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by Galen Peoples
   He was close this time, real close. He could smell it. A man developed a nose for these things–and he had had the benefit of nearly forty years in which to sharpen his senses. The e.t.s had slithered out (or lumbered, or oozed, or whatever the hell it was they did) somewhere near there, give or take a few miles–or a few hundred. Give him time (if he lived that long) and he would home in on the ship that had spewed them out–not what he and the others had found, ’way back in ’47, but what they had not found.
   Sgt. Yancy Swift, U.S. Army Air Corps (Ret.), combed the ground foot by foot, inch by inch. A canvas satchel, stamped “Property of U.S. Army,” hung from his shoulder. He moved slowly, both from age and by deliberate method, bent almost in an L (his energy configuration, as Michael might have called it). He glimpsed something gleaming in the dirt two feet away, knelt down, and extracted it. The answering gleam it brought to his eye would have puzzled most observers: it was only a scrap of metal. He transferred it eagerly to his satchel.
   A shadow somewhere blocked the sun. Swift looked toward it. A man (if it was a man) was standing on top of the hillock ahead. He descended toward Swift, who squinted to see him better. “What do you want?” he asked. “Are you–one of them?” The stranger did not answer but continued his advance. He strode up to Swift and confiscated his satchel, nearly wrenching his shoulder off as he did so. “Hey, that’s mine!” Swift protested. He felt the stranger clutch at his neck. Pain shot into him, followed by a yawning blackness.
   As he lay inert on the ground, the stranger rifled through the satchel and tossed aside first one and then another of the pieces so painstakingly collected, and flung the bag away contemptuously. Then he turned to the ex-airman’s unconscious body and regarded it with a cold eye, almost an appraiser’s eye, as if calculating whether it were worth putting to some practical use of his own.
   That was on Saturday. Two days later began a new school week that would be the longest of Max Evans’s life.
   The incident that kicked it off was not momentous; it was almost shabby. In a shallow stairwell located at one of the side exits from the physical sciences building (which was also the shop building), Kyle Valenti and two of his fellow Comets–easily identifiable by their blue and gold lettermen’s jackets–were crouching beside a device which in a different setting would quickly have been recognized as a pneumatic tire pump. A long hose ran out of it along the floor of the stairwell into a drainage pipe set in one of the walls. Kyle and one of his teammates were peering over the wall and the other one had his hands on the pump handle. At Kyle’s signal he pressed it down, and then he raised his head to watch along with the other two. A moment later all were convulsed with laughter, which they strove manfully to suppress.
   It was then that Max happened to emerge through the exit door into the stairwell, nearly bumping into Kyle, and spurring him to a churlish “Hey, ace, wanna watch where you’re going?” However, when he saw who it was, his manner changed at once. “Max! Say, hi. So what’s up?”
   His smile of exaggerated friendliness, Max saw through at once. He ran his eye over the apparatus the three had set up. “What’s that thing for?” he asked. Kyle scratched the back of his neck absently, and they all looked in different directions. “Okay, skip it,” said Max. “I was only asking to be polite.” He started up the stairs.
   Kyle laid a hand on his arm. “Wait.” He seemed anxious on second thought to keep Max there. “You’re a guy, you’ll appreciate this.” The side of the building they were on faced a walkway; the drainage pipe, Max now saw, ran directly under this and appeared to end at a grating in the middle. Kyle pointed out a girl coming up the walk, gestured to Max to crouch down, and did the same himself. Then he signaled to the pump man, who pressed the handle again. As the girl stepped over the grating her skirt flew up, partly revealing her briefs; she gave a little shriek and at the same time, thrown off guard, she caught her heel on one of the bars, stumbled, and dropped her books, at the same time as she was smoothing her skirt down. She somehow managed to avoid a fall, to Max’s relief, but as she collected up her books her eyes darted around suspiciously. Max could not see whether her embarrassment had been witnessed by any students other than themselves.
   Those with him in the stairwell had ducked down and were clutching their mouths tightly, having a struggle again to contain themselves. “Ain’t it a hoot?” Kyle whispered. He seemed not to have noticed that Max was not laughing.
   “That’s it?” said Max.
   “My granddad told me once they used to have something like this at county fairs when he was a kid. I was telling Paulie–you know Paulie and Tommy?”
   “Yeah, they beat me up one time.”
   “Oh, right, I forgot. It was nothing personal, they woulda done the same to anybody.”
   “Ah. Must be great guys, then.”
   “I knew you’d see it. Anyway, so Tommy figured out how to run the hose through the drain so it blows up girls’ dresses and shows their underpants.”
   “And this is the first time any of you have seen girls’ underwear?”
   “That’s not the point.”
   Max remained sober of countenance. “What is the point, Kyle?”
   “The look on their faces! Like they’ve been–I don’t know–”
   “Violated? Ritually abused?”
   Kyle looked upon him with pity. “You just don’t get it, do you?”
   “One of those girls might be Liz. Or my sister.”
   “Aw, Liz is a good sport.” Kyle considered. “I don’t know your sister.”
   “Why should she have to be a ‘sport’ and put up with your juvenile pranks?”
   “‘Pranks’? Who says ‘pranks’ now?” He looked to his friends for enlightenment; they shrugged. Then he put an arm around Max’s shoulder in big-brotherly fashion. “See, Evans, you may not be aware of it, but this is the kind of thing guys do when they get together. Just stupid stuff like this. That’s what it means to be a guy.” He peered out again. “Here comes another one!” Tommy moved his hands into place on the pump and Kyle gave the signal. “Now!” he whispered.
   A larger pair of hands descended on Tommy’s, arresting them in mid-push. “I don’t think so,” their owner said. The others turned to discover Principal Wiley in the stairwell with them; all their faces, except Max’s, convicted them without a trial. “May I ask who borrowed this device from the auto shop?” said Wiley. After a moment’s hesitation, both Kyle and Paulie raised their hands. “You may return it to where you found it. You’ve earned yourselves detention this Saturday.” He cocked his head at Tommy. “You, get out of here.” Max began to follow him. “Not you, Evans.”
   “But I wasn’t–”
   “My office. Now.”
   Max took in with him an unconcealed air of grievance, which he was not slow to give voice to. “I wasn’t part of that out there. I was just an innocent bystander.”
   Wiley was staring out his office window. “Yes, I know. I heard the whole conversation.”
   “Then what am I doing here?”
   Wiley strode back to his desk and leveled a penetrating stare on him. “Tell me something. Who are you, Evans?”
   Max paled. “Why–why would you ask me that?”
   “For a long time now I’ve had my eye on your friend Michael Guerin. He’s always turning wrong corners, always bucking the system. But maybe he’s just a noise maker, and you’re the square peg. Why did you choose not to take part in Mr. Valenti’s little prank?”
   Kyle’s earlier question was thus answered definitively, but Wiley’s seemed to Max askew somehow. “You wantyour students to spend their lunch hours looking up girls’ dresses?” he asked.
   “Of course not! It’s my place to frown on such behavior. But not you, at your age. You should be champing at the bit to pull down a girl’s pants. If you’re not, there’s something wrong with you.” A suspicion flashed into his mind. “You do like girls, don’t you?” Then he remembered. “Of course–the incident with Ms. Parker in the eraser room. To tell you the truth, that relieved my mind about you. I thought, finally, he’s learned how to be human.” Max’s face reflected his astonishment, mixed with fear that he had been found out, but he quickly masked both feelings with his customary bland, blank demeanor. “Until then,” Wiley went on, “whenever I’d see the two of you together, it seemed like she was there for you, but you were only half there for her. Where’s the other half, Evans? Saving it for a rainy day? Or is it like the theoretical black hole? Things go in, but nothing ever comes out?”
   Max squirmed a little in the big chair. Usually he had no high opinion of Wiley’s perspicuity, but this time he had hit it on the button. “Whatever the condition,” he said, “I’ve got just the treatment.”
   He picked off a Xeroxed flyer from a stack in his top right drawer and reached it over the desk to Max, who read it over–and then read it over again. He thought he must be missing something, and then realized that he was not; Wiley was. “Country line dancing?”
   “Best thing there is,” said Wiley, “for developing socialization skills. Great workout too. Our group meets on Wednesdays. Will we see you at our next meeting?”
   “It’s–sure something to think about.” Max was at a loss how else to answer. “Thank you,” he added.
   Wiley nodded smugly and told him he could go now.
   Once out in the hall, Max deposited the flyer in the first trash barrel he came to; he would have to remain unsocialized, he decided. But the rest of Wiley’s message stayed with him, like a muscle cramp he could not shake. And Wiley’s first question, which had so disconcerted Max at first hearing, he was now asking himself: Who are you, Evans?
   He and Liz had not spoken that day, or the previous few days. Now that Michael and Maria were back, Liz had no plausible reason to approach him, and he would have felt awkward approaching her. She had been equally out of touch with her oldest friend of all. But him she found an excuse for visiting after school that afternoon.
   She found his garage door raised and Alex himself busy clearing out the Whits’ former rehearsal space. “Alex,” said Liz, “hey.” Focused on unscrewing a mike stand, he hardly acknowledged her arrival, and Liz wondered at this a little, it was so unlike him. “Saw your flyer on the bulletin board at school,” she said. “You’re selling your guitar?” The question was redundant, since the instrument was lying in plain sight with a “For Sale” sign propped against it.
   “Yeah, I thought of smashing it up–very rock-idol thing to do, but environmentally unfriendly. Besides, I can use the cash.”
   Liz stared at him as if she had never known him. “But what about your music? You were so committed to it.” “Aw, it’s no good now. I can’t hear it the way I used to.”
   “Alex, a slight hearing loss is a simple condition to–”
   “Not hearing loss. Anyway, not that kind.” Alex seemed a little embarrassed. “I used to hear music everywhere I went. Really heard it, like I was receiving it from some other plan–some other place. And all I had to do was write down what I heard. Now it’s not there any more. It is for some kid somewhere, I’m sure. Just not for me.”
   Liz thought of a possible explanation. “Is Isabel still avoiding you? Or are you avoiding her?”
   “Both. We agreed it’s for the best.”
   “Yeah, Maria isn’t speaking to me either. You know, you and I are the only two whose friendship hasn’t changed. Since the fourth grade. That’s something to–” Alex was looking away from her, biting his lip. “Alex, what is it? Tell me.”
   He was silent for a few moments. “I’ve had a lot of big ideas, in the day. The pancake burger, clothes that never need washing, house with a convertible top–but never mind that. The point is, the Whits were the only idea I ever got going, and now they’re gone. Oh, we could find a new guitarist, but it wouldn’t be the same.”
   “And you blame me.” Of course he would, she thought; she blamed herself.
