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by Galen Peoples
   "Grounded," Liz Parker wrote in her journal (which most sixteen-year-olds would have called a diary) under the date Wednesday, March 1. "Grounded on top of being grounded. Hmm, wonder what the technical term for that is." She considered. "Fresh-grounded? No, that sounds like coffee."
   She felt her mind straying, and sucked on her gel pen to help herself focus her thoughts. As often, they turned to Max Evans, her boyfriend (though she hardly ever called him so: the designation seemed not to fit somehow). Her parents and his had split them up for several days by grounding them both; he had served his sentence, but hers remained in effect through the end of the week–three more days. Then they would be together for good. Or so she hoped; in the past there had been problems.
   This was their second grounding in a row. The act that had occasioned it was having sneaked out while being grounded already. But it had been worth the additional punishment. On their excursion, they had found something wonderful: an artifact of another world. It was a black stone, or something like a stone, with a strange inlaid symbol, almost a spiral–two nearly contiguous arcs with a spot in the middle. At first it shone icy blue, but soon the light died out, and so far it had stayed out. They had seen the same symbol before: once on a cave wall, and once in the form of a pendant that Max's sister now had in her keeping.
   Liz did not know how to record all of this in her journal. And she did not want to; the book had been stolen once, and might be stolen again. Last time the thief had been one of her friends; next time it might be–whoever was out there, watching them.
   Before having met Max and since having grown old enough to choose, she had lived science: biology mainly. The worlds the microscope revealed to her fascinated her more than the one she saw unaided. The operations of those worlds seemed enigmatic until they were explained–those that had been explained. Those that had not, she planned to make her life's work. Her future was clearly mapped out.
   –until the previous September. Then an unlooked-for event had added a bend to her intended course: she had died. While waitressing at the Crashdown Cafe (the family business), she had taken a bullet in the stomach; the wound had been fatal. But she was not dead now. Max Evans had given her a jump start.
   Max was one of the loners in her class, a boy many girls wondered and, sometimes, daydreamed about. He had reached out to her as God reached out to Adam on the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and she had reawakened to see him gazing down at her full of worry, and more than worry. He warned her to keep quiet, doused her with ketchup to account for the bloodstains, and was then pulled away by the others who were like him (as far as anyone could be like him): Isabel, his adoptive sister, and Michael Guerin, his best friend–his only friend except Liz.
   She kept quiet, almost, about her resurrection. When questioned by her parents and Sheriff Valenti, she said nothing. But when her two best friends, Maria Deluca and Alex Whitman, began pressing her, the secret began to bite at her like a flea. By then it had expanded to include the fact that Max and the others were, as he put it, "not of this Earth." And soon she told all. This relieved her of her itch, but stung her with regret for violating the trust Max had placed in her. In any case, now they were six: those who knew.
   Roswell, NM was famous for aliens, but none of its other residents had ever met one–or not knowingly. A hot, dry, drowsy little city (pop. 44,975), Roswell had stirred to life of a kind one hundred thirty years earlier, popping up in the middle of the flat desert like a popcorn kernel in a frying pan. From its boundaries the desert extended vastly far in all directions, a cosmos unto itself. And from out there, or from something that lay out there, one hundred twenty years after the city's birth, the three children appeared. Six years old, their charts read, but that was a guess; no one, including themselves, knew their ages. Or their place of origin; that was for them yet to discover.
   At the school they attended now, West Roswell High, where the social order was sharply defined, Max and Isabel, along with a majority of the student body, occupied the higher tiers. But the district also encompassed the trailer park where Michael lived, as well as a section of trailer-like houses on the outskirts, so that the kids from that side of the tracks rubbed shoulders with those from the other. And Earth kids, unbeknownst to them (that is, all but three), were doing the same with their extragalactic counterparts.
   That Wednesday at the Crashdown, shortly before closing, the six were clustered in and around the booth nearest the rear door labeled "Employees Only." Three of them were leaning over the seat; one of these had on a chef's apron, and the others had antennae (artificial, not real), which bedecked the tiaras that accompanied their servers' uniforms. Shielded by the backs of these three, by a row of Tabasco sauce bottles, and by the shoebox housing it, the artifact Max and Liz had found was sitting on the table.
   Alex had been studying it for nearly five minutes while the others watched. Finally he sat back.
   "What do you make of it?" asked Max.
   "Material's like nothing I ever saw before."
   Isabel made a sound that was not quite a laugh. "Why would you? Have you been to our home planet? Have you been anywhere?"
   Alex threw her an aggrieved look. "Hey, your set, okay?"
   "Sorry. Guess I'm on edge."
   "But what is it?" asked Liz. Nobody volunteered an answer. "Okay, we'll take turns. I'll start." She did not have to inspect the object further; she had examined it thoroughly while she and Max were bringing it back. "I think–it's a guide," she said finally. "When you're lost, it shows you the way." Again nobody had any comment. Liz turned to Michael, who was standing next to her. "You go next. What's your guess?"
   He answered without hesitation. "A weapon."
   "No, just the opposite," countered his girlfriend. "It's a–harmonizer."
   "Harmonizer?" Isabel repeated. "As in music?"
   Maria shook her head. "Don't know, it just came to me. Alex? What do you say it is?"
   "A gold mine–if it could be mass-produced. Imagine what a great novelty item it'd make."
   Isabel shook her head. "Alex, seriously."
   "I am being serious."
   Max, the next in line, deliberated for half a minute before giving his diagnosis. "I think it's a database. With information on where we came from and why we're here."
   "Which doesn't include me, I bet," Liz said glumly.
   Max reached up and squeezed her hand. "Wrong."
   Last up was Isabel. "It's a generator, all right?" she said, sounding sure of herself but not happy about it.
   "Like an electrical generator?" asked Alex.
   "Exactly like. It can boost our powers to the nth degree. I'm surprised you don't feel it, Max." She felt more than that, but was reluctant to put her feeling into words. The artifact was more than a power booster; it was an agent of change, and it would bring about the end of the life they knew. She was not ready to face that.
   "If we can only figure out how to get it working," Michael mused.
   Isabel shivered. "I hope we never do."
   Her brother looked at her in surprise. "Why?"
