master key. Alex scowled as she used it. "Should you really be doing this?" he asked.

"Ms. Quivers loaned me the key. I sort of forgot to give it back."

"Yes, one sees you can do it. The question on the table is—"

"Do you know a better way to get in?" Alex, who believed she was still missing the point, fell silent.

Silent was the hall also, except for a loud rumble which Alex ascribed hopefully to the air conditioning. When Liz opened the door to the gym, she saw the trash barrel where it had been—but empty. "S-word," she said with feeling as she shut the door back.

Alex raised an eyebrow. "Liz, you shock me." Then the rumble came again, this time from around the corner, where the hall extended to the right. The two of them went to look. They saw no one there, but halfway down the hall an object was sitting on the floor outside the janitor's closet. Liz gave a little cry. "Is that it?" asked Alex. She nodded. He quickly fetched it and brought it back. "Now let's get the hell out of here."

One of the office doors swung open to discharge a canvas trash cart—the source of the rumble they had heard, and now heard again—and behind it emerged the janitor called Pete, whom Michael and Maria had seen and failed to recognize on the Saturday before. Seeing the object in Alex's hands, he smiled. "You came for it, then. Knew someone would."

"Did you?" Alex asked uncertainly.

"That's why I laid it aside."

Alex cocked his head at Liz, and they started out. Then she remembered her manners and looked back to say, "Thank you." Pete nodded and smiled again.

Not until they reached the steps did she stop to look at the exhibit. "Oh, no!" she cried. "The blood analysis is missing! We have to go find it." She started back.

"Whoa there! Where would you look?"

"We could ask the janitor."

"Mr. Creepy? He might have taken it himself."

"Somebody did. But who else—" She did not have to finish the thought. "Nasedo!"

"Liz, the fact to focus on is, it's not here. Come on, before the security guard finds us"—he knew there was always one around—"and asks what we're doing here."

"We'll tell him we're picking up our science project."

"Oh, uh-huh?" He pointed to the name. "Which one of us will be Nicky?"

"Okay," she admitted, dragging out the word reluctantly, and with her eyes still on the gym building all the while. On returning them to the front, she found Alex had not waited for her vote; he was halfway down the steps, and carrying with him what they had come there to collect. Liz hurried down the steps after him.

Once home, he left her in the garage examining their recovery by a work table lamp while he went to fetch something from the house. A few minutes later he returned through the connecting door. "I wanted to show you this," he said. He had a magazine in his hand, and he held it up for her to see.

The title of it was UFO Enquirer. The cover showed a bulbous-headed extraterrestrial pawing a scantily clad Earth girl, in illustration of the feature article "Earth—Alien Spawning Ground?" Liz showed her annoyance at being distracted from the business at hand by what Mr. Seligman had termed "tabloid garbage." "Your dad actually reads this stuff?" she said.

"You should see his den. Lined with it. But you're missing the important part." He pointed out the name that was attached to the article: Dr. Otto Grunewald. Liz's eyes widened. Instantly she snatched the magazine out of his hand and began riffling through it. "Obviously a crackpot," Alex commented.

Liz skimmed the first part of the article. "I'm not so sure. Sounds like he knows his facts."

"Facts?"

Liz looked up. "One fact, he's definitely cognizant of. The date on that blood analysis that's missing was the day after Max's birthday."

"So he—knows when Max was born?"

"Oh, nobody knows when Max was born. His 'birthday,' so-called, is the date he was admitted to the orphanage."

Alex puzzled over this. "Then Isabel's birthday should be the same, yes?"

"It was. Mr. Evans had it changed to her date of adoption so she could have a birthday of her own. But the point"—occasionally Alex tended to miss the point of things, and she had to spell it out for him—"is that Max was the child in that display. Which was Dr. Grunewald's idea. He knows about him, and about Isabel." She slapped the magazine shut. "I need to borrow this."

"Nothing doing! If my dad notices it's gone—"

"He won't miss just one." She rolled it up and stuffed it into her purse.

Alex questioned both the assertion and the likelihood of the magazine's returning to him in something like its present condition. "Careful with that! It's collectible."

Liz stood and slung the purse over her shoulder. "Look, Alex, Max doesn't know any of this. Please don't say anything to him or to Isabel."

"I would think it concerns them most."

"It does, yeah. But I—I need to gather more data first." Alex looked doubtful. He did not like the idea of withholding such news from them, especially from Isabel, and a hunch informed him that the reason Liz had given for having to do so was not the only one, or the main one. "Please, Alex," she said. "For me?" This nearly always worked with him, and so it did now; finally he nodded. But he still looked doubtful.

When Liz knocked at the Grunewalds' door that evening, it was Nicky who answered it. He was obviously pleased to see her there. "You came!" he said.

"We kind of arranged it," she reminded him.

"You bet. Come on in!"

Liz had never before seen the inside of his house, only the garage, and it interested her as houses always did, her family being without one of its own. This one must have been handsome originally, but it was past due for a fixing-up; the walls needed patching and repainting, and the carpet— She looked back at Nicky to find him grinning at her in a way that made her slightly uncomfortable. "So what do we have to do?" he asked.

Liz had an answer prepared. "You can start by introducing me to your father."

Nicky led her through the house and the yard to an outbuilding at the rear. He leaned on the heavy fire door, pushed it open, and called in. "Dad?"

Steps led down into a long white-walled room, immaculately kept, in sharp contrast to the main house. Liz could not help being impressed. The room contained everything a well-appointed lab ought to have: sinks, counters, tables, racks, and an array of experimental equipment, plus a refrigerator and a freezer. It also looked as though at one time it might have doubled as a doctor's office: one corner was taken up with an examining table and a cabinet of medical supplies.

"Yes?" said a voice behind them, close enough to make her start. She turned to stare into a face older and gentler than she had imagined, though the suddenness of its appearance had momentarily wiped her preconceptions from her mind.

"Dad," said Nicky, "this is Liz. The girl I told you about."

"Charmed." Dr. Grunewald extended his hand.

Liz took it. "Good to meet you." There followed an awkward silence, and she did not hesitate to jump into it. "Would you mind if I asked you a few questions about your research?" She turned to Nicky. "This'll only take a few minutes."

"Sure, go ahead." Liz stared at him until he realized she was waiting for something more from him. "Oh, right, I get it. I'll just..." He pointed vaguely toward the house and backed out with as much grace as he could muster for his guest's benefit.

"Please shut the—" his father began, but too late, and he went to shut it himself. "Well," he said, returning to her, "and what is it you wish to know of me?" His speech had retained, to a degree, the flavor of his native tongue.

"Nicky tells me you're investigating—" She hazarded a guess. "Blood conditions?"

Grunewald widened his eyes. "And this interests you?"

"Oh, I'm very heavily into blood." She did not like the sound of this. "I mean, the whole field of microbiology, I find absolutely fascinating. It's going to be my career, you know."

"With a specialization in hematology?"

"Oh, that's definitely an area of interest. Of course, by the time I'm through with college, I'll know where the new ground's being broken, and I'll have a better idea of the specific course I intend to pursue."

Grunewald could not suppress a smile. "You sound as if you were applying for employment."

Liz sighed. "I know, it's how I talk." But that gave her an idea. "Though, since you mention it, if you did need somebody to help out here, it'd be great experience for me. If you needed somebody. To help out. Here."

The doctor was studying her, rather as she had studied Max the previous day, like a specimen under the microscope. When he was done, he clapped his hands together, startling her. "What an excellent suggestion," he said. "When can you start?"

"Right away!" Then she remembered. "But not tonight. I'm helping Nicky do a new science fair project. His first one—"

"Yes, I heard about that. My fault, I'm afraid." His eyes lit up. "But wait!" He withdrew to a closet at the rear and rummaged there while Liz, taking his command literally, waited where she was. Finally Grunewald brought out what looked like a shelf with things attached. "Proof one should never toss anything away, eh? I built this myself when I was in school." He carried it to one of the counters and pointed to a paper-towel dispenser over the sink. "Fetch me a brace of those, will you?"

Once thus equipped, he proceeded to wipe the dust from the object while Liz watched; he did not ask her to help, and so she had plenty of time to examine the object closely. It was a frame fashioned from what might have been coat-hanger wire, with three small balls stuck to the ends; two of them could be swiveled in and out of alignment with the third. A backboard provided supporting text and diagrams. "A lunar eclipse in miniature," Grunewald explained. "And by happy coincidence, another is due next month—revise these dates and, voila! What do you think of that?"

Liz was thinking that it would save her and Nicky an RV-load of work, but she did not like to say so. "I'm sure this will make Nicky very happy."

"And restore me to his good graces perhaps. After today he'll never again take my work seriously." He paused deliberately. "Ah, but do you, I wonder?"

The question took Liz off guard, as Grunewald must have intended; as she spoke he appeared to be studying her reactions. "I don't really know that much about it," she began. Then she realized that this was her big chance and she had to take it, even if it meant losing the place she had just gained. "Except—well, except for this." Her heart was in her throat as she pulled out the magazine and unrolled it to show to him.

Rather than angry, he seemed somewhat embarrassed. "Ah, yes, well. Have you read it?"

"Yeah," Liz admitted. "Well, some of it."

"Then you will be aware that it's nonsense. Not utter nonsense—I take care to propose nothing that may not be true. However, on the other side, there's little to say that it is. The merest speculation." He sighed. "Not that they care, of course." He walked over to a picture on the wall, a blow-up of himself at a lectern on an outdoor stage with a multitude gathered around him. "Thisis my readership—the true believers, ready to soar on any wind of affirmation that blows their way. Yet, say what you will of them, they're the ones who keep the flame alive. Therefore it is to them that I address myself—today. One day it will be otherwise, and then..." He noticed Liz move closer to the photo for a better look. "Something in it interests you?"

She pointed to one of the multitude, a blonde girl in her teens, with pretty but angular features. "I could swear I've seen her before."

"You probably have. That was taken near here, at a convocation held to mark the fortieth anniversary of the—celebrated event. You'd have been a child then."

"I remember the crowds. And..."

"What?"

"It sounds silly. I remember feeling expectant. Excited and expectant. Not about the event, but something else." She laughed. "Figure that one out."

Grunewald tapped his lip. "I should need more data than is presently available."

This brought Max to her mind again. "Yeah, that's just the problem."

"Indeed," the doctor concurred. He too seemed to speaking with a meaning of his own. The two of them studied the picture together.

By the time she and Nicky had finished retouching the planetary model and he drove her back home, the cafe was closed, but Max was standing in the alley at the side door. Liz was less happy to see him than she knew she should be, but why, she could not say. "Who was that?" he asked her, as Nicky zoomed off.

"No one." She did not want him to know about Dr. Grunewald; not yet.

"Funny, it looked like someone." Liz did not reply. "I've been waiting for you. Where you been all this time?"

"I'm working on a—biology project. I'll tell you all about it later. When my findings are conclusive."

"Sounds mysterious." He tried to hug her, but she dodged him. "Something the matter?"

Liz did not know, and did not want to think about it just then. "Tired, is all. 'night." She let herself in with her key and then shut the door between them; shut Max out. He left feeling puzzled and obscurely guilty.

Before he reached the end of the block, a new worry had displaced that one. A figure that looked somehow familiar ran out in front of him with a shout—"Save me, space guy!"—and then out into the street, into the path of an oncoming Jaguar. Behind him a woman screamed. Only when Max saw who she was did he recognize the man. There was no time to prevent the collision—but he had to do something. With a quick power burst, he changed the Jag's front end—or as much as he had time for, starting at the grill and working back—to a softer metal. Combined with the swerve the driver executed at the last minute, it was enough to cushion the impact. The car hit Larry askance and propelled him to the side, but not hard enough to cripple or kill him.

The driver had no idea of what had happened, and chose not to stick around and find out. Max changed the Jaguar back to normal as it sped away. Then he ran over and knelt beside Larry.

Jen had preceded him. "Are you hurt?" she asked.

He sat up with a groan. "Huh! What do you think?"

"What were you trying to do?" asked Max.

"I thought you'd stop the car. Like last time."

"Are you crazy? Nobody can do that."

Larry rubbed his neck. "Guess not."

"And even if—" Max gave up. "Oh, you're an idiot."

"See, Larry?" said Jen. "It's not just me." She helped him onto his feet.

"Can you walk?" asked Max.

Larry took an exploratory step. "Ow! But yeah." He pointed after the driver. "That guy's a public menace! Did you get his license?"

For Max, that tore it. "You ran out in front of him! There's no way he could have kept from—" He curtailed the thought when he realized where it was heading. But Jen had heard enough to realize the same thing, and she was now staring hard at him. "Anyway," he concluded, "you're lucky to be alive."

"More than lucky, I'd say," Jen observed.

Her stare was making him uncomfortable. "Maybe you ought to take him to emergency," he suggested, "just in case."

"No doctors!" Larry decreed. "Some of them are in league with—" He stopped himself. "Okay, no more," he told Jen. "Promise."

But she seemed strangely less resolute than she had been. "We'll go home. I'll run you a hot bath." She gave Max a last, undecided glance as she helped her husband off.

If Liz had heard the noise of the accident, she did not attend to it, being, at the moment, too much caught up in family matters. She had just shut the door on Max and was starting upstairs when her mother's voice reached her from the living room. "You still haven't told her?"

Then her father's. "I thought we agreed we'd do it together."

"Yes, on Sunday. What happened to that?"

"She was gone half the day—who knows where?" This was an exaggeration, as he himself knew.

"And when she was here, where were you?" Silence was his only reply. "We have to let her know. It affects her more than anybody."

"As it should."

"Jeff! Shame on you!"

"Why? Isn't she the reason you're leaving?"

Liz's breath caught in her throat. She felt as if a vise were pressing on her head, and on her heart. "That's not true," said her mother, echoing Liz's own unspoken thought.

"It's not another man—or so you say. What else could it be? Hasn't our whole life these past sixteen years been centered on her? We've been so busy keeping her highness happy—Liz!"

She was now at the archway, staring into the room. She had never noticed before how much it resembled a prison cell on its bricked side. Half one thing, half another—just like her parents. She stood huddled and forlorn, like a street urchin in the rain. But only her cheeks were wet. "Go ahead, talk," she said. "About how I'm responsible for breaking up our family."

"Your father didn't mean that," her mother said quickly.

His face wore exactly the look that Liz had foreseen it would. "Lizzie, honey—"

"If I'd died that day the way I was supposed to, none of this would have happened."

"Liz!"

"And as for the highness thing—you put that on me. It wasn't something I wanted." She ran to her room; a second later they heard the door slam.

"Well, thank you, Jeff," said Nancy. "For telling her."

After a half hour or so he came knocking at her door, but she did not answer. He tried the knob, but it was locked. He called in to her. "Lizzie? Princess?"

"Don't call me that!" he heard from the other side. "Don't call me that ever again!" The voice was muffled by layers of bedcovers—the means closest at hand to isolate herself from everyone and everything.

She did not mention the impending divorce at school the next day; in fact, she hardly spoke to anyone the whole morning. After third period she stopped by her locker and descried Maria at hers, looking almost as unhappy as Liz felt, and keeping her distance. Liz, who could not remember the reason for that, felt a desire to bridge the gap, so she would again have someone to confide in, but before she had made up her mind to it, she spied Max approaching. Not him, she thought, not now.

"Liz!" he called out cheerfully, having made a conscious effort to blot from memory the less-than-friendly treatment she had accorded him at their last meeting. However, it was recalled to him at once by the cool reception he got now. He had hoped for more; hoped he had misread her attitude of the previous night. "Have I done something wrong?" he asked, point blank. Liz shook her head. "Is there—someone else?" He cast around in his mind; only one face presented itself. "It's not Kyle, is it?"

Liz's eyes bulged. "Kyle? My God, never."

"That's good. When I saw him looking at you yesterday..." Max laughed in relief. "I should have known you'd have better sense than that."

The color rose to her cheeks. "Oh, really, Max?" Immediately Max knew he had erred. "Well, guess what, my friend? I don't need your seal of approval on how I conduct my life. What I do about Kyle, or my parents, or anything else is based on my decisions as an independent rational being—a human being. You don't know us enough about us to judge us. How could you? Someone like you?"

She had not meant to put it like that; she could see that it cut deeply, and she regretted saying it, but also she did not.

"Someone like me?" Max echoed hollowly. He ran his eyes down her: eyes that no longer beckoned her to lose herself there, but looked lost themselves. "You're right," he said. "I don't know you at all."

And so he left.

Maria flung her locker door shut with a clang. "Why would you do that?" It was the first thing she had said to Liz since the day before; she could not help herself.

"Do what?" said Liz. But she knew.

"Blow him off that way. The boy adores you!"

"Yeah, that could change. In a flash, Maria."

"It's not enough for you he saved your life? When you have someone you can count on, you don't—"

"You can't count on anyone, ever. Understand? Even people you thought you knew. And Max is different from us. It's a scientific fact. His thinking is different, his blood's different—what else? What's his life cycle? Maybe he's going to metamorphose into a—a giant green blob. And Michael too. Until we can conduct a controlled experimental study—"

"You want to experiment on them? Like Dr. Frankenstein?"

Liz was shocked. "Is that how you see me?"

"Didn't you say once it's all right for scientists to hurt people as long as they get the information they want?"

"That's not what I said. I said sometimes sacrifices are—"

"Human sacrifices? Or only alien sacrifices, like Max?"

"You are so ignorant of the scientific process." Liz could hear how stuck-up that sounded.

"I know your 'process' has turned you into some inhuman ice maiden—la fría. Why Max even bothers with you, I'll never understand. You don't deserve him as a boyfriend. Or me as a best friend."

"If you feel that way, why don't you get yourself a new best friend?"

"All right, I will!" Maria thought of the perfect parting shot. "And I know just the one—Pam Troy. Your last boyfriend had the right idea." She saw this hit home and she was satisfied. Then she left. Liz was alone—all alone. Well, so be it, she thought; she made up her mind to relish her solitude.

Unfortunately it did not last. Late that afternoon at the Grunewalds', as she turned into the front walk, an all-too-recognizable voice brought her up short. "So is this his place, huh?'

She whirled to meet the eyes of its owner. "Max, what are you doing here?"

"Had to find out who it was you've been seeing. I knew there had to be someone."

"You followed me?"

"You wouldn't tell me. What other choice did I have?"

"I don't have to account to you for my movements! Maybe where you come from, this is a normal part of the mating ritual, but down here on Earth—"

"Where I come from? Liz, I've spent my whole life here—all I know of it."

"Exactly. But what don't you know?" With the air of having won a point, she started on up the walk.

Max did the same. "Think I'll have a talk with this guy myself. Straighten out a few things."

Liz halted and faced him. "Max, do not do this. I'm telling you. Do not."

"It isn't like you to be so secretive."

"I never had a stalker before."

"I'm not a stalker!"

"Then stop acting like one. Go, Max. Now." She waited. So did he. But she was ready to wait forever and he was not. "All right," he said, with a hint of threat in it. Then he went. Ironic, Liz thought. And here I'm doing all this just for him. She believed it too. Self-justification, frustration, and a measure of regret competed inside her, but ultimately what took first place was the scientific spirit, and it was this which propelled her forward, along the walk, up the porch steps, and inside.

Her assignment that day—taking an inventory of the equipment—delighted her, not only because she enjoyed compiling lists of things but also because it gave her a chance to nose around, to the extent she could with Grunewald at his microscope only a few yards away. At one point she started to interrupt him, to ask the name of a particular beaker (or was it a retort?), but she stopped herself; best not, for his sake and her own. After assuring herself by a glance that he was not watching her, she pulled a little at the top drawer of the file cabinet: locked, of course. She continued with the inventory, but her eyes (and her mind) kept stealing back to the cabinet.

A few minutes later the doctor rose. "I'm going out for a little," he said. "Keep on with what you're doing."

No sooner was he gone than Liz started toward the desk, where the key had to be (if he did not have it with him). But she never got that far. Passing the microscope, she could not resist—she never could—the compulsion to peer in. She was astonished by what she saw: a blood specimen, but of a peculiar type, green instead of red; like so many tiny green eyes staring up at her. She had seen that type before.

Next to the microscope sat a wooden box containing more slides. She held one of them up to the light. It appeared to be another blood specimen; no doubt they all were. She was eager to work through them before the doctor returned—so extremely eager that when she tried to substitute the new slide for the one in the microscope plate, it slid out of her fingers, fell, and shattered on the floor. "Oh, no!" she cried.

She knelt and began collecting the pieces that were big enough for her to grasp. Then she heard the door open. She quickly stood, and with her rearmost foot swept the rest of the glass under the microscope table.

But it was not the doctor who entered; it was Nicky. "Hey, Liz!" he said, looking around. "You seen my dad?"

"He left for a while. Didn't say where he was going."

"Oh, no?"

"No."