   “I know it’s not fair, Nicky’s dad was a maniac and he tried to carve up Max or whatever–”
   “I understand. I do.” Alex began to apologize to her. “No, I mean, I really do.” Best to leave, and not linger; her recent experience had taught her to remain unsentimental in such situations. “Have a good sale, Alex,” she said, and then rethought. “No, have a great sale. And a great life.” Another thread cut; maybe the last of all. She left sadly and resignedly for home.
   If she could have seen Max just then, and could have felt any more unhappy than she did already, she certainly would have. He was sitting on his bed among piles of his belongings–clothes, CDs, books, sports equipment–examining each of the items in turn and then putting it down with an air of dissatisfaction. “I give up,” said a voice behind him. He turned to see his sister in the doorway. “What are you doing?” she asked. “If I’m not being too nosy.”
   “You are.” Isabel predicted he would give a fuller answer on the count of three. She began counting: one–two– “Wiley called me in today,” said Max. “He says I’m only half a person. And, Isabel, he’s right. Half of me is there, the other half is–a void. Where something should be, there’s nothing–nothing at all.” He looked at her hopefully. “Do you have any idea what I mean?”
   It was clear that the topic bothered her. “I don’t think about it. I find enough things to keep me occupied so I won’t think about it. And you still haven’t said what you’re doing.”
   “Looking for that other part of me. The dark side of the moon.”
   “In this stuff?”
   Max looked it over again. “No. I can see that now. But how, then?”
   “I’ll tell you, but you won’t like it.” Max waited. “Intuition.” He shook his head. “You see? The word frightens you.”
   “It’s not the word.”
   “All it means is knowing, but without knowing why.”
   “I don’t have any intuition. You do, I don’t.”
   “That’s silly. Everyone does. You just have to–slide back the door.”
   “Then why haven’t you? If it’s as easy as all that.”
   Isabel knew what he meant. Why hadn’t she acknowledged that side of herself: her alien side? Not her powers, which she had (for a time) worked to develop, but what lay within her: her thoughts and feelings–if he and she had any feelings beyond those that were human; Isabel could not be sure they did, and she was not eager to find out. “Because I don’t want to,” she said. “Not yet. It would mean the end of everything we know.” She gazed around the room. “This, at least.”
   “This will end some day,” said Max. “For us. It has to.”
   “You know that?” He nodded. “But without knowing why.” In saying this Isabel tried to look wise, rather than superior, because she was not feeling superior at all. However, Max had to admit to himself that this time his sister might be right.
   That evening he stationed himself outside the UFO Center, where he could stare across at Liz when she passed into view behind the cafe’s blue gingham curtains. On one such pass, she glanced out and saw him watching her–or imagined she did; he was, of course, but at that distance she was probably unable to tell for sure. He saw her break into a smile, which she cut short–or he imagined he did; he probably could not tell, either. It did not matter. Whether either had truly seen or not, each knew, without seeing, what the other would do. They were that close.
   Then all at once his perception of her changed: she seemed to have receded, as if one or the other of them had moved a block farther away. She turned from him, unsure of herself, of him, and of the two of them together. And he felt hurt–but only a part of him did; another part–the part that was now observing her from a distance, as she did her microscope specimens–that part did not care. Looking from her to the street, he discovered that the whole town now seemed to him a foreign country. He felt as remote from the passers-by as if he were separated from them by a dense force field. Then all at once it burst, and he was back in the midst of them: his neighbors who were also strangers, in a strange land which was also his home. It all confused him beyond his ability to sort it out right then and there. Yet he had to sort it out; and when Liz looked across again, he was gone.
   Great as her disappointment was, it was surpassed by her relief; she too was having trouble sorting things out. He and she distrusted each other, and with reason: she had betrayed him; he had spurned her. But she had not known about Grunewald, any more than he knew about the blood poisoning–and after all, she had only herself to blame for that. Reason advised her she had been more in the wrong than he had, but hurt feelings kept her from admitting it.
   Yet he still loved her. He might not know it, but she did, and always would. However he might try to persuade her otherwise, however she might try to persuade herself, her faith in the fact was inalterable beyond persuasion. And it made her desire him very deeply–no matter what he had done, no matter what he could ever do. Her mind held enough authority over her senses to suppress the desire but could never eradicate it. Once, in the seventh grade, she had gone without liquids for a day, to see if she could do it; the experiment had succeeded, but had left her with a greater thirst than she had ever known–and it had never quite gone away since. So it was now.
   Max went where he always went when his human life became unmanageable: to the desert. He found a precipice from which he could look down on Roswell–a toy town full of tiny lights, beneath a sky sprinkled with tiny lights of its own. He stared up at those brilliant pinpricks in the black-blue curtain, and suddenly he found himself among them, looking down at the lights of Roswell far below. Those seemed to grow even smaller, and smaller still, merging finally into one light that was infinitely far away. Then suddenly he was back on Earth again, and the stars were in their places above.
   Max dropped to his knees in supplication to them, or to other bodies he could not see. “I shouldn’t be here, but I am. Why?” They did not answer him. “This place is everything to me. Yet it’s nothing. Liz is everything to me, yet–” He suppressed the inescapable conclusion. “No!” he shouted. His voice echoed across the desert. He let the echoes die away until he could hear only his own breathing. “You were wrong, Isabel.” He was not sure if he had spoken it or only thought it, or if there was a difference between the two. “It isn’t knowing without knowing why. It’s seeing without seeing why.” He got up. “How can I live without seeing?” The world around him seemed not to care. “If I have to live blind, I don’t want to live!” He ran toward the precipice and poised at the edge, ready to throw himself down–
   –when he heard the sound: the beeping he had heard before: the voice of the Lodestone. But this time the Stone was calling to him. He heard it as plainly as if he were holding it in his hand. He raised his head to the great round moon that hung over the valley, and he saw both its sides: the one facing him, with a face that was Feddin’s, and the side that could only be seen with a keener sense than vision: the dark side, whose face was swathed in shadow.
   Isabel and Michael were waiting for him on his return, waiting in the park where they had met before in the weeks past. But it was different this time; they all knew it. Max seemed to have a size to him the others had not seen before. Their childhood’s end was drawing near.
   “You both heard it?” asked Max. The other two nodded. “Was it real?”
   “You have to ask?” said Isabel.
   “I think he means, real to them,” said Michael.
   “We hear it, they don’t,” Isabel explained. “You must have triggered it yourself.”
   “I did? How?”
   “By wanting to know.”
   Max understood now. “Let’s go, then. It’s time.” He started off; the others did not move. “Well?”
   “I told you before,” said Isabel. “I don’t want to know yet. Neither does Michael.”
   Michael nodded in confirmation. “Isabel says you think we’re half-baked or half-assed or something. Well, this half’s as much as I can deal with right now. There’s more power out there than I knew–and not only out there.” He placed a hand on his own brow. “It’s scary.”
   Max could not believe they would not want to come. “But this is it. This is what we’ve been waiting for all our lives.”
   “We’re not ready, Max,” said Isabel. “Neither of us. I’m sorry, but you’ll have to go alone.”
   “Alone? How can I?”
   “It makes no difference whether you’re with someone or not. You’re always alone. We all are. That’s who we are.” She seemed to have grown wiser by his experience.
   Max’s eyes met hers and then Michael’s. He saw a sadness in both of them he had not seen before, or had not noticed. “Then you do know. Both of you.”
   “As much as we want to right now,” said Michael.
   “Okay,” Max said at last. “But I may call for you before it’s through. You can’t sit in the park forever.” Neither of them contradicted him.
   “And before you leave,” said Isabel, “go and heal Liz.”
   “I will if I can.”
   “Any of us can, now.” She knew Michael had learned as much from Feddin as she had from his stepdaughter. “But it should be you.”
   “She’ll have to trust me. She wouldn’t before.”
   “Should she have? Or should you have trusted her?”
   “No,” Max admitted. “And for different reasons than we thought. But she will now.” He saw ahead, and it made him sad. “Whether she should or not.”
   He knew the way to her window; it was open, as it always was. Liz lay asleep, her head buried in a pile of pillows. Max slipped in under the rice paper blind, then knelt beside her and gazed on her tenderly. Her face, her hair, the aura of grace and delight she radiated, all things about her, he still loved–or at least the human part of him did.
   It was not long before she opened her eyes. She was startled at first by his being there, but only at first, and was not offended, as she might have been. Max had been right: one look–one real look–between them, and yesterday’s mistrust was forgiven, if not forgotten. “I’m sorry,” he said. “So sorry.”
   “It was my fault.” Her words tumbled out on top of his. “I should never have gone there, never sent you there.”
   “You couldn’t help yourself. You had to know about me–what I am. I see that now. Because I do too.”
   “If there’s anything I–if there’s anything at all–”
   “There is something.” He indicated the pillows behind her. “In there.”
   Liz sat up, and her bedcovers fell off, revealing her negligee. She felt no shame, or even embarrassment, but for some reason her heart began to pound faster. A beeping arose from the pillow at the bottom of the pile. “Someone will hear!” she whispered.
   Max reached down and inserted his hand into the pillow slip. As soon as he had touched the small object within, the beeping stopped. “May I take it?” he asked softly.
   “You’re not taking it,” said Liz, “I’m giving it.” She gazed at him with loving eyes. “It was always yours to have, anyway.”
   As Max withdrew his hand, Liz gave a small gasp of unexpected pleasure. She shut her eyelids to everything else. Max leaned over and kissed them. “Thank you,” he whispered. Liz opened her eyes again. “I’m going out there now,” Max said. “To the place where we came from, to find out who I am. If I come back–”
   “If?” The word alarmed her.
   “If I do, things will be different. But, whatever happens, it won’t erase what we’ve had. This–amazing thing we’ve had.” His expression grew sober. “May I take your hand now?”
   “I only wish,” Liz said, with a different meaning.
   Max held her hand between both of his, shut his eyes, and concentrated. A look of confusion came over his face. “How–” Then he understood, and he opened his eyes. “You don’t need healing. Your body has healed itself. Your blood has absorbed ours. Now it’s stronger than ever.”
   It was Liz-the-scientist who responded to the news first, to assess whether or not she had cause to hope it was true. “No, that’s impossible,” she said. “Grunewald....” She looked for an explanation. “Maybe his blood was weak to start with and mine wasn’t.” It convinced her; she stared at Max. “I’m all right?” He nodded. “I’m all right,” she repeated, in awe. A second later, the larger import of it struck her. “Then we can be together! I can come with you!”
   “No.” Max withdrew his hands. “You belong here. I don’t.”
   “It’s your home too.”