   She did not answer him. But to Alex she said, "Walk me home, will you?" Though technically a question, it was more in the nature of a command.
   Alex seemed not to mind, however. "My pleasure!" he exclaimed–and he slid out of his seat so fast he bumped his knee on the table.
   Isabel got up rather more cautiously. "But by the back alley," she added, "so no one sees us." This dimmed Alex's glow a little, but he faithfully limped out after her regardless.
   There was a shout from the front. "Yo, anybody on duty in this joint?"
   The servers rotated their antennae in that direction. "I'll take it," offered Maria. And with her departure, the group broke up.
   Max removed the artifact from its box and slipped it into a pocket of his jacket. "You're keeping it?" said Michael.
   Max had not expected a challenge on that front. "I was the one who found it."
   "You and Liz," Michael reminded him.
   "I can ask her. If it's an issue."
   "No, no." Michael threw up his hands. "Whatever you say, Maximilian."
   Max sighed. "Why do you do that?"
   Michael stopped on his way toward the kitchen. "Do what?"
   "The file extensions. Maximilian. Maxwell. The name's Max. Plain and simple Max."
   "Didn't know it bothered you." He disappeared through the staff door.
   "Of course he does," Max muttered, "otherwise he wouldn't do it. Make it sound like I'm letting on to be more than I am. Like I think I'm better than he is. Oh, he knows what he's doing, all right. You can bank on it."
   Liz, who was the only one left to listen, nodded slowly. "And the mature way to confront the problem is to work yourself into a state over it." This fetched a grudging smile, which she answered with a willing one. Then she reverted to the former topic of conversation. "So what are you going to do with that thing?"
   Max picked up the empty shoebox and turned it over and over, as if searching for instructions. "Isn't that what we were all in disagreement about?"
   "Not all–" Suddenly her eyes grew big. "Oh, my God!" She felt like yelling, but managed to keep her voice down to a whisper. Inside his jacket pocket, and filtering out through the cotton shell, a blue light shone. "Max, look!"
   "What?"
   He looked but saw nothing. It had disappeared even before Liz had finished speaking. "Must be seeing things," she murmured. But she knew she was not prone to that.
   Looking up, she saw something else, which was certainly not imaginary: her father had just entered by the main doors. She fleetingly wondered whether this was connected to the phenomenon she had just observed (if she had observed it), but the thought was wiped out by her more pressing concern; Jeff was glaring back at the two of them, and Liz knew why.
   "I'm not supposed to be talking to you," she whispered to Max. This had been a condition of her grounding. She grabbed a rag from the sideboard and applied it to an imaginary spill on the table. Max slumped down in his seat and retracted his head into his jacket, turtle-like.
   But the camouflage came too late; Jeff had seen them. "Have you been hanging out with this boy the whole time I was gone?" he asked as he walked up.
   "He's a customer too," his daughter said innocently.
   "And the kid who got you grounded–which you still are, in case you've forgotten."
   "Not likely," came the muttered reply.
   Jeff ignored it. "Time to start closing up," he said. A second later he disappeared and the staff door swung to behind him. Liz knew from experience that he did not mean for her to evacuate the place immediately but to begin the preparations for locking up, which would take her almost until 8.
   Michael and Maria had been auditing the conversation from opposite sides of the order window. "Glad he's not my dad," Maria whispered.
   "Me too," said Michael, but he sounded a little wistful, as Maria had also. He returned to scraping the grill. "'course, your mom is practically your dad," he added.
   "Hey, you think that was her choice?"
   "Easy! Her and me are buddies now, remember?"
   Crossing in back of Max as she shuttled a tray of glasses from one sideboard to the other, Liz bent near to his ear. "Don't look now," she murmured, "but you're being watched."
   She flicked her eyes toward a customer at a table on the other side of the room. Glancing over, Max recognized a former regular from his own place of employment, the UFO Center, who had made trouble for the two of them in the past, and now looked as if he might be working himself up to do it again. He was staring fixedly at Max through thick glasses beneath a mop of unruly hair. "Thought that guy left town," said Max.
   "He's back now."
   "We better start hanging out at the park." Max had been of that mind for some time anyway.
   "Why there?"
   "Not as public."
   Liz began to laugh, and then saw by his face that he was not joking. Very solemn he could be, when he was not being airy. But then so could she; they were a good match that way.
   He was still on her mind later as she made her journal entry, into which a little of the evening's conversation found its way. She bethought her also of her best friend, not grounded, and free to hang out with her boyfriend; she was no doubt at his place at that very moment. Liz sighed in envy.
   But tonight Maria wished she had not come. She was sitting in a corner deprived of tv or radio while Michael concentrated on the map in front of him. The gooseneck lamp beside it on the coffee table cast the only light in the apartment. Dim as this was, she could make out the yellow gemstones which formed roughly a V on top of the map. They were artifacts also, from the same place as the first–a place far beyond Roswell; Michael had set them over the larger map symbols as aids to concentration. The rows of smaller symbols between, Maria could not see from her chair, but she remembered that they looked like words from an alien alphabet, probably describing the sites under the stones.
   There were five stones, five sites, and five symbols for the sites: a spot enclosed in parentheses, a set of concentric circles and half circles that might describe a solar system, a pair of diagonal lines with extensions like whipcords, a row of boxes (almost) with a spot inside each, and the same spiral Maria and the others had seen on the artifact. In addition, there was a sixth symbol outside the V: a pair of crisscrossing lines with a box at each end and a half circle in each box.
   The map was an accurate replica of the one they had seen in the cave on the Mesaliko reservation southwest of town. They had been led there by an old Apache called River Dog; he it was who had given them the stones. But it was Michael who had discovered recesses in the wall, and known to fit the stones into them so that they radiated a luminescent glow by which the symbols had been revealed plainly. He had seen in a vision that they represented not only one set of locations but two, in the identical configuration: one in the sky, the other on the earth, in and around Roswell–but where were those earthly sites? He had borrowed Max's replica map to study in hopes of figuring it out.