Nicky looked around some more, trying to think of more to say. "You really like this test tube stuff, huh?"

"Oh, huh—I mean, yes. Yes, I do."

She was holding her hands behind her back. In her nervousness she closed the left one on the glass it was holding, and one of the shards punctured the skin. She gave a tiny squeal. "You okay?" Nicky asked.

Liz forced a smile to cover up what she was feeling. "Phenomenal," she said. But she did not look it.

Nicky was wise enough to be suspicious, but had no way of knowing what to be suspicious of. "You're sure my dad's not here?" he said.

"Do you see him anywhere?"

"No," he admitted.

"Well, then?"

Nicky looked for the catch and could not find it. "I really should get back to work," said Liz. She turned away, moving her hands to the front as she did so. Nicky was still unsatisfied, but he shrugged it off, as he was used to doing with his father. On his way out he left the door open again.

Liz uncupped her hand to examine the cut. Her blood had moistened the sample on the glass, and brought it welling to life. The two strains, green and red, pooled together, and appeared to glow for a second. Then the glow faded.

From the garage the discordant twangs of an electric guitar invaded the quietude; Nicky was practicing. His insistent rhythm matched Liz's galloping heartbeat. She ran to the sink, rinsed her hand, and wiped it dry with a paper towel. Kneeling by the table, she used the same towel to pick up what remained of the glass, fearful all the while that the doctor would return and catch her at it. When she had collected all she could, she folded it up in the towel, stuffed the towel into her purse, and ran from the lab. And then home.

As she approached the cafe she saw her father and Alex in conversation outside; she did not feel up to meeting either one. So she circled around to the back alley and entered by the fire ladder, the rooftop patio, and her bedroom window. Once inside, she re-inspected the cut, which was now almost unnoticeable. She extracted her journal from its hiding place within the wall, took it to her desk, and began to write up her observations, impartially (as she hoped) and impassively.

She was interrupted by a knock at her door. "Liz?" Her mother: of course. And the purpose of her visit would be to lecture her daughter on the importance of being sensitive to the needs of one's parents'. Liz knew all about that, but her own needs were all that mattered to her at the moment. And so she ignored the knocking. "Liz, I heard you come in," said Nancy, "so I know you're in there. Open your door, please."

Her mother's persistency would keep her out there forever, and Liz, having inherited it herself, knew this. "What?" she said finally, with a sullenness she felt sometimes but seldom gave way to.

"Open your door and I'll tell you."

Liz smacked her pen down with a sigh of exasperation. Moments later she swung the door open and was staring into her mother's face. "What?" she said again.

"Well," said Nancy, " some courtesy, for a start."

"Sorry," said Liz, only half-meaning it, and then, in a tone only a little moderated, "So?"—which was not very far from "What?"

Fortunately Nancy, from her years with Jeff, was practiced in patience and forbearance. And she truly had Liz's best interest at heart. She tried to stay focused on that. "I'd like to ask you a personal question. If I may."

"Can I stop you?"

"Are you and Max not speaking these days?"

Liz was surprised she would even know that. "Why would you care? You never liked me seeing him."

"True. But there's also Maria."

"What about Maria?"

"She's asked to cut back her hours, to work only the shifts you're not working. Have you quarreled with her too?"

"She was being completely unfair." She wanted to add, And it's none of your business either, but she restrained herself.

"Liz, if you're pushing away everyone who cares about you—"

"I'm not the one who's leaving!"

This had seemed to burst out of her from nowhere; she had had no idea she was going to say it, and she wished she had not, or not in that way. But now that it had been said, it could not be taken back. That would have been dishonest.

Nancy had flinched a little at the outcry; she shut her eyes while she recovered her train of thought. "And now you're afraid to be close to anybody," she said. "Not the most positive outcome, Liz—is it?" Liz did not reply. She did not know what to say. The statement was not entirely true—but it was not entirely untrue either.

Her mother saw there was no point in pressing her to say more. "All right, then do me this one favor at least—spare me two hours of your time. It shouldn't take any longer than that."

"What shouldn't?"

Nancy answered with another question. "What time tomorrow are you through with your lab work?" This was what Liz was calling her job at Grunewald's, when anyone asked.

"Five."

"That's fine. We can go then. Please try to be on time, will you?" She began to shut the door.

"On time for what? Where are we going?"

"A place I want you to see." Liz could not imagine where, but did not expend much thought on the question; she had a more pressing worry.

She tried not to show her nervousness the following afternoon as she attended to her lab duties, as well as she could manage with her heart pounding inside her like a fist on a punching bag. Grunewald was standing at the microscope table, searching through the box of slides—and then searching through them once again. Liz tried keep from looking at him.

"Ms. Parker?" he called at last. "Come here a moment, will you?" And she came. "Today one of my slides appears to be missing. Would you be able to shed any light on its disappearance?"

Liz opened her mouth with the intention of producing a lie. But that was not what came out. "I broke it," she said. Grunewald's face betrayed no expression; Liz felt compelled to go on. "I was looking at it and I dropped it. I hoped—I hoped that you wouldn't notice."

The doctor's tongue made a clock-like sound. "Wouldn't you have noticed, in my place?" Liz did not reply. "Of course you would. So that was a vain hope, wasn't it?" This time he did not wait for the answer. "May I ask where the slide is now?"

"It broke, I told you. I threw the pieces away."

"Yes, but where is it really?" His eyes bored into her. "With Max Evans?"

This astonished her. "Max? I would never—no!"

Grunewald took a key from his pocket. "Open the top drawer of my filing cabinet, if you will." Liz did as instructed. "And now remove the last folder—no, the very last one. Open it." Inside she discovered a stack of photos—dozens, maybe hundreds of them—of Max and herself in every place that they frequented: school, the cafe, the park, various sidewalks. Some of the moments pictured, she did not remember herself. In the same drawer, she had seen other folders, with other photos. "You came here spying on his behalf," Grunewald proclaimed, "to find out what I know about him. And you took that slide to show him, didn't you? Eh? Confess it!"

"No! I'm not here for him. I'm not!" She realized it for the first time. "I told myself I was, but that wasn't true. I'm here for me—because I want to know. Me, Liz Parker. Maybe that's wrong, but it won't make it right to keep deceiving myself." Grunewald's eyes showed a glimmer of satisfaction. "And I wasn't honest with you either. I'm sorry about that. But would you have been, in my place?"

"No," he said, "I confess I would not."

"Then that was a vain hope—wasn't it?"

"Don't be pert." But he sounded amused rather than offended. "Very well, I believe you. You may continue working here." He turned back to his microscope.

But Liz—forthright, compulsively driven Liz (and therein, though she would have denied it, her mother's daughter)—was not about to leave it at that. "Now hold on a minute! You have a right to be mad at me because I broke your slide and I wasn't up front with you about me and Max. But what about you? You knew about us. Obviously you've been spying on us. The blood on that slide was Max's, wasn't it? How did you get it?"

Grunewald regarded her with something like amazement. "Then you knew what it was. No one else would have. You're the best possible person I could have found to assist me here." Liz felt herself beaming, and told herself to stop it. "But there are things you don't know. That blood didn't belong to your friend. It belonged to my son."

"Nicky?"

"When he was scarcely more than an infant, I was engaged by the county to provide pediatric services to the orphanage—the old one, out on Highway 285. I believe it was later converted to a cheese factory."

"I know. Max told me."

Grunewald stood and crossed to the file cabinet. "There was a fire. It was deliberately set. Someone wanted those records destroyed." Immediately Liz thought of Nasedo. "And they were destroyed—all except the carbon copies I'd taken." He pulled out another folder and handed it to her. It contained the blood analysis on Max that she had seen in Nicky's exhibit, an identical analysis on Isabel, and other reports concerning one or the other.

"As part of my duties," Grunewald elaborated, "I examined every child as it was enrolled. One night, two children, a boy and a girl, were brought in from the desert. I knew from the first that they were different. Their blood had properties that seemed—almost magical." Liz envisioned a makeshift office, occupied by a younger, more fervid Grunewald, and two small, scared children—strangers in a strange land—under his curious scrutiny.

"Nicky was anemic," he continued. "Rashly, I infused their blood into him, hoping it would strengthen him." Liz surmised that he had done it in secret—taken the magical children from their beds, drawn their blood behind a locked door, sneaked the specimens out under his coat. She wondered for a moment just how ethical a physician he had been. But it was not for her to judge; she could imagine herself in the same circumstances and doing the same.

"I brought in a colleague to confirm my findings about the children. I gave him the blood to examine for himself. But they changed it somehow—that is, the girl did." This gave Liz to wonder: how would Isabel have known to do that, lacking language, or other data on this world? How would she have known that was what would be required to divert suspicion? Perhaps she had picked up an image from Grunewald's mind and guessed enough of its meaning. Or perhaps she had seen into his own blood, divined that it represented the standard to which they were supposed to conform, and changed Max's to match. Again Liz could envision the scene: Grunewald inspecting the sample again, blaming the children for the change in it, insisting that his colleague wait until he could drag them back in and take another sample, a true one this time...

"Of course he thought I was insane. Unfit for duty." Of course, Liz agreed silently; anyone would have. "He took his opinion to the county board, and my contract was terminated. Later I gave up the practice altogether to devote myself to teaching—and my research. By then it was vital to me." He stared darkly at the slide box. "You see, the blood I'd pumped into—into Nicky—had had the opposite effect from what I'd intended. It corrupted his blood. It poisoned him."

Liz felt a chill. She glanced down at her left hand, which the same blood had entered—but just a smidge of it, and the cut had stopped bleeding by the time she got home; so she reassured herself. Of course she would continue to monitor its progress; that was the scientific thing to do. But there was no basis for worry, none at all. She was sure that if she told the doctor, he would confirm her conclusion. But she was not going to tell him.

She became aware that her attention had strayed. "...find a cure," Grunewald was saying. "But I had only that small sample of donor blood to start. Now it's used up and I need more. From your friend and his sister. If you were to invite them here and I showed them the work I'm doing, perhaps together we could persuade them to work with us."

Liz did not quite understand. "By giving blood, you mean?"

"By offering themselves as subjects for experiment." He could not hide his excitement; it would have put Liz off if she had not felt it too. This as what she had been wanting herself, and when Grunewald went on to describe his plan, he was describing her own fantasy. "We could perform every test there is," he said, "and learn all there is to know about their physiology. It would mark a new chapter in scientific discovery, and perhaps it would show me the way to a cure—for Nicky, I mean. Will you help me?"

Liz hesitated—but for practical, not ethical, reasons. "First off," she said, "you can forget about Isabel. Nobody's ever been able to talk her into doing something that wasn't her idea to start with. Max—maybe, if you put it to him the right way. And if I can get him over here."

"Yes, yes," Grunewald agreed matter-of-factly, "you do that. I will take care of the rest."

And so that afternoon Max received an unexpected visit at work. The UFO Center was empty of visitors, as it often was in the late afternoon. He was proceeding up and down the rows of photos and news cuttings, wiping the dust from the display windows, when he happened to look toward the entryway where a flashing green light simulated...something, he was never sure what—the landing lights of a UFO perhaps, or a containment breach at Area 51—and he saw Liz on the steps. The pulsing glow gave her features a sinister cast that came and went, came and went.

She descended by the steps to the main floor and approached him; her first words were harmless enough. "Hi, Max."

"Oh, are we talking again?" He continued dusting. "Or is this part of some experiment?"

Liz paled a little. "Why—why would you say that?"

"Specimen for dissection, remember?"

She had to strain to recall the conversation, it seemed so long ago now. "Oh. Yeah. Sorry." Further apology seemed in order. "And for yesterday."

At last, relenting, he looked at her. "Me too." The fault had been partly his.

"It's natural we'd have trouble communicating sometimes," Liz offered. "After all, you are different from—the rest of us."

"Different scary?"

"No!" But that was not precisely accurate. "That is, not in yourself—"

"Only as a freak of nature?"

"No! As a—an undetermined quantity. That is, an anomaly—or seeming anomaly—oh, I knew I'd mess this up." She cut to the chase. "Max, there's someone I'd like you to meet. He's the person I've been seeing after school." She could tell from Max's face what he was thinking. "It isn't like that! He's a doctor. I'm helping him in his research. He's interested in enlisting you to help too."

Max grew wary. "What kind of research?"

"He'll explain it to you. I can take you to see him when you're done here."

Max shook his head. "My parents are expecting me home for dinner. Since I just got off being grounded, I don't want to push it."

"Then after dinner?"

Max felt an uneasiness he could not explain to himself, let alone to her. "Liz, are you sure this is something you want?"

"At the moment it's what I want most in the whole world."

That settled the question. After his unjust suspicions before, he felt he could not deny her this; he had been wrong then, and probably was now. "All right. I'll come by for you at 7."

"7 would—oh, no!" She had suddenly remembered her appointment with her mother. "I can't. I have to go now. I'll meet you there at 7:30. 'bye!"

"Liz! Who are we meeting?" But she was already out the doors.

She arrived home only a couple of minutes late, and was soon sitting beside her mother in the red Acura, heading south on 285. "Where are you taking us?" Liz asked.

"You'll see soon enough."

"Who'll make dinner for Dad if we're both gone?"

"Liz, we own a restaurant, remember?"

Liz looked back toward town. She was worried about Max, she did not know why—maybe because when she had left him he had seemed worried himself. But that was usual with him. She had no clue where she and her mother were going, and did not try to guess; it would have been a waste of time.

At last they turned onto a winding drive which Liz recognized as the approach to Angels' Ground. She wondered why she had been brought there. The parking area was empty; the loving couples would not start arriving for two hours. Nancy swung in at one end and shut off the motor. As the two of them stepped out of the car, a soft breeze welcomed them. They took the path that ran along the west rim, with Nancy leading. She stopped at fifty yards or so. "This is it," she announced.

Liz made a quick reconnaissance; the spot appeared indistinguishable from any other. "Okay. What is it?"

"The place where your dad and I used to come every Friday night for our—romantic interludes, I suppose you could call them—both before our marriage and after. For a while at least."

This disclosure made Liz feel a little squirmy. "Mom, I'm not sure I need to—"

"One Friday night," her mother went on, ignoring her, "something strange and wonderful happened here. Your father claimed afterward he hadn't seen it, but he had. He blocked it because it didn't jibe with his world view."

"What was it?" Liz was interested in spite of herself.

"Well. At the moment when we—that is, when I—the moment—you understand?"

Liz felt squirmy again. "Mom..."

"—I saw a glow. Down there." Her eyes—and so, inevitably, Liz's—dropped to that part of her. "And I could feel it. I could feel the glow. That was the moment you were conceived."

"But how could you know that? I mean, how could you be sure?"

Her mother laughed. "My little scientist. I just knew. So, you see, your arrival was magical from the beginning. You were—and you are—something very special to both of us."

"Except Dad didn't see it."

"He did. The first time he held you." She squeezed Liz's arm. "It's not you he blames, baby. It's himself. He's just taking it out on you. And he blames himself for that too."

Liz understood her father, for the most part; the physical phenomenon she had just heard described, and which seemed unexplainable, interested her more. "A glow, you said?"

"I'd sign an affidavit attesting to the fact. And Amy Deluca—"

"Maria's mom?"

"She always insisted this place was a center of cosmic power. Of course, that was Amy."

This set an idea simmering in Liz's brain. "Is it possible Maria was conceived here too?"

"I wouldn't be surprised. The two of them used to come up here all the time. Amy and that lowlife she ended up marrying—and later divorcing." Another recollection came to her. "'Glowworm'! That's what she used to call Maria as a baby. I wonder—"

Liz could hardly contain her excitement. "And Alex's parents? Did they come up here too?"

"We never really knew them. His mother died, didn't she?"

But Liz had stopped listening, caught up in the wonder of her discovery. "I bet they did. I bet... It's got to be more than a coincidence. Don't you see?" Of course her listener did not, but the question was rhetorical. "Oh, my God, this is amazing!"

In her enthusiasm she had all but forgotten the presence of her mother, who had moved to the cliff edge, facing the sinking sun. After a moment Liz heard a sound she had only heard from her once before: the sound of sobbing. "Mom? What is it?"

Nancy laughed, even as she wept. "She asks what it is. My life's about to take a left turn into a tunnel with no light at the end, my family is disintegrating because of a choice I made—me, no one else—and my only child, whom I had believed to be upset about this state of things—who certainly gave every indication of it up to this evening—she is deliriously happy." She broke out in a cry. "What do you have to be so damn happy about?"

Under normal circumstances Liz would have felt that a hug was called for. But the two of them had never been like that, or not since Liz had been small. "Mom, I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking about you and the stuff you must be going through."

"Guess not," Nancy muttered.

Liz continued without pausing. "It's just that what you told me is, like, a really big deal—so big you can't even imagine."

Nancy thought she might. "Does it have anything to do with Max Evans?"

Liz did not know how to answer. "In a way."

"I know the two of you are into something out of the ordinary, something you won't talk to your father or me about. We thought at first it might be drugs—"

"Oh, Mom, no!"

"We realize that now. It must be something we're too old to understand. Some kind of cult thing. I know how exciting those can be. But they can also be consuming. So, whatever this 'big deal' is—"

Liz could not tell her; even if she could have done so without revealing the origin of Max and the others, it was too early to regard it as proven. But she did not like to see her mother waste her time in straying down the wrong road. "What it is, Mom, is a—hypothesis. Which, if true, would explain why Max and I are—why we seem to be—destined for each other." Her mother smiled tolerantly. "I know, it sounds all gooey-eyed. But it's totally scientific. Like a unified field theory of my life, or that part of it anyhow. And if Alex can confirm it—"

"Baby, there are some things you can't predict. As I can vouch from late experience."

Liz had another of her bright ideas. "Do you think if you brought Dad up here—"

"Nice thought. But it's too late. That chapter's over. The life has drained out of us." Liz saw this was true, and that she ought to have seen it before; there had been plenty of signs. But she had not been looking. "As you know," said Nancy, "my work has been taking me to Santa Fe lately. That's where I'll be moving. And I was hoping..." She did not have to finish. "It's a big city, Liz. With a lot more to see, more in the way of opportunities—"

Liz remembered. Soon after Nancy had begun commuting to the capital, twice (and occasionally three times) a week, she had taken Liz there for a day to show her around, even letting her skip school for the occasion. They had taken in the museums and galleries, lunched at the best little Mexican seafood place, which Nancy's boss had recommended, and gone home with dozens of sights left unseen. At the time the prospect of living there some day had tempted Liz keenly, but now...

"I can't," she said.

Nancy nodded. "You've always been closer to your father. Even when you're mad at each other."

"He needs somebody. To remind him of stuff."

"Don't I know it?"

"Then there's Max. Things aren't good between us at the moment. I'd like to make them right, if I can."

"Baby, don't take this wrong, but I wouldn't want to see you toss away your future for something that may only be for the present."

Her daughter smiled at the obviousness of the advice. "You know, I know that. And I know this chapter will probably end too. But what if it's not for a long time? What if it never ends?"

"You can't tell," Nancy conceded. "Especially at sixteen." On an impulse, she opened her arms. "May I hug my sixteen-year-old?"

It was out of character for both, but Liz could hardly refuse. The unaccustomed closeness, awkward as it felt, was oddly pleasing. But after a few seconds she found herself becoming impatient. "Um, this is great, but, you know, I need to get back. I promised to meet Max. And before that, I have to conduct a—field interview."

Nancy stared at her. "You are the oddest girl sometimes."

As they walked back to the car, Liz recalled another of her investigations, which was puzzling her increasingly. "That V shape up there—I don't suppose you know what constellation it is?"

"You're the science mavin." Nancy looked upward where Liz was pointing. "I don't see anything. Must be my aging eyes." And she could not have missed it; at that early hour, it was the only thing in the sky. This corroborated Mr. Seligman's testimony. Then only we can see it, Liz thought, we six. She did not yet know it for a scientific fact, of course. But she would have bet anything on it.

Before leaving for her interview, of which Alex was to be the subject, she peered into her wall niche, pondering whether to take the artifact along. Following the interview, she would be seeing Grunewald, and she believed that with his knowledge of extraterrestrials, he might be able to infer something of its nature; also, she would have liked to impress him with a find of her own. But she had not asked Max, and suspected he would not approve. So she sealed the niche again.

When she reached the Whitman house, music greeted her ears, though the garage door was shut. She pounded on it without result. The self-correcting clock she always carried with her read 6:40; she could still get to Grunewald's on time. She walked over to the front stoop, where her ring at the door was answered, though none too promptly, by Alex's father. "You'll be wanting Alex," he said. "I'll take you back to him."

"I tried the garage door. But with all the noise..."

"I know!" Donald agreed. "We're trying to hold a meeting here." As she stepped inside, he nodded toward the den, where a group of men like him—middle-aged and dull—were congregated. Liz hated to stereotype people, but after all, some people were stereotypes. "If those kids don't knock it off soon, I'll"—Donald floundered—"declare an adjournment," he ended lamely. Then he led her up the hall toward the garage.