   “My home–and my prison.” As he said this, he was so absorbed in his own feelings that he did not notice Liz’s reaction. “I feel like a tissue sample on one of your slides. Stuck here by somebody I never knew and can’t even imagine. My rightful place is with my people, if they still exist. Your place is with yours.”
   Liz’s whole being denied this. “I don’t have any people! My parents are breaking up, my best friends aren’t speaking to me any more. You’re all I have. Take me with you, Max. Please!” She bent in to him and kissed him deeply.
   Max allowed the kiss to last longer than he knew it should, and then pulled away, though he did not want to; he would always not want to. “I’m sorry,” he said, and he started to the window.
   Liz flung herself after him. “Max! Don’t leave me here! Don’t leave me alone!”
   He pulled away again, more forcibly this time. “No more!” he said. “This is goodbye.” Then he left as he had come, through the window.
   But if he thought that ended it, he was not really thinking, or thinking of Liz: of who she was. As he started away down the alley, he heard her call him. “Max!” she called, and he stopped; he had to–yet at the same time he had to go. Liz was descending to him by the fire ladder, still in her negligee, her curves highlighted by the twin-headed street lamp at the corner of the building. The ladder ended a few feet short of the pavement; she jumped down, landed on all fours–but gracefully, like a cat–and then picked herself up. The pavement was made of stone, with inlaid patterns of brick, patterns more intricate than Max had ever realized. As Liz stood to face him, her negligee rippled in the light wind. He had never seen anyone so beautiful.
   Staring at her, he seemed to come to a decision. He waved his arm, and her negligee became a sandstone-hued gown, cut to an Attic pattern. Then he passed his arm across himself, and his apparel changed to a tunic the color of red clay. “Come with me, then,” he said. “You can only come as far as the gate, no farther. And you’ll have to return alone. But we can travel together, this little while.”
   He stretched out his hand. She reached out and took it. Hand in hand they turned and began to run, in long strides, with the wind lifting them, so they were almost flying–or were they flying?
   Much later–how much later Liz could not have said–they were camped together at the bottom of a valley encircled by high cliffs and visible only to the stars. She was lying propped up on one of her arms, a little apart from where Max was sitting with his knees raised, staring out onto the dark terrain. He had exchanged their classical attire for something less romantic but more practical, and better suited to the cold desert night: jeans, sweaters, and jackets. The Lodestone lay between the two of them, its spiral pulsating with light. “If only–” Liz began.
   Max shook his head. “There are always if-onlys.”
   Liz continued undeterred. “If only we could stay like this forever. With the desert asleep all around us.”
   “It never really sleeps. Nothing does, in your world of ours.” He turned his eyes on her–and they were not human eyes. Liz shrank away. A second later they had returned to normal. “You did that,” she said accusingly.
   “I only raised the blind,” said Max. “You saw what was there to be seen, as your perception translated it to you. And now you understand why you have to stop at the gate. What lies on the other side...” He paused. “...wasn’t meant for your eyes. Only ours.” And Liz shivered, for the first time that night.
   When she woke in the morning all was grey. Max was already up, and waiting for her. Neither of them had brought along any provisions for the journey; Liz realized she had unconsciously trusted to him to take care of their needs. She would have enjoyed the usual morning comforts–a bath, a change of clothes, breakfast–but Max’s quietly expectant air discouraged her from asking. She rose, and they set out.
   In mid-morning they reached the outskirts of the Frazier Woods. These lay near the Pohlman ranch, where everyone knew the saucer had crashed in 1947. Inside Max’s jacket the Lodestone began to beep, and they heard the growl of engines. A few seconds later a caravan of olive-drab Jeeps appeared on the road ahead. The pair ducked behind a clump of bushes. The Stone’s beeping continued. Max removed his jacket and wrapped the Stone in it, muffling the noise enough so that it was drowned in those of the caravan. Of the official personnel who rode past them, most were Army, but a few were not; Max recognized one of them as Margaret Seaver, the director of BEAM.
   The path the vehicles turned up, he recognized too: it led to the crash site. He and Liz followed at a distance. The beeping had now subsided. Within a few minutes they reached a fence, which had been newly repaired; a fresh sign on the gate labeled the compound as government property. “Was this the gate you meant?” Liz asked. Max shook his head.
   Inside, the soldiers and civilians were met by others. When the last of the train had passed through the gate, a corporal swung it shut and secured the padlock. “The government’s taking it over again,” said Max. “The place the ship landed.”
   “Why, after all this time?” Liz asked.
   “They must be looking for something.” He thought of Seaver. “Energy, maybe.”
   “But there’s nothing here any more. Is there?”
   “There never was.” He remembered Michael’s account of what Feddin had said. “This was only the husk, the ship’s outer body. The heart of it–the place we came from–lies out there.” He looked to the south. That, he knew, was the direction in which he had to go.
   Liz was feeling pangs in her stomach, and they were growing sharper all the time. As Max walked ahead of her, showing no sign whatever of fatigue, the distance between them grew steadily. At long last, coming to the foot of a small rise–yet another rise–she halted. “Max!” she called. “I’m thirsty!”
   Max stopped and looked back with something like impatience. Then his face softened and he turned his eyes to a point on the ground a yard or so from where Liz was standing. A few drops of brown liquid seeped through to the surface and gradually expanded into a little pool. Liz peered into it questioningly. “Tea,” Max said.
   He turned to the sand at its edge, where a little ball arose, spinning as if in a kiln. A minute or two later it stopped spinning to reveal itself as a ceramic teacup. Liz marveled at it, as she always did at such productions, though she should have been used to them by now. And there was a second observer, hidden behind a rock and unnoticed so far by either of them; he was watching with even wider eyes.
   Liz knelt to scoop up a helping of tea. “Careful,” said Max. “It’s hot.”
   She took a sip. “It’s good. But not quite–”
   “Yes, that’s what Isabel says.”
   “You’re not having any yourself?”
   “I don’t need any.” It sounded like a rebuke. He allowed her to finish one cup and half of a second cup, and then he started on.
   “Max?” she called again. “I’m hungry too.”
   This time his exasperation was audible. He turned to a dried shrub a few yards off. It began to dwindle. When it was done dwindling, it had become a teacake. The second observer was impressed all over again. Liz began to bite into the cake and then, remembering her manners, held it out to Max. He shook his head. She lit into it greedily. Before she was half finished, Max started off again. “Wait!” she said, picking herself up.
   “I can’t. I have too far to go.” He continued walking and Liz hurried after; their unsuspected companion followed her at a distance. Soon Max had far outpaced them both. He climbed to a ridge that looked down on the plain they would have to cross. Liz labored most of the way up, and once at the top she halted. “Max, I have to rest.”
   “If you can’t keep up, go back.”
   “I’m doing my best!”
   “That’s not good enough!” He had not meant to shout. But neither had she, and now she looked hurt. Max spoke more softly. “It’s not your fault. It’s mine. I was weak. I brought you along when I shouldn’t have. That will just make it harder in the end. Return to Roswell, where you belong.”
   Liz moved toward him with a weary, heavy step. “I thought we were running away. Just the two of us.”
   “No!” Max cried. Liz recoiled at the force of it. “You haven’t heard me! I’m going where I can find out who I am–what my purpose here is.” His hands were pressed to his chest. “Everything I’ve been hungry to learn all these years.”
   “I know who you are!” She remembered she had not been so certain a few weeks before. “Now I do,” she amended. Love had told her. If she had only listened to it all along!
   “You only see the part you want to see,” Max said. “The part that fulfills you.” Liz heard this as the accusation it was. He softened his tone again. “That isn’t enough for me any more. I have to know the other side. Because there is one, whether you want to see it or not. And you’re no help to me finding it. You’re only–in the way.”
   Liz withstood the blow. “But we have something special.” She looked imploringly at him. “Don’t we?”
   “Yes! That’s what’s holding me back–binding me!”
   “Binding?” Liz repeated in a small voice.
   “Liz, listen.” Max’s face and voice were showing increasing strain. “I have to break free. Free of everything. Otherwise I won’t be able to do this. And I have to. If you have any feelings for me–”
   Liz lashed out at him with the first words that came to her tongue. “Feelings? You’re the one who wants to wipe out your feelings–wipe me out. But I guess that’s what your people are like, isn’t it? Cold and selfish.”
   “And your people are childish and undisciplined. Always letting their feelings run riot.”
   “I’m not the one raising my voice, Max.” She knew she was sounding priggish again, but she could not help herself.
   “Because of you! You!” Max was trembling. “Just let me alone, can’t you? If you hate me that much, it should be easy.” He started off again.
   Now Liz regretted all she had said. She ran after him, footsore as she was. “Max, I didn’t mean it. I was angry. Please don’t send me back. There’s nothing for me in Roswell.”
   He turned on her. “That’s not my problem now!”
   “Max!” She ran at him in an attempt to embrace him. He shied to one side. They were standing nearer the edge than either of them realized. Liz took a wrong step and went over. “Liz!” Max cried. He reached out for her, but too late. The hill stood at an angle of about thirty degrees, so she slid instead of falling. But it ended in a sheer drop: the ground under Liz’s feet gave out unexpectedly, and she plummeted eight or ten feet onto the hard earth.
   From above Max heard her cry out. “Liz!” he shouted. “I’m coming!” He half jumped, half climbed down to her, and knelt by her side.
   “My ankle!” she groaned.
   “I’m sorry. I was angry too. Let me fix it.” He tried to take Liz’s hand; she pulled it away. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings. I was only trying to explain–”
   “That I’m in your way. Yeah, I got that.” She turned her face from him.
   “Liz!”
   Then a shadow fell on both of them. On a hilltop west of the ridge a man was standing–and not the one who had been spying on them, but someone younger and bigger. The slope below him was a gentle one, and the way down to them was easy, so that it took him only a few minutes to reach them.
   Liz was surprised to find herself staring into a face she knew. “Doug?”
   “Liz! Didn’t expect to run into you out here. And–Max, wasn’t it? Doug Shellow.” He extended his hand.
   Max remembered him vaguely. “The guy from the dating show, right?”
   “Just my cover, old man. I’m actually an NMU student. Archaeology.”
   “What brings you out here?”
   “Archaeology. Visiting some old ruins. What about you?”
   Max had to think up a reasonable cover story. “Taking a hike.”
   Doug turned back to Liz. “What happened?”
   “I fell,” she said. “My ankle–”
   “I know a place I can take you.” Without asking her permission (let alone Max’s), he lifted her up and headed back toward the hill he had just come down. His breathing grew a little heavy, but he did not complain.
