When he visited the offices of The Bee, Ted Barnett’s face lit up in recognition. “Well, if it isn’t my star columnist.”
“No,” said Stan, “it’s not,” and proceeded to confuse the hell out of him.
At the end of an hour interview he knew that Ted Barnett did not read science fiction and that his star columnist was punctual, easygoing, undemanding, and transacted all business over the Net. He’d never missed a deadline. He had a unique slant on life (something Stan had already gleaned from a perusal of the column), and was from Quebec.
Stan also knew the columnist’s e-mail address. He hadn’t needed to write it down because it was his own—the local in-box of his summer house in South Shore Tahoe. It rather looked as if he was going to have to take a trip upstate. He did not request that his photo be removed from the column, nor did he, to Barnett’s obvious relief, insist that the columnist cease and desist. He could not have said why he did not do those things, although he suspected unhealthy curiosity and a fascination with the bizarre (which had contributed to his delinquency as a writer) were somehow involved.
“It seems,” said Ship, “that our descent did not go unnoticed.”
“Should we be concerned?” asked Qtzl around a mouthful of cheese puffs. “The human thought we were a natural occurrence.”
“One he is particularly interested in. If he locates the exact earthfall of this ‘occurrence,’ he will find… me. He is already very close.”
Qtzl’s crest pulled itself tightly against his head. He felt a strong urge to hiss. “What can we do?”
“Very little, Qtzl. We cannot move me.”
“You’re well camouflaged.”
“To your eyes perhaps. Who knows how well camouflaged a human will find me?”
Kerwin Frees was not a wealthy man by any stretch of even an impoverished imagination. He kept a bit in savings for the all too frequent rainy day and had a few investments. He lived frugally on a teacher’s salary during the school season so he could afford to chase UFOs the rest of the year. Now he dipped into savings to do something that would most assuredly cause his parents—happily far away in San Francisco—to throw up their practical hands in despair. He rented a helicopter to fly over the eighty or so acres he’d targeted as the most likely place for the UFO to have come to Earth. To make the sort of showy splash it had in the midnight sky, it would have to have been of a size that couldn’t fail to disturb even the densest forest.
He started the pilot at one end of the target valley and asked him to take a zigzag course down the length of it, flying as low as was safe, practical and legal.
The pilot, for his part, was closemouthed and taciturn, not even asking his client what they were doing until they were making their third dogleg over the forested slopes, Frees peering intensely into the greenery below, camera clutched in his hands. “Exactly what is it we’re looking for?”
“I’m not sure… exactly.” That was the truth. Did he keep his eyes peeled for a flash of sunlight on metal? For a burnt swathe of forest? For a few flattened trees? Yes, all of the above. “Something unusual.”
“Unusual as in what… Sasquatch?”
“What? Oh. Oh, no. Nothing like that. I’m a-an astronomy buff. I think a meteorite fell out here a while back. It’d be great if I could find it.”
“Wouldn’t that have been on the news?”
“It was.”
“Huh. Missed it, I guess. Not that I pay much attention to things like that. Ball lightning—now that’s something I’m interested in.” The pilot, suddenly garrulous, proceeded to regale him with a series of ball lightning stories, and Frees, guiltily interested, listened to them.
Somewhere in the middle of the third or fourth tale—one in which the pilot suspected the lightning of owning some form of primordial intelligence, Frees suddenly lost the thread of narration. His eyes had found something unusuaclass="underline" flattened treetops pointed as eloquently as any arrow to a long scar in the bare earth to their east. The scar ended in a dense thicket of brush. He took a flurry of photographs.
“What?” asked the pilot. “What is it? You see something?”
“Something. Could you get us closer to that… that scar in the ground down there. There—just beyond those broken trees.”
The pilot whistled. “See what you mean.” He heeled the ’copter over and headed back around for a second, lower pass.
“I don’t suppose,” said Frees, snapping madly away with his old Pentax, “that you could land us down there?”
“No-o-o way. Nobody could land down there. Except maybe your meteorite.”
Frees nodded and glanced around the area for landmarks. He found one of particular interest—the cabin on Perelandra Circle, which was, he calculated, mere hundreds of yards from the crash site. If there were people in that house, they couldn’t have avoided seeing the off-world visitor plummet to Earth.
The house did not look particularly lived-in. There were no vehicles around it. No smoke curled out of the chimney, though the air was beginning to cool slightly with the onset of evening. Stan contemplated his approach. He could sit here until his eyes froze open, feeling like a poor man’s Spenser, or he could get up and boldly go where nobody else had any right being.
He did not know martial arts. He did not carry a gun, mace, or pepper spray. He was, he had to admit, a poor excuse for a red-blooded American homeowner. Despite these drawbacks, he started up his car, pulled off the shoulder of the badly paved road, and drove brazenly into his driveway. No one ran out shooting. He heard no slamming of windows or doors.
He hesitated momentarily, then got out of the car, patting his pocket to make sure his cell-phone was still there. At the first sign of trouble, he would call the police. He should have called them before, he supposed, but he wasn’t sure what he might have said that would have made sense: “I think someone pretending to be me is writing an advice column out of my summer cabin.” Oh, yeah—that sounded believable.
He slammed the door of his car, then opened it and slammed it a second time. Then he approached the house, while having a loud conversation with himself. The front door was unlocked. He hesitated again, thought about the police again, then opened the door. “Hello?” he called. Silence. “Halloooo!”
The place was clean—had even been dusted—though the cleaning service wasn’t due to go over the place for several weeks. He made his way through the living room toward his office where he would surely find evidence of habitation. On the way, he peeked into the bedroom. The bed looked untouched. If there was someone sleeping in it, they were scrupulously neat.
In the door of his office he stopped cold. This was obviously the center of the interloper’s activities. The computer was turned on and apparently downloading something. Even as he watched, it finished up and returned to the main e-mail window. Curious, he opened the message icon that had appeared at the end of the download.
“Here’s your new batch of goodies, Arlen. There re some real doozies in here,” said the message, and was signed, “Alec.” Probably an editorial assistant. Still more curious, Stan opened the download and read:
Dear Arlen,
I was lunching the other day with an important client, when suddenly, in the middle of the meal, she got out a mirror and a dental pick and began cleaning her teeth right there at the table! / almost came unglued. Try to imagine a sophisticated-looking woman in a Christian Dior suit sitting in a five-star restaurant giving herself a root-planing!
I am in a complete dither—this woman represents our most important account, but now I’m afraid to be seen with her for fear I’ll find out she’s got some other private chores she likes to do in public. I find it hard to believe she’s never been thrown out of a restaurant for this. What should I do?