They took her out of the hospital and put her in jail. Some ways it was good. The food. The bed was all right, too. Through the window she could see lots of women exercising in the yard. It was explained to her that they all had much harder beds.
“You are a very important young lady, you know.”
That was nice at first, but as usual, it turned out they didn’t mean her at all. They kept working on her. Once they brought the saucer in to her. It was inside a big wooden crate with a padlock, and a steel box inside that with a Yale lock. It only weighed a couple of pounds, the saucer, but by the time they got it packed, it took two men to carry it and four men with guns to watch them.
They made her act out the whole thing just the way it happened, with some soldiers holding the saucer over her head. It wasn’t the same. They’d cut a lot of chips and pieces out of the saucer, and, besides, it was that dead gray color. They asked her if she knew anything about that, and for once, she told them.
“It’s empty now,” she said.
The only one she would ever talk to was a little man with a fat belly who said to her the first time he was alone with her, “Listen, I think the way they’ve been treating you stinks. Now, get this: I have a job to do. My job is to find out why you won’t tell what the saucer said. I don’t want to know what it said and I’ll never ask you. I don’t even want you to tell me. Let’s just find out why you’re keeping it a secret.”
Finding out why turned out to be hours of just talking about having pneumonia and the flower pot she made in second grade that Mom threw down the fire escape and getting left back in school and the dream about holding a wineglass in both hands and peeping over it at some man.
And one day she told him why she wouldn’t say about the saucer, just the way it came to her: “Because it was talking to me, and it’s just nobody else’s business.”
She even told him about the man crossing himself that day. It was the only other thing she had of her own.
He was nice. He was the one who warned her about the trial. “I have no business saying this, but they’re going to give you the full dress treatment. Judge and jury and all. You just say what you want to say, no less and no more, hear? And don’t let ’em get your goat. You have a right to own something.”
He got up and swore and left.
First a man came and talked to her for a long time about how maybe this Earth would be attacked from outer space by beings much stronger and cleverer than we are, and maybe she had the key to a defense. So she owed it to the whole world. And then even if Earth wasn’t attacked, just think of what an advantage she might give this country over its enemies. Then he shook his finger in her face and said that what she was doing amounted to working for the enemies of her country. And he turned out to be the man that was defending her at the trial.
The jury found her guilty of contempt of court, and the judge recited a long list of penalties he could give her. He gave her one of them and suspended it. They put her back in jail for a few more days, and one fine day they turned her loose.
That was wonderful at first. She got a job in a restaurant, and a furnished room. She had been in the papers so much that Mom didn’t want her back home. Mom was drunk most of the time and sometimes used to tear up the whole neighborhood, but all the same she had very special ideas about being respectable, and being in the papers all the time for spying was not her idea of being decent. So she put her maiden name on the mailbox downstairs and told her daughter not to live there anymore.
At the restaurant she met a man who asked her for a date. The first time. She spent every cent she had on a red handbag to go with her red shoes. They weren’t the same shade, but anyway, they were both red. They went to the movies, and afterward he didn’t try to kiss her or anything; he just tried to find out what the flying saucer told her. She didn’t say anything. She went home and cried all night.
Then some men sat in a booth talking and they shut up and glared at her every time she came past. They spoke to the boss, and he came and told her that they were electronics engineers working for the government and they were afraid to talk shop while she was around—wasn’t she some sort of spy or something? So she got fired.
Once she saw her name on a jukebox. She put in a nickel and punched that number, and the record was all about “the flyin’ saucer came down one day, and taught her a brand-new way to play, and what it was I will not say, but she took me out of this world.” And while she was listening to it, someone in the juke joint recognized her and called her by name. Four of them followed her home and she had to block the door shut.
Sometimes she’d be all right for months on end, and then someone would ask for a date. Three times out of five, she and the date were followed. Once the man she was with arrested the man who was tailing them. Twice the man who was tailing them arrested the man she was with. Five times out of five, the date would try to find out about the saucer. Sometimes she would go out with someone and pretend that it was a real date, but she wasn’t very good at it.
So she moved to the shore and got a job cleaning at night in offices and stores. There weren’t many to clean, but that just meant there weren’t many people to remember her face from the papers. Like clockwork, every eighteen months, some feature writer would drag it all out again in a magazine or a Sunday supplement; and every time anyone saw a headlight on a mountain or a light on a weather balloon, it had to be a flying saucer, and there had to be some tired quip about the saucer wanting to tell secrets. Then for two or three weeks she’d stay off the streets in the daytime.
Once she thought she had it whipped. People didn’t want her, so she began reading. The novels were all right for a while until she found out that most of them were like the movies—all about the pretty ones who really own the world. So she learned things—animals, trees. A lousy little chipmunk caught in a wire fence bit her. The animals didn’t want her. The trees didn’t care.
Then she hit on the idea of the bottles. She got all the bottles she could and wrote on papers which she corked into the bottles. She’d tramp miles up and down the beaches and throw the bottles out as far as she could. She knew that if the right person found one, it would give that person the only thing in the world that would help. Those bottles kept her going for three solid years. Everyone’s got to have a secret little something he does.
And at last the time came when it was no use anymore. You can go on trying to help someone who maybe exists; but soon you can’t pretend there’s such a person anymore. And that’s it. The end.
“Are you cold?” I asked when she was through telling me.
The surf was quieter and the shadows longer.
“No,” she answered from the shadows. Suddenly she said, “Did you think I was mad at you because you saw me without my clothes?”
“Why shouldn’t you be?”
“You know, I don’t care? I wouldn’t have wanted . . . wanted you to see me even in a ball gown or overalls. You can’t cover up my carcass. It shows; it’s there whatever. I just didn’t want you to see me. At all.”
“Me, or anyone?”
She hesitated. “You.”
I got up and stretched and walked a little, thinking. “Didn’t the FBI try to stop you throwing those bottles?”