Liz's eyes kept returning to the den. "What kind of meeting is that?"

"Not your concern." The rudeness of his answer surprised her. Then he noticed the top of the UFO Inquirer protruding from her purse. "Is that my magazine?"

"You know, it is. I was just—"

He grabbed it. "How'd you get hold of it?"

"Alex loaned it to me to read."

"He should learn to respect other people's property." He inspected. "Now look at it! The corner's bent."

Liz began to suspect a strain of immaturity in his make-up, but she also realized he could tell her more about Angels' Ground than his son could. Then she would not have to wait for the Whits to finish rehearsing. "Excuse me," she said to him, "you may think it's weird, me asking you this—"

That was as far as she got; Donald either had not heard her or was ignoring her deliberately. The two of them had now reached the connecting door. As Donald he threw it open, a tide of noise rolled out and over them. Alex and his bandmates—Nicky on guitar, Markos on rhythm, and Chris on drums—were in full swing. "Alex!" his father shouted over them. "Company!" With that, he went in to his meeting, leaving Liz on her own. But somehow Alex had managed to hear the announcement and he acknowledged her presence with a nod .

It was not long afterward when Max arrived at Dr. Grunewald's, his apprehensions of ill omen continuing unallayed. He had arrived early, and was standing on the porch debating whether to stay when the door swung open, revealing a figure whom he recognized immediately. "You!" he said—but recovered fast enough to mask the recognition. "—must be the man I'm supposed to meet," he finished. "Liz invited me."

"Ms. Parker was detained. She asked me to see to you till she arrives." Grunewald's manner was smooth, almost too smooth. "And see to you I shall," he concluded as Max stepped across the threshold, his misgivings blazing more strongly than ever. He hardly had time to see the syringe raised above him, in a hand that had been hidden, before the needle plunged into his neck. And he had no time whatever to act before the drug took hold and the room went black.

The panic he had felt in those few seconds was communicated to Isabel in a flash. She dropped the plate she was drying, which her mother, next to her at the sink, had just washed. "What is it?" asked Diane. "What's wrong?"

Isabel stared at the pieces on the floor. If her mother had not been present, she could have reassembled them in a trice. "Slipped out of my hand. Sorry."

The phone rang in the living room. "You get it," Diane said. "I'm sure it's for you. Meanwhile I'll take care of this." As she swept up, she could half-hear Isabel's side of the ensuing conversation, and moved to the entryway to hear it better.

"Michael...Yes, I did. But I'm sure it was nothing. I would know...Yes, you'll be the first...Yes, I promise... 'bye."

Diane's maternal instinct signaled her that something was wrong. "Was that Michael? What was he calling about?"

"Nothing that need concern him." Isabel was happy that her mother could not see her face, because in it she probably would have seen the fear that Isabel had successfully hidden from Michael; that had been both for Max's good and for his own. He had received the same flash she had, but she had could not trust him to act, and especially to react, in a responsible fashion; it was up to her alone.

She tried to sense her brother, but could not. That meant his consciousness was functioning at its lowest level, too low for her to pick up at a distance, or not functioning at all. Either he was out cold, or... She moved to her room so as not to be seen. Already her mother was hunting for her in the living room; in a minute she would come tapping at the bedroom door. Isabel would have just enough time to do what was called for. If Max was not dead but only unconscious his dreamspace would be out there somewhere, open to her, if she could find it.

After much searching, she did. He was not dreaming, exactly, but inhabited a hazy limbo in which a fun-house reflection of himself kept materializing and dematerializing, first in one place, then in another. Drugged, thought Isabel. But by whom, and why?

At that moment the only person (besides the culprit) who could have told her was shrinking against the door of the Whitmans' garage with her hands over her ears; the Whits made a lot of music in a little space. Alex gestured to the others to cut it, and when they failed to comply he stepped to the amplifier and yanked out the feed. The noise subsided with a moan; Liz uncovered her ears. His fellow Whits, released from their trance-like state, looked around, blinking. "Break time," Alex announced. "I have to talk to Liz."

One of them grabbed a soccer ball from the corner, another lifted the garage door, and all three ran out to the drive. As Alex came up to Liz he pointed to the system he had just silenced. "Isabel tweaked the amp for us. Isn't the sound awesome?"

Liz declined to express an opinion—and there was something else on her mind, anyway. "Alex, who are those men in your house?"

"Bunch of UFO nuts. They meet monthly to compare sightings. That's what you came here to ask me?"

"No, not at all." She took a deep breath. "Okay, I realize how strange this sounds, but just how much do you know about your conception?"

"My conception of what?"

"No, the moment you were conceived. Before you were born."

"Oh, that. I never thought about it." His face wrinkled. "Not sure I want to think about it now. Why?"

"Is there any chance it could have happened at Angels' Ground?"

"Possible, I guess. Isn't that where guys take girls to—wait a minute!" He ran into the house. Liz checked her clock again; she had plenty of time left. She watched idly as the other band members kicked the ball around. Soon they moved the activity into the street. Since it was a cul-de-sac, they were running little risk from traffic; not that that would have discouraged them.

A few minutes later Alex returned with a framed photo, which he handed Liz. It showed his father and his late mother standing side by side at the location she had left less than an hour earlier. "That's the place, right?" said Alex.

"I knew it!" She felt the thrill of having her hypothesis vindicated, and of being involved in the greater mystery it had opened up—what was Angels' Ground?—which so far lay beyond hypothesizing. It reminded her of the other mystery that had been so much on her mind lately. She took Alex by the hand and led him out to the drive, from which she pointed up at the five points of light twinkling against the deepening blue. "You can see those, right?"

"Those five stars making a V?"

Another hypothesis of hers vindicated. "But why?" she mused. "Of course they can see them. They can do a lot of things. But why us humans?" The photo of Alex's parents gave her an inspiration. "Maybe because of that—because we were... Maybe there's a connection!"

Alex was at a loss. "Liz, you're rambling again."

"You'd ramble too, if—" She never got to finish, for at that moment a soccer ball struck her on the hip. "Ow!"

Markos ran up. "Sorry, Nicky bounced it off his head. He likes to do that." He picked up the ball. "You're not hurt, are you?"

"Yes, a little."

"Really?" Markos shrugged. "Happens sometimes." He kicked the ball and ran into the street after it.

Liz herself witnessed the next use of Nicky's patented head block, which she saw was apt to send the ball flying any which way, and which to her looked painful. "Should he be doing that?" she asked doubtfully.

Alex noticed her rubbing her sore thigh. "Sorry. Does it hurt a lot?"

"I'm not talking about me. I mean, is it right for him to be hitting it with his head like that?"

"Liz, it's not a regulation match. They're just fooling around."

"But should he be playing that rough? As frail as he is?"

"Nicky? Frail?" Alex laughed. "He may be skinny, but he's tough as pig iron. Even when we were little—except that Nicky was never little—he was always running his trike into things, skinning his knees and elbows. He always had cuts and bruises all over him."

"But that's not what—" A suspicion entered her mind. "Alex, how much do you know about his dad?"

"Aside from the alien thing, you mean? Not much. really. He may be a crank, but he's always been okay with me. You know who had it in for him, though? Isabel's dad. My dad's a building inspector with the city, and he told me Mr. Evans kept a campaign boiling against him for months—filing complaints, circulating petitions, all kinds of stuff. Finally forced Grunewald to shut down."

"Why would he do that?"

"Well, you know the rumor. But you can't always—"

"What rumor?" Sometimes Liz felt as if she had spent her whole life in a vacuum-sealed chamber.

"You never heard? That he tried something funny with Max and Isabel. When they were kids."

Liz had been seasick once; that was how she felt now as dread flooded her mind. What if the invitation she had conveyed to Max was just a ploy of Grunewald's to get at him again? He had certainly lied to her about Nicky; what else had he lied about? "I have to go," she said, and she dashed off, fear written in her features.

"Did I say something wrong?" asked Alex. She was too far away to answer, and so he answered himself. "Yep. Musta said something wrong."

She knocked insistently at the doctor's door for a long time before he showed his face; she inferred that he must have been in his lab. "Where's Max?" she asked, between quaffs of air; she had run all the way and was still short of breath.

"He said he had to be getting home. He was early, you see. Waited for you nearly an hour. I hope I was right to let him go?" Liz did not know whether to believe him or not. The words, the look, the air of apparent concern all came too readily; he was not really connecting with her, only making a show of doing so. He looked tired, and that might explain it.

But it could not explain the lie. "You told me Nicky was frail. That was your word, frail."

Grunewald guessed why she had brought it up. "Yes, one wouldn't know it to look at him, would one? And I suppose he doesn't take the care of himself that he should." Again the explanation flowed too easily, and again Liz doubted him. But she also doubted herself for feeling that way. Grunewald was recessive at the best of times; tonight she could not read him at all. And she did not want to believe ill of him, or of science and the scientific method. So she gave him the benefit of the doubt. "You're absolutely sure Max went home?"

"Haven't I just said so, my dear?"

The sexism, she let pass. "Okay, thanks. I'll try him there." Grunewald smiled at her, rather distantly, and then shut the door; Liz heard the click of the lock, which renewed her suspicions for a moment. But she thought the most sensible course of action was to check at Max's house before anything else. While there she could also ask Mr. Evans for a confirmation of Alex's story.

When she was gone, Grunewald returned to his lab. Next to the examining table he had moved into place a short stand on rollers with a squarish bag attached to it; from the bag ran a tube that ended in a needle. "Now we will have the blood of you," he said to the subject supine on the table, who could not hear him. "All the blood, I think." Again he smiled distantly. "Yes, yes, that will be good."

An arch of leaves like a big croquet wicket marked the entrance to the Evanses' front yard. The path was paved with four-squared stones, which Liz normally took the time to appreciate, but tonight she was in a hurry. As she approached the house, Isabel appeared in the drive and crossed the lawn to intercept her. She was in a hurry too. "Where's Max?" she demanded.

"He isn't here?"

"Would I ask if he was? He said he was meeting you."

"Is your dad home? I need to talk to him."

Isabel laid a hand on the base of her neck with more force than Liz considered polite. "We have to find Max first. He may be in trouble."

"I know. And your dad can help. He knows about Dr. Grunewald."

A horrible idea flashed into Isabel's mind—and she was not picking it up from Liz either. "Grunewald! Is Max with him?" Liz's face betrayed her fear, and some of her guilt. Clutching her even more tightly, Isabel shut her eyes. To Liz it seemed as if a light were being trained on the myriad segments of her mind, each in turn, at a speed that was inconceivable. Isabel was scanning her thoughts, public and private, and bypassing all of them, except one. When she opened her eyes again, they were full of accusation. "You invited him there? Liz, how could you?"

"I didn't know. How could I?" Her voice was trembling; she felt herself about to cry.

Isabel had neither the time nor the disposition to offer sympathy. "You're going back there with me," she said, "now." She did not offer Liz a choice.

Seconds later the Jeep, with the two of them in it, was racing through town. "Grunewald was the doctor at the orphanage," Isabel informed Liz—"that is, until they found out he was crazy and fired him."

"He told me you were responsible for that. That you changed Max's blood sample. Was that true? At that age?" She knew this was not the time to ask, and that she had no right, considering the trouble she had made for them, but she was so curious she could not help herself.

"I didn't know I'd done it," said Isabel. She did not sound pleased with herself, as might have been expected; she sounded defensive. "I don't know how I did it. It just happened—when I sensed he was going to hurt Max. And did he tell you what he did to us after that? He began stalking us—following us around, taking our pictures." He still is, thought Liz, only you don't know it. "One day he tried to lure us to his office to get more of our blood. We got scared and ran away. He chased us into the candy store, and the lady there called our dad—thank God." Liz wished, wished, wished she had known all this; how could she not have? "The one man Dad did everything he could to save us from," Isabel concluded, "and you delivered my brother into his hands. How loyal of you, Liz."

This was crushing. Liz searched for some idea, any idea, to contribute. "You could ask Michael to help."

"I don't want Michael's help. He'd probably kill Grunewald first thing out of the gate."

"But you won't?"

"No. Not unless—" She shut off the thought.

A few moments later they pulled up at the house. "Follow me," Isabel ordered, "and do exactly as I say. Understand?" Liz was gazing at the property, dismayed by the transformation it had undergone in her eyes: once charmingly unkempt, it now loomed up as a ramshackle ruin, with menace lurking in every recess. "Liz!" Isabel said sharply. Liz recollected herself. "I asked if you understand." Liz gave a little nod.

Isabel led the way up onto the porch. "Go ahead, knock," she said. Liz did, but Grunewald did not answer; Isabel had not expected him to. "Stand back," she ordered. "And don't ever tell anyone about this. Not even Max."

She turned to the door, and almost at once it began to bubble. It melted away on both sides and ran down the frame to form two puddles of brown ooze on the floor. Liz stared in amazement. "That looks like—"

"Chocolate," Isabel confirmed. "It's easier if you know the substance you're dealing with."

She marched into the house, with Liz taking up the rear; a glance back at the door, and it was restored to its former condition. "Rule number one," said Isabel. "Clean up your messes as you go. You might never get another chance."

Liz supposed she would never get a chance at all. "The lab's that way," she said.

"I know. I can sense him there—Max, I mean." She headed to the back. Liz cast her eyes around warily, half-expecting the doctor to leap out at them from some corner.

The lab was unlocked. Isabel entered alone. Grunewald was nowhere to be seen. She rushed to Max, who was still lying unconscious on the table. She shook him, kissed him, called his name, but all to no avail; he remained inert. Eyes shut, she probed his dreamspace. He was no longer skittering here and there as he had been, but his form was semi-transparent; she did not dare to touch it in that state. "Max!" she called. "You have to wake up. I have to get you out of here." At first he seemed not to have heard. Then, as his form grew more solid, he lifted his eyes to hers and nodded slowly.

As she emerged from the dream limbo into the world of the woken, the body beside her stirred and opened its eyes. She was the first thing Max saw, standing there beside him like Florence Nightingale, wearing an expression that radiated care and gratitude. She did not often show her love so obviously; like, never. "Thanks," he whispered. Isabel dropped a tear, and was mad at herself for it. Damn, she thought, I'm turning into Liz.

Liz was hovering in the space between the house and the outbuilding, where Isabel had instructed her to wait. She heard a clatter from a shed to the side. A few seconds later Grunewald emerged, his eyes bleary, his shirt hanging outside his trousers. He was carrying a surgical saw. Liz, rather dauntlessly under the circumstances, moved to block the laboratory door, as far as her size would allow. Grunewald stopped; her presence seemed to confuse him. "Ms. Parker," he said finally, as if he had located the name in some long-disused directory. "Stand aside, if you please."

"You lied to me." Once again her indignation overcame her better judgment. "Nicky doesn't have anemia. He's not dying."

"No," Grunewald admitted. "I am." He lifted the saw. Liz shrank back. But he was not looking at her; he was staring at his own arm. She turned away as he sliced through his shirt sleeve, just above the wrist. The wound bled, stained the white cotton red, and dripped out of the slash in the fabric onto the red brick paving.

"It was the blood, you see," he said. "It poisoned me. Not Nicky, me." The syllables came in a slurred monotone, and with a thicker accent than usual. "It ended"—Liz could not be sure he had not said "undid"—"my practice, ja. It even turned Helene against me. She said I was crazy, she would have taken my son, but I told her I would have her declared crazy. The blood again, you see. It drove her away. But his blood will bring her back." Liz realized he was speaking of Max. His lips gathered into a pout. "But der bag does not work, nein. The blood does not flow. It trickles in dribs und drabs. Mit this, it will flow!" He lifted the saw again and lurched toward her.

"Drop your weapon!" a voice shouted. Liz looked toward the house. Valenti was standing at the back door, Deputy Owen in the kitchen behind, with both their guns trained on Grunewald. "Drop it, I said!" This time Grunewald complied. Valenti turned to Liz. "Come around to me," he instructed her, "nice and slow." But Grunewald made no move to stop her.

Owen hurried past her to him. As he was grappling with a set of cuffs, trying to get them open, he noticed the blood-soaked arm. "He's wounded, Sheriff!"

"Take him to the car and bandage him." They kept a first-aid kit under the dash. "But cuff his other hand to the door handle first." Owen marched Grunewald off toward the street.

"Come on," said Valenti, speaking to someone in the house. Liz had not suspected there were others with him. But now they were revealed, framed for a second in the doorway as they paced briskly forth: Agent Topolsky and a man in a suit, also obviously FBI. They were headed for the lab.

Liz thought of Isabel. She lunged out in front of the posse, trying to make it look as if she had stumbled accidentally. "Nice try, Liz," said Topolsky. "Now clear the way."

Hearing her voice, Isabel instituted a change of plan. Max was safe; that was what mattered. But he was just beginning to recover from the sedative, too groggy to summon his powers to his own aid. "I'll call Dad," Isabel promised; her meaning was somewhat cryptic, but Max was hardly listening anyway. She ran her eyes over the file cabinet, the refrigerator, the slide box—every object in the room that might contain evidence pointing to either of them—and she focused on each in turn, just long enough to do what was necessary. Then she raced to the wall and dived into it—literally, like diving into a pool of water—and was gone.

The FBI agents and Valenti clattered down the steps, with Liz trotting after them like a puppy. They scanned the room. Liz spied Max straining to sit up. She ran to him and put her arm around him. "Here, let me help you."

He was conscious enough to understand this. "Help me?" he said, and he shook off her arm. The rejection, and the justice of it, pierced her to the heart. But she got her wish anyway, if only briefly; when Max swung his legs down and tried to stand, they faltered under him, and he had to lean on Liz while easing into a sitting position on the edge of the table.

The two agents ignored him for the moment as they searched the room for evidence, of which they found none. The file cabinet contained no files, only dust; the slide box contained no slides, only a puddle of what smelled like...the agent elected not to investigate farther; the beakers in the refrigerator contained what looked like Jello. Everywhere, it was the same: the evidence, if there had been any, had either been removed or changed to something useless. Topolsky turned on Max. "Did you do this?"

"He was unconscious," Liz said quickly.

Topolsky looked around again. Someone was missing. "Where's the girl who was with you?"

"What girl?"

Valenti advanced until he was shoulder to shoulder with his colleague. "Don't play dumb with us, Ms. Parker. Isabel Evans."

"She must have left by the back way."

Valenti peered around. "What back way?"

Topolsky returned her attention to Max. "What did Grunewald do to you?"

Max was now fully cognizant, though his head still felt heavy. "Nothing. I mean, he was showing me around the place, and I must have fainted. Haven't been eating very well. Stomach problems."

"What did he say to you?" Topolsky asked.

"He was raving," Liz interjected. "You saw him. He's a maniac. You can't pay attention to anything he says."

Topolsky directed the next question to her. "Were you aware he'd been shadowing you and your friends?"

"I suppose you'd have cause to know, " Liz shot back, a little more tartly than was called for.

"We have been watching him," Topolsky conceded. "And you were observed visiting this house on numerous occasions."

"That's right. I was doing some work for him."

"Why'd you come back this evening?" Valenti asked. "And you, Evans—what were you doing here?" Both were mute. Valenti stepped toward them. "One of you better start talking, or—"

A voice broke in on him. "Or what?" He and the others turned to see Philip Evans on the steps. "All we need," Valenti muttered.

Philip hastened to his son's side. "You all right, Max? Isabel told me—"

"I'm fine." He smiled weakly. "—now."

Philip turned to Valenti with an air of grievance so self-evidently justified that every right-thinking citizen would certainly support him in it: Liz remembered that he was a lawyer, and she was grateful for it now. "On what grounds are you detaining these children?"

"Just trying to determine if a crime's been committed."

"The way you were talking, it sounds as though they're the suspects."

Valenti made an effort to keep his cool. "We believe Dr. Grunewald may have detained your son with intent to commit bodily harm. But if Max is unwilling to cooperate—"

"I told you," said Max, "I was unconscious. I don't remember any of it."

"There's your answer," said Philip.

Valenti started to reply. Topolsky spoke first. "But Liz wasn't."

Liz opened her mouth. "Liz, you don't have to say anything," Philip cautioned her. So she shut it again.

"Maybe Grunewald had an accomplice," Topolsky suggested. "Someone who lured Max to him." She was staring hard at Liz, who could not meet her eye. Topolsky turned to Max. "Why did you come?" she asked.

Max was staring at Liz. "I thought she'd be here." Liz did not dare to look at him either; her eyes remained fixed on the glossy floor tiles.

"That's enough," Philip declared. "If you have further questions, you can ask them when Max is rested. Needless to say, I would insist on being present. And on seeing to it that Ms. Parker is properly represented. Kids? Time to go." He ushered them to the steps and out the door. The law officers did not try to stop them.