   “Hey, we were going a different–” Max began, and then left off: not the right time, he saw. He followed in Doug’s steps, now feeling useless as well as remorseful. “I could help you,” he offered, but Doug seemed to be ignoring him–as Liz certainly was. Behind them still trailed their stalker, who had at his disposal a knowledge of the particulars, every jog and jag, of all the paths for miles around, stored in a mind that had spent forty years learning them.
   From the top of the hill they saw the highway; Liz had not realized it was so close (in choosing his course, Max had sidestepped it deliberately). On the roadside a little way down sat a white adobe-style building, and Doug made for it at a fast walk; his arms were tiring of their burden, but he preferred that Max did not find out, as he would if he were asked to take over–and it seemed Liz would not want to be handed off to him, anyway.
   A battery of wooden signs, taking up most of the store frontage, promised the usual snacks and souvenirs, and also a UFO museum, which was claimed to contain the genuine remains of the Roswell saucer. Max had little faith in the claim but had a desire to investigate it nonetheless. He followed Doug inside. At once his eye lit on a door at the far end with a “Museum” sign above. Surrounding him and the others were racks and stands sparsely stocked with tourist-geared trinkets, including some of Amy’s.
   “Anybody home?” shouted Doug. “We could use some help out here!”
   “Aw, pipe down!” a voice shouted back from somewhere at the rear. “I’m comin’, ain’t I?” Moments later a grizzled figure in fatigues pushed around the shower curtain hanging in the doorway behind the front counter. They had no way of recognizing the man as the one who had been shadowing them. A minute after their arrival, he had scuttled in at a side door.
   “This woman’s been injured,” Doug informed him.
   “I can see that myself. Bring her in the back.” He slid aside the curtain and waved them through.
   Max was near enough Doug to whisper, “Is he one of the old ruins you’re visiting?” Whatever Doug’s private opinion of Max might have been, he could not help smiling at this.
   The store itself was not large; the back room was smaller. Swift gestured toward a cot in the corner. Doug sat Liz on it and up-ended the pillow against the wall so that she could lean back on it. As their eyes met she remembered why she had found him so attractive on the one date they had had. “It’ll be okay,” he said soothingly.
   “I’m sure it will now,” she replied, “thanks to you.” She flashed a glance of disrespect at Max to point up the contrast. If her eye had lingered on him a little longer, she might have seen that the remorse she was wishing on him was already well in place.
   Swift pulled a stool up beside her. “Let’s have a look at you now.” He removed the shoe and the sock from the injured foot and raised the jeans leg a couple of inches. “Not meanin’ to be fresh,” he apologized. He inspected her turned ankle. “Just a sprain. Don’t worry, I know how to treat ’er. Learned first aid in the Air Corps.” He stood to attention. “Sergeant Yancy Swift, retired.”
   Doug stuck out his hand. “Doug Shellow. This is Liz Parker. And Max–somebody.”
   “Evans,” Max said, in some annoyance.
   Swift went to a shelf and lifted down a first aid kit, from which he took out a cloth bandage and a roll of tape. He returned to Liz and set to wrapping her ankle with them. “When were you in the Corps?” Doug asked, out of politeness.
   “Tour of duty ’40 to ’48.”
   “Then you must have been around when–”
   “When it all went down? Hell, boy, I wasn’t just around, I was there. Seen it for myself.” Max felt a surge of interest in what he might have to tell. “Since my discharge I been collectin’ the proof. Got stuff in my museum you never saw, I bet.”
   “Come on,” Doug chaffed him, “that’s just tourist fodder. You don’t honestly believe in little green men from Mars?”
   “They ain’t little. And they ain’t green. And they prob’ly ain’t from Mars. But hell, yes, I believe in ’em. Met one of ’em myself couple days ago.”
   “Oh, yes? What’d he look like?” Doug glanced in amusement at Max and was surprised to find him listening intently.
   “Like you and me,” said Swift. “They can do that, you know. Didn’t get a long look at this ’un, though, ’cause he knocked me out too fast. And when I come to, I had a silver handprint on me–here.” He pointed to the right side of his neck. Doug bent to look. “Nothin’ there now.”
   “Is that all he did?” Max asked.
   “Sure, that was all.” Swift glanced slyly at him. “Why, what else’d you expect?”
   Take your body and keep it for a while was the answer Max was thinking, but could not say aloud. If Klima had done so, he would probably be telling the story now, just as Swift (if he was Swift) was doing. But why? Liz would have asked, if she had known to. Why would he risk exposing himself that way? Max knew the answer. Klima would do it partly to boast, partly to play with his human listeners–and if he suspected who Max was, partly to test him. It was exactly what he would do. Max had no idea how one would recognize a shape shifter on sight and he continued to stare at the sergeant, searching for signs. “Maybe you know already,” he suggested.
   The sergeant stared back at him with the same knowing look. “Maybe I do,” he said. He looked toward Liz, turning the right side of his neck to Max–and revealing the silver handprint, to Max’s eyes at least; it was outside Liz’s line of sight, and Doug was looking the other way. It had not been there earlier, and in a second or two it disappeared again. It was the sign Max had been looking for. It appeared Klima was playing with him too.
   He watched for another sign–some word or glance from the old man–to confirm this. But all he did, that Max could see, was to wrap off Liz’s ankle. “There you go,” he said. “Stay off it all you can.” Max kept watching, but Swift either did not notice or pretended not to. After returning the tape and the bandage to their places in the kit, he opened an aspirin bottle, shook out two pills, fetched a cup of water from a cooler by the doorway, and brought them to Liz. “Here, these’ll help a tad.”
   “May I have some of that?” asked Doug.
   At first Swift thought he was referring to the aspirin, but then saw Doug had taken out a pill case of his own. “My allergy’s acting up again,” he explained to Liz. “All this dust.” And indeed the room was layered with it.
   Max was struck by the oddity of what he had heard; it distracted him briefly from the manifestation he had just witnessed. “You’re allergic to dust,” he asked Doug, “and you’re going into archaeology?”
   “That’s right, why?”
   Max shook his head as if to say (as he was thinking), Strange beings, these scientists. But then he had known that already from his experience with Liz.
   Doug knelt beside her cot. “Feeling hungry?” he asked. She shrugged. “Suppose I buy you lunch?” He added, with a smile, and in a lower voice, “Or what passes for lunch here.”
   “Such a gentleman to offer!” she said, speaking in Max’s direction. “Yes, thank you so much.” She shifted her position, and groaned a little.
   “Don’t try to move.” Doug turned to Swift. “You sell food here, right?”
   “You bet I do. Big selection. And the microwave’ll heat it right up for you.” He winked. “We got that from them, you know. Come on, I’ll show you.” He exited through the curtain.
   Doug smiled at Max. “I think the sarge has been feeding on locusts and honey a little too long.”
   But Max was not smiling. “Don’t let him fool you. He may be more dangerous than you think.”
   “You’re seeing things, old man,” said Doug. Max glanced sharply at him, and then realized it had only been a figure of speech. “Must be the high desert air.”
   “Maybe so,” Max replied vaguely. But he had seen the handprint. It had been shown to him alone: only Klima could have done that. Unless.... Max had been called to the desert, and was being prepared (he felt), to receive knowledge. What it was, what form it would take, and how it would be imparted were alike a mystery to him; who knew but what his vision of the handprint might be a part of the process? Klima might have had nothing to do with it; Swift might in fact be the innocuous recluse he appeared. But somehow Max did not believe it. He decided he would withhold final judgment, and in the meantime watch his step.
   “Trust me,” Doug was saying to him, “the biggest danger here is the food. I strongly recommend inspecting it before biting in.” His suspicions notwithstanding, he shortly returned to Liz carrying two sandwiches on plastic plates. He rested one of them on her cot and seated himself on the stool alongside. “Brought you the vegetarian. I thought it’d be the safest. I’m risking the chicken salad myself. Funny, I once knew a girl who was addicted to chicken salad sandwiches. The vending machine on campus carries them. But it only carries one a day. If somebody got in and grabbed it ahead of her–well, you wouldn’t want to be her lab partner that afternoon, believe you me.”
   Liz thought his story one of the least compelling she had ever heard. However, when Max re-entered, her interest seemed to revive. “Dougie, how fascinating!” was what she said. But she did not care to hear any more. “So, you’re doing research out here?”
   “What? Oh, yes,” Doug said, finding himself having to switch gears unexpectedly. “Digging for native American artifacts. At it three weeks. Once I set myself a goal I can’t let go until I’ve found what I’m after. As a fellow scientist you must know the feeling. Your subject is–don’t tell me now–”
   She did, anyway. “Molecular biology.”
   “Right, right! The paramesia.”
   “Oh, Dougie! Nothing is more satisfying than having a heart-to-heart talk with someone who understands.” She was not interlacing her fingers below her chin, but that was practically the only limit to her coquetry. The discouragement of Max–of his human side, anyway–was effectively complete. With bowed head, he slipped out the side door. At the moment there was no apparent danger from Klima (assuming he even was Klima), and Max needed some distance from the others. Liz had shown him, all right; she had achieved the goal she had set herself. But she felt disappointed nevertheless.
   “What projects are you working on now?” Doug asked.
   “None,” she said curtly, and then, trying to hide her indifference–mainly out of courtesy, now–she added, “That is, nothing much.”
   “I don’t know about you,” Doug said in a confidential tone, “but I’d rather be sifting through a heap of dirt than wasting my time at some school prom.”
   “Yeah,” Liz agreed glumly, “why dance when you could be sifting?”
   “Exactly.”
   Liz gazed toward the side door with a sigh. “Guess I’m not as hungry as I thought I was. Mind if I take a nap now?”
   “Of course.” Doug removed the plate to the stool he had just vacated. “In case you decide you want it later.” Liz made an affirmative noise, tried to turn over, then remembered she could not, and satisfied herself with turning her head and shutting her eyes.
   Max was not thinking about Liz any more. With greater ease than he had expected, he had dispatched his human feelings about her to a remote part of his consciousness, where they could neither hurt nor hinder him. Now he was standing a little away from the store, surveying the horizon. Something in him drew his eyes to the sun. Seeing it, he knew. It’s almost time, he thought. Time for exactly what, he did not know, or exactly where it would befall, but he knew beyond a doubt that the moment was nearly come.
   He also knew he should have been alone. Liz had distracted him already; Shellow might be in his way; Swift, if he was Klima (or even if he was not), might try to stop him, and in doing so might pose a threat to Liz. In that case Max would do his best for her, but it was more important that he do what he had been called to do, and none of them, not even Liz, must keep him from it. He would deal with them in whatever fashion was dictated by events and his own knowledge–including, perhaps, the knowledge he had without knowing how.
   Doug had returned to the store, where Swift was leaning lazily on the counter. “She’s sleeping now,” said Doug.