   "This is tougher than I thought," he said, half glancing at his guest. "Maybe that thing Liz and Max found can help translate." That was one reason he had hoped to be its keeper, instead of Max. He pointed to the spot in parentheses. "This symbol's definitely the library. Thought I knew what the others were too, but once I started looking, come to find I didn't. Like when you've had a dream and you think you remember it, but when you try to tell somebody, it's gone."
   And maybe sometimes you should let it go, Maria thought. But she would not say so, would not burst his bubble. She walked up behind him and rested her hands on his shoulders. "They must have something in common, something unique, don't you think? Why else would they have been singled out?"
   Michael had no insight to offer. The identification of the library had come to him unbidden, as had most of the facts he had acquired in his life, but when he tried to extrapolate others, as he had been trying for the past hour, the effort hurt his head and he soon gave it up. "Wonder if one of them's the trailer park?" he mused. If the map was limited to Roswell and the top equated to north, he figured the park would be situated near the spiral.
   Maria felt all at sea, not for the first time (or the last) in their discussions. "Why would it be?"
   Michael smiled wryly; it had been a private joke. All his jokes were private ones, but Maria could usually recognize them, if not understand them. "You're right," he said. "That's one place that wasn't written in the stars." This signaled the end of his mental exertions for the evening. He reached for her hand and pulled her down toward him until she was close enough to kiss, though her lips were upside-down to his, and for the next hour, her small silken surrenders pushed away his memories of the place where he had grown up.
   After she had left they returned, as they always did. He sat awake in the corner armchair remembering his ten years of captivity in the dingy white trailer with the short thick-set man who had brought and held him there. He had hated it as much as it was possible to hate any place. And still he yearned to see it again.
   "Old Chisholm Trail Trailer Park," read the sign. The posts supporting it were half rotted; Michael was always surprised to find them still standing. In the early morning haze the dust lay where it had settled the night before. A rooster crowed; a dog barked; there were no signs of higher life. The "home" that had been Hank's was obviously unoccupied: no vehicles were parked out front. But it was wearing a shiny new coat of yellow paint.
   Michael tried the door and found it unlocked. The inside smelled of disinfectant. He had advanced as far as the hall when he heard the screen door creak open behind him. "Who's in there?" a voice growled; one human was stirring, at least.
   Michael turned to see a broad, mustached face he had known since childhood. "Easy, Borry. It's just me."
   "Mike?"
   "Who else?"
   Boris Nazarian stepped inside. He had the reserved and suspicious air of a private security guard–which he had been before he bought the park to see him through his retirement. "What you doin' here, Mike? Your old man's long gone."
   "Had to visit the old homestead one last time. You know how that is."
   "No, not really. Not the way Hank treated you. I shoulda reported him to the sheriff, but you–"
   "Wouldn't have changed anything, would it? Except make him madder–and I woulda caught most of the mad."
   "You were bigger than him. He was more scared of you than the other way around. Why didn't you haul off and let him have it?"
   "Only one place that road leads. And that's a place I don't ever want to see again."
   "Again?"
   Michael let the question slide. "Things turned out okay, once I escaped from here." He added, after a pause, "No offense meant."
   "Then why are you back? Why would anybody come back?"
   Michael stared toward the sanitized living room and saw past it to what it had looked like in his day. "If I tell you, you'll think I'm crazy."
   "Will I?" Boris leaned against the wood paneling, causing it to creak alarmingly. "Never told you this, Mike. I had an old man whaled on me too. Hadda join the Navy to get away from him–and get me some cojones. After I was through training, I called him and told him when I come home I was gonna beat the bejesus out of him. Not on my first leave, or my second. I wanted to make the bastard sweat. But come my third...." He sighed. "I come home like I promised."
   "And then you pounded on him?"
   "I was gonna. But you know what? He said, go ahead, it'd be a mercy. He was dyin'. Son of a bitch. I couldn't whale on a guy who's dyin'." He shook his head. "I was there at the end, and I felt for him, you know, the way you would for anybody. But I couldn't forgive him. Never will. But–"
   "You still miss him?"
   Boris took this as a challenge. "Yeah, what of it?"
   "It's crazy! A guy who abused you, and kept on abusing you. Why would you miss him? Why?"
   Boris knew Michael was not only talking about him. "'cause they was all we had, Mike. Back when we needed somebody. And you wanna know the punchline? Now we ain't even got them." He stepped up to his former tenant and laid a hand on his shoulder. "You don't wanna be here, Mike. There's nothin' for you here." But Michael had known that before coming.
   He did not speak on the way to school the next morning. But he was not silent either. He was bumming a ride in the Evans Jeep as usual; today Max was driving. In back, Isabel was giving thanks for the seat backs that divided her from Michael and damped the sound of his voice as he sang along with the radio:
      "Teen-a-gers from out-er space
      Well, we're just teen-a-gers from out-er space
      I say, teen-a-gers from out-er space
      With this place
      On our case...."
   "Must you do that?" he heard from the back seat. Max switched the radio off without touching the knob. "At last," said his sister, over Michael's protest. "Peace in our time."
   Max turned to Michael. "I need to ask you something anyway." He reached into his jacket.
   "Hope that's nothing illegal you're carrying." Michael nodded over to their left, where a beige Range Rover with an official insignia on the door was cruising alongside them at the same speed. Max took his hand away from his jacket. The driver gave him a nod, which he returned nervously. Damn that Valenti, he thought.
   After two blocks, the sheriff turned off, but by that time they had reached the school. "I'll have to ask you later," said Max.
   Their human allies had arrived a few minutes earlier and were waiting at their usual gathering spot by the big school sign at the top of the steps. "Oh, my God," said Maria, and then quickly covered her mouth.
   "What?" said Liz, looking in the direction of the couple that had just passed by.
   Her friend moved to block her view. "Nothing! Less than nothing. A sub-factoid in the sub-nothing universe." But Liz had already seen: the sheriff's son had been arm in arm with a girl who was not one of Liz's favorites, and had cast her in passing what might have been interpreted as a smirk. "Sorry," said Maria.
   "You mean Kyle's being with Pam Troy? Yeah, I'd heard that." She continued staring after them. "But this is the first time I've actually seen them."
   "You are over him, correct? I mean, you are with Max now."
   "Maria, there was nothing to be over! It's just–I don't understand what he sees in her, that's all. I mean, even Kyle has standards."