"I can charge Grunewald with attempted assault," said Valenti. "Kidnapping—I don't know."

Topolsky seemed unconcerned. "Let's wait for the psychiatrist's evaluation. I have a feeling the doctor won't be making his rounds for a while."

"If it wasn't for him being a lawyer..." Topolsky nodded in sympathy. "Tell me something, Agent. You ever want to know the truth of a thing so bad it claws at your gut and you just can't let it go?"

"You don't know the half of it." She was gazing at the photo of the UFO convocation, and in particular at the girl in the crowd Liz had thought looked familiar. Then she headed out, with her associate following.

As Valenti started to follow both, he glanced at the photo himself—and it stopped him cold. "Well, I'll be damned," he said. The girl was her–a lot younger and brighter-eyed than her experience with the Bureau had left her but, now that Valenti had caught the resemblance, unmistakably the same person. Never in a million years would he have expected that. He filed the information, in case it should be called for at some time, and exited after her and her colleague.

Philip's grey Mercedes had Liz home in minutes. Throughout the ride neither he nor his son had so much as glanced into the back seat. Now as she opened the door Philip spoke to her, but without turning his head. "You know, Liz," he said, "I think it'd be best for everyone if you didn't come around any more."

This stung deeply. "Mr. Evans—"

"I can get an injunction. If it becomes necessary." He was still facing the windshield. And so was Max. Liz restrained herself with an effort from doing something really immature, like crying. As she stepped out onto the sidewalk, Max rolled down his window. She looked toward him hopefully. Maybe everything was all right, after all; maybe—

He had on that scowl of his which was almost a frown. "Guess your experiment was a failure, wasn't it?" he said. "And just think—you won't even be able to publish the results." He rolled up the window without giving her a chance to answer. And she would have had no answer in any case. The Mercedes glided off into the night. That was that, then.

The restaurant was closed, but her father was inside, waiting for her. "Lizzie, finally. You know your friend Maria got herself terminated today?"

Liz had to struggle to recall what that was about; it seemed like a story from another life. "I thought she was cutting back on her hours."

"Wouldn't have been enough to justify keeping her on. What the heck happened between you two?"

"Philosophical difference." That summed it up as well as anything. She looked out the window in the direction Max had gone—for good, she imagined. "And, you know," she said, "for once in her life Maria was right."

Just before bedtime she extracted a specimen of her blood and put it under the microscope to examine. It had been in contact with theirs, and Grunewald claimed theirs was toxic to humans; the claim was probably a product of his mania, but as a good scientist Liz could not dismiss it out of hand, she must continue to observe and to record her observations dispassionately. Yet now, when she needed it most, her scientist's lack of feeling failed her: she was too scared to look.

She heard a tap at her window, but saw no one. Max! she thought; apart from herself and her family, he was the only one besides herself familiar with her rooftop retreat. She stuck her head out the window and looked around eagerly, but he was not there. Someone was, however. "Isabel?" said Liz. "Is that you?"

Isabel was leaning against the wall with her head turned away. "Max sent me," she said, in an oddly clipped manner, and fidgeting with her nails as she spoke. "To pick up that—thing you're holding for him."

Liz showed her disappointment. "He couldn't come himself?"

"You honestly think you have a right to expect that?"

"If I could just explain to him—"

Isabel felt she had borne more than enough. "Liz, just go get it, will you? And make it fast. I'm only doing this for Max."

Liz fetched the Balancer from its hiding place. She had never wanted the responsibility for it anyway—so why did she feel such a sense of loss as she laid it in Isabel's hand? "Thanks," said Isabel brusquely. "Oh, and I'm sorry about the handprint." She crossed the roof and, a moment later, disappeared over the side.

Puzzled, Liz consulted her mirror. Her hair had fallen to one side to expose the back of her neck, which was tattooed with a shining silver residue where Isabel had grabbed her earlier that evening. Luckily, her hair had hidden it from the adults, and the fingermarks were now fading; soon they would be gone.

Liz no longer felt scared. She took her journal from its niche, which she had left unsealed after removing the Balancer, brought the journal to her desk, and opened it to the first blank page. Then she bent over her microscope.

Her blood was still red. But not completely; not any more. Now it had a thread of green winding through it, like the swirl of chocolate in marbled ice cream. She kept staring at the swirl, thinking it was a trick of the eyes and would go away. Finally she accepted that it would not, and perhaps never would. But she could not complain. It was what she had wanted: to have a human test subject. She deserved it; she deserved all that had happened.

She picked up two objects from the desk, sliding one of them out of its frame first, then tore up both of them together, and dropped them into the wastebasket beside her. One of them was her application for the science bowl. The other was a picture of Max Evans.

Episode 1.18X

The Wrong 'Uns

On Roswell's southwestern outskirts, between the town proper and the endless brown floor of the desert, there stood two square miles of prefabricated frame houses. Outside one of these, behind a wire mesh fence, a small boy was sitting in his yard scooping up some of the dirt with a toy steam shovel: this was how he chose to spend his Saturday mornings.

After a little he noticed a slightly bigger boy with slightly browner skin watching him from the gate. The watcher smiled shyly. His eyes widened as the lock on the gate changed to salt, or something like it, and then crumbled away. The gate swung open. After a moment's hesitation, the boy entered. The smaller boy held the shovel out to him, offering him a turn at play.

The woman the next house over peered out her screen door and saw the two of them sitting together. "¡Dios mio!" she cried. She ran out of the house into the road and across to the neighboring property, halting a few feet short of the open gate, from where she waved to the boy who was visiting. "¡Salgase de ahi!" she shouted. "¡Immediatamente!"

Reluctantly, and with an apologetic smile at his newfound friend, he got up and walked out to her. Then he realized he had taken the steam shovel with him. As he was starting back in to return it, she pulled it out of his hands and flung it at its owner. Then she herded her boy back home and inside. "¡Nunca vuelvas a entrar ahi!" she ordered. "¿Entiendes? ¡Nunca! ¡Ellos son los malos!" She shot a hostile look back at "los malos," or the only one that was in sight, before following the boy in and slamming the door after them.

The steam shovel was lying on its side where the woman had thrown it. The boy whose shovel it was wished for it to stand up, and it did—but it immediately fell over again. He bent sideways for a better view; one of the wheels was bent. He wished for it to straighten itself out, and it did. The toy reared upright and came rolling over to him. He stopped it with a look, picked it and himself up out of the dirt, got up himself, and went inside. He was tired of the game for today.

In the town proper, some older boys were congregated at what until today had been the residence of a fellow band member. "You came," said Nicky. "Thanks." An adult they did not recognize was stuffing Nicky's luggage into the rear of a Navigator that was parked in the drive.

"You going to live with your mom?" asked Alex.

"Nah, they haven't exactly been able to find her. For now I'll be staying with my cousin in Salt Lake. Hey, you guys can visit on spring break. We'll jam, maybe land a gig or two somewhere."

"Definitely," agreed Alex, bobbing his head a few times to denote conviction.

"I mean, it's not like the group's disbanding or anything like that."

"Disband? The Whits? Never!" A silence ensued. It was the silence of an empty house, an empty garage.

But something else was also on Nicky's mind. He leaned close to Alex so the others would not hear. "Alex, those friends of yours. Are they—what my dad thought?"

Alex affected incomprehension. "Friends? Uh, which ones would those be?"

"Isabel Evans," Nicky whispered. "Is she—one of them?"

"Isabel? Is Isabel—" Alex laughed. "Isabel!" He laughed again.

"Yeah, that's what I figured," Nicky said. He reflected. "Woulda been cool, though. So long, bro." He gave Alex a hug (a guys' hug), and then the others took their turns. They said goodbye as if it were not the real thing, as if they were really going to reunite some day, and did not know that Nicky's leaving was the end of all things.

Alex was still feeling a little melancholy at lunchtime as he took the last bite of his Canis Major ("A great dog!" the menu translated; the name had been Liz's invention). He waited at the register for Liz to take his check. Until then he had not noticed that she was the only server. "Where's Maria?"

"She's no longer with us."

"You mean she's dead?"

"No, she's around. Just not—around."

Glancing into the street, she saw the Jeep approaching with Max at the wheel and Isabel alongside. In front of the cafe he slowed down to a crawl. Liz's face took on a look of hope—until she saw the two women jaywalking in front of him. He had only stopped to keep from hitting them, and as soon as they mounted the opposite sidewalk he went on without a sideways glance. Liz's feeling that she had it coming to her did nothing to allay her disappointment, which she tried but failed to conceal. "Guess they're around-not-around too, huh?" Alex ventured.

"Okay," an angry voice interrupted, "come on and tell me what it is I don't know."

"The question on my lips," said Alex.

The first voice was Michael's. Liz looked up in surprise; when she had last seen him he had been at the grill. Now he was standing over her, fuming like a bull. "I have no idea what you're referring to," she said. It did not sound convincing even to her.

"Max and Isabel just drove by without stopping. That's on account of me, isn't it?'

Liz was truly amazed. "You?"

"There's something you all aren't telling me. And you think I'm too stupid to figure it out. But I will. You can count on it."

"Once you do," said Alex, "clue me in. No info's being routed my way either."

"Will you just let it go, both of you?" Some of the customers turned their heads. Liz lowered her voice. "If there's anything you need to know, I'll be the first to tell you." An older gentleman at the other end of the counter called for more water, and she went to fetch the carafe from the side counter. Michael returned to the kitchen.

"'Need to know,'" Alex mused to himself. "You suppose Liz could be a spy on covert detail?" He considered the proposition, and her. "Unh-uh," he concluded.

The longer Michael stood alone at the grill, the heavier his sense of grievance became. Liz watched from the order window as he administered harsh treatment to a variety of sandwich ingredients, of which the tomatoes fared worst. At last, taking pity on both them and him, she went back to the kitchen for a talk. "You're right," she admitted, "there is something. But it's got nothing to do with you. It's something that happened between me and Max." Which was true enough as far as it went.

"The two of you have a fight?"

"Kind of," she dodged. "You're better off not knowing." She almost wished she did not.

"And you're sure that's all there is to it?"

"That's all. Well, there is one other thing." It did not pertain, and to her it hardly seemed to matter now, but it was a puzzle she could not let go of. "That V shape in the sky you said was Aries. What made you say that?"

"Nothing. I just knew."

"But it isn't Aries. I can show you. In a book." She knew Michael trusted books.

"Okay," he said, "then show me."

Alex had left the restaurant in search of the Evans siblings—one of them in particular—and found them at a competing establishment two blocks down on Main. Taco UFO (locals pronounced the second word "you-foe")was the name listed in the phone book , but the sign at the top of the pole alongside read simply "Tacos." The only seating the place offered was a zigzag array of oak picnic tables outdoors under the sign. Max and Isabel were sharing one of them, facing each other with morose looks. Two uneaten tacos in plastic baskets and many unopened packets of hot sauce lay between them.

"Hey, you two!" Alex greeted them as he walked up. Isabel regarded him balefully and Max not at all. "Mind if I join you?" There was no answer. "Okay, then. I'll just sit here quietly. In kind of a—meditative, nonverbal kind of—impasse—aw, shoot, Max, why don't you and Liz make it up? Whatever the problem is, it can't be worth all this."

Max stared at him as if he had not spoken. "I need to talk to you," he said. "Over there."

He led Alex off to the Jeep and reached in to pull the Balancer from under the front seat. "I need you to hold on to this for a while. There's nobody else I can trust."

"Not even—"

Max cut him off. "No."

Alex grimaced. "I don't know. If my dad should happen to find it—"

Max pressed the object into Alex's hand. "Then see he doesn't find it." He called to Isabel. "Toss you for the Jeep?"

"I'll walk."

"Okay, then I'll see you this evening." He climbed into the driver's seat and started the engine.

All the while, Alex had been attempting to register his objection. "Max? Max, I don't—"

"Don't mind helping out. I know. That's really great of you, Alex." He clapped Alex on the shoulder. Then he sped off in the Jeep. And he still looked morose.

"Yeah," said Alex, "goodbye to you too," said Alex. He felt conspicuous with the Balancer in his hand and stuffed it into a pants pocket, where it strained the seam; he limped a little as he returned to the table and plumped himself down opposite the one remaining customer. "So," he said, "Isabel." She rolled her eyes and sighed heavily.

Liz meanwhile was spending her lunch break in the staff room, giving Michael a crash astronomy tutorial. "This is how Aries looks," she said, pointing to the illustration in her textbook.

Michael studied it for a minute. "Must be a different Aries, then."

"There can't be two of them!"

"I don't care. That V shape is Aries. I feel it!"

Liz saw that resistance was futile. "Okay," she allowed reluctantly, "it may have something to do with Aries. But it's definitely not the constellation as normally observed from Earth. And there's something else strange about it too. We're the only ones able to see it—you three, me, Alex, and Maria." (she assumed the last as a logical corollary).

Michael listened without a word, or a clue; he felt he was in over his head by a long way. "Do you suppose," said Liz (but she was really asking herself), "that it could be some form of radiant energy outside the visible spectrum? And that we can—"

Michael had only heard as far as the word "energy" when a look of eagerness came into his face. "That's what it is! Energy! The V up there and the V down here—they're both the same. The same kind of energy." (Again, he "just knew" this.)

He went on in the identical vein for a while, rambling wherever his thoughts took him (yet always coming back to the word "energy") in a way that was neither systematic nor easy to follow. But Liz stuck with him as best she could, and little by little most of it fell into place. "So the Stones from the cave luminesce," she re-phrased, "when they're in proximity to the locations on the map, because of the energy they contain."

"Exactly!" said Michael.

It made sense to Liz. "And one of them is—"

"The library. I don't know yet where the others are."

"I know one of them!" The realization had just hit her. "It has to be. Angels' Ground!"

"You mean the place where we—where people go to—" He did not like to say it outright in front of Liz.

"Well?" she said. "Energy?" Michael saw the sense in this. "Do you have your map with you?" she asked. He did; it was never far from him now. He retrieved it from his jacket, which was hanging on the coat tree next to the door.

Liz looked the map over. "If this is north and this is the library—wait, this isn't right. None of the symbols are in the right place for Angels' Ground."

"Then it isn't one of the energy sources."

"It has to be!" she repeated.

"How do you know?"

"I just—" She stopped; that was what he had said, and she had refused to accept, as regarded Aries. Then she realized something that should have been obvious to her before. "We can test it with the Stones! We'll take them up there, and if they start glowing, then we'll know—"

"Sorry, I can't—I don't have them right now." The words came out of him awkwardly. "They're—in storage."

Liz waited, but that was all he would volunteer, and she sensed that she should not push him. "Okay," she said. "But I'm sure of it, anyway." She pointed at the map again. "So we now know this isn't north. The correct orientation, we won't know until we can identify the symbol for Angels' Ground, which has to be one of the four left." Then she reasoned farther (once she got going, she found it difficult to stop): "I could draw up four different maps, overlay each one on a map of Roswell, and compare for obvious correspondences or discrepancies. That will take time, of course—"

During her speech Michael had been looking increasingly troubled. "Forget about it."

"Why?"

"You've told me too much already. Anything I find out, I may have to use against you—all of you—if it ever comes to that."

This prediction was surprising coming from him, but she saw that it fit in with Grunewald's findings, and her own fears. "Do you think it will come to that?"

"It's what Nasedo wants. And a lot of humans, I'm sure."

"But not you." His face reflected the same confusion it had in his earlier talk with Maria. "Do you, Michael?"

"It doesn't matter what I want. I'd still have to betray you. And that'd make you a traitor too—because you supplied me with the information."

Liz stared gravely at him. "Then that would be between me and my conscience. If that day ever comes, we'll all have to choose sides. We'll all betray someone." She added, more quietly, "Maybe some of us have already."

Michael got up. "Well, it won't be on my account. I think too much of—" He stopped; that would sound corny. "Think too much," he amended. "But don't you think any more about it. Leave the alien stuff to us—to me."

"Understood." This response satisfied him well enough, and he returned to the kitchen, unaware that to Liz's precise mind "Understood" was not synonymous with "Agreed."

Out in front of Taco UFO, Alex continued to sit mutely, since Isabel seemed indisposed to conversation. At length, however, she spoke, though her words were not an incentive to further colloquy. "Don't you have somewhere to be?" she asked. "Other than here, I mean."

After his long experience of her, Alex took this in stride, and set out along a more positive line. "Liz told me about you rescuing your brother. That was pretty brave."

"Trust Liz to keep a confidence." Well, it had seemed like a positive line. Isabel stood as if preparing to go. "Whatever you do, don't tell Michael. He doesn't know the history with Grunewald."

"How could he not know?"

"We hadn't reconnected at the time. If he finds out now, he'll think we've been keeping things from him."

"He thinks so anyway. What's the difference?"

"Do as I tell you! And stop annoying me!" Then Isabel recalled her resolution of three months earlier not to be so imperious, at least with people she knew. "Sorry if that sounded rude."

"No, we certainly wouldn't want to hurt anyone's feelings, would we?"

Isabel looked as if she would have liked to answer him, but she left without doing so. Following her retreating form, his eye also took in the order window, where it paused on a face he knew. "Maria," he said absently to himself—and then, "Maria?" He walked up to her.

She displayed a facsimile of her normal smile. "And now Alex. La reunión familiar. Who knew?"

"You moonlighting?" He considered for a moment. "I guess technically this would be sunlighting." He realized this sounded like something Liz would have said.

"Yup, finally shook the old Crashdown, thank God. This place is so much more convenient."

"Better pay? Better hours?"

"Actually, no. And no."

"And farther out of your way. Sure, I see the convenience in that."

A Chevy pick-up pulled into the lot. "Oops, here comes the trail boss. He doesn't like us cowherds socializing on Taco time. Vamos, compadre."

So Alex took to the sidewalk. "Alex Whitman," he muttered gloomily to himself, "social outcast."

Ahead of him he saw Isabel lingering at a playground fence, watching the children inside. He had never pegged her as having maternal leanings. He guessed that she was remembering her own childhood and regretting the one she wished had been hers—as was indeed the case. As she watched, a small girl who was climbing up the slide slipped on one of the rungs, clung desperately to the handrail for a second or two, and then fell. Isabel tensed as if about to act on her behalf, but she did not. The girl landed hard, and tore her sleeve. She began to cry. An older girl, apparently her sister, ran to comfort her.

Alex ambled up beside Isabel. She knew then that he must have seen it all, and she wished he had not. "You again," she said unhappily. And she continued up the sidewalk.

This time, however, he stayed with her. "Me again, yeah. Excuse me for trying to remain a caring friend in the face of continuous rejection."

"You don't understand. You couldn't." For once Isabel was not trying to be rude; this was the most polite reply she could summon up without being dishonest.

"I understand you could have put your oar in back there to keep that girl from hurting herself, and you chose not to."

"It wouldn't have—" She realized that what she was about to say was not true, and she revised it. "—been a good thing," she finished.

"Helping people isn't a good thing?"

Isabel flared at that. "I do help! Or I try. But the right way—the normal way."

"But, Isabel, what's normal for you—"

"Is the same as for everybody else! There aren't special rules for people with—abilities. Just because I can do things doesn't mean I don't know they're—oh, I told you you wouldn't understand."

Alex took a stab in the dark. "Does this have anything to do with what happened at Nicky's? And what did happen there, by the way?"

"Didn't blabbermouth Liz tell you all about it?"

"All she said was—"

Isabel swung on him. "Look, Alex, I'm not Wonder Girl, all right? I can't go around all the time crumbling doors and melting into walls!"

Alex stared at her. "You did that? Wow. That's—impressive."

"Doors and walls are there for a reason."

"To keep other people out?" He took another stab. "Or to keep you in." Isabel did not answer. Uh-huh, Alex thought.

After leaving them, her brother stopped by the UFO Center to collect his paycheck and seen someone—at least it looked like him—who was the last person he would have expected to see there. He was studying a diorama of a crashed saucer and three dummy aliens (to whom Max had privately given the names of Isabel, Michael, and himself). Max hailed him tentatively. "Dad?"

Philip was more surprised to see him than the other way around. "Thought you were off duty today."

That he had probably timed his visit on that assumption did not occur to Max until later. He held up his paycheck. "What are you doing here? Thought you considered all this stuff—"

"Moonshine? Well, maybe. But still worth examining, don't you think?"

"This is all tourist bait down here. The serious material, if you can call it that, Milt keeps under lock and key." He nodded toward the upstairs office.

"You have anything by Doc Grunewald?"

Max's guard went up instantly. The question had been put with all apparent casualness, but Max knew his father too well to be fooled by that. "Grunewald?"

"He's written on the subject, hasn't he?"

"I wouldn't know."

His father stared levelly at him. "Son, what really happened out at his place?"

"Told you, I was out cold. He must have drugged me."