   “Best thing for her. Where’s the other one got off to?” Doug nodded toward the windows. Swift watched Max for a little. “Don’t let that ’un fool you. Might be more dangerous than he looks.”
   “Funny, he said the same thing about you.”
   “Eyewash.” Swift punctuated the comment by spitting into the waste can. “Did I hear you say you was doin’ some diggin’ round here?”
   “That’s right. Know any likely spots?”
   “I might.” Doug waited; Swift considered. “Yep, I just might. Tell me, while you was out diggin’, you ever happen to run across somethin’ you wasn’t lookin’ for? Somethin’ you didn’t know what to make of? Somethin’ funny-like? And you just let it lay there? You ever run across anythin’ like that?” His eyes glinted.
   Doug sidestepped the question. “I’m interested in everything that’s been deposited here over the years. It’s all relevant.”
   Swift mulled over his reply. “Tell you a story. You don’t have to believe it if you don’t want to, but it’s the God’s honest truth. I was with them that found the saucer out at Pohlman’s.” He proceeded to give his account in some detail, most of which was already known to the hearer:
   On the night of July 7, 1947, Swift was one of a party ordered to investigate reports of a UFO landing in a field on the Pohlman ranch, off highway 42. It was he himself who questioned the rancher. “Said he heard a noise like a big drill,” Swift recounted, “only one hell of a lot louder. Whole ground shook, he said.”
   The Air Corps men combed through the wreckage and found only a few scraps of metal, along with smaller debris scattered over a quarter mile. “I tried to tell ’em that was just the hull. Weren’t enough to account for the whole ship. Way I figured, the insides musta been jettisoned, same as a rocket jettisons the first stage as it goes up. ’cept this went down, at an angle like so”–he slanted his hand at forty-five degrees–“and kept goin’ till it come to a stop hundred or two hundred miles from where we was.”
   Doug appeared to be considering the possibility. “It would have left traces in the earth, wouldn’t it?”
   “Coulda changed it to somethin’ that don’t show traces. Like water, maybe.”
   Doug looked more interested than he had before. “Where do you think it went?”
   “That’s the big question, ain’t it? Thought you might have an idea. I been lookin’ for forty years. Got old lookin’. I’ll show you what I’ve dug up so far. Maybe you can make somethin’ of it.”
   Just then Max walked in. Doug waved him over to them. “Max, guess what? The sergeant has offered to show off his collection. You should see it too.” Swift was visibly unhappy about this, having intended for his own reasons, whatever those might have been, to confer with Doug in private.
   “Wise idea,” Max whispered to Doug, as Swift went ahead of them to unbolt the museum door.
   “Why is it a wise idea?” Doug whispered back.
   “In case he’s–an impostor. You’re safer with me along.”
   “Careful, old man,” Doug advised, only half-jokingly. “Or I might start thinking you’re as dotty as he is.”
   The inner room was on the same scale as the others but looked even tinier. Narrow aisles divided the rows of display cases. Just like the science fair, Max thought. The walls were hung with photos and newspaper pages he was well acquainted with himself, from the collection he dusted twice a week. The glass cases housed a melange of disparate items: rocks with colorful strata, patches off Air Corps uniforms, rows of scrap metal. The centerpiece of the collection was a scale model combining the shapes of the scrap and those of the presumed missing sections into a theoretical whole. “This is how I figure that puppy musta looked to start with,” said Swift, “give or take a 3% margin of error.” The result resembled a gourd with its bottom half smashed flat.
   “Spitting image,” Max said, “no doubt about it.” Doug suppressed a smile, and the two of them proceeded into the next aisle ahead of the sergeant. “You’re right about him,” Max whispered. “He’s a crackpot.”
   Privately, he was still not certain. Swift’s air of harmless lunacy might be just the impression Klima was trying to create. It did not jibe with his other known personae (excluding perhaps Maria’s dog); he seemed too clever, as well as too proud, to waste time playing the fool. But they really knew very little about him–and Max had seen the handprint.
   He continued down the aisle after Doug as they summarily reviewed each exhibit in turn. “What a waste of time,” said Doug. “Glad he didn’t charge–” On reaching the last case he stopped short, and his manner changed. “Max, come have a look at this.”
   The fragment within was unprepossessing, small and dun-colored, partly on account of its dirt coating, which had been left intact. Then Max’s heart gave a leap: under the dirt showed a row of hieroglyphics like those on the cave map. He did not know whether Doug was familiar with it or them, but his excitement certainly seemed to equal Max’s own. “Sergeant?” he called. “Where did you find this?”
   Swift joined them in front of the case. “Out where some of you scientist boys was diggin’ a few years ago. Doubt if this one’s the real McCoy, though. Don’t fit with the rest.”
   “Can you take us there?” Doug asked eagerly.
   Swift was obviously reluctant. “Don’t like to leave the place untended. ’specially with the girl here.”
   “You could close up for a half hour. Leave her to her nap. It wouldn’t take any longer than that, would it?”
   “That depends on what you find.” He crooked a finger at Doug and led him a few feet away. “Do we have to take him?” he whispered.
   Doug looked as if he were seriously considering the question. “If we leave him behind, he’s apt to abduct the human female. Then it’d be our fault.”
   Swift scratched his stubbly chin. “Hadn’t thought of that. You’re right. He’d best come too.”
   Leaving the human female to her nap as Doug had suggested, the three trekked out to the dig site. But it offered little to view, either from the original period of use or from the date of excavation; if there were any artifacts remaining, they still lay buried there. “Yes, I know this place,” said Doug. “Quemaduras. And the pit.” He pointed toward the gaping hole in the middle. It had shelves jutting out at different depths, the lowest of them thirty feet below ground level. The project had evidently been discontinued before completion and left as it was. “The circle of truth,” Doug Said, “was situated in the center, about nine feet down.”
   “Circle of truth?” Swift had not heard the phrase before.
   “This was a holy place of the Mesaliko. A kind of shrine where they opened themselves to receive knowledge from the spirits of their ancestors–or their own imaginations, if you prefer. Nothing extraterrestrial about it.” He sounded disappointed again.
   But Max was not. Anticipation was swelling in him, and had been ever since their arrival. Doug was right: no alien artifacts were to be found there, but it did not matter; this was the place to which Max had been meant to come. Everything that had happened–the quarrel with Liz, her sprained ankle, Shellow’s rescue, the sergeant’s knowledge of this place–had conspired to bring him, in spite of himself, to where he had to be. Here he would receive the revelation that was at hand; this he knew, but without knowing how. Aware, yet unaware, he started toward the pit.
   The Lodestone began to beep, but faintly. This recalled him, and he stepped back. The sound ceased. Though the site was not one of those on the map, it evidently contained a measure of the same energy, the Vallosan energy. If Max concentrated for a moment, he could feel its pull, but it was as weak as the signal the Stone had emitted. Perhaps there were many small repositories like this, scattered all over the Earth; they might be almost anywhere, and might be responsible for powering all kinds of minor phenomena without anyone’s ever guessing.
   “Did you hear a noise?” Doug asked him.
   Max feigned innocence. “Noise?”
   “Step forward again,” The instruction proceeded from what sounded like a true scientist’s curiosity. Max could not do it, could not disclose the presence of the Stone to the others–but what excuse could he make?
   At that moment, by luck or some other agent, a welter of dust flew up around them. “Sandstorm!” Doug shouted. “We have to leave!” Suddenly he was seized with a fit of coughing and sneezing, doubtless produced by the allergy he had spoken of. He started off with Swift.
   Max lingered where he was. “I’m staying!” he called back.
   “Not–safe!” Doug managed to bark out, between coughs.
   “I’ll risk it.”
   Doug stared curiously at him, as if he was almost ready to stay himself, and for the moment his coughing was stilled, as if Max’s intention had driven it from his mind. A moment later it kicked up again, and his companion drew him on. “Let him git blowed away, if he’s that set on it,” said the sergeant. “All this goo’s prob’ly his doin’ anyhow.” After they had gone several yards, they looked back to see Max standing in the eye of the whirlwind, untouched, with a circle of calm all around him. “What’d I tell you?” said Swift.
   Once the storm was behind them and Doug was able to resort to his pill case without its contents being blown away, he did so; shortly afterward his attack appeared to subside. And now the sky had begun to dim. “Is it my imagination,” he said, “or is it getting darker?”
   “The eclipse!” Swift exclaimed. Until then the demands of his unexpected guests had put it from his mind. “Almanac said one was due.”
   For miles around–downtown, at the high school, at the reservation–people stood like store window mannequins as the untimely night fell. Liz–the only person of Max’s acquaintance who could have told him precisely when it would happen–was almost the only one sleeping through it.
   The sandstorm had passed. Max walked to the pit and, standing at its edge, turned to the black sun. What was the hour of darkness for others was for him the hour of seeing. He removed his jacket, shirt, and shoes. Barefooted and bare-chested, he climbed down into the excavation, to the heart of it, directly below the space where the holy circle had stood. There he sat cross-legged. And shut his eyes. And saw–
   The same thing he had seen with his eyes open: darkness. But a lesser darkness, with the blue night sky spread out above him and the desert around him. A girl child was standing with him–naked, as he was: the first scene in the drama of his life on Earth. It was succeeded by a later one, and that one by a later; scene upon scene, each supplanting the last more quickly than the one before; dozens, scores, hundreds of them, the totality of his experience on this planet racing past him, and catapulting him finally into today. And over it all hung the dark sun, in which he saw Feddin’s face–that is, the face he knew.
   Then another face eclipsed it: Coach Clay’s. The mouth opened and the tongue extended, with a pill resting on it. For some reason this troubled Max; it reminded him of someone else he had seen taking pills. But who? The face changed–to Doug Shellow’s. That was who it had been: Klima had taken his shape; and he was with Liz now. But Max could not stop on her account, or on any account; the hour of seeing had arrived.
   Liz, still lying in the back room, opened her eyes. For a few seconds she was not sure they were really open: the room had been dark before, but it was darker now. “Why is everything so–” Then Liz-the-scientist remembered. “The eclipse! And I’m missing it!” She sat up. “Doug? Max?” she called. She received no answer. “They must all be out watching it.” She got to her feet: her ankle still pained her, but less than before. She limped to the dividing curtain and peered out.
   The shop was dark as well as empty, except for a light from the museum. Its door was standing half open. Liz hobbled down to it and pushed it open the rest of the way. The light– “Oh, my God!” she cried. The light emanated from the floor; it was the luminescence of a silver handprint, which gave an eerie glow to the face it was tattooed on: Sergeant Swift’s face. He was lying dead. And Doug was gone. Liz knew now who he was. But where was he? Outside, and alone with Max! Fear–for Max–coursed through her.