   "Well," Alex offered hesitantly, "you have to admit she's very–" The two girls flashed him identical cold looks. "Okay," he conceded. "After all, what do I know? I'm just a sophomore."
   "Junior," Liz corrected him. "This is our junior year."
   "I do that a lot, don't I?"
   "All last year," said Maria. "You kept telling people we were still freshmen. Very diminishing." Her voice faded with the last words, and Alex saw she was no longer looking at him. Michael and the Evanses had appeared at the foot of the steps.
   "Who's that watching us?" asked Isabel.
   The two boys followed her eye to a window of the gym building. "Coach Clay," Michael replied, waving to the figure standing there. Clay–if it was he–turned away without acknowledging him.
   "Warm guy," Max observed.
   "He's a coach. He's supposed to be tough."
   "Friday he gave me ten laps. For nothing!"
   "Uh-huh. What was nothing?"
   "Talking during roll call."
   "It's against the rules. You knew that when you did it."
   "When did you suddenly become his champion, Michael? He hasn't spared you, that I recall."
   "That's his job. Making us into men."
   "Which, given your biological profiles–" Isabel began.
   "If you're too much of a wuss to take it–" Michael continued.
   "Who's a wuss?"
   He gave Michael a shove, and Michael was prepared to return the favor with interest when Isabel stepped between them. "Boys, boys! None of that in my saloon."
   The quarrel had gone farther than Michael had intended; now he took a step back, both figuratively and literally. "I'm just saying you got no call to dump on him," he offered. "That's all I'm saying."
   Max had a sudden insight, or what he believed to be one. "Michael, he's not your dad." Michael flashed him a glare, confirming his guess.
   Then they reached the big sign and the three waiting by it. Below the school's name, writ large, stood forth its motto: "Pathway to Excellence and Integrity." Michael read it but gained no encouragement thereby. He felt neither excellent nor integrated; he felt alone, even in familiar company. Maria waited for him to show her some attention but got only a grunt, and could not even be sure it had been meant for her. She watched glumly as Liz and Max locked lips. Alex was watching them too–and then glanced tentatively at Isabel, the glint of a suggestion in his eyes. Isabel caught it but pretended not to.
   Michael perceived a space between the six of them and the other students walking past. He was certain he was not imagining it; the others were steering clear of them, if not on purpose, then instinctively. Michael knew he was in the wrong place, in more ways than one. So were Max and Isabel, maybe–but at least they had a "home." Maria accosted him, in a bid for a hug. "Gotta go," he said abruptly. As he left, he threw another glare at Max identical to the one before; Max had had no call to say that about his father–but no, he had been talking about Clay.
   "Wait!" Max called after him.
   Maria sensed that he was somehow responsible for the quick departure. "What was that all about?"
   Max did not hear her; he was too wrapped up in his own immediate concern. "I wanted to talk to him," he said, a little petulantly.
   "Yeah," said Maria, staring at him, "me too. See you, Liz." She headed off, hugging her books disconsolately.
   "Nice going, Max," remarked his sister; not for the first time, he found himself a target of blame without quite knowing why. Then she left too. "Alex," she said; it was almost a goodbye.
   Alex was used to almosts from her. "Hey, Is?" he called. "What do you say later on we–" But Isabel did not look back. He accepted this at his lot; after all, she had almost said goodbye, and he did not want to be greedy. "Another time, then. That's fine. Perfectly fine." He nodded as if to convince himself. "You know," he said to Max, "your sister–"
   "Yeah, isn't she?" The reply came automatically. After a moment Max realized Alex had probably had a different sentiment in mind.
   The object of Alex's affection having removed herself, he had no further reason to stay, and with his exit Max and Liz were left to themselves. "Your turn," Max said dourly. "Have at me."
   "Max! Right here on the steps?" The mischievousness of her answer caught him by surprise (she was able to do that sometimes). He smiled a little.
   Michael's dark mood followed him into first-period P.E., but he trusted to the coach to knock him out of it. Light fell from the arching windows onto him and the other boys as they lined up along the length of the basketball gym and Clay paced down the line, clipboard in hand. "Fenton," he called. "Franzese. Garfield. Gomez. Gottlieb. Guerin." He glanced at Michael's sweatshirt. "Not regulation, Guerin." Standard issue was blue with gold lettering.
   "Sorry, I tore the–"
   "No excuses!" He lifted the ballpoint that was chained to the clipboard and made a check by Michael's name. "Grey mark for today."
   "But, Coach–"
   "No back talk! Or you'll get a second one." And he proceeded down the line.
   Michael did not mind the grey mark; he knew he had earned it and he had protested mainly out of a regard for form. But the coach had spoken to him so coldly! As if he had never shown an interest in Michael's well-being, as if he had never offered advice on how to handle his foster father.... But now it seemed as if that was all in the past.
   A few minutes into the period, after the boys had chosen up sides, Michael noticed one of his shoelaces dangling, and had stepped to the sidelines to repair it when Clay descended on him. "Guerin! What do you think you're doing?" The other boys postponed their play to listen.
   Michael stood up to face the coach head on. "I'm tying my–"
   "You're slacking! I don't allow slackers on my court." Clay lifted his ballpoint. "Another grey mark."
   "I was tying my shoes!" He pointed down. "See? Left, right. Like Mister Rogers."
   "You trying to be a smart-ass, Guerin?"
   Michael resorted to the age-old defense of young people unjustly accused. "But I didn't do anything!"
   "Yeah, you did. Know what it was? You got born–if that's the right word for it." Michael flinched; what had Clay meant by that? "You know something, Guerin? I don't like you. I never have. Don't like your mouth–don't like your attitude–don't like your face. What do you say to that?"
   Michael did not know what to say. Clay always imposed strict discipline on the boys, but always impartially, impersonally. And he had never once demeaned them; Michael had believed it was not in his character. "I thought–" he began.
   "You thought what?"
   "Forget it." He started out onto the court.
   "Don't walk away when I'm talking to you!"
   Michael stopped. "Still here. So?"
   Clay took a step closer. "Got no father, have you?"
   "You know I don't."