"Sounds as though he might have been planning to conduct some kind of experiment on you. It wouldn't be the first time. Though you may not remember—"

"I remember," Max said grimly.

"He always was suspicious of the pair of you. I dismissed him as a nut—well, he is a nut. But is he completely nutty?" The question came too close to the mark for Max's comfort. "I'd like you to recount for me if you can the exact sequence of events before you blacked out."

"So you can shoot holes in my testimony? I told you, Dad, I remember nothing. Nothing at all."

Philip smiled with the bland assurance of someone who had anticipated the answer, and every other possible answer, before it was given. "Fine," he said. "We'll talk about it later. When it's not so painful for you. See you at dinner tonight." As he strolled out, he left Max feeling like a first-time ship's passenger in choppy seas.

He and Philip did not discuss it again at dinner; indeed, nobody talked about much of anything. The two children remained as depressed as they had been the rest of the day, and their depression seemed to spread to the entire table.

After Isabel retired, her mother looked in to find her regarding herself in her curtained mirror with no more joy than she had shown while picking at her rice casserole. "Are you all right, honey?" Diane asked. Isabel forced a not very successful smile. "I saw at dinner something was bothering you. If you're worried about that man Grunewald, your father assures me he's safely locked up."

"It's not him, it's—" Isabel did not want to tell, but she could not stop there. "—my body." And she still had not told it. But what could she say that her mother would understand, that would not terrify her and endanger them all?

"What about your body?" her mother inquired.

"I hate it," said Isabel. "Hate it hate it hate it hate it." For additional emphasis, she flung herself onto her wire frame bed.

"Why, Isabel Evans!" Diane came to stand beside her and placed a supportive arm around her shoulder. "There's nothing wrong with your body." She scrutinized the reflection in the glass. "You're a little wide-hipped, is all. It runs in the—I mean, many of us are prone to it."

Isabel had forgotten about that: great, one more thing to be unhappy about. "Thanks, but that wasn't exactly what I meant."

"Then what?"

Isabel shook her head, and shook it again. She should never have brought it up; that was what Max would say. But Max said lots of things. It was easy for him; he was aloof from it all. He did not want to live the life of the typical American teen; he just wanted to pass for one. "You'll look back on these as the best days of your life," the principal promised her and the other students at the all-class assembly every year, and Isabel had taken the counsel to heart. She wanted to make the most of her time there, to make it something to remember—because who knew what would happen to her after, what she would become? She had no models to go by: not her mother or her grandmother or any of her friends or teachers or—God forbid—Agent Topolsky. None of them had in her what she had: her abilities, as she called them, deliberately avoiding the word "powers." Or, rather, "power" in the singular—because that was what it was: a single thing manifesting itself in different forms.

—and now it was changing. (As if it had not been enough to deal with before!) Isabel no longer had a clear sense of what it was today, or what it would be—what she would be—tomorrow. And her mother (who was not her mother, any more than her father was her father; but this was something else Isabel chose not to think about)—her dear, well-meaning mother, so certain she knew what her daughter's problem was—she was off on an entirely wrong track. But how could Isabel disillusion her?

"And all those boys," she was saying, "who are climbing all over one another for a date with you? I suppose they don't bolster your confidence?"

Not in the way it matters, thought Isabel. And besides, boys... "Boys," she said aloud, "are..."

"Yes, they are," her mother agreed without having to hear the rest. "They most certainly are." Then her face took on an unaccustomed slyness. "Of course, there is Alex Whitman."

"Alex?" He had not figured in Isabel's thoughts at all. "What about Alex?"

"He seems to have a good head on his shoulders."

"Alex! Oh, yes. He knows all there is to know—especially about me. Just ask him! He's full of good advice. And always so helpful—always wanting to be doing things for me. Why can't he just leave me alone?"

"Have you asked him to?"

"Are you kidding? Yes, I've asked him!" Isabel did not care for the drift of the conversation at all. But it had taken her mind off her other worry.

"And does he, when you ask him to?"

"Well—yes! But he never goes very far—because when I need him again, there he is. What on earth did I do to—"

"Merit such devotion? Nothing, probably. But that's how it usually works. Strange, isn't it?" She smiled in apparent mystification, but Isabel was not fooled—and had not fooled her either: her mother knew as well as Isabel did that she did not really want Alex to leave her alone. But what did she want of him? That, her mother did not know, nor did Isabel herself.

During school hours she was keeping what Alex called bad company: Ursula Slavin's clique, which Isabel had taken over as her own. At lunchtime on Thursday of the same week, waiting together in the cafeteria line, they filled the room with their chatter and laughter, which was a little too loud and a little too shrill to be wholly genuine. "But, Ursula!" Isabel protested, in response to her cliquemates' unsubtle insinuations. "Of course I'll be on the prom committee with you guys. How could you doubt me?"

"Well, you've been so busy lately," Ursula sniffed. "With those other friends of yours."

"But I don't have any other friends! You know that."

"What about Maria Deluca? Of the flea-market Delucas? And Michael Guerin? The creature from the trailer park?" Ursula's face took on a solemn expression. "You've been observed, Isabel," she warned. "People are talking."

"Who's talking?"

"Well—us. And we're your friends. I can only imagine—oh, my God, here's another one." Alex, with a musician's instinctive timing, had just added himself to the line. "Honestly, Isabel. Alex Whitman? Does he have even a prayer of ever being perceived as a social asset?" Alex could tell that she was talking about him, could imagine the kind of thing she was saying, and was disappointed in Isabel for listening to it, as he was often disappointed in her. But then, he was often disappointed in himself, and so he did not hold it against her much.

If he had been able to hear the conversation he would have counted it in her favor that she put up some resistance. "Alex is nice! He's—his own man."

"Fine," said Ursula, with a catty smile at the other girls, "as long as he's not yours." Isabel let the matter rest there, though she felt uncomfortable about it.

After stocking their trays, the girls headed for their usual table, with Ursula in the lead, but she stopped dead in her tracks on seeing it occupied by a small, dark girl Isabel did not remember ever having seen before. "Oh, my God," said Ursula. "An e.t."

This disconcerted Isabel momentarily. "What?"

"A freshman." Ursula did not know the girl personally; she could just tell. "Sitting at our table. Isabel, go read her the act." Isabel seemed to hesitate. "Go on, Isabel! The way you did last time."

All the girls' eyes were on her, and so were Alex's. For some reason Isabel did not want him watching her just then. "Let's take another table," she suggested.

"Isabel! We have our status to uphold. If we let one of them take our place, soon we won't have a place."

"But she was there first."

Ursula stared at her. "So?" Isabel realized then that further appeal to common decency would be pointless. "Don't tell me you're feeling some kind of sympathy for her?" Ursula asked.

"No, that would spoil the image, wouldn't it?" For the first time Isabel saw Ursula as she knew Alex did (he had made no secret of it), and she was mad at him for that. Why did he have to be there? What was he, her conscience or something?

Ursula stepped up to her as closely as her tray would permit. "Isabel, what is wrong with you today? You're the one that called them e.t.s to start with. Which I must say is highly appropriate. Go send her away." Her tone, and the look in her eyes, grew darker. "Otherwise we might start thinking there's something weird about you."

Her threat hit home. Isabel cast her a hostile glare, which looked genuine for a moment, but then changed to the insincere, put-on kind—which restored Ursula's trust in her. Putting Alex out of her mind, almost, she approached the table in a manner that reminded him of the Queen of Hearts in Alice. "...unless it's this little e.t.," she said. The freshman girl looked up at her with a pair of big grey eyes, which seemed even bigger by contrast with her tiny features. "You're new to this planet," continued Isabel, "so you couldn't be expected to know. But just for future reference, this table is ours. We sit here every day at this hour."

"I know," said the girl. "I've seen you." And she placidly resumed eating. Ursula and the others made expostulating noises. Alex, who had been listening with concern—for Isabel as well as her target—smiled with relief. This one could take care of herself.

"And you still sat down here?"

"Why not?"

"Allow me to explain this to you in terms you can understand." Ursula's eyes glinted. This was the "act" she had looked forward to hearing Isabel deliver again. Alex, to whom it was new, listened less happily. "We are upperclassmen. We are the rulers of this planet. You are a freshman—an alien species—an inhabitant of the most insignificant planet in the most obscure galaxy in the known universe. You have no rights. You exist only by our sufferance. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We will tell you where to walk, where to sit, when to come, and when to go. So—" Glancing inadvertently at Alex, she found his eye trained sternly on her, and she faltered. "So—so—" She found herself powerless to continue. Damn him, anyway!

Seeing her dilemma, Ursula stepped into the breach. "So either you do as we say or go back to your own planet." She ended with a glance at Isabel which suggested that her queenship of the group was due for reassessment. One of the other girls grabbed a flyer from the bulletin board—a cartoon of the famed Roswell alien, bug-eyed and chinless (which Isabel liked to annoy her brother with by telling him it proved people knew about him), and handed it to Ursula, who tried to stick it to the girl's back. It would not hold.

The girl did not bother with them. She was gazing up at Isabel inquiringly. "Go on!" Isabel said. "Go!"—and then, in a whisper, "Please?"

The girl shrugged. "I was finished anyway." She wiped her mouth daintily, then stood and picked up her books. "For today, I mean," she added, with a glance at Ursula. As she passed between the two of them, she laid her fingers lightly on Isabel's hand. You can't change what you are, she said—but she did not move her lips. Isabel stared at her in shock. The girl drew her attention to the salt and pepper shakers on the table. One was white, one black; they traded colors. The girl smiled at Isabel ever so slightly and then walked off with the same placid, unhurried air.

Isabel stared after her. She hardly heard the voice at her side—Ursula's, it must have been—squealing, "My God, did she actually touch you? Isabel?" After a few seconds she sat down with the others and put up a front of ordinary sociableness, but her mind was (so to speak) in a galaxy far, far away.

Alex had seen that something had happened between the two of them, but had seen no more than that. He hurried out after the girl and found her standing in the shade of the building, gazing out at the blue and gold umbrellas of the lunch patio with an expression he was unable to fathom. "What'd you do to Isabel?" he demanded.

The girl regarded him with the same imperturbable manner she had shown inside. "That's Isabel's to tell. If she chooses." Then she walked off again. Isabel was watching from inside, wondering what had been said. But she would not ask Alex, and she certainly could not ask the girl. She would put it completely out of her mind.

Liz, on the other hand, never put anything out of her mind if she could help it. This included Michael's questions about the cave map. After school that day she stopped by the Roswell Historical Society, which had its office in a tiny building at a corner of Summerhaven Park. It was only open two afternoons a week, not counting Saturdays, and this happened to be one of them. The docent on duty Thursdays was an elderly woman with glasses and a librarian-like air. "I'm doing a project on the town's history," Liz lied, "and I have questions about some of the local landmarks. Like, oh, the library. And Angels' Ground..."

While she was so occupying herself, Isabel was trying to manage the feelings that had been growing in her all day, the more that she thought about what she had vowed not to think about. The revelation had burst on her so suddenly and so unexpectedly, she had been unprepared to accept it, especially in the middle of the school day, surrounded by her friends (so-called), caught up in her painstakingly cultivated conventional teen's existence, in which her noontime encounter had no place; in other words, she had to "think outside the box," as the saying went, in order to think about it at all. And she had had to fight past her immediate, instinctive reaction—which was one of fear, plain and simple—to reach the sea of conflicting emotions that tossed inside her. Now she was almost drowning in them.

She had met a girl like herself! That was exciting, because it was a first—and scary, because the only alien they had known about other than themselves was a serial killer—and ego-threatening, because she was no longer the only known female of her species—and embarrassing, because when she had met the other she had been trying, obviously and clumsily, to pass for human, trying to deny her own identity: this, more than anything else perhaps, was what she had been reluctant to face.

She knew she should tell Max; she longed to, in a way. But she felt constrained to keep it a secret. If she could talk to the girl alone, with nobody else around, she could find out things. On the other hand, what questions would she ask? And would she be able to understand the answers? She doubted if the girl would let her get that close anyway, now. Telling Max would not help: he would try to simplify things and end up making them more complicated; it was what he was best at.

But he was also her brother. And she felt a need to talk to someone. So she slipped into his room that night long after they had "gone to bed," but knowing he would still be awake. She hunched down on the throw rug beside the bed with her knees drawn up to her chin. "Oh, Max," she said, "I did a stupid thing today."

"So what else is new?" Isabel did not smile. "Stupid how?"

"I was mean to someone. To a freshman."

"Oh, well, if it was just a freshman..." Isabel smiled a little this time. "You're not a mean person. Why would you act like you were?"

She tilted her head and rested one cheek on her knee. "To be normal."

"How many normal people have you ever actually met? I have a feeling the supposedly normal ones are the exceptions. And probably they'd rather be different, would rather be noticed."

"'Supposedly.' Mmm, maybe," said Isabel. She noticed that the photo on his nightstand was lying face down. She lifted it to look at. "Still, if I could be the girl in this picture..."

"Liz?"

"Is this who she is?"

Max studied the photo for a moment. "No. Nobody could be that girl." He returned it to its place, face down. "Why on earth would you want to be that?"

"On earth," she repeated, with meaning. "Why do you think? So I won't have to deal with who I am."

"But I thought you were okay with it. I mean, we haven't talked about it in a while—"

Isabel remembered vividly. "Since we were ten. Then, I felt like I was someone really special, only no one else knew it, but some day they would and I'd be, like, their queen. It's not like that, Max. And I can't stay in denial about it. I'm changing. My body is changing. "

"Mine is too. Happens to everybody at our age—the biology book says."

"Not like this. I feel the power growing in me, but I hardly know what it is or what it can do—what I'm capable of. Neither do you. And of course Michael..."

"Others might know. Others of our kind—if we knew of any. But, unfortunately—" Isabel had opened her mouth to speak. "What?"

She shook her head. "Nothing." She stood. "Thanks for listening, Max." She hurried out of the room. Her brother looked after her curiously. Sometimes he understood her, and sometimes, like now, he was obliged to defer understanding.

Within the hour she was at the school auditorium, pushing Alex out onto the stage in front of the entire student body. He tried to bolt for the wings, but Isabel grabbed him and held him fast. "You can too dance," she said. "Try it and you'll see." And suddenly he was dancing, beautifully, and the crowd was cheering and applauding. "Now take off your clothes," she said. And suddenly they were off and he was in his t-shirt and shorts before God and everybody.

And then something began to happen to his body: it began to grow new parts. A big fin, thrusting out of his front, tearing the boxers, and an even bigger fin, thrusting out of his back, tearing the shirt. The crowd was chortling and jeering. Then his jaws began to grow. They grew out a yard from the rest of his face and turned toward Isabel, somehow pulling the rest of his body after them. Then they opened wide—and swallowed her whole.

...Alex sat up in bed and found himself sweating. He discerned, by the night-light, a girl sitting on the madras spread. "Isabel? Is that you?"

"Hush," she said. She laid a soothing hand on his cheek. "You're only dreaming."

"Doesn't feel like a dream."

"It has to be. You know that's the only place I can open up to you."

"Were you responsible for that coming-out party just now?" He knew she must have been.

"Sorry about that. But I wanted you to understand how it feels—how I feel sometimes. It can make me—I might say things that aren't very—" She struggled to say it.

"Hey," said Alex. "It's okay." And it was; Isabel saw in his eyes that it was. She could have wept for gratitude, if she had not been Isabel. "Wish I could do something to help."

Isabel had been hoping he would say that. "Actually..."

She did not have to finish this time either. "Ah," he said. "Not drawn by uncontrollable primal lust, then." Isabel gave him "that look," as Alex called it. "Hey, you said it's a dream."

Isabel felt a momentary doubt over what she was about to do, but she had argued it out with herself beforehand and concluded it to be justified. She needed Alex's help, and to get it she would have to tell him what she had kept from Max, and would rather have kept to herself. But at least she could trust Alex to be content with what she told him, and leave the rest hers; he was always willing to give her as much space as she needed—or less, when she needed that. He was really rather wonderful, and in the past she had not appreciated him sufficiently: so she had decided just before her visit. But she had also reflected that perhaps it only seemed that way tonight because she wanted something from him.

Reservations or no, she was determined to go through with it; she had to know. "Alex," she said, "that freshman today. The one I—the one in the cafeteria. She's a—a not-of."

"Not of what?"

"Not of this Earth."

The term was new to Alex. "'Not-of.' I like that. You mean she's one of you. Okay, so?"

Isabel stared at him. "You're not surprised?"

He was not, very. He had known there was something odd about the girl; odd but recognizable. "Well, you know how it is," he said. "When you've seen one alien..."

Isabel suspected he was deliberately trying to be annoying, but for her present purpose she was willing to allow him that. "I'd like you to find out all you can about her—who she is, where she's from, where she lives. I know you're able to hack into the school's computer." In fact, Alex had an easier means of access he had stumbled onto accidentally, but he did not let it be generally known. "Will you," asked Isabel, "as a favor to me?"

As Alex was debating it in his mind, weighing the ethical and the erotic considerations, a hazy figure with a golden aura around it materialized at the foot of his bed. "Okay, you win," he said to Isabel. "This is a dream."

"It is now," she said wonderingly.

The figure became more distinct, and they found themselves in company with the person they had just been talking about. "Wouldn't it be simpler to ask me?" she said. She smiled at Isabel so freely that it was as if Isabel's harassment that day had had no real meaning, and Isabel began to believe it had not. "I'm Neila McFadden," she went on. "I'm from—well, the first Earth city I knew was Richmond, Virginia. As for where I live, you can come and see for yourself." And she supplied the address, which was located in the complex of low-cost housing southwest of town.

Isabel drove out there after school the following day. A few miles past the city limit, she took the precaution of pulling to the side of the highway and waiting for the next several vehicles to pass before returning to the highway, reasonably satisfied that she was not being tailed. Best to be cautious: Topolsky was back, Valenti had never gone away, and Nasedo—who knew where he was?

Soon she exited into the grid of narrow lanes separating the ten-square lots. She looked for street signs but saw none, and few visible numbers on the small houses. However, she was in luck—or perhaps instinct (or some wilder talent) came to her aid. She stopped in front of a house from whose stoop a plain-faced Hispanic woman was keeping a close eye on a boy at play in the yard.

Isabel left the Jeep and crossed the road to their front walk, lined with pebbles. She called to the woman on the stoop. "Excuse me? Can you point me to the McFadden house?" On receiving nothing back but a blank stare, she strove to dredge up her recollections of freshman Spanish. "¡Buenos dias, señora! ¿Por favor, donde esta la casa del McFadden?"

The woman's eyes grew wide, and she erupted into a stream of exclamatory utterances too rapid for Isabel to understand fully. "¡Largo de ahi!" she shouted. "¡Esos son malos!" This was followed with a string of epithets.

"Perdona me—" Isabel began.

"¡Esos son malos!" the woman repeated. "¡Malos! ¡Malos!" She waved the boy to her, swept him inside ahead of herself, and slammed the door.

Isabel returned to the Jeep and was lifting a leg to climb in when a sturdy-looking old woman shouted to her from her rocking chair on the porch of the house the Jeep was parked at. "She's right, you know," the woman said. "Ain't too smart, that 'un, but she knows that much."

Isabel walked up to her. "Sorry, what was it she said? My Spanish—"

"Wrong 'uns, she called 'em. And wrong 'uns is what they is."

"Are they? Why's that?"

The old woman shrugged. "'cause God made 'em that way, I reckon."

"Where's their place?"

"Next one down that side. One with the big wire fence around it."

"Thanks."

"But you stay clear of there, honey. Them's no good. Them's—"

"Wrong 'uns, got it." So much for positive intergalactic relations, she thought—and that applied to her too.

She walked across to the gate, feeling less assured than before she had come, and stopped uncertainly. One part of her was anxious to go in; the other part was just anxious.

"If Alex was here," she reasoned with herself, "he'd say, 'Isabel, are you sure you want to do this?' And I'd say, 'Yes, Alex, I'm sure—and it's none of your concern anyway.' And he'd say, 'Isabel, everything you do concerns me. You're the woman of my dreams—literally.'" She shook her head. "No, Alex would never say that. He'd say, 'But, Isabel, aren't you scared?' And I'd say, 'Of course I am! I know nothing about this girl—except that she's like us. And she did invite me.'" She shook her head more emphatically. "This is a waste of time," she said. "I'm going in there." She continued standing. "I am." And finally, "Now." As if that had been the magic word, the gate latch lifted and the gate swung open. "Wal, come on in," said Isabel on its behalf.

As she advanced up the dirt walk, the front door opened and Neila appeared, smiling. "What kept you?"

"Should I have RSVP'ed first? I don't know the right etiquette for dream invitations." She thought again. "It was a dream, wasn't it?"

Neila left the question unanswered. "Come in," she said.