   Max himself was remote from present cares. His vision–the light at the heart of the darkness–had begun. He saw himself, and all his selves–the Vallosans; saw them in all their dimensions, ranging over time and space. In their true form, they looked human-like but not human: greyer and more leathery. And their home world looked Earth-like but not like Earth; its sunlight was darker, its landscapes narrower. He remembered it from a life, or lives, past–but someone else’s, not his. Its denizens, however, he knew; he knew them in himself. If his knowledge of them had needed and sought and found words, they might have been these:
   Isolated. Alone. That’s what I am–what we all are. We Vallosans. Alone all our lives. We have communities but no community. We have feelings, but they’re never shared; we believe they remain purer in isolation. There are myths of love and friendship, but they’re like the Earth myths of men flying: only children and dreamers believe them.
   The one thing we have–almost the only thing–is war, always and forever. It’s our occupation, our avocation–our life. Not war between races or countries, because there is only one race and only one country, and not for a flag or a creed, because we don’t have those. It’s for ourselves: for individual gain and glory. In that sense we’re all mercenaries. Life for us is a battle; we’ve made it so. War doesn’t scare us–why should it? If we’re wounded we heal ourselves; if we feel pain we anesthetize ourselves; if we die it’s over. We fight for the necessities–space to live, bread to eat–but no more. We believe it’s wrong even to want more.
   Yet we’re not barbarians. We have art and literature–but not as things apart: everybody paints, everybody writes. Why did I never write a poem for Liz, I wonder? Was it my human side that held me back? We create–but we don’t save what we create. We attach no importance to beauty for its own sake, only for the power it holds.
   We have no religion–that is, most of us. But we wonder about things. When we’re not fighting, we’re experimenting: figuring out how things work and how to make them work better. That’s a different kind of war, I guess. There are a few holy ones–mystics and their disciples–who reject the Vallosan way and live on their own, in the desolate places. They’re left to themselves, and no one mourns them when they die. In fact, no one mourns any death, or celebrates any birth. Families are strictly biological. Children are assigned by lot. And raised to be– Isolated. Alone.
   So he ended where he had begun. And in fact his perceptions had not been consecutive but concurrent, each one coexistent with all the others. “Who are you, Evans?” Wiley had asked him, and he had asked himself; now he knew.
   “This is the other half of me,” he said aloud. “Why I can’t give myself to Liz the way she gives herself to me. Half of me wants it, the other can’t comprehend it. And I have both halves in me. That will never change. I’ll always be divided. Never whole.”
   “Never,” a voice echoed.
   Max opened his eyes. A dark figure was standing above him in the blackness, at the brink of the pit. “Klima!” said Max. “It was you who communicated that image to me at Swift’s place. So I’d suspect him instead of you.”
   “One of many stratagems I’ve learned in my time here. To confound the humans.”
   “You’ve done more than that to them. You murdered Hubble’s wife, Maria’s father–”
   “It wasn’t murder. It was war. That’s why we’re here. Join the fight. Become who were you created to be.”
   “Then I’d become you. One of those is too many.”
   “In that case, give me the Lodestone.”
   “I need it. To take me where I’m going.”
   Shellow–that is, Klima–smiled. “It will do more than that.” He searched mentally for it, on and near Max, and realized at once it must be elsewhere. Max’s mind flashed immediately to where it was, and he could not hide the thought fast enough: Klima turned to the pile of clothes on the ground nearby. A beeping arose from the jacket. As he moved toward it the dirt under his feet changed to ice. He fell and began sliding toward the edge of the pit. Laughing at having been caught by such a basic trick, he spun around and propelled himself back toward the jacket. He reached out for it.
   –but another hand grabbed it ahead of his: Liz was there. She had hurried to Max’s aid–as fast as her ankle would allow her to–no matter whether he wanted it or not, no matter whether he deserved it or not. Klima turned on her. But before he could act a tower of earth rose between them and toppled over onto him. He dissolved it to a thick fog. Out of the fog sprang Max, helped along by the ground, which changed to bouncy rubber wherever he stepped. When he reached Liz’s side he took up his jacket and unsheathed the Lodestone. The spiral bathed them both in its blue light and Max felt its power flowing into him as he faced Klima. “Hurt her,” he said, “and I’ll kill you where you stand.” Hearing this, Liz was not as mad at him as she had been before.
   Klima seemed to be debating whether to try him or not. “Coward,” he said. “Human. You’re not even part Vallosan.” But this was his parting shot. He turned and fled, into a darkness more profound than the eclipse could account for.
   Then it ended and day returned and it was almost as if the night had never been and Max and Liz were by themselves once more. He knelt beside her. “Will you let me heal you now?” he asked. She extended her ankle to him. He passed his hand over it. She flexed it and felt no pain. Without further word, he rose and started away. She jumped up and ran after him, without difficulty now. “Go home, Liz,” he said; this time he was not angry.
   “But I saved your life.” Her voice was shaking, but she pressed on. “We saved each other. We’re–comrades in arms.”
   Max smiled at the double meaning. “All right. You’ve earned your place on the journey. And we have little enough time left to us, anyway.” So together they headed out across the plain.
   That night in Roswell, two hours after having gone to bed, Diane rose in her sleep and walked through the house to the laundry room, where Isabel was waiting. “Sit,” she commanded in a whisper, and Diane lowered herself into one of the pair of folding chairs Isabel had set up there. She sat with her back straight and her eyes still shut. Then her daughter spoke to her–not to her waking mind but to the part Isabel could enter, though Diane herself could not.
    “I have to go somewhere,” Isabel said. “But before I go I wanted us to take a dreamwalk together. So I could tell you–all that we should have told you before. You won’t remember most of it–sorry, that’s how things have to be for now–but I wanted to tell you, at least once–though there’s not that much to tell. We don’t know much, you see. Max has gone to find out more, and he’s summoned me and Michael to find it out with him. We have to be there too, otherwise Max wouldn’t have summoned us. I don’t know how long it’ll take or when we’ll be back. But you don’t have to worry about us. Remember that much. And maybe you can get Dad not to worry too. Tell him we’ve gone camping with Michael.”
   Isabel gazed at her mother with affection. “You’ve been wondering who I am–what I am. So have I, and so has Max. All we know right now is, we came here from a place a long way off, where they can do things that people here can’t. Change things, and change ourselves–well, some of us can. See into other people, and see into their dreams. I know it’s scary to think there are people who can do those things. But believe me, it’s a lot scarier if you’re the one who can do them. The thing you have to keep remembering”–she meant herself as much as her mother–“is that it’s natural. As natural as it is for a bird to fly or a fish to swim.” She smiled at the song that began playing, unbidden, inside her mother’s head. “That’s right. ‘Fish gotta swim, birds gotta fly.’ See it as just another mystery of the universe–as wonderful and unexplainable as a sunset over Bitter Lake or snow on the peaks of the Guadalupe Mountains. Think of it like that and you won’t be scared. Remember that too. And remember–don’t ever forget–I love you.”
   This was inadequate to her feelings. But words always were. Maybe when she knew more she would be able to say more or say it better. “Okay,” she concluded, “you can go back to bed now.” Diane rose and walked off as if hypnotized. Returning to the hall, she did not see her husband, who, having woken to find her missing, had come looking for her. As she passed him, he watched her curiously. He had never known her to sleepwalk before.
   Glancing in the direction she had come from, he saw Isabel in the laundry room, folding the chairs back; she did not see him. A look of suspicion crept over Philip’s face–but he was not sure just what to suspect. He was still revolving it in his mind when he returned to bed. It was lucky for Isabel he did so because if he had continued watching he would surely have stopped her leaving. She went out by the back door and crossed to the park, where Michael was waiting. She could not very well take the Jeep, and he did not have a car. So the two of them left on foot, following Max’s summons to the desert.
   Out there, before night had fallen–and it would be true night this time–Max had sighted their birthplace (or what was for them the equivalent) rising from a line of rocky hills, the place from which they had wandered as children ten years before: the rocks pictured on the map. “That’s where I’m going,” he told Liz.
   “Then this will be our last night together,” she said. Max nodded. “Can we make it–something special?” Her look was openly inviting. Max extended a hand toward the earth. It rose up on three sides to encurtain and enroof them, and then it became a canopied tent made of red velvet. From the same earth Max fashioned two golden goblets and a fountain of Bordeaux, with which he filled the goblets until they overflowed. He gave one to Liz. Holding it in both her hands, she sipped long and deep from it. Her head, unaccustomed to wine, began dancing. “This is so, so great,” she said. Then she wagged a finger at him. “But, y’know, it’s not ’xactly what I had in mind.”
   Max smiled. “I know. But it’s all I can give.”
   After two gobletfuls Liz was feeling not only airy but sleepy; she slid over to where Max was sitting and leaned her head on his shoulder. He placed a comforting arm around her, and together they sat staring out the front of the tent, toward his destination. Neither of them spoke for a while.
   At last Liz said, “You’re not with me, are you? I mean, really, really with me. Are you?”
   “No,” Max admitted, “but you’re with me. For tonight at least.” Liz held that thought. “I’ve sent for the others,” Max added, bursting her bubble a little. “The gate wasn’t meant for me alone. The three of us must pass through it together.”
   “How do you know that?”
   Max smiled again. “Intuition.”
   Another silence followed. “Max, what’ll happen to us? After tonight?”
   “I told you, it will all be different.”
   “But we still might–we might–might–” Her voice trailed off with her thought.
   He hushed her. “No sense trying to make out objects when it’s pitch black. You humans spend too much time doing that.”
   “Of course. What else is there to do?”
   “What I’m doing. Wait.”
   “Then I’ll wait with you. Wait long as you want. You bet bet bet I will.” She snuggled up against him and shut her eyes.
   “There’s that about humans,” said Max. “They’re loyal.”
   “And you’re not?”
   He pointed. “See that stone?”
   “What about it?”
   “It will be there tomorrow, and next year, and a century from now, unless someone moves it. But you can’t say it’s loyal. It’s just–fixed.”
   For some reason then Liz began to cry. She tried to stop herself but could not. Max continued staring out toward the hills, pretending not to hear her, until the crying had stopped, to be replaced by an audible steady breathing. Then he began to recite, in a voice low enough not to wake her:
       “Elizabeth Valerie Parker
      child of Earth
      the day I found you
      I also found myself
      or thought I had.
      Before that day
      I never understood
      what happiness was
      in life on this Earth.
      Then I understood
      or thought I had
      because we were happy
      and I thought it was
      the same kind of happiness
      for you as for me.