   Clay stepped closer still. "Boy without a father's got nobody to show him how to be a man. He'll never be anything but a girl. That's what you are, Guerin. A pretty little girl. Aren't you? Aren't you?" Michael felt like smacking him but swallowed the impulse and kept his cool. Then Clay smacked him–on the shoulder, and hard.
   "Don't touch me!" Michael warned.
   "What's the matter? Little Miss Guerin doesn't like big bad man touching her?" He doled out another smack.
   "Do that once more and I'll–"
   "You'll do what?"
   "Report you," Michael finished weakly.
   "Report me. Just like a girl." Clay drew his hands back. "Okay, Miss Guerin. No touchy feely." He picked up a basketball from the floor. "Report this–maggot." Spinning on his heel, he hurled the ball at Michael, hard. Michael batted it off with his forearm. Clay retrieved it and hurled it again. This time Michael caught it in both hands and flung it away, high into the bleachers.
   "Stop it!" he pleaded.
   "Stop it!" Clay mimicked him.
   "I mean it!"
   "I mean it!"
The ball had rolled back to him somehow. He took it up and began dribbling it, pacing out a circle around Michael. "The other guys know, don't they? Know you're not one of them. That's why they stare at you–why they talk about you behind your back. It's why your girlfriend won't give you squat."
   He hurled the ball again, this time at Michael's head, and so fast that Michael had no time to dodge or think how to defend himself. So he did the only thing he knew to do: a foot from his face, the ball turned into a red balloon, but only for a second, before it exploded with a pop. Now a limp wad of plastic, it dropped to the floor, where it regained its original leather shell.
   Only Clay had been close enough to see the transformation. But he did not seem surprised by it. "Destroying school property," he said. "Another grey mark, Guerin. That makes three strikes. Know what the penalty for that is? Life, with no possibility of parole." Michael could not help reflecting that this would describe his entire experience on Earth; Clay's bullying was just one example.
   And what could he do about it? His pride would not let him just stand there and take it, but he could not fight back without revealing himself (and maybe the others along with him). The only action he could take was to take no action, to back away. He had done so times enough before, with Hank, but he had not expected the coach to put him in the same strait jacket. Hurt and confused, powerless to understand or to act, he did the only thing left to him: he ran away, back to his locker, while the other boys watched, every one wondering if he would be Clay's next target. Those closest to him saw him smile after Michael with satisfaction. It was as if he had planned it that way.
   Michael was still trying to make sense of the whole incident when he returned to his locker at break time. He found Maria waiting there. She moved to kiss him; he shook her off as he had earlier. "Not in the mood." She tried again more forcefully. "I said no, I meant no!" Max and Liz walked up to find them facing away from each other, with scowls on both their faces.
   Liz moved to Maria. "You okay?"
   "Ask Doctor No."
   "Something wrong, Michael?" Max asked. And then again, "Michael?"
   The answer came reluctantly, for a variety of reasons. "The coach. He was being a real sadist this morning."
   "This comes as a shock."
   "Okay, okay, you were right about him. But this was just weird. He kept throwing the ball at me and wouldn't stop."
   Maria saw that his feelings had been hurt more than he wanted to reveal. "Sorry, I didn't realize." She gave his side a squeeze, which this time he permitted. She looked at Max. "Shouldn't you or Isabel have sensed the problem? I thought whenever one of you gets hurt–"
   "Only in extreme cases. And with Michael, there's not a lot to sense. He likes to bite the bullet. True grit."
   "Yeah, tell me about it."
   Michael was not amused by this exchange but let it pass. "What did you do?" Max asked. "When Clay went after you?"
   "What I had to." The others waited. "Rang the changes." He added, before anyone could object, "He didn't leave me any choice!"
   "You think he saw you?"
   "I don't know. If he did, he didn't say anything. Like I said, it was weird."
   "Sounds like he was baiting you on purpose."
   Liz sighed. "Yes, Max, we get that. The question is why."
   "Is there any doubt?" said Maria. The others turned to her. "He tricked you into exposing yourself–and not in the way you all are thinking. Does this remind you of anybody?" They looked blank. "Ms. Topolsky? Careers day?"
   "FBI!" said Liz.
   "Yes, Liz, we get that," Max said pointedly, earning a scowl from her. "That's why he's been posing as your mentor, Michael. It wasn't that he really liked you."
   "Oh, of course not. Because that would be totally outside the realm of possibility, right?"
   "I didn't mean that."
   "Yeah, you did. But it's okay." He said the next words so quietly the others could hardly hear them. "I know better now."
   "What'll you do if he goes for you again?" Max asked.
   "Eat it. What else, assassinate him?"
   Max appeared to consider the idea carefully, but in the end he shook his head. "Draw too much attention to ourselves."
   "Which disposes of the ethical dilemma," Liz observed. Max shrugged; she did not pursue the point, but made a note to have a serious talk with him later. "English is in the library today," she reminded him. "You coming?"
   "I have to talk to Michael first." This clearly came as news to Michael. Liz went off alone, and Max pointed him toward the rest room. "In there."
   "And this isn't weird," said Maria.
   "Stand watch out here," Max ordered her.
   "I have class!"
   "So do we. Don't worry, you'll get there on time, or almost." He ushered Michael inside. "Remember," he said to Maria, "don't let anybody in till we're done."
   "How do I stop somebody from taking a leak?"
   "Use your imagination."
   "It's an area I'd rather not focus my imagination on, thanks all the same. And may I point out that legally–" But by then Max had gone, having shown no sign of hearing her. With reluctance she took up her post at the door.
   Two people who passed gave her funny looks, as she had feared; she improvised an explanation. "My boyfriend's in there," she said, "doing his business. I want to be sure I don't miss him coming out. I've lost too many that way." This did not seem to help; if anything, it elicited looks that were even funnier. Any subsequent attention she garnered from passers-by, she ignored without comment.
   Inside, Michael waited impatiently while Max checked the stalls to make sure they were unoccupied. "So what's the big deal?" Michael asked.
   Max reached into his jacket and pulled out the artifact. "My mom nearly found this when she made my bed yesterday."
   "Your mom makes your bed?"
   "It's a thing moms do." He extended it to Michael. "I want you to keep it for a while."
   "Now you say that."
