“Well, I hate to rain on your parade, but the so-called spacecraft is local. The rest of it—special effects. Hollywood.” He smiled at the woman. “I’m sure that makes perfect sense to you.” Frees shrieked. “That’s insane! You all saw the aliens! You all saw the ship!”
“Special effects,” Stan repeated.
“What about the column—Ask Arlen?” asked Frees. “You didn’t even know it existed until you saw it was being run with your picture. You tracked the writer here, to your summer cabin. And you found aliens.”
“Are you suggesting that aliens were writing an advice column?”
The reporters laughed; Frees reddened. “You know the truth.”
“Maybe I do. But nobody here would believe a story like that. I certainly wouldn’t, and I write science fiction. So my line is—no comment. Now, if you’ll all excuse me, I have an advice column to get out.”
He pushed past the reporters, ignoring their cries for his attention, and made his way back up the hill. Frees, stranded below, managed to keep all but a few from following him.
Ted Barnett met him halfway up the hill. “What was that all about?”
Stan shook his head. “I couldn’t even begin to explain.”
“Was that an alien spacecraft?”
“Wasn’t that what I said it was?”
“Yes.”
“And did you believe me?”
“I’m here, aren’t I? I leaked the information, didn’t I?”
“That begs the question. Do you believe that was an alien spacecraft?”
Barnett hesitated. “I’m not sure. I hate to sound like a rank materialist, but the more important question to me is—are you really Arlen? Or was it somebody else?” His eyes grazed the clouds overhead.
“Why don’t you reserve judgment until you get my next column?”
Barnett nodded. “OK. How does this guy Frees figure into this?”
Stan glanced down the hill to where the UFO chaser was still drowning in journalistic undertow. “He concocted a story about aliens writing the column—about me hiding these aliens in my summer cabin. He was harassing me.”
“And this is your way of getting even.”
“Maybe. Or maybe it’s my way of getting the aliens out of here safely. Or maybe it’s my way of getting more free publicity.”
He left Barnett and went back up to the cabin, where he closed and locked the door in the faces of a couple of tabloid reporters. The act gave him a perverse and childish sense of satisfaction. From his office window he watched Kerwin Frees swimming uphill against a current of microphones and cameras. At the bottom of the hill, a handful of people were going over the crash site in minute detail.
Stan frowned. He hadn’t thought of that—hadn’t considered what kind of evidential residue Ship might have left behind. He called the police and reported that he was being overrun with trespassers. Then, musingly, still not certain what he had just gained and lost and gained, Stan Schell sat down at his computer to answer the day’s letters and meditate upon the alien point of view.