      But yours is face to face
      and mine is behind a veil
      as if I could not absorb it
      could not endure it
      unless it was filtered
      filtered of impurities
      the matter of this Earth.
      So it seems in the end
      I am not like you.
      I thought I was
      felt I was
      or felt I could be.
      But the harder I tried
      to be like you
      to be of this Earth
      to live on this Earth
      the more my other side
      rose up against it
      my alienness
      that is, me.
      So I came here to find
      that side of me
      that alien side.
      Maybe there never was
      another side.
      Maybe all the rest
      was only you.
      Soon I will know
      soon I will go
      and gaze into the mirror
      waiting for me here
      mirror of that self
      mirror of Vallosa.
      Then I will become
      the thing I see
      with no more pretense
      no more Max Evans.
      Dream of him softly
      child of Earth
      after he is gone
      into that mirror.
      Dream of who he was
      or was in you
      once upon a time.”
   And so he had written the poem he had never gotten around to before. But, being of Vallosan extraction, he did not trouble to commit it to paper or to memory, and as soon as it was spoken it was gone.
   In the morning Liz woke to find herself alone. The canopy had disappeared, and so had he. “Max!” she called. The only answer she got was her own echo. She began running toward the hills, and when she could run no longer she walked. Eventually she saw him, but as a tiny figure far ahead. She called again, but she knew there was no way he could have heard her. At the foot of the hills she saw two other figures waiting, and knew who they must be. Soon the three of them joined hands and climbed up out of sight.
   An hour later, against all of her expectations, she saw Max once more. Climbing the same slope the three had taken, she attained to a view of a higher slope above and a shallow valley below, where there stood exposed the ship’s core, or much of it. The core was oval in shape, with a hull of its own, separate from the one that had been shed on landing, and this one was the same color as the surrounding dirt–if it was not the dirt itself Liz was looking at. Max and the others were standing opposite it. Liz did not know that until three quarters of an hour before it had been completely buried and they had spent that time vacuuming off (without benefit of a vacuum cleaner) the earth that had covered it .
   She gazed at it in awe. She was actually seeing the craft that had brought them to Earth. Most people believed it had never existed, yet here it was. From where she was, she could see no way down to it. Yet the others had managed to get to it somehow.
   And now Max pointed the Lodestone at it. A hatch appeared in its face and slid up with a faint humming sound. The three entered, Max last of all. “Max!” Liz called. He looked back at her–but with the same alien eyes as before: a stranger’s eyes. Then the hatch slid down, shutting him off from her, perhaps forever.
   Inside, the three looked around them. The core was bigger than it had appeared from without. Its inner walls were embellished with the symbols from the cave, writ large; these were not painted or inscribed, but seemed like part of the walls themselves. The visitors made a brief reconnaissance and discovered that the large central chamber they were in opened in one direction onto another, smaller chamber which contained two sets of pod-like berths, four to a set, and connected with tubes. This configuration was the same shape as the sixth symbol, the forgotten symbol, on the map: the one that was placed outside the V but near the picture of the rocks; it was a picture of the pods. Into the wall behind them were set eight transparent cylinders, with additional tubes running between them and the pods. And that was all the apparatus they saw. “There are no controls,” said Michael. “How’d they work this thing?”
   “The same way we opened the hatch,” said Max. “By force of will. Or does that sound too crazy?”
   Isabel gave him “that look.” “Max, we’re beings from another planet standing inside the ship that brought us. The ordinary rules about what’s crazy don’t apply.”
   Outside, Liz traced the rim of the valley, searching for the path down. At last she found it. A few minutes later she was standing where the others had stood, facing the core. She tried to get in–pounded at the hatch, kicked it, looked for something to pry it open with–but soon saw that her efforts were useless. She slumped down and began to cry; Max had said it was no place for her, and he had been right. She continued crying until she had cried herself dry, and then continued sitting, having no further reason to stay but no wish to go.
   Presently she felt the ground beneath her tremble, and she heard the growl of engines. She climbed back up to the rim and looked over. On the plain below, a contingent of Army Jeeps was moving in, and with them a pair of earth movers. The Jeeps might have been the same ones she had seen at the Pohlman ranch, because Seaver was there too; she climbed out and strode among the soldiers, pointing here and there, and shouting orders. She pointed to the hill Liz was standing on, but for some unrelated purpose; she was not really looking at it and had not seen Liz, but Liz ducked down anyway. It took a minute for the significance of the earth movers to hit her. When it did, her fear–for Max again, not for herself–got the better of her common sense, and she started down the hill at a rush.
   The three inside had no inkling of what was going on outside; the core was soundproof. Having finished their reconnaissance, they looked at one another uncertainly. “So, we’re here to find out stuff,” said Michael. “How?”
   “Simple,” said Isabel. “By opening ourselves to it.”
   The other two knew she was right. “Well?” said Max. “Are we ready?”
   Isabel looked at Michael; after a moment he nodded. “We are now,” she said. They all took a deep breath and joined hands. Isabel shut her eyes, and the others followed her example.
   For several seconds nothing happened. Then a wild jumble of images, noises, and other sensations broke loose inside their heads; it was like playing a thousand VR games at once. They opened their eyes, but it made no difference: their true surroundings had vanished, lost in the chaos. They had to struggle to keep it from sweeping them away with it, into madness. “It’s too much!” Michael shouted.
   Isabel resisted best: she was used to psychic spaces that made no sense. “Focus!” she cried. “Pick out one thing and use it as a lens.”
   “The Lodestone!” Max felt blindly for it and held it out in front of them. “We can focus on this.” They did so, with great effort. And they saw it–dimly at first, then clearly: saw it solid and immobile, a fixed center in the whirling disorder. They channeled their perceptions through it, and little by little the disorder sorted itself out. Presently they became able to understand some things, first one and then another. And they did it in communion: the understanding of one was the understanding of all. “I see,” said Michael, in a tone of awe. “I mean, I’m starting to now.”
   The soldiers outside did not notice Liz until she reached the bottom. The nearest one, whose dog tag identified him as R. Aguilar, Corporal, moved to apprehend her–without need, since she was already approaching him. “What are you doing here?” Liz demanded.
   “That would be my question.” He nodded toward a “No Trespassing” sign like the one Liz had seen at the ranch.
   She thought fast. “Rock collecting. For a geology project.”
   “Where are your rocks?”
   Maybe she had not thought fast enough. “I didn’t find any. Of the right varieties.”
   “Where’s your car?”
   “I don’t drive.”
   “You hiked from Roswell?”
   “I’m a wizard hiker.”
   Seaver stepped up to them. “What’s this girl doing here?”
   “That would be his question,” Liz rejoined, rather tartly.
   “Says she walked from Roswell,” said Aguilar.
   “Which, oddly enough, is true,” Liz noted.
   “Take her to the motor area,” Seaver ordered. As the corporal started to lead her off, Seaver made a chopping gesture in the direction of the earth movers, and they roared to life.
   “No! cried Liz. “You can’t do that!” She started back, but Aguilar grabbed her by the shoulder and held her fast.
   Her protest had stirred Seaver’s interest. “Why not?” she said. “Are there others still up there?”
   “No,” said Liz; she could hardly have answered otherwise. She searched for another justification. “It’ll destroy the ecosystem.”
   “A system that’s of no use to humans should be destroyed.” Liz was prepared to debate the point but never got the chance. “Get her out of here,” Seaver said. Liz watched helplessly as the big machines lumbered into position and gouged out their first load of dirt.
   The onslaught had an immediate and unexpected result. The entire hill began to vibrate, the vibration spread, and earth came pouring down in an avalanche, raising a dense fog of dust. The machine operators scrambled down off their perches and out of the way. When the dust cleared, Liz saw that the hill was only half as high as it had been, and flat at the top, though the whip-like rocks above it remained untouched. The core could not be seen. She would have been happy for that but for one fact, which she realized with a surge of alarm: the core was now completely buried, and those inside were buried with it.
   They were still unaware of what was passing outside; they were absorbed in the vision they were undergoing. Now that they had learned how to read it, they discovered that they themselves had determined its form, through their unspoken questions; it was a compilation of the data required to provide the answers. But it also seemed like life unfolding before them–their life somehow, and yet not theirs.
   ...Vallosa, as it had been, they saw, and one of its many battlefields–probably a permanent one. But the combatants were fewer than they had been two decades earlier. Constant warfare dwindled a population, even allowing for the power to heal and to resurrect. Too busy fighting, the Vallosans had not been tending their planet as they should have, and so its resources had dwindled too....
   On an airfield, a fleet of ships sat waiting–ships to carry the seed of Vallosa to a planet that was not yet dying. One of them was the ship whose core they were standing in now. In the enclosing section, the part that would later be jettisoned, sat a cot of a sort, but no other amenities, and no controls. Feddin entered, in uniform. He shut the hatch, reclined on the cot, and strapped himself in. A holster on the wall beside him held the Lodestone. He laid a hand on it and willed the ship to take off....
   In mid-voyage, while he was asleep or in some form of suspended animation, the ship was jolted by some outside force (the envisioners were not told what, because the core itself did not know). Five of the wall cylinders were dislodged, their seals broke, and the contents trickled out. That was what had become of their shipmates....
   The ship landed in a field. A fiery projectile shot out of its side into the earth and sped underground, its glow visible on the surface as a circle of blue light gliding across woodland and desert. From the hull that it had abandoned staggered its pilot, injured and shaken, but alive. Far off, under a range of rocky hills, the core came to rest, and there went dark....
   Back in Roswell–the Roswell of the present–an olive-drab Jeep pulled up outside the Crashdown, and Liz climbed out. She surveyed the familiar facade, tinted purple in the dusk. Not long since, she had expected never to see it again, and she still felt divorced from the place, as if it were one she had known in her childhood and was now revisiting for the first time.
   When she entered, her father dropped what he was doing (which he had had no very clear idea of to start with) and ran to her. She had not given him a thought until then. “Lizzie!” he said. “Are you all right? Where in Pete’s sake have you been?” Liz became aware that he and the customers were staring at her. She was herself only half-conscious of her soiled clothes, and could not see how weary and bedraggled she looked.
   “I ran away,” she said. “With Max.” She felt as if her voice were issuing from someone else.
   “I knew that kid couldn’t be trusted! Glad you came to your senses, though.”
   “I didn’t. He sent me away. Turns out we’re–from different worlds.” Her father did not know what to make of this. Liz saw past him to the girl working the tables, and realized that her face was familiar too. “Maria?” She was not supposed to be there, was she? Or had that all been settled? Liz could not quite remember now. “Maria’s back?”