   "You live on your own. It's safer with you." Then he remembered the exception. "So long as you don't mention it to Maria."
   "Why?"
   "Because–Maria." Michael needed no more explanation than that. He took the object Max offered. "Handle it gently," Max warned, and Michael did. "For all we know, it might be a nuclear detonator." Michael stared at it as though with new eyes. "Probably not," Max admitted. "But it doesn't come with a manual. So we should be careful till we can find out more about it."
   Michael was rotating the object slowly so as to study it on all sides. "Yeah, that's a plan."
   "What is?"
   "What you said."
   While Max tried to recall any statement of his that could be described as a plan, a boy whose name Maria had never been certain of was trying to maneuver around her into the lavatory, with no success. "You can't go in there," she stated flatly. "–Roy, isn't it?"
   "Ray. But this is urgent!"
   "Roy–"
   "Ray."
   "I know how you feel, believe me, I do. When you're sitting waiting for the bell and your entire being is consumed with the strain of holding in a bladderload–" She noticed that Roy, or Ray, was evincing more interest in the picture she was painting than she thought desirable. "Okay, enough sharing," she said. "You'll have to wait."
   "Why?"
   "Because the rest room's flooded. Water an inch deep. Whew." I have never heard anybody use that word before, she reflected, and I will probably never use it again.
   "How come there's no sign?" Ray asked.
   "They ran out of signs and put me here instead."
   He looked at her crookedly. "That doesn't sound very believable."
   "No, you know, it doesn't, and that's because–it's a lie. The fact is, there's a–transaction going on in there."
   "What kind of transaction?"
   "Highly personal.."
   "I want to see for myself!"
   At that moment Max and Michael emerged together. "On second thought...." Ray emended. He hurried past them and inside.
   "What were you doing in there all that time?" said Maria–and then, immediately, "I can't believe I just asked that."
   "See you later," said Max. He was really speaking to Michael, but out of politeness he pretended to include Maria.
   When he had left, she turned to Michael. "What's up with Max?"
   Michael shook his head. "He said not to tell you."
   "Uh-huh, so?"
   Michael heaved a sigh; he should have known he could not hold out. "He gave me this to hang onto," he said, taking the artifact from his jacket. Just as he did so, Ray came out the door behind him in time to get a glimpse. His eyes went wide, and Michael quickly returned the artifact to his pocket. Ray dropped his eyes again and hurried off up the hall. "Suavé," said Maria, in two syllables. "Now he'll think it's a gun."
   "So let him. Who cares?"
   "What if he reports it to Principal Wiley?"
   "I'll show Wiley it isn't."
   "What will you say it is?"
   "Nerf football?" He slid the object out an inch or two.
   "Right, like he's gonna believe–" Then she saw for herself. "Oh-h, yeah."
   A thought from a few minutes earlier floated to the front of her brain: wasn't she supposed to be somewhere? Then she remembered. "Oh, my God, I'm late for class!" The hall was almost empty now; a boy sprinted past them. She started off.
Michael was late too, but seemed less perturbed about it. "See you at lunch," he said, "under the bleachers." And she knew just where. But not why.
   At two minutes past noon, she was following Michael back They arranged to meet in the stadium at lunchtime. Two minutes later, he was leading her down to the chain link fence behind the football stadium. The fence separated the campus from the golden brown hills to the north. "Then don't come," Michael said, looking over his shoulder, in answer to the various protests she had raised. "Same difference to me either way."
   "It can't wait till after school?"
   "It can. I can't." He lifted his hand up to the fence. The section before him faded from grey to white, and crumbled to powder as he passed through. On a hunch, Maria swiped the edge of the aperture with her finger and tasted what clung to it. The powder was what it looked like: sugar. Michael was now several yards ahead of her. She slipped through after him.
   The two of them climbed a hill, and then another, and came to a halt on the far side of the second. They were within hearing of the loudest sounds from campus, if either listened hard, but these did not interfere with Michael's concentration. While the thing was in his possession, he wanted to test it in every way he could imagine. The first, most obvious test to try was to find out if he could use it. His intuition, as well as his common sense, told him it was intended to be used. But by what means, and to what end, they did not disclose.
   He and Maria were on a flat with hills fore and aft. Michael walked to the far end and swung about like a movie gunslinger, holding the artifact at his hip. From the side, where she was sitting cross-legged, Maria watched with amusement. "¡Oye, vaquero!" she cheered. Michael drew his weapon from its imaginary holster and aimed it at the hill behind them, telling it–willing it–to bore a hole through to the other side. He did not know if that was the kind of thing it could do; it seemed as likely as any. But no matter how hard he tried, it made no difference: the hill remained intact.
   Maria was watching with her chin on her fists. "What are you trying to do exactly?" she shouted.
   "Drill a hole in the hill."
   "Uh, excuse me, why?"
   "Some other program you'd rather watch?"
   She realized she had not made herself clear. "But that isn't what you do, is it? Your thing's more, like, chemical engineering."
   "Not at all," he replied, in a patronizing tone that made her want to step on his foot. "What we do is transform the molecular struct–" He stopped. "Chemical engineering. That's what it is."
   "The Nerf ball's probably a tool to help do that." Michael stared at her; how obvious now that she had said it. "I do make sense once in a while," she observed drily. "Hard to believe, I know."
   Michael was too busy to answer. He was doing a repeat of the previous experiment, this time with a new object: changing the dirt of the hill to salt. Again he concentrated with all his might, striving, straining....
   And again he failed. He wiped the sweat off his forehead. Ringing the changes took a lot out of a guy–especially when he was standing out under the noonday sun in southern New Mexico.
   Then he got a new idea. This one took him back to the school, to the metal shop, which was housed together with the wood and auto shops at one end of the physical sciences building. The door was locked. Michael passed his hand over the lock, and the door popped open. His companion glanced around nervously. No one was close by, but she was sure that at any minute a teacher would appear around a corner. "You realize this constitutes breaking and entering?" she said.
   "What'd I break?"
   "Okay, entering." And he did enter, in spite of Maria's disapproval. She wanted to leave him to his fate, but it was too late for that, by several months. So she scurried in after him.