Isabel stared through the open doorway. It was, she sensed, the passage to a different life—and a different her; that beyond it she would lose herself—or find herself, depending on how one saw it; after all, Eve's expulsion from Eden was also a release. Isabel wanted to find out what lay waiting for her in there; she had other wants too, some of them tending in the other direction, but at the moment that one was paramount. So she went inside.

Nothing terrifying befell her immediately. The lair of the "wrong 'uns" was benign, not sinister, full of sunlight pleasantly softened by the paper blinds. These were of a style like nothing Isabel had ever seen, and so were the other furnishings: patchwork-like, triangulated, nearly weightless. "So this is what houses look like on our world," she said.

"Do they? I didn't know. I copied this from Better Homes and Gardens."

She seemed to be waiting for something—for a request from Isabel, for the right moment, for something. This made Isabel restive, and she came to the point right away. "You know why I'm here, right? Because I'm not sure I do."

"To learn," Neila said simply. "You came here to learn."

Isabel nodded; she had known, after all. "I don't think I'm ready. Not yet."

"If you weren't, you wouldn't have come."

"But this power in me—"

"The Balance."

"The Balance." She had known that too. "It's so strong. So destructive."

Her way of putting it seemed to surprise Neila a little. "It can be," she acknowledged. If you want it so."

"What I want," Isabel said, almost in desperation, "is to keep from hurting anyone."

"If you're holding a gun and don't know how to use it, will that stop you hurting someone? Come to the kitchen. I'll make us a pot of tea."

She did this in the conventional way—except for the unusual quantity of pepper she put into the brew. "Why go through the whole process?" asked Isabel. "Can't you just—"

"Of course. But it's never quite the same. Hadn't you noticed?"

Isabel laughed. "Yes, but I thought it was just me."

"Some things," said Neila, "require time." She said no more than that, but stood watching the kettle and waiting for the mix to boil.

Isabel knew it was time. She took a deep breath. "Okay, then. I guess I'm ready. When do we start?"

"We already have."

"When will it end?"

Neila shook her head. "There is no end, that we can see."

They took their tea together in the front room, seated on what Isabel guessed to be a sofa. "I'll teach you all I know," said Neila. "There will be others who know more. You'll discover them in time."

"Like your mother?"

"I never had a mother. Or a father. I was ship-born."

"You mean you were born—out there?"

"No, after it landed. A long way from Roswell. though. So was my brother—adoptive brother." She regarded Isabel curiously. "Weren't you?"

"We don't know. It might have been a ship. But it wasn't where they found the wreckage. We've searched. It must have been some place farther out."

"Was it just you and your brother?"

"Adoptive brother. And Michael."

"Yes, I was forgetting him. Will you tell them about me, do you think?"

"No," Isabel said. "That is, not yet. Have you told anyone about me?"

A small boy ran in from the back hall. Until then Isabel had not guessed he was there. "He's the only one I have to tell," said Neila. "Aluben, say hello to my friend Isabel." Isabel heard a shy 'lo, but only inside her head. "Ben doesn't talk much—aloud, that is."

Isabel had always had difficulty communicating with children, mute or not. "Hi there, big fella. How you doing?" was the best greeting she could come up with.

"He was sick this morning. That's why you didn't see me at school today."

"He seems fine now." In fact, he had begun running in circles around them, and Isabel was trying to shut her ears to the relentless tattoo of his feet on the hard floor.

"Oh, we don't stay sick. You didn't know that?" Neila gave something like a sigh. "We have a long road ahead of us."

"My brother brought someone back from the dead once," Isabel offered, feeling the need to show she was not as backward as her new friend supposed.

"Yes, I heard about that. I'd been wanting to meet you ever since. Pretty reckless of him, wasn't it?"

"It was," Isabel admitted. "Brothers." They both laughed.

The one that was Neila's, having tired of running, went to the dining room bureau (that is, what Isabel assumed to be a bureau) and took out a bag of building blocks, which he poured onto the floor and proceeded to play with as any child might, almost: after stacking them as high as he could, he changed them into balls, which promptly fell and rolled away in all directions; he changed them back into blocks, crawled around to collect them, and stacked them again, only to change them into balls and make them fall again; and so on, without end. "It seems to surprise him every time," Neila observed.

Isabel envied him. "He makes it look so easy."

"It is easy."

"Not for me it isn't."

"Then we'll have to make it easier." She rested her cup and saucer on the coffee table (which Isabel had had no trouble recognizing; apparently coffee tables were impossible to disguise). "First lesson," Neila announced. "Change the cup and saucer to your favorite color. You can do that, can't you?"

"Of course!" Isabel felt offended that anyone would have to ask.

She bent her focus on the objects for a few seconds, and they turned pink. "No," said Neila, "I mean your true favorite." The objects then turned a dark purple, almost black. "Ultraviolet," Neila said approvingly. "Now the table." In a few seconds it matched the tea things on it. "And now the walls. All the walls."

Isabel's mind resisted. "That's too much!"

"No, it isn't. You just have to picture it. Not just on the outside, but inside, where all the tiny little—" She searched for the right words.

"At the molecular level?"

"That's what they call it!"

Isabel, who was no science whiz herself, wondered for a moment whether Neila knew as much as Isabel had been giving her credit for. Well, we're aliens, she thought, not Rhodes scholars.

She turned her attention to the wall opposite them. "Start with the wood," Neila instructed her. Isabel shut her eyes and concentrated; soon the image became clear to her in every detail. "Now the plaster." This was a little more difficult for some reason, but she achieved it. "And now the paint." This was easy, since Isabel had done some painting herself. "Now," said Neila, "will it to change. All of it, on every wall. It's no different than the cup and saucer. In fact, it's easier, because all you're doing, when it comes down to it, is repainting."

Isabel found herself straining. It should have been easy for her, but it was not. Superficial as the change was, it was a harder task than, for example, melting a door, because it was at once more subtle and more widespread; she could see the big picture but had trouble holding on to it. At last she managed to keep it in mental view for more than a flash, and her will carried; the new color washed down the walls as if someone had flung a tub of paint at them—but the picture slipped out of mind before she was done and the wash stopped in the middle, leaving the walls two-toned: purple on top, yellow on the bottom.

Ben ran to Neila and buried his head in her chest. Bad, she heard. "Don't be frightened," she soothed him, "it's just colors." She glanced back at Isabel. "Your shade is too truthful for him," she explained. "Don't worry about it. Go on." Isabel tried, but the color crept down only a little farther. "No! You're trying to persuade yourself you can do it. And if you have to do that, you can't. Just accept that you can. Slide back the door of your cell." Isabel did not understand—until she did it. Then it was exactly as Neila had described: a sudden escape from confinement into a limitless universe, of which she was in control. Almost before she could take another breath, her color was flowing all the way to the floor and was all around them.

But now Ben was crying. "You don't like it?" said Neila. "Then you pick one." Ben thought a moment. "Cat?" Neila repeated. This puzzled her for a moment, and then she got it. "Oh, cat!" She laughed. "It's a neighbor's," she told Isabel. Then she shot her eye around the room and decked the walls in alternating streaks of orange and grey.

"Please!" said Isabel. "Show some taste." She changed the streaks to a highly tasteful pink. Neila, not to be outdone, changed them to a sky blue. The two kept up the contest, working their way through the spectrum, until at last both timed their changes to happen at the same instant, and their clashing energies exploded together in a confusion of colors like an every-dimensional rainbow.

Ben clapped his hands; he liked that. He and Neila laughed, and Isabel laughed with them. Now she felt up for anything. "What next?" she asked.

"Next. Hmm...I know! You'll make it colder in here."

"I tried that once. I couldn't do it."

"But you're free now. You've opened the door." Isabel knew it was true, and that she would never go back into confinement again; she would have sooner died.

"Imagine absolute cold," Neila directed, "and begin moving toward it." And Isabel did so; it was easy—almost ridiculously easy. "Closer," said Neila. "And still closer." Ben was now shivering. "Ben, you know how to warm yourself! Do it." Shortly he ceased shivering.

"You can stop now," Neila told Isabel. But the temperature continued to drop. Ice was forming on the walls and the ceiling. Neila became alarmed. "Isabel, stop!" But Isabel seemingly could not; her eyes were fixed and her body was vibrating like a hummingbird's, too rapidly for the vibration to be seen.

Neila took action, meeting Isabel's power play with one of her own. At once the temperature began to rise. The icicles cracked. The noise broke Isabel's trance. She looked around to see the walls running with water. Within seconds it had evaporated and the room was back to normal. Isabel felt as if she had been riding a roller coaster and locked in a steam press at the same time. "What happened?" she asked.

"The power was controlling you. You must keep it in check at all times, otherwise you'll get swept away by it. That's why it's called the Balance." She gazed at Isabel admiringly. "You're stronger than I expected. Much stronger than me. Almost a warrior."

Isabel began to blush, and then found she could control that too (which would come in handy some time, she was sure). "I wonder what Alex would say if he knew."

"Your human friend? You mustn't tell him. Anything we reveal, they only use as a weapon against us."

"Yes, I've been told that before." And as then, she reserved judgment, especially where Alex was concerned. "What about seeing into their minds? How do I get better at that?" She was still thinking of Alex.

"That isn't a power that can be developed. It's a bond that either exists or doesn't between you and the other mind."

"And what about dreams? I can visit other people in their dreams, and Max can't."

"No, only women possess the dream power. It can be developed, but only in a wrong way—to twist other people's dreamspaces and corrupt their minds completely." She shivered. "I've never seen it, but I've been told about it."

"I could bring them good dreams instead of bad ones," Isabel proposed.

Neila stared gravely at her. "That's how it's done."

Isabel was silent. Once or twice she herself had fallen prey to that temptation; she wondered if Neila knew. From now on she would have to remain in command of herself and her abilities. After all, she was almost a warrior.

Nevertheless, she volunteered to cook dinner for the family that evening, and it was ready almost before they turned around. Max watched with deep misgivings as she carried in the last of the casseroles (using a pair of pot holders for show). "How'd you get it done so fast?" her mother asked.

Isabel smiled brightly. "Who knows? Maybe I'm a witch." Her brother flashed her a cautionary look which she ignored.

Philip began to serve himself. "This one's not hot."

"Isn't it?" Isabel laid a hand on it. "Feels hot to me." Her father tested it again—and quickly drew his hand back. "Did it burn you?" said Isabel. "Sorry."

"Wasn't like this a second ago," he said.

"But it must have been!" said Diane. She looked around helplessly. "Mustn't it?"

"Yeah," Philip agreed, "must have." But he sounded incredulous.

Isabel continued to ignore Max's disapproving eye. "Dig in, everybody!" she chirruped gaily.

After dinner the two shared dish duty, but Isabel had everything washed and dried in a few seconds. Her brother beckoned her into the adjoining laundry room, out of their parents' hearing, and spoke to her in a whisper. "What exactly do you think you're doing?"

"Dishes," she said blithely.

"You have to stop it! They're getting suspicious."

"Let them. I'm tired of pretending I can't do things. Tired of crawling when I could be walking." Before today she had not known she felt like that. "Doesn't it ever get to you?"

"Of course it does. Things could be so easy for us. So many things."

"You said we should develop our powers, didn't you?"

"Yes, but not to the point where we give ourselves away. We can't take that risk."

"'Can't'!" Isabel repeated derisively. "With you everything's always 'can't do this,' 'can't do that'! I say it's time to see what we can do." She sailed off before he could answer. Max stared at the finished dishes with more concern than a casual bystander would have supposed they merited. This was one of those times for not understanding his sister.

As for Isabel, she was pumped up with the conviction that she was beginning to understand herself for the first time. Lying in her room, she thought only of her next session with Neila—except for a moment's self-congratulation at not having told Max about her. That had been the right decision; he must never know.

The same evening, in the kitchen of the Crashdown, Liz distracted Michael from his work by proudly reporting her discoveries in the Historical Society's archives. "I checked out the sites on the map—that is, the two we know about, and—"

Michael was predictably irritated. "Didn't I tell you to leave that to—"

"Yes, but listen! Both places have a record of strange occurrences. Electrical disturbances, unexplained noises, car batteries dying for no reason—that happens at Angels' Ground—"

Michael grinned. "Yeah, I've used that one myself."

Liz felt he was not taking her seriously enough. "Michael! Don't you see what this means?"

He shrugged. "Shows I was right." But he had been convinced of that before the proof.

"All the sites are energy sources. I'll bet every one has stories like that connected with it."

Despite the lightness of his manner, Michael was impressed: Liz had come through once again, and without his having expected it. He still wished she had listened to him—but he could not wish she had not found out what she had. "Did you ask if there were any other places around here where weird things have happened?"

"Michael, we're in Roswell, the alien capital of the world. There are reports of weird incidents everywhere. We'll have to find the other sites first. Then we can look them up specifically."

"Liz!" her father called from the front. She started to go.

"Thanks," said Michael. "I mean it. But I still don't want you involved in this alien stuff."

She turned in the doorway with a forlorn smile. "Too late for that now," she said. The door swung shut after her. Max, thought Michael. She must be talking about Max.

He hitched a ride to Angels' Ground that night, at an hour ungodly enough for the last loving couples to have finished their business. He hiked to the top and seated himself cross-legged at the rim overlooking the town, where he meditated at length on what Liz had told him, together with what other information he had gleaned. He had laid two maps down in front of him: the replica of the cave painting and a street grid of Roswell. Following Liz's proposed strategy, he tried postulating first one and then another of the map symbols as representing the location where he was.

Suppose it were the lines like whipcords? Then north would be at the top left. However, if it were the row of boxes, north would be at the top right, and the distance to the library symbol would be shorter, which meant the scale would be smaller—or would it be larger? If it were the whipcords, the boxes would be northwest of them; if it were the boxes, the spiral would be in the same place the whipcords would be if—

Michael felt his mind give way. He clutched the back of his head. "Too much!" he shouted.

And someone heard him. "Doing some surveying?" she asked as she walked up at his back.

Michael did not have to look this time. "Ms. Topolsky—again." He slid the cave map under the other one. "Just practicing my map reading. It's for a class project."

"Past curfew again," Topolsky observed. "'way past."

"So arrest me."

She shook her head. "Out of my jurisdiction."

"You know, I've never been sure what all your jurisdiction covers."

She sat down next to him with a great deal more agility than most adults could boast "A very broad spectrum indeed. Including what happened at Dr. Grunewald's."

"Doctor who?"

"You mean the others didn't tell you about it?"

"Nah, they're not telling me much these days. What happened?"

"They wouldn't tell me either. But I'll share my surmise with you, if you like." Michael shrugged. "The doctor abducted your friend Max, intending to torture or perhaps to kill him. His sister and Liz Parker broke in and rescued him. They may also have done something to unhinge the doctor. His mind's completely gone. But don't worry, we have him safely under observation."

"Why would he kidnap Max?"

"He seems to have gotten it in his head that Max was an otherworldly being."

"What proof did he have?" Michael immediately revised his question. "I mean, thought he had."

"None," said Topolsky, "now." She could not keep the edge out of her voice.

Michael felt happy—until he reflected that all the others, even Liz, had kept the information from him. "Am I the only one who didn't know?"

"You know now," Topolsky pointed out. "And in exchange..." She took a sheet of paper from her purse. "Can you tell me what this is?"

It was a sketch of the Balancer, not quite accurate, but close enough. "Who drew it?" Michael asked.

"A student." Michael remembered the boy outside the rest room, and wondered how the drawing had made its way to Topolsky's desk. "Well?" she said.

Michael felt compelled to give an answer and decided that the truth, or part of it, would be best. "It's something Max found."

"What does it do?"

"So far, nothing. Except—" He had remembered the small explosion in the park. But that would only make her Bureau more eager to lay hands on the thing. "No, nothing," he said.

She let it go. "And who has it now? Max?" Michael hesitated. "Remember, I told you about Grunewald. He didn't."

Michael gave in. "Okay, he's got it." Then an idea struck him: since Topolsky knew about Nasedo (though just how much, he was uncertain) she might know about the map too. "Okay, now it's my turn. See if these symbols mean anything to you."

He got to his knees and began to draw in the dirt with his finger. No sooner had he finished the whipcord lines than Topolsky grabbed his arm. "What do you know about those?"

"What those?"

"The rocks."

"You can tell from my drawing they're rocks?"

"It's their exact shape. You've never seen them yourself?" Michael shook his head. "Then where did you get this picture?"

"Saw it on a wall somewhere."

"Graffiti?"

"Yeah, in a way, come to think of it. Where are they located?"

"In the desert southwest of here. I don't know the exact location."

"How far, do you think?"

"I said, I don't know!" The subject seemed to disturb her. Yet she had been the one who had brought it up.

"The exact shape," Michael mused. Then his face lit up, and he looked back at the plateau. "I'll be damned," he muttered. Next to the symbol he had drawn, he drew another: the one that resembled a small solar system. "Remind you of anything?" he asked.

Topolsky squinted at it. "A nipple?" Michael raised his eyebrows. She shrugged. "Well, that's what it reminds me of."

"And women say guys only have one thing on their mind." He scooped up his maps, pocketed them, and scrambled to his feet. "Show you what I mean." At the west end of the parking area stood a natural rock pile. Michael helped Topolsky, and then she helped him, onto a ledge halfway up, which afforded a view over most of the plateau and the winding approach where she had left her Impala.

"See?" said Michael. "It's the same as the symbol"—and, apart from some small errors of proportion, it was. "Those aren't just symbols. They're pictures of the places themselves."

He had forgotten that Topolsky did not know about the map and that he did not want her to. "Where is this graffiti wall of yours?" she asked.

He answered with another question that terminated the conversation. "Mind if I bum another lift from you?" He started downhill on his own, leaving her to pick out her own way, as he knew she could. Be my guest, she replied, not aloud, but he was out of earshot anyhow.

At the same time (or a little earlier, or a little later) Alex was scaling a dune more steep than any to be found at Angels' Ground, or indeed anywhere in the waking world, with Isabel preceding him. Her bare feet glided easily over the sands, almost as if she were floating. On reaching the crest, she turned to him and lifted her arms, as a star-spangled galaxy whirled in the black sky behind. The high whistle of the wind expanded into a choir of angel soprani. "Can you really do all this?" Alex asked.

Tonight Isabel did not have to remind him that it was all a dream. "This is only the beginning," she said—and upon the word she was transformed into a queen or a goddess or something that partook of each, whose like Alex knew he could never have looked upon and lived, except in a dream. He fell to his knees before her, and the object of his veneration accepted it as her due: mere Isabel no longer, she was now Isabel triumphant.

Though it had been Alex's dream, not hers, it imbued her with a sense of elation that lasted through most of the following day. In the afternoon she and Neila made arrangements for her next visit—that is, her next lesson—and while the two of them stood talking together Ursula and some of her clique—which was no longer Isabel's—passed without acknowledging her, or she them. She was not sure who had cut off communications first, but either way she was glad about it.

So was Max. He had walked up just in time to witness the dual snub, and he felt like applauding. He had never liked any of those girls in the least, or understood what Isabel had seen in them. Now he scowled after them, as he always did, hoping they would notice (though they never seemed to. However, as Neila left his sister, he scowled after her too. At his appearance she had cut the conversation short, feeling it prudent to avoid a face-to-face meeting at that time.

And so it proved. "Who was that?" he asked.

Acting from the same cardinal virtue as her mentor, Isabel assumed an air of indifference. "A friend."

"What's her name?"

Isabel hesitated. "Her name is Neila. Why, does it matter?"

"Is she the one you burned up all those miles on the Jeep to go and see yesterday?"

Isabel had not expected him to notice that, or to make the connection. "So what if she was?"

"There's something strange about her." And all of us, thought Isabel. "You know, she might be a decoy put here by the FBI."

"Max, she's just a kid!"

"So?" Isabel had no answer for that. "Keep away from her until I make sure she's all right."

Max had issued such directives in the past—he was famous for them—and his sister had usually gone along with them to avoid contention. But today—the first day of the rest of her life with the new sense of empowerment she had acquired—it was more than she could, or would, put up with. "Who do you think you are, my jailer? You have no right to dictate who I can and can't see!"

Max realized he had come on too officiously, but was puzzled as to why it should suddenly be riling her now; she should have been used to it. "I didn't mean it to sound like that," he said.

"Well, it did," she replied. And for a little both were silent.

It was Isabel who advanced the first peace offering. "Max, please. This means a lot to me. I never had someone to talk to before—someone who understands about—" She stopped; she had revealed more than she had intended.

"Understands?" Daylight dawned. "That's what it is about her. You never said."

"I found out by accident." Her friend might have disputed this interpretation. "It was so lucky I still can't believe it. She's teaching me things, Max—things you couldn't begin to conceive."

Max doubted that. "Who are her parents?"

"She doesn't have any. Like us."

"She must live with someone. Some adult. She hasn't mentioned them?" Isabel shook her head. "Don't you think you should ask her?"