   “The girl I hired quit. So I re-hired your friend.” Maria was regarding Liz with what might have been concern or mere curiosity, but upon Liz’s volunteering a smile, she quickly turned back to her customers. Liz felt a slight pang of regret, like the echo of a long-ago disappointment. “I want to know exactly where you’ve been,” her father was saying, “and what that boy did to you.”
   “Dad, he didn’t do anything–at least, none of the things you’re thinking. I would have been back sooner, only I sprained my ankle.” Jeff’s eyes went to it automatically. “It’s fine now,” Liz said.
   “Quick recovery,” Jeff observed.
   “Has Mom gone?”
   “No, she insisted on sticking around until we knew you were safe.”
   Now Liz remembered it all. She had slipped back into her old place as if she had never left it. “I messed up your plans again, didn’t I?”
   “Lizzie–”
   “It doesn’t matter. Honestly, it doesn’t. Right now I just want to get some sleep, okay?”
   Jeff had no choice but to acquiesce. “Okay. But tomorrow we talk things out.”
   “Sure, tomorrow. ’night.” She started toward the back.
   “’night, pretty pumpkin peachy-pie!” This effusion surprised them both. Liz turned completely around to face him. “Wow,” said Jeff, looking sheepish. “Haven’t called you that in a long time.”
   Liz stared at him reproachfully. “You’re right, Dad. We really do need to talk.”
   Back in her room–which was also as if she had never left it–she resisted the temptation to fall onto the Laura Ashley covers and went instead to the window, as if she could see the desert from there, and prayed to the machine that had swallowed him and the others. “When you’re done with him, please send him back.” She could scarcely finish. “As Max, not a stranger.” She clung to that hope, even as she gave herself up to the inducements of Laura Ashley, while far away, under the New Mexico desert, the vision of the ship-borns continued into the night.
   ...Forty years passed. The core remained buried, and asleep....
   Then it woke. A crowd was gathered above to celebrate the night of its coming; their accumulated energy penetrated to it, saturated it, and brought it to humming life. It knew what it needed; it was programmed to know. Its energy called to one of those from above: a fifteen-year-old named Kathleen.
   She probably did not know, probably thought she was going off exploring on her own. At the time, she had a curiosity about everything in the universe, much like Liz Parker’s now (and later as a teacher she would recognize the kinship). The thing drew her up into the rocks and then down toward itself, eking out a passage in the earth for her to take. Kathleen ventured in, then ventured deeper, and yet deeper. Too late, she realized she had gone too far; the tunnel had closed behind her. The thing drew her inside it, through its open maw. And then....
   What came immediately after was missing from the record. The next thing the vision showed was Kathleen lying in a faint under the rocks. When she recovered consciousness, those were the first things she saw. But exactly what she had been subjected to within remained a mystery. Perhaps when the core had blocked her memory of that, it had blocked its own also. Or perhaps it was programmed to keep the technical details to itself. But they knew what had happened, and why, even if they did not know how. Blood, or some other source of genetic material, had been transferred from her to the cylinders, to mingle with the Vallosan material already contained there. The synthesis would create hybrid beings–themselves....
   And now they saw their own genesis. The material from the cylinders ran into the pods. Bodies formed there and grew, their physiological processes slowed almost to stasis. And so they lay for twenty-six months....
   Then the boy who was not yet named Max had a dream. His consciousness was propelled forth by the same energy that had conveyed him to this unknown world. He dreamed of a girl his age, with long black hair. She had a name, but he did not yet know it. In her bedroom, miles away, she shared the dream with him. The two of them floated together in a cosmos of stars and shooting stars and rainbow clouds of gas. They regarded each other with the fascination of two different species, unlike but not unfriendly.
   “My name is Liz,” the girl said. “What’s yours?” The boy stared at her without understanding. “I live back there, in Roswell.” She began to float toward him. He floated an equal distance away. “What’s the matter? Can’t you get close to anybody?” And then she knew. “You’re from up there! Mommy says nobody lives up there. I knew she was wrong.” The boy floated away farther. “Come back!” He faded to nothing. “Come back,” she said wistfully. “some day. Please?”
   The boy sat up in his pod; the force of his dream had woken him. Its mental energy had woken the other two as well. Innocent of this world, or of any, they opened their eyes to life....
   Max–present-day Max–broke out of his vision with the same force he had all those years earlier. And again he brought the others out with him. Neither complained; they knew what they had sought to know, and were not then capable of absorbing more. They took long, deep breaths as they recovered from the exertion. “Visions take a lot out of you,” Max observed.
   One thought stood out in Isabel’s mind. “We are human.”
   “Half human,” Max corrected. “Vallosans made human. Destined to be always at odds with ourselves, and everyone else.”
   “And Topolsky’s our....” For some reason Michael found himself unable to finish.
   “As far as anyone is,” Isabel said carefully
   “So that’s what it was,” said Michael. “We kinda messed up her life, you know?”
   “I didn’t know,” said Max. “How do you?”
   “Things she told me. She’s still not sure what’s real and what isn’t.” Michael shook his head. “We’ve messed up a lot of people just being here.”
   “Now we’ve seen the omega factor,” said Isabel. “Our planet’s ending.”
   “And the alpha,” said Max. “Our own beginning.”
   “And we know more than we saw.” It was Michael who put it into those words, but they were all aware of it; the vision had penetrated to more than their senses. “We know what they were thinking and feeling. What they had in mind when they sent us here.”
   “We were sent to take over,” said Max. “Not by waging war, as Klima wants, but by invading the human bloodline, as Grunewald feared. But not to kill humans–to mutate them.”
   “Turn them into Vallosans,” said Michael.
   “Exactly. Except it won’t work, maybe because we’re part human already. Liz’s blood is the proof of that.”
   “Good,” said Isabel. “It was a stupid idea anyway.”
   Michael was walking along the wall, running his eyes over the symbols. “I can read these now. Can you?” He laughed. “Yeah, of course you can.” He stopped at the spiral. “But not this one. And it’s the most important of all.” He tried, but gave up. “No information.”
   “I think you have to–” But Isabel never got to finish, for just then the light that radiated from within the walls began flickering. “Bet this thing used up all its juice on us,” said Michael.
   “Sooner or later the ambient energy will regenerate it,” said Max. “Until then....” He pointed the Stone at the hatch. “No use.”
   “Leave it to me,” Michael said confidently. He focused on the hatch and melted it through–only to bring the earth that lay on top pouring in.
   “Well, I hope you’re satisfied,” said Isabel. “This is another fine–”
   “We’ll turn the dirt into hard rock,” said Max, thinking more practically, “and bore a tunnel through to the surface.”
   They turned toward it as one.
   A few minutes later they climbed out into a new day, not having realized until now that the old one was gone. Also, the hill had changed shape. “What the hell happened here?” Michael asked.
   As if in answer, a pair of heavy-duty engines started up below, and the ground beneath them shook. They looked over the rim (which was lower than it had been before) and saw the earth movers in motion; the onslaught had resumed. Even as they saw, they were seen; one of the operators pointed up at them, with a shout, and they dropped down again. Max thought fast. “We’ll have to destroy the ship,” he said.
   Michael protested. “But there’s more information in it. A lot of things we don’t know.”
   “That’s why we have to destroy it. If the Army get their hands on it–”
   “Michael!” Isabel was looking down again. “Klima has to take pills, you said.” She pointed to Corporal Aguilar, who was standing alone at the foot of the hill and doing just that.
   “A lot of people take pills,” Max pointed out.
   “I got business with this one,” said Michael. He plunged his hands into the earth, worked it like clay, and lifted out a basketball.
   Isabel clutched at his sleeve. “But how do you know it’s him?”
   Michael shrugged. “I don’t.” It appeared that the knowledge he had gained at Feddin’s feet had not reformed him entirely. He rose to standing and hurled the ball down at Aguilar (or whoever it was) with superhuman force; more than his arm by itself was capable of. Perhaps he had known more than he had pretended to–perhaps some instinct had told him–for no sooner had the corporal spotted the approaching missile than it exploded. “It’s him, all right,” said Michael. “He’s with the military.”
   “I don’t think they know it, though,” said Max.
   “That’s his advantage,” said Isabel. “He can become anyone he likes, any time he likes. If he’s out to make war, he can make himself the head of the Army–of both armies. And if he gets hold of this thing–”
   Hearing this, Michael understood at last. Klima could destroy the planet; he probably would not want to do that, but he might choose to wipe out the human race. Which would include Maria–but why was Michael thinking of her now?
   “You’re right,” he said to Max, “it has to go. But are we powerful enough to do it?”
   “Together–with the energy here at our disposal–maybe. We’ll try melting it down.”
   They joined hands and concentrated. At first the core resisted. Then it changed into a tangle of energy that throbbed and whirled and sparkled. “Are we doing that?” asked Michael.
   “It’s doing it,” Max answered. In response to their desire, re-fueled by the same energy they had invoked, it was finishing the job for them. “God, Max,” said Isabel.
   Then, unexpectedly, the tangle leapt out at them, and with such force that it blew Michael and Isabel backwards and knocked Max to the ground before dispersing into the air. And as Max fell, the Lodestone slipped–or was drawn–out of his pocket into the hole the core had left, and whose sides now collapsed, filling it with earth and swallowing up the Stone. Max grabbed after it, but too late.
   Michael glanced below. Some of the soldiers were starting up the hill. “Time we were out of here,” he said.
   “The Stone!” Max shouted. “We have to get it back!” But there was no way to do so that he knew of, especially with their enemies closing on them.
   “It’s gone, Max,” said Isabel. “Accept it.”
   Max would not do that; he could not. Yet he had to. And so, after a moment so long that it seemed to Isabel almost endless, he turned away from the dirt pile in which the Stone might lie buried forever, and the three of them fled over the hill, just ahead of the Army’s arrival.
   Late that night, as Liz lay in bed, he came in and woke her. His body was still out in the desert; it was his mind that burst into hers, causing her to clutch at her breast and gasp. But that was not out of fear: it was bliss having him inside her. Miles away, he gasped too, and sat up with a lurch, waking his sister, who was lying close by him in the tiny camp that the three of them had made. Michael was still asleep. “What is it, Max?” whispered Isabel. “What’s wrong?”
   “I made contact with Liz just now,” he said. “Didn’t mean to, it just happened.”
   “And she broke it off?”
   “No.” There was a trace of regret in his voice, but none of doubt, for he had no doubt any longer. To be always at odds with everybody: that was the destiny he had sought, and found. “She didn’t break it off,” he said. “I did.”
   And Liz, lying in the aftermath of his precipitate withdrawal, was left still tingling, still steeped in the sense of him, and wanting it never to leave her. “I won’t sleep,” she promised, regardless of whether he could hear or not, “until you’re resting here with me. Here in Roswell–home.”

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