   The shop was a big high-windowed room containing masses of machinery for drilling, soldering, brazing, arc welding–every basic job in metal working that could be taught. To Maria the place summed up all the least attractive characteristics of the male sex. But to Michael, today, it was a gold mine.
   First he tried the drill. Maria covered her ears to shut out the shrill whir. She had not guessed what he had had in mind to do; it seemed imprudent even for him. "Is this really such a good idea?" she shouted.
   Michael shut the drill off and examined the artifact. It was unblemished. "I'll be damned," he said. "It's so dense nothing penetrates."
   "What am I reminded of?"
   "Ha ha."
   Next he took down a welding torch. "And I ask again...." Maria remarked.
   But again her worries were unnecessary. The torch had no more effect than the drill had. Michael then stuck the object under a vertical press, with the same result, or lack of result; it could not be punctured, burned, flattened, dented, scratched, or otherwise marred. Even more strangely, it did not react to the attacks by beeping or glowing, as it had done when Max and Liz had first found it; for Michael, it would not perform at all.
   "Now what?" Maria asked.
   Before Michael could make up his mind, a figure stepped out from the shadow of a wall. "Coach!" Michael exclaimed. How he had gotten in, neither could fathom, since no one had been there when they entered and no one had entered after them.
   "What are you kids doing here?" He did not wait for an answer; just as well, since they did not have one. "Guerin, what are you hiding behind your back?"
   "Nothing."
   "Show me." Michael tried to devise a way to avoid doing so, but had not time or freedom to think of one. "Show me!" Clay repeated. So Michael showed him.
   Clay's eyes registered recognition. "Give it to me."
   "It's not–not mine," Michael stammered.
   Maria had the cooler head. "It's mine," she said, grabbing it away from him. "It's a–beeper. Reminding me to take my medication."
   Clay was looking skeptical. "What are you on medication for?"
   "For stressful situations. Like this." The bell rang. "Proverbial," Maria commented. "Michael–walkies!" She pushed him toward and out the door.
   However, no sooner had they turned into the central hall than two boys stepped out into their path, as if they had been watching for them. Michael knew them from P.E. class, but did not remember having ever spoken to them. He remembered their names: Rick and Scott.
   "Hey, you," said Rick. Michael started to return the greeting. "–freak," Rick added. For a second Michael's face showed a flicker of what might have been disappointment. Then it settled into a solemnity of resignation Maria had seen before. He straightened up, squared his shoulders, and waited.
   "Ignore him," said Maria, hopefully. She began to steer Michael around the other two, but they moved to block her.
   "And so much for plan A," said Michael. He faced Rick eye to eye. "You want something from me, jerk?"
   "Not from you." He looked to Maria with a smirk. "Olla, mamacita. What you doing hanging out with this loser?"
   "You can do better than him," said his friend. "You're not a total dog." The two began to close in on her.
   "Lay a hand on me and you're dead men."
   "Come on, chica," Rick begged. "Give us a sample of what the freak's getting." He outstretched a hand.
   –only to have it grabbed up by Michael. "Man," he said, "you are worse than dead." He ran his eyes up the arm. Frost began to appear on the skin where it showed. Rick yelped in pain. "You like that?" Michael demanded. "Do you–chica?"
   "Let me go! Please!"
   "Michael, don't!" Maria clutched at his shoulder, trying to pull him away–not as much for Rick's good as for Michael's own. What he might do if he let himself go–what he might be seen to do–was anybody's guess; it might be murder, or worse, and it might be the end of him too.
   Scott was becoming panicky. "Listen, it wasn't our idea. It was coach!"
   "Coach?" Michael paused to hear more.
   "Coach Clay. He told us to pick a fight with you so you'd get in trouble. It's the truth, I swear!"
   Michael bent close to Rick. "What about that?"
   "Coach," Rick gasped out. Michael thought about it for a second or two, and then let go of the arm.
   Rick began patting and squeezing it. "I can't feel anything!"
   Michael shrugged. "It'll pass. With luck."
   Scott was shrinking back from him. "What'd you do to him?" he asked.
   Gratifying as their subjugation was for Maria to witness, it only aggravated her fear of public notice. She did some more fast thinking. "Tai chi," she said. "Along with some feng shui and jet li. He's mastered them all."
   The boys seemed to accept this, or at any rate did not seem inclined to argue. The confrontation was over, and Maria was feeling optimistic that it would be forgotten in a few days, when out bellowed a voice that made her jump. "What exactly is going on here?" Principal Wiley was standing outside his office door. He pointed a finger at Michael. "You, in here."
   "But, Mr. Wiley–" Maria began.
   "You too, miss," he said. "Since you're so eager to have a word."
   –and from the moment of her sitting down, Maria found herself playing paralegal on Michael's behalf, answering the principal's questions because he would not, and angry at them both for it.
   "Why did you start that fight?" Wiley asked Michael, for the third time.
   "I told you before," said Maria, "it wasn't–"
   "And I told you to keep your nose out of it."
   "How come you didn't call the others in here? Why only Michael?"
   "Because their files"–he tapped a manila folder lying on the desk–"don't show a record of infractions dating back to their freshman year." He wagged a finger at Michael. "You realize this incident is all the justification I need to have you suspended permanently?"
   "That isn't fair!" This was Maria answering again.
   "However," Wiley added, "as a believer in equal opportunity I'm offering you one last chance to mount a defense. Starting now."
   And at last Michael spoke. But his answer was like nothing Wiley had expected. "Demand me nothing. What you know, you know. From this time forth, I never will speak word."
Wiley ran it through his mental mill a second time to be sure he had not missed something. "What am I supposed to make of that?"
   "It's Shakespeare."
   "Shakespeare! You're a great proponent of the Bard, are you?"
   Michael sighed. He had been right to begin with: there was no point in letting himself be drawn in. He had made that mistake out in the hall, and see where it had gotten him.
   "Oh, yes," Wiley continued snidely, "I can see from your academic performance what a reader you are."
   "Actually he reads a lot," said Maria, perhaps unwisely. "Off the syllabus. The things he likes, he can quote back word for word."
   "Can he?" Wiley's tone was skeptical.