"That's between us!" She sounded angry because she had secretly been thinking the same thing—so secretly she had almost kept it from herself—but she had been afraid to tax her new acquaintanceship by probing for information. "And you keep your nose out of it," she told her brother.

"I can't promise that."

"I mean it, Max. Stay away from her!" She stormed off, leaving him more worried than before. But then, every new thing in his life worried him more than the last; it was his curse.

If he had been aware of the investigations Michael had undertaken, he would have regarded them as further grounds for concern; because with Michael you never knew. For the whole day, in every bit of free time he had managed to squeeze out, Michael had been studying the map; apart from reading books, it was the longest he had ever concentrated on anything. To the identifying tag "Library" he had now added two more, "Angels' Ground" and "Rocks—Desert (where?)," next to the appropriate symbols. Only two sites remained to be identified; Michael had not had a chance to ask Topolsky about them, but they would probably have meant nothing to her. It was a fluke her knowing about the rocks (and how had she known?)

It was clear now that the symbols were simplified but recognizably accurate diagrams of the sites they represented: the diagonal lines were the rocks, the concentric circles were Angels' Ground— But hold on! The spot in parentheses? How could that be the library? There was no obvious resemblance at all.

That evening Michael went to take another look. There was no higher ground from which to view the whole layout, only lawn on all sides, except at the rear, where it descended by a gentle slope to a small amphitheatre. Michael had attended concerts there in the summers.

—the ampitheatre! He ran around to look at it and confirm his recollection. Sure enough, it was an ellipse: the amphitheatre, not the library, was the energy center. And again the map had pictured it accurately enough to enable a positive identification.

Michael turned his attention to the two unknown symbols: the spiral and the five boxes. Surely, he thought, the original of the latter should be easy to track down. He could gauge its general direction from that of the rocks: if they lay southwest, as Topolsky had said, then the boxes lay more or less west—and if the map was to scale, they were even farther away than Angels' Ground. That would be some walk. But again, the town was not all that big. The prospect of further geographical calculations daunted him more. It feels like homework, he thought. Steeling himself to the necessary exertion, mental and physical, he set out on his expedition.

Soon he came to row on row of apartment buildings and sought among them for a building with five and only five units, but found none. He knew he was being optimistic (and lazy); the place he was after had to be much farther on than that. And so he kept walking, until the apartment buildings ended and a section of single-family houses began—miles of them. Eventually these gave onto a wedge of the business district, the bulk of which extended off to the southeast, and this in turn gave onto more houses. Michael felt as if he had been walking half the night. But it was only an hour past curfew when he reached his goal.

He had no clue at first that it was within his view. All he saw around him was an industrial area stretching for blocks, a congeries of parking lots, fences, and walls, looking sterile and desolate under the security lights, and all of them too far apart to be the objects of his search.

As he was about to give up for the night, he glimpsed an empty lot—no, a whole succession of them—in the middle distance, and beyond them an aggregate of smaller shapes, among them a set of five: five exactly. They were slightly longer than the map pictured them, but in exactly the right configuration. Michael could not imagine at first what they could be. Then he remembered the old railroad yard. It had been shut down, reopened for a time as the Aickman Railway Museum, and then shut down again. But the rusting rail cars remained; where else could they go? As he drew nearer he was able to see them in increasingly greater detail: a locomotive engine, a string of passenger cars, and a caboose with two walls caved in, as from a collision.

On reaching the yard he found it surrounded by a chain link fence—which of course this was no obstacle. In the map on the cave wall, it had been the westernmost of the five boxes that had housed one of the Stones and been pointed up by its light. So it was the westernmost of the five cars—the locomotive engine—toward which Michael looked first.

After he had hauled himself up the tall steps into the engineer's cabin, the thing he noticed at once was an item of clothing—a sweatshirt—draped over the throttle. He turned it over. "Coach," read the patch on the back. Michael tensed: Nasedo had been there—but apparently was no longer: Michael relaxed. He had now seen what was to be seen, which from his perspective was nothing, and was about to leave the cabin when he heard the sound of a bell, faint but clear: dingdingdingdingding: a train bell. It kept ringing, and growing louder. Looking out through the front window of the cabin, he saw a light—a train light—a hundred yards ahead, bearing down on him out of the blackness, as if a train were approaching on the same track. This was impossible; there was no track beyond where the engine stood. Yet the ground shook under him.

Scarcely knowing what he was doing, he ran to the steps and leapt to the ground, then shot a look around. There was no train—how could there be?—only the bell and the light and the shaking. Michael started running and did not stop until well past the fence. He quickly mended the hole he had made in entering (though there was no point) and stood in the middle of the field outside the yard, panting and—he now became aware—trembling. "What the hell was that?" he asked himself or God or nobody.

Almost at once, the answer came, and it almost made him laugh. "Unexplained occurrences," Liz had reported: well, he had just had a taste of them, and they had terrified him; no wonder the museum had had to shut down. But why those occurrences: train lights, train noises? Maybe traces of the realities lingered there like echoes, and the energy of the place amplified them; maybe they were what people called ghosts. But they were chance emanations, with no malevolent will behind them—at any rate, not tonight. However, Michael desire to repeat the experience. And he did not need to; he had gotten what he was after. Once home, he added a fourth tag to the map.

Now only one symbol remained a mystery: the spiral that was not a spiral. Michael knew he had never seen anything resembling it anywhere. Yet it stirred something in him that was like a memory. His instinct told him that the spiral was not like the other symbols, that its significance lay deeper. For one thing, it was engraved in the Balancer, and for another, Isabel had a pendant—another alien artifact they had found—cut in its shape. Michael wondered whether the spiral affected her as it did him. He could not stare at it too long, or it brought to mind things that bothered him, things and people: usually Hank and, for some reason, Maria. He made an effort, largely successful, to put it out of his thoughts: he had to be up early for work the next morning.

This being a Saturday, Isabel had been able to recruit Alex to drive her out to Neila's in his father's Volvo, Max having claimed the Jeep—on purpose, she suspected, to prevent her going. If that had been his plan, she reflected with some satisfaction, he had failed in it. She and Alex reached the house before noon.

She did not go in at once: she was waiting for something from him. "Glove compartment," he said finally. In it she found a white handkerchief, which enshrouded the thing she wanted. To satisfy herself of this, she felt at it gingerly through the wrapping, stopped as soon as she recognized its contours, and packed it away in her purse. She found that it still excited a slight distaste in her.

"I still think I should check with Max on this," said Alex.

"Trust me, if anyone can tell us about it, it's Neila."

"Maybe," Alex acknowledged. But that had not been his point.

Isabel opened the door. "Thanks for the ride. You can pick me up at two."

"Unh-uh. I'm waiting here."

She looked doubtful. "Long wait."

"Brought my games with me." He lifted a laptop out of the rear seat. "Scouts' motto—'Be prepared.'"

"You were never a Scout!"

"My motto too."

Isabel gave him the most uncomplicated smile he had ever received from her. "You're a nice guy, Alex. You know that?"

"Story I get is, we finish last."

"Not with me you don't." On impulse, she leaned over and kissed him. The beaming countenance this left impressed on his features remained long after she entered the house and almost until she came out again.

She began this visit with a confession. "I told my brother about you. Didn't mean to, it just happened."

"It's all right," Neila said. "He was bound to find out somehow sooner or later."

"He was asking me questions about you. I didn't have the answers."

Neila read between the lines. "You could find them if you tried, in my dream closet. I could do the same to you. But do we need to?" Isabel shook her head. "Your brother would never understand that." Neila glanced up at her. "Would he?"

Isabel had her purse open and her hand on Alex's handkerchief, ready to take it out for Neila to see, but at this question her hand froze. "You're right," she said after a moment. "My brother wouldn't understand at all." She let go of the handkerchief. She was uncertain now if what she had been about to do, or if refraining from doing it, was the right thing; perhaps she would know better later. She clasped the purse shut and laid it on the sofa. With barely a thought for Alex, still playing out in the car, she turned her attention to whatever lesson she might be set today. She looked forward to it.

And Neila did not disappoint; Neila never disappointed. "In my mind," she said, "I'm holding the image of a form. Find it, see it, and change the table to match it."

Isabel focused, and within a few seconds found it, saw it—truly saw it, as if it had been there in front of her—and tried to change it, but with no success. "Slide open the door," Neila reminded her. Isabel remembered; she did it, felt the freedom of it, and the table metamorphosed into a cube twice the size it had been before. "Repeat!" Neila commanded. "But a different form this time." Again Isabel focused, found it—and made a face. "No snide remarks!" Neila chided her. The cube swelled into a valentine's-day heart twice as big again. "Repeat!" said Neila.

This time the job took longer and taxed Isabel more sternly; her face was smothered in perplexity. At the end of it the heart expanded—almost exploded—into a geodesic dome so huge that it scraped the ceiling plaster. "Isabel!" exclaimed Neila. "This isn't what I was thinking of at all."

"No," said Isabel, "me either." They stood and circled it, staring at it wonderingly.

In the lane outside, Alex heard another car approaching. There was no reason the sound should have startled him, but it did; the afternoon had been that tranquil. The girls would have heard it themselves if they had not been absorbed in the mysterious manifestation before them. "You must have picked it up from someone else," Neila said. "Maybe your friend?"

"Or something triggered the memory. I was inside one of those once." This brought to mind the pendant she was wearing, which was concealed by her top; she wore the pendant for luck, but never where it could be seen, in case the wrong people happened to be watching). "That's where I found this." She lifted it into view.

Neila stared strangely at it for a moment, then went to a bookcase (identifiable as such by the books it contained) and took down a framed photograph, which she brought over to show her. "It's the same one, isn't it?" The photo showed a pair of men in front of a dome like the one Isabel had created—in fact, the same one she had been in. It had been a late addition to the house of a man who had once written a book. It was a book on aliens, Isabel had seen it herself, and from the portrait on its dust jacket she recognized the author as one of the men in the photo. He was wearing the pendant that was now hers. "That's James Atherton," she said. "But who's the man with him?" He was tall, with a black beard, was dressed as a cowboy.

"That's my father," said Neila. "He gave him that charm."

A chill seized Isabel. "You never had a father. You said so."

"Sorry, I meant stepfather. I forget sometimes, we've been with him so long." In the pause that followed, the sound of the motor reached them. Neila ran to a window and pulled back a corner of the blind to peer out. Her face lit up. "It's him! I didn't expect him back until next week."

Isabel was confused. "Who?"

"The one we were just talking about. My stepfather."

No, thought Isabel, no. She backed away toward the door—and bumped into the dome. "I have to be somewhere. A date. I have a date." She hardly knew what she was saying; the only thought in her head was to get out of there as fast as she could.

"No, stay! I want you to meet him!"

Isabel ran out, ignoring her cries. A battered Cadillac convertible with the top down was turning in at the open gate; its driver looked just as he had in his photo. Isabel raced past him to the Volvo. She opened the door on Alex's side. "Slide over!" she shouted—and when Alex was slow to comply she shoved her way into the driver's seat, forcing him aside. The key was in the ignition; she turned it. "Hey, not your car!" Alex protested.

Isabel glanced back at the house for a second. Neila was standing at the door, looking as bewildered as Alex was looking. Isabel wished she could take her out of there—and her brother, of course—but it was impossible now. Tabling her regret, she swung out into the lane and shot off in the wrong direction. She turned at the first crossing and doubled back at the second.

"What's your hurry?" asked Alex. "Who was that guy?"

"Nasedo." Her eyes remained fixed on the road. Why did he, of all people, have to be Neila's father? For once something in her life had been perfect, had made her happy, really really happy, and now—

No sooner had Alex absorbed the news than another thought struck him. "Isabel, where's your purse?"

It took only a second for the realization to hit home. Isabel jerked the car to a halt. "Crap!" He had never heard her scream before. "I left it!"

"Left it? But it has the—"

"I know!"

"It's with him!"

"Alex, I know! I was so rattled—" She buried her face in her hands. "Oh, God, what'll I do? What'll I do?" At that point she was not even figuring Alex into the equation.

"Max'll kill me," Alex said. He knew this was not the most important consideration just then, but it was the one uppermost in his mind. "He'll do the opposite of what he did to Liz. He'll make holes in me."

"After he finishes with me." She despaired for a moment, and then ordered herself to snap out of it; that would not help anything. "We'll have to go back for it," she said.

"And take on Nasedo? Just you and me?—well, you."

"You're right. We'll have to bring in the others—except Michael. But we won't tell them about—that."

Alex knew what she meant. "Why not?"

"Because I don't want them to know, okay? Until I can get it back." Covering your ass, in other words, Alex thought. Just like the rest of the world. He understood the motive but did not admire her for it. Just like the rest of the world.

However, in less than an hour, he was at the UFO Center telling Max as much, and only as much, as Isabel had directed him to. "Nasedo?" Max repeated. His first concern was the same as his sister's. "You haven't told Michael?"

"No, Isabel thought it'd be best to keep it from him. For now." The qualification was Alex's, not hers. "She's gone across to tell Liz."

"Liz!" Max could hardly believe that even Isabel could be so imprudent; as far as he was concerned, they should not tell Liz anything more about themselves, ever. But then he remembered Liz's store of knowledge and her capacity for analysis. "Maybe it's best, at that," he allowed. "She might be able to help."

At the moment, however, she was not helping in any way Isabel could detect. "But are you sure?" she asked for the third time, forcing Isabel to repeat, "I told you, I saw him."

They were in the staff room at the Crashdown. Isabel had unstopped the kitchen door to keep Michael from hearing them. His back had been turned—Isabel had made sure of that—but not quite long enough to prevent his catching a glimpse of her leopard-print top as the door swung in. There was no mistaking that top.

Through the order window he could hear Jeff calling into the back. "Lizzie! Doing a solo out here!" This confirmed his guess as to who the other party in the conversation was.

"Five minutes, Dad!" she called back.

"You've had your five minutes," he said grumpily. Through the window Michael saw him return to the front, visibly irritated. He was not a very good waiter, but he somewhat made up for it by being a good host, and that afternoon he was too busy schmoozing with the customers to notice the woman who was not one—not today—but was just making a brief tour of the joint in search of someone, whom she did not find. On reaching the rest room door at the back, she discovered a need she had been theretofore unaware of and went in to meet it, paying no heed to the sign on the wall that read "Rest Rooms for Customers Only."

The "five minutes" Liz had requested had not yet ended, but something else was about to, and Isabel would be cross with herself later because she had not foreseen it. "You mustn't tell Michael," she was insisting, as she had insisted to Alex and (through him) to Max.

"What does it matter?"

Liz's seeming attitude of bleak indifference, which was normally alien to her, took Isabel by surprise. "You know Michael as well as I do. Maybe better. Depending on what happened to be running through his head at the time, he might try to kill Nasedo, or join up with him. Whichever, he'd be putting himself in danger."

Liz shook her head dismissively. "Nasedo's no danger to you. Just us." She looked away. "But then, so are the rest of you. He does it his way, you do it yours. Same difference in the end." That morning she had been brooding on her hematological condition, as she found herself doing more and more often lately, and that had left her bitter, as it always did.

To Isabel, who still knew nothing of her case, Liz's mood was just a mawkish self-indulgence, and a distraction from the crisis at hand. "What are you talking about?" she asked.

"Isn't that the reason you were sent here? To contaminate our blood? Only Dr. Grunewald found out."

"Grunewald's crazy."

"Then I'm crazy too."

"You're sounding that way."

This judgment was not without foundation; Liz's state was in fact getting to her, and in her present mood the weight of her hopelessness leaned hard on her other thoughts, throwing them atilt. "One drop, Isabel. From one of his slides. That's all it took."

"Took for what? We don't have time for this." While she was speaking, Michael, unheard by either of them, crept up to the other side of the door and put his ear against the crack.

"Took for your blood to poison mine. I'll show you if you want. Under the microscope."

"I believe you," said Isabel. "You're the scientist." She knew this sounded cold, but she could not help it. Though she felt for Liz in her plight, she could do nothing for her, and so disregarded the problem for the present as none of her concern. Triage, this was called in rescue missions—and that was what she was now engaged in: the rescue of Neila, and the Balancer. "Does Max know?" she asked.

"And if he did?" said Liz. "What's one human more or less?"

"I think you mean more to him than that." And she did think so, even after what had happened between them. But the expression of the thought had sounded perfunctory, like a mere courtesy; she was holding back her sympathy for the sake of practical need—and it would have been of no use, anyway, so why waste energy on it?

Michael, listening at the door, was trying to make sense of it all. He could not see the hardening in Isabel's expression, but heard it in her voice as she went on. "Obviously I can't contradict you. I don't know why we're here any more than you do. But I do know one thing, now." She was pacing; Michael could hear her footfalls. "I thought we could work together to fight Nasedo, in spite of all our differences." At the mention of Nasedo, Michael began listening more intently. "Now I see that Michael was right."

"Right about what?"

"He kept insisting to Max that your race and ours are natural enemies. And this proves it."

"Maybe it wasn't natural." Any claim of proof always stirred the scientist in Liz to examine it. "Maybe you were genetically engineered for it."

"Then that's even worse," said Isabel. And suddenly she was overtaken with the sadness of it, of Liz's dashed hopes and her own. "I'm really sorry, Liz," she said, "though you may not believe me right now. Sorry we ever interfered with your life. Max should have—" She stopped as she realized where the thought was heading.

Liz did not shrink from saying it. "Let me die? Yeah, guess he should." But Isabel had not meant that—had she?

The two of them had now reached the end of their conversation; the end of everything. "Crap," Isabel said, for the second time that day.

Michael was set to barge in and demand a full explanation from them of what he had just heard, but somebody beat him to it. The door from the cafe opened halfway, and Jen's face appeared in the gap, gazing at Isabel in fear and amazement. "What are you?" she asked.

"How much did you hear?"

"All of it. Through the wall." She pointed in the direction of the ladies' room.

"Have to get that fixed," said Liz.

Isabel tossed a glance that way. "Done." Then she turned back to Jen. "If you heard, you know. But you mustn't tell anyone."

"Especially your boyfriend," Liz added. The two of them converged on Jen, suspending the separation agreement just settled upon to mount their joint attack.

"Husband," Jen corrected. "He's my husband."

"You married that guy?" Isabel said, and then, "Sorry."

"He's not always like that." But her tone was defensive. "Not with me. Or his sister. She has a birth defect. That's really the reason for the alien thing—he was looking for a cure for her, from up there." Then the truth hit her. She stared at Liz. "But you were healed. So Larry was right!"

"And if he ever finds out," said Liz, "his life could be in danger. Yours too."

"Danger from what?"

"You read about the silo murder?" said Isabel. "And the handprint they found?" Jen nodded. "The guy who made it—he's back."

Michael gave a start, causing himself to bang his shin on the door. The girls heard, but before they could act on their knowledge, Jeff burst in on them. "Okay, Lizzie, back to work now! No more breaks today! And you two, out of here! This area's staff-only." They all hastened to obey, and Michael, rather than waiting to be caught eavesdropping, quickly returned to the grill.

Meanwhile Max and Alex were waiting in front of the restaurant, according to Isabel's instructions. "You have the Balancer with you?" Max asked.

"The what?" Alex had not heard the name before.

"That artifact we found."

"No, we—have to drop by and pick it up after we leave here." It was not precisely a lie, but it was deliberately misleading, and Alex did not feel comfortable with it. Or with what they were doing, either. "Why don't we just tell Valenti? He's been hunting this guy for years."

"And if he gets killed or put in jail, what happens to his stepchildren? They'd be like me and Isabel. Orphans."

"So we let him keep on killing because he's a family man?"

"I haven't worked that out yet. But I'm not bringing the sheriff in on it."

"In on what?" said the voice they least wanted to hear: Its owner had stolen up on them from behind without half trying. "Okay, you two," he demanded, "what's going on?" They stood facing him like deer caught in the Rover's headlights.

—and might have stood that way all night if the girls coming out of the back room had not seen their predicament. "And now the sheriff," said Isabel. "This is just great."

Jen sized up the situation immediately. "Leave it to me," she said, to the others' surprise. She ran outside to where the three were standing and tugged at Valenti's sleeve. "Sheriff, I have to report a missing person. My husband."

"Ma'am, please, one minute—"

"He's been gone all morning. I'm afraid he's been abducted by aliens." This captured Valenti's attention, and that of the boys also. "I'm in the kitchen making scrambled eggs," Jen went on, "Larry's favorite. But no bacon—he used to have six big strips every morning, but I put a stop to that after we got married."

While Valenti listened, trying to hide his growing impatience, Isabel slipped out the cafe doors behind his back. She waved thanks to Jen, Max slipped away after her, and together they hurried across to the Jeep, which he had left outside the UFO Center. To his annoyance, Isabel claimed the driver's seat and grabbed the car keys from his hand.

