“Anything at all, Conrad.”
“Do you have any beer?”
“Just a second.” Mr. Skelton headed into his house, leaving his front door open.
“Are you crazy?” demanded Dee. “Is beer all you can think about?”
“I just didn’t want him to see me getting into the car,” explained Conrad. “So he doesn’t see me all lit up by the dome-light. I don’t want people to know I’ve changed my face.” He hopped into the car and bent down when Skelton reemerged from his house. Dee took the beer—two cans of Sterling—and got in the car as well.
“Why are we helping you, Conrad?” she asked as they drove off. “What am I doing chauffeuring a nonhuman saucer-creature? Why didn’t Mr. Skelton come back out with his shotgun and blow you to bits?”
“No beer for me, thanks. I’m confused enough as it is. Does Hank know?”
“Yeah. But you’re the only one who knows I can change my face. Please don’t tell anyone, OK?”
“Can you change back to Conrad for a minute? I don’t like you to be Charles Bulber. You look like a real straight-arrow.” “My powers only work in life-or-death situations. Like at the graveyard just now when the cops almost caught me.”
“That fire-stick you were fighting with was one of your ... race?”
“Flame-people, Dee. Yeah, that was one of them. They were trying to get me to come back. They think I’ve fucked the mission badly enough already. But I dig it here. I like being human.” They pulled into a Gulf station, and while the attendant filled the tank, Dee put her arms around Conrad and gave him a big kiss.
“That’s nice of you,” she said after a time.
“What is?”
“To dig being human,” said Dee. “I don’t think Jesus ever said that.”
“What are you talking about?” said Conrad. They pulled out of the gas station and headed for town.
“I mean, the way the story goes, Jesus was an extraterrestrial-type being who put on a human body, right?”
“I’m not Jesus.”
“I knowyou’re not. But youare in a somewhat similar situation.”
“I never understood why Jesus had to get crucified. Couldn’t he just say, ‘Fuck thiscross shit,’ and fly off, or change his face? Why should he let the pigs kill him?” “He had to die so he could rise from the dead. I think the idea was to let the pigs take their best shot at him ... and thenstill come back.”
“Oh, look, I don’t want to start thinking this way. It’s too sick. I’m just a hippie.” Conrad finished the first beer and started on the one he’d opened for Dee.
The news about his being an extraterrestrial seemed to have changed Dee’s attitude toward him considerably. Before this, they’d been good friends, but now she was looking at him with ... veneration.
As if heknew where it was at .
“You’renot just a hippie,” said Dee quietly. “Listen.” She put on the car radio. News, excited news.
“... tentatively identified as Conrad Bunger, aged twenty, formerly a resident of Louisville. Bunger’s family have refused comment until ...”
“I ... I think it might have been Sue,” Dee said. “I told her not to, but she ...”
Conrad groaned and twiddled up and down the dial.
“... indicate a genuine UFO incident. Positive radar contact was made by air traffic controllers at Standiford Field ...”
“... Fort Knox jets scrambled, but the vehicle evaded them easily ...”
“... photographs seem to show one man—now identified as Conrad Bunger, aged twenty—with two alien beings having the appearance of rods of light. An analysis of the images reveals ...”
“... Cornelius Skelton, who states that Conrad Bunger spoke to him in person, giving assurances that ...”
“... here with Cornelius Skelton, who says he saw Conrad Bunger shortly after the Zachary Taylor cemetery incident. Mr. Skelton?” The old man’s voice came on—the reporters must have gotten there right after Dee and Conrad left. “That is correct. Ah spoke briefly with ... the alien. There is every reason to believe that this being’s purpose here is of a peaceful and scientific nature. Ah feel—”
Conrad clicked the radio back off.
“God. We’re going to have to be very cool at the train station, Dee. There’s going to be cops all over the place. You don’t think Skelton gave them your license number, do you?”
“What would be so terrible if the policedid catch you, Conrad? You haven’t done anything wrong.
Maybe you should go public.” She gave him another admiring glance.
“Look, if the police get me, I’ll be on live TV. And any time I’m on live TV, the flame-people will know where to look for me. They want to cancel my mission, Dee. They want to get me out of here. They’ll chop up my body, and take my flame back to the flying wing.”
“Oh, I don’t know, Conrad. Maybe it’s nice in the ... flying wing. What does that mean, anyway,flying wing ?”
“That’s what our saucer looks like. Sure, maybe it is nice there. But I’m scared, all right? I’m scared of a big change, number one, and number two, I have a bad feeling the flame-people might be really mad at me. What if they court-martial me, or something? My instinct is to stretch out this Earth-gig as long as possible. Make the most of it, you know?” They were driving down Broadway now. Conrad glanced back to make sure no cops were following them.
“The flame-people can’t find you unless you’re on TV, or holding that crystal?”
“Right. It’s like a person can’t see what’s going on in an anthill. You can’t keep track of just one ant.
Jesus ... would you look at that?”
There was a police barricade in front of the train station. You had to pass a checkpoint to get inside.
Flashing red lights and excited yokel faces.
“Just drop me here, Dee. Thanks for everything. I’ll miss you.”
“But ...” She looked at him all wide-eyed, like he was a guru or a rock star. This afternoon it had been Dee-and-Conrad , but now it wasHuman-and-Alien . It felt bad.
Dee’s face relaxed into her old smile. “We’re all aliens, one way or another, aren’t we, Conrad?”
It was hard to stop kissing, but—like everything else, like everything—at some point it was over. Last smile, door-slam,putt-putt , goodbye.
Getting past the cops was easy with the Charles Bulber IDs. The next train north was due in forty minutes. Conrad wandered into the train station’s large newsstand and bought himself theSchaum’s Outline Series on General Physics .
Part IV
I got up and went out. Once at the gate, I turned back. Then the garden smiled at me. I leaned against the gate and watched for a long time. The smile of the trees, of the laurel,meant something; that was the real secret of existence.
—Jean-Paul Sartre,Nausea
Chapter 24:
Saturday, August 13, 1966 Charles Bulber
23 Crum Ledge Swarthmore, PA 19084
August 13, 1966
Dear Audrey, I guess you’ve read about me inTime —yeah, this is Conrad here—DON’T TELL ANYONE! BURN
THIS! I mean it, Audrey, if they catch me, it’s my ass. God I miss you. You’ll be back in the U.S. on Sept. 2. You see, I remember. It might not be too cool for me to come up to Columbia, but you can come down here and stay with me at Mr. Bulber’s house, it’s so hard waiting for you, sweet darling.
I hope you don’t think I’m icky for being sort of an extraterrestrial. I can hardly wait to run my pincers and feelers all over your ripe young ... No, wait, it’s not like that; it’s the story we were goofing on at the Gold Rail with Hank Larsen last winter ... it’s really true. My body is real Earthly meat, but there is a kind of stick of flame in my spine, which is what came from the flying saucer. Theflame-people , remember? I mean, it’s obvious, really—that’s why I had those special powers all along. (Remember the time I shrank for you up in NYC and Katha Kahane starts pounding on the door? Yubba!)