   At Maria's urging, and only then, did Michael demonstrate. "Thou told me thou didst hold him in thy hate," he began. "Despise me if I do not–"
   "Aw, that's a load of crap."
   "Now Othello's crap."
   "Tell me something in words I can understand!" Michael could not help chuckling at this. "Well?" said Wiley. Michael thought immediately of several figures of speech that would meet the requirement, but their use would certainly make his own position worse. "Why do I make the effort?" Wiley sighed. "Your kind always dig your own graves. Strictly trailer-made."
   Maria was surprised at the blatancy of the insult. She saw Michael stiffen in his chair. "What was that?" he asked.
   "Easy, babe," she murmured. She lay a hand on his arm.
   Wiley had opened a drawer of his desk, taken out a form, and now began filling it out. Maria knew what it was. "You're not kicking him out of school for this?"
   "You'd rather I wait for the next session of the fight club?"
   "He was defending me!" she protested. Then she felt obliged to add, for the sake of her own pride, "Not that I required defending, mind you. Because–"
   Her ingratitude, as Michael heard it, provoked him out of his silence. "You think you could have handled them?" he said. "Fine, next time I'll let 'em lay on, Macduff." He glanced at Wiley. "Which is also Shakespeare, incidentally."
   Wiley stopped writing and looked up with a changed expression on his face. "Hold on now. Are you claiming those boys were making unwelcome advances toward you?"
   Duh, thought Maria. "Michael stopped it before it got started–which, at the time, I admit I appreciated." She decided she owed him that much. "They weren't mounting a–well, weren't mounting, period." Wiley pursed his lips. "They were just trying to piss Michael off. And succeeded, obviously."
   "Why would they want to do that?"
   "It wasn't their idea. They–" Michael gave her a split-second shake of the head.
   Wiley had not seen it. He waited. "Yes?"
   "The devil made them do it," Maria finished weakly.
   "The devil. I see." Wiley assumed she was too much embarrassed to discuss the incident, and so he let it pass. "But there's still this matter of sneaking off campus. And not for the first time either." He tapped the folder on the desk.
   "I did the same thing!" said Maria. "I'm as guilty as he is."
   "It's obvious to me you were induced to accompany him, if not by force, then verbal persuasion."
   "Oh, yeah, his silver-tongued charm. A quality he's known widely for." Michael shot her a dirty look.
   Wiley ignored her sarcasm. He scrutinized first one and then the other of them. "What need was it, I wonder, that drove you beyond the campus confines? A craving for some controlled substance perhaps?" His look lingered on Maria. "One of those herbal remedies of yours?" Her jaw dropped. "Oh, I know all about them from the sheriff."
   "Mr. Wiley, I swear to you–"
   "Enough. This is Mr. Guerin's hour of judgment, not yours. Just remember, I have my eye on you too."
   "Eye," Maria repeated, "noted."
   "Well," said Wiley, with an air of finality, "in view of what appear to have been extenuating circumstances, I'm willing to ignore today's roughhouse." He tore the suspension form in half and dropped it into his wastebasket. "But for playing hooky" (Maria and Michael had not heard that word since grade school, and mouthed it at each other in disbelief) "Mr. Guerin has earned himself a detention this Saturday."
   "I've got work," Michael objected, truthfully.
   "Not this Saturday you don't," Wiley snapped back. "Report to the gym at 8 sharp."
   "The gym?"
   "The gym. By a strange fluke of poetic justice, the teacher assigned that morning is the same one who reported you as AWOL this afternoon–and called my attention to the fight in the hall."
   "And that teacher would be?" asked Maria, guessing in advance what the answer would be.
   And it was. "Coach Clay." The reaction she saw written on Michael's face approximated her own. She was anxious to compare notes, but restrained herself until Wiley dismissed them and they were well out of his hearing.
   "Now we know his plan," she announced. "To have you to himself without witnesses."
   "Don't blow it all out of proportion," said Michael. But she could see she was not the only uneasy one.
   Then she remembered something he had done earlier, or omitted to do, that had been bothering her. "Why didn't you tell Wiley those two guys were playing for Clay?"
   "Would he believe me over a teacher?"
   "They'd have backed you up."
   "And come down on Clay's wrong side? I don't think so. One thing I've learned about you humans–give you an excuse to wiggle out of dong the right thing, you'll take it. Every time."
   "Well, thanks for the compliment." It might be true, but he did not have to say so.
   "Nah, I don't mean you," Michael said, and Maria felt better–for a moment. "That is, not especially. You're not as bad as some."
   "No? Then how bad am I?" Michael answered with a back-and-forth tilt of the hand–sign language for "so-so." This elicited from Maria an open-mouthed recoil of a type which by Michael's observation was unique to teen girls: an expression which conveyed that the indignity or inequity under which they were laboring so far exceeded anything anyone else had ever undergone that language would not serve to express their disbelief.
   Michael did not get what the big deal was. "You wanted the truth, didn't you?" he asked–in respect of which Maria, infinitely offended, turned on her heel and marched out of the building. Michael did not have time to go after her then; she might have the day off, but he did not, and he was already late for his shift.
   Standing over the grill at the Crashdown, he reviewed all he had said to her, and he found no fault in it. He looked across at Liz, waiting on the outer side of the order window. He would have been the first to admit that it had taken him a great while to appreciate her merits, and since doing so he kept discovering new ones all the time. He smiled out at her. "You know, I never did thank you for getting me this job."
   "You got it for yourself."
   "Okay, then I take it back." Liz laughed. "You laugh. Maria'd get mad. She's weird that way." Liz did not reply; she had a feeling there was more to the story than he was telling. "You know, it should have been me and you together. Woulda made more sense."
   Liz was unexpectedly touched. "That's extremely flattering of you, Michael, but I'm not sure–"
   "You, I can understand," he said. "You're like books–you explain things. But Maria...."
   "Oh, nobody understands Maria. Or Max," she added, for good measure. "It's just the way they are. Either you accept that, or...." Or what? she wondered.
   "Then why are we with them?" Michael asked, almost pleadingly. "Instead of each other?"
   "Because in the first place we'd have to be in love, which we're not. And in the second place, if we were we'd be in the same boat we are now." Michael nodded in resignation. "You know