"We have to wait for Alex," Max said. "He's got the Balancer at his place."

"Not any more he doesn't," said Isabel, and she turned the ignition key.

"So the eggs are done," Jen was saying, "and I call him. 'Larry!' I call. But he doesn't answer. And when I look, he's gone! And he hasn't been back."

Valenti scratched his neck. "And you suspect aliens are responsible? Why's that?"

"Well, last night I woke up and heard this weird squeaking. Like mice."

"Maybe it was—" From the corner of his eye he saw the Jeep hanging a U, and before it disappeared on squealing tires around the nearest corner, he also saw who was in it. "Hey!" he shouted.

Coincidentally, the person Jen had reported missing was just turning the same corner on foot. "Larry!" she cried. She ran to meet him halfway.

"I've been looking all over for you," he said.

"I've been looking for you too." That much of her story had been true. "Where have you been?"

"Interview." He wanted to keep her guessing longer but could not hold back the good news. "Jen, I got the job!"

"Larry, that's awesome!" Hugging each other, they walked back to where Valenti was still glaring after the Jeep, or where it had been. "Look, Sheriff!" said Jen. "Larry wasn't taken by aliens, after all."

"Got a job at the library," Larry said smugly.

"Same difference," Valenti muttered.

"Let's go celebrate," said Larry. "What do you say to dinner at Chez Pierre?"

"I say, ooh la la!" And the couple walked off romantically, arm in arm.

Alex was now left alone with Valenti, and uneasily aware of the fact. "Mr. Whitman." Valenti grinned. "Seems like it's just you and me. What say we step out back for a chat?" He motioned toward the alley.

"A chat about what?"

"What you kids are hiding from me." Alex put on an absolutely-not-hiding-anything look of a kind Valenti had seen many times before. "You know, it could be more dangerous than you think. Suppose something happened to Isabel Evans?" Alex glanced sharply at him. "You'd feel pretty cut up about that, I expect. Rather spare you that. But you'll have to work with me." Alex recognized the tactic, but it had its effect regardless. By the time they reached the alley at the rear, Michael, who had intermittently been keeping an eye on the various comings and goings, had posted himself inside the back door, holding it open just far enough for him to overhear.

Isabel meanwhile was heading west on the 70 at a speed which Valenti could not have matched, which the Jeep was bearing hardly, and which had her brother clutching the door frame with something approaching panic. "Will you slow down?" he begged her.

"No."

"Oh," he said, in some slight surprise. "Well, okay, then." Somehow she had assumed command, and he did not challenge it. "Will you tell me where we're going?"

"To Nasedo's."

"And you have the Balancer with you?"

Isabel cast around for a strategy that would save her from having to tell him outright. "Not...exactly."

"Didn't you say Alex gave it to you?"

Isabel cast around again. As yet no strategy was forthcoming. "Not...exactly," she repeated.

"Then what exactly? Isabel, where is it?"

Isabel realized avoidance was impossible. "I left it at Nasedo's."

"You what?"

"I couldn't risk going in there alone. I mean, I had Alex with me, but I needed you."

This placated Max a little, as she had hoped. "We have to get it back," he said. "Who knows what he'll do with it?"

"It's more important to get her out of there. Her and Ben."

"I wouldn't say more important—"

"Of course they won't listen." Isabel was now speaking principally to herself. "He's never harmed them, and never will. But he's a criminal. A murderer. And sooner or later it will come down on them. It always does. Then everybody ends up getting hurt." Max had questions he wanted to ask, but he held back until she was done. "You were right, Max, and I was wrong. We should keep to ourselves, not get involved with other people. It only makes matters worse. And now Liz—" She stopped, realizing he did not yet know about Liz.

"What about her?"

She tried to tell him as simply as possible. "Her blood got another kind mixed up with it. Our kind."

This confused him. "I don't see how that's—"

Isabel saw what conclusion he had naturally jumped to and she cut it short. "Not you. It was a blood sample from the lab. There was an accident. Her blood was poisoned. Our blood poisoned hers. Like Grunewald said it would."

"But Grunewald is—"

"Crazy. I told her that. Didn't seem to ease her mind a lot."

"And you're sure? Absolutely sure?"

"She is. And she's the biology expert."

Max could not accept it, and shook his head several times in token of his nonacceptance. "There must be a way to save her. Some way, somewhere."

Isabel felt like giving him a hard shake. Just like him to have his head in the clouds now, when they had to be thinking practically! "Why must there? We can't save everybody, Max. And now, thanks to me, we may not even be able to save ourselves. I've bungled it all." This was the other side of self-determination.

But at least she had succeeded in putting a stop to his meaningless invocations and restoring him to the present concern: he now looked as unhappy as she felt, and that was something. "Could things get any worse?" he asked.

"Afraid so." She nodded toward the rear view mirror. "Same car's been tailing us for miles." She turned onto a side road and the car sped past. She saw it was the Volvo that had brought her the same way in the morning. "Oh, you fool!" she said (to Max, since the driver was out of earshot). "You can't handle him on your own!" But before she could deal with this new fear, there arose a shrill cry, one her brother could not hear; it filled every corner of her mind, and of her being. Although it was soundless and wordless, its message was unmistakable: it was a cry for help. And Isabel knew who the sender was: every consciousness was as individual and recognizable as a silver handprint.

Max saw the alarm written in her features. "What is it?"

"Neila. And she's in trouble." But where? Where? Isabel searched the landscape. "There!" She pointed to a grey Sebring with smoked-glass windows which was soaring past in the opposite direction. That had been the source, without doubt.

"Is Nasedo with her?"

Isabel imagined him as she had seen him, and cast her mind into the Sebring, probing for a match. "I don't think so. No, he can't be."

"Then he's still at the house. And Alex—"

"I can't be bothered with Alex now!" But she felt a twinge of conscience as she said it. She climbed back onto the highway and sped after the Sebring. When it turned off heading south, she did the same.

The Volvo she had seen continued to Nasedo's house and stopped in front of it. The driver switched off the ignition without a key (which in any case he did not possess) and jumped out. He said, to an audience not present, "So this is the place you all didn't want me to know about, huh? Found it in spite of you." He crumbled the gate with a glance, tramped up the path, hesitated for a second at the door, then crumbled that as well, and marched inside. The dome still crowded the living room. The intruder circled it with care, expecting the coach to pop out from behind it at any second. Having cleared it without incident, he proceeded to reconnoiter, one room at a time.

He found only one door shut, and threw it open. The room was dark, but as soon as he stepped in he sensed another presence there. He made a light, like a will-o'-the-wisp fluttering near the ceiling. It revealed the room's other occupant: a man on a bed, half-lying, half-sitting. He smiled at Michael. "I've waited for this a long time."

"Yeah," said Michael, "me too." Ben's playground ball was sitting by the door; the room was his. Michael lifted the ball and hurled it at the bed with such fury that it burst against the headboard. The reclining man had deflected it from himself, but only barely. "Why did you have to make me fight you?" Michael yelled. "And turn me against the only people who mattered? Now everybody's the enemy." The man on the bed did not answer, but stared at him in seeming incomprehension.

The Sebring, and the Jeep dogging it, passed out of the city into the desert. The Sebring turned off onto a narrow road, took it for a short way, and then abandoned it to cut across the waste. The Jeep followed suit. Both were trailing the Great Wall of China, in dust. The Jeep's tires and suspension had an easier time over the rock and brush, and gained on its prey steadily, but too slowly for the driver's taste; she wanted resolution now.

She wheeled around to a view of the sedan's front tires, focused on them, and turned them to granite, forcing it to a stop. Two "suits" jumped out, waving revolvers. When these turned red hot under Max's merciless gaze, the suits threw them down and fled. Unexpectedly, a beige Rover and a black Impala, side by side, bore down on them from the turnoff road, blocking their escape. One of the vehicles disgorged Valenti, the other Topolsky and another suit, all with guns drawn. The Sebring men raised their arms in surrender.

As the Jeep pulled up beside the Sebring. Isabel rotted one of the rear doors and it fell away, revealing Neila, Ben, and a heavy-set woman with greying hair sitting beside them. She grabbed the boy by the collar. A second later her hands flew to her head, liberating him. He and his sister scrambled out together and she enfolded him in her arms protectively. Isabel ran to them. Max followed her at a walk.

The law officers strode up with the two fugitives in tow. Isabel, to whom it was not yet clear they were being detained, not reinforced, favored Topolsky with her most scornful stare, which she had spent a lifetime practicing. "So the FBI's stealing children now? Nice way to make your living."

Topolsky nodded toward the two. "Not ours, I'm glad to be able to say. But I bet I know whose they are." She peered into the sedan. "As I thought. Hello, Margaret."

The grey-haired woman nodded coldly to her. "Kathleen."

"Out," said Topolsky. The woman did not move. "Now!" This time she complied, though grumblingly. On emerging from the car she was confronted by the row of not-ofs: the two children, Max, and Isabel: probably more than she had ever seen together in one place; her belief in them, if it had ever wavered, was now confirmed.

"Allow me to introduce your child stealer," Topolsky said. "Margaret Seaver from the Bureau of Energy Alternatives Management—or BEAM, as it's called."

"More than from the Bureau, dearie. I'm the new number two."

Topolsky seemed unimpressed. "I wouldn't brag about that too loudly if I were you."

"Who's number one?" asked Valenti. Seaver ignored him.

"Wouldn't we all like to know?" said Topolsky. She looked toward Neila and Ben. "And these are the children." She gazed at them with a catlike curiosity which suggested she had heard something of them herself. "What's your business with them, Margaret?"

"They're being detained on grounds of national security. Sheriff, I expect your support in this."

Valenti rubbed at his five-o'clock shadow. "My job's enforcing the law. These kids haven't broken any laws that I know of."

"Some things, there are no laws to cover—yet. We create our own as need arises."

The sheriff met her commanding stare head on. "Then that kinda makes you the criminals, doesn't it?"

"And inasmuch as your agency has no police authority," said Topolsky, "I'm taking you all into custody on suspicion of kidnapping and child endangerment. You have the right—"

Seaver laughed derisively. "You have no legal basis for holding us."

"Some things, laws don't cover," Topolsky rejoined, "so we make up our own."

"One phone call—one—and I'll be out. And so will you, dearie—out on your well-shaped ear."

Topolsky stared at her. "Who said anything about a phone call?" This seemed to unsettle the woman somewhat.

"Where's the kids' father?" Valenti asked suddenly. "He was at the house with them." Max and Isabel glanced at each other: how could he have known that?

Seaver shrugged. "We saw no one else."

"No, you wouldn't have bothered to look, would you?" said Topolsky. "Not once you had the children. Your 'energy alternative.' Good for eighty years—or longer, who knows? And they rarely need recharging." The scorn Seaver showed on hearing this did not entirely mask her displeasure at the accuracy of her adversary's knowledge, or guess.

It was not lost on Valenti either. "I get the feeling," he said, "that I'm in over my head here."

"So are they," Topolsky replied, her eyes still on Seaver. "Only they don't know it yet."

A familiar figure had climbed out of the Rover and now came over to join them. "Didn't I tell you to wait in the car?" said Valenti.

"Wait for how long?" Alex rejoined, sounding equally cross.

"You can't be here," said Isabel. "You drove past us twenty minutes ago."

"That was Michael. He swiped my car—I mean, my dad's."

Max looked at Isabel. "We have to go after him."

"Maybe not," said Valenti. He pointed toward a battered Cadillac convertible approaching them. Michael was driving (which in itself would normally have been sufficient to frighten those who knew him) and Nasedo was sitting beside him. They came to a stop some fifty yards away. Nasedo climbed out, though with evident effort, and held the door open. "Children!" he called. They went running to him.

Valenti reached for his gun. Nasedo held out an object resembling a Nerf football, and instantly cylinders of some transparent substance, glass-like but impenetrable, rose up out of the earth like cornstalks to encase the sheriff, his colleagues, and the men in custody—but not Seaver. Seizing her chance, she broke into a run, or an attempt at one. But she did not get far. The dirt at her feet changed to a thick black tar that enveloped and mired them. Nasedo, who had created and guided it, walked out to her, clearly full of purpose, though his step faltered now and then. When he got to her he reached out and grabbed her neck with a black-gloved hand. Before Max or Isabel could think of some way to stop him, they realized he did not intend to harm her; he was doing a mind bind. It lasted only seconds, but it appeared to drain all the energy from him. And when he stepped back from her, he looked nearly as frightened as she did.

"That's what you have in mind for the children?" he said. "All of them?"

"Papa!" shouted Neila. "We have to go!"

"You must be stopped," Nasedo continued, "but not by me. Were I to act against you now, others would follow in your steps. Your end will come—but it must be at the hands of your people, not mine." And with that he returned to the Cad.

The afternoon's multiple encounters and re-encounters had gotten in the way of Isabel's original purpose, but it was not forgotten, and the more events worked against it, the more urgent it seemed. She approached Neila but stopped a few feet away, whether of her own volition or Neila's or someone else's she could not tell. "Stay here!" she urged. "I'll find a place for you and your brother." Then she had a Liz-like bright idea. "You can live with us! We'll be like sisters."

"Sorry, Isabel. He comes first."

"There are things you don't know about him."

Neila smiled sadly. "You don't understand."

"I can help you. We can help each other." Isabel's voice grew increasingly strained as her emotions neared the breaking point. "Don't you see? You're the only one I have!"

"I know." Neila's cheek was wet; she brushed it dry. "But, Isabel—dear Isabel—he's the only one we have."

Max came up alongside his sister. He called out to Michael. "Don't do this, I beg you. Take his road and you'll never find the way back."

Michael gave a half-smile. "You don't know what you're talking about, Maxwell. As usual."

Having failed with Neila, Isabel now turned to him. "Please, Michael, think what you're doing."

To her he spoke more gently. "Have a little faith, Issy. Just—a little faith."

The two children climbed into the back, and Nasedo rejoined Michael in the front. "Goodbye, Isabel!" said Neila. "Remember me." Then they took off in another cloud of dust.

"Remember you?" Isabel echoed. "What do you think?" This came too late for the other to hear, and she could not have heard, anyway; Max had, but only barely, and he was standing right at Isabel's side. The parting, unexpectedly, had left her with an aching inside that would not stop. But it ebbed and flowed like the tide, and every time it retreated a little it rushed in on her again with greater force and a greater sense of loss. And at every resurgence Isabel could hardly keep from crying; for all she knew, she might be crying already. Perhaps she was not that much of a warrior, after all.

The cylinders imprisoning Valenti and the others melted away into the earth, and so did the tar around Seaver's feet. "I'll put out an APB for them," Valenti said, and he hurried to the Rover.

Isabel watched the Cadillac's lengthening dust trail. "I'm responsible," she said, more to herself than to her brother. "For everything that's happened."

"Not Liz," said Max. "Not her."

"No. But Neila. And Michael."

"And the Balancer," Max untactfully added. "Don't forget that."

It had scarcely figured in her thoughts. She had always had a dislike for it, and to her its loss mattered little compared to Neila's, which was like losing a part of herself; which was losing a part of herself. "I wanted to come into my own. I did. And now we've lost both of them."

Her brother replied quietly. "I think we lost Michael a long time ago."

Valenti returned with a scowl on his face. "We can forget the APB. They've jammed the radio somehow."

"And the 'somehow's mount up," said Topolsky. "Or had you noticed? See you back at the station." She and her partner led the three arrestees to the car, crowded them into the rear, and left.

Alex hove a sigh. "Better collect the Volvo. Assuming it got where it was going."

"Want to report the theft?" asked Valenti.

Alex made a face. "Well, the thing about that is, I took the car without permission in the first place—"

"I getcha. Come on, I'll drive you out there."

"I'll take Alex," said Isabel. She was taking command again, and even the sheriff did not question it. "You can see Max home."

Max was not wild about the idea. "I can't come with you?"

"I need to talk to Alex alone." She beckoned him after her. Max and the sheriff, left by themselves, stood for a few seconds trying to come up with something in the way of polite conversation, then by silent joint consent gave up and headed for the Rover.

After they had gone Isabel and Alex remained sitting in the Jeep but not talking, in spite of what she had said. Alex sensed she was working herself up to a duty she did not want to perform. And he was right. Isabel did have feelings for him—her mother had been right in that—and as the two of them sat there she thought of telling him how far those feelings extended, just this once and never again. But she knew that if she did that she could not go through with the rest. So ultimately the bottom line—the single, incontrovertible bottom line—prevailed. "We can never be together, Alex," she said. "Put it out of your mind. I have."

Is that all? thought Alex. "This makes—let's see now—repetition five thousand two hundred ninety-eight. Or is it nine?"

"I know, Alex, I know. I've been unfair to you. I was unsure of myself, and I took it out on you. But this time it's the real thing. On account of Liz and—all of it. Okay?" She reflected that if she had been as much of a leader as she had been pretending to be, she would not have been soliciting his consent with that last word.

"What's Liz got to do with it?" Isabel had assumed Liz would have told him; one more duty for her to perform.

By the time they reached the patch of frame houses, the shadows were long on the ground and the two of them had passed beyond all that could be said. They found the Volvo readily enough—but it was now sitting in front of a vacant lot with Isabel's purse in the middle of it, like a proof left by a ghostly hitchhiker in urban legend. As Isabel went to pick it up, she stared around her at the emptiness where her finishing school had stood, and she felt bereaved all over again. There was a pit inside her she needed to have filled, and the only person who could fill it was gone. She thought of the pendant she was wearing; she wished, too late, that she had given it back.

After dropping Alex at home, Isabel sat on the street in the Jeep, and continued sitting until the sun had sunk from sight. Everything goes away, she thought, suddenly or by degrees.

She was still thinking the same thing later, lying awake in her bed, when her mother looked in on her. It was the first visit in two days (Isabel's room not requiring the daily tidying that Max's did), and since then Isabel had changed the color of the walls and the ceiling to her "true favorite"—ultraviolet, to use Neila's name for it—and though she had resolved to change it back when she got home that night, she had not had the heart; it was the only memento she had. "When did you repaint in here?" asked Diane. She got only a shrug in reply, and hardly even that. "Well, I must say..." She stared around at the womblike blackish enclosure. "I don't know what to say."

Isabel did not know what to say either. So she changed the subject. "Sorry I didn't let you and Dad know where I was today. Max and I were helping a friend. On the road."

"Oh, Max called us. He said you were with him." He would, thought Isabel. And just when I thought I was being the most independent. "I wasn't concerned," Diane assured her. "I can always trust your brother to look after you. Though you're getting to the stage now where you can look after yourself. You're not a little girl any longer, Isabel. You're becoming your own woman. Strong, self-reliant—and sometimes rather frightening." She gazed around at the walls again, and then straight into her daughter's eyes. "A person might almost say, alien." Isabel felt a little shudder run through her. She recalled Neila's warning about humans: all humans. Her mother smiled distantly at her from the door. "Good night, dear."

She did not get to sleep for a long time after that. If her mother were not what she appeared—if trust could not be placed even there—then everyone and everything was to be feared, and there was no assurance to be found anywhere. Isabel fought against accepting this, but at last she did. It relieved her mind, in a way: the uncertainty was a kind of certainty.

Finally that night, as she was on the verge of falling off and unable to judge whether she were asleep or awake, a girl's figure manifested itself to her, as it had once before. I came to say goodbye, Isabel heard. The visitor had not moved her lips.

Neither did Isabel. It doesn't need to be. We could keep meeting here.

The other one shook her head sadly. You'd find out where we were in real time. You'd send others to find us.

Yes, because your stepfather—

Don't! Or I'll have to leave. The force of the thought was stronger than if the words had been spoken: almost like a physical restraint.

You can't! I need you!

Not any more. You're free now.

If Isabel believed this, she did not admit it. Only because of you. You showed me how to do things I could never have imagined. But without you I don't know how to handle it. I'm out here on my own.

Neila—her own Neila—smiled. Isabel, you always have been. You've just become aware of it, is all. You've woken from your dream.

Isabel remembered the deed she had left undone, and reached up to her neck to remove the pendant. Take this, she bade her. It was never really mine. Each of them extended a hand, and the object rippled as it passed from one into the other; from one state of reality into another. Neila lowered it onto her neck and gazed at Isabel for what they both knew would be the last time. Be strong, she counseled. And be kind. The strong have to be kind. And the kind have to be strong. She regarded her in a way she would never have dared to in their conscious lives. Goodbye, dear Isabel. I love you—forever. Then she retreated into the shadows as she had come.

If Isabel had been asleep, she woke then. Immediately she felt at her neck: the pendant was really gone; that much at least, she had accomplished. But only that; the rest was gone too. Isabel turned to her pillow and whispered into it. "Me too," she whispered, and her voice broke, as it never did in dreams: one reason for much preferring them at times like this. "Oh, my good, wise Neila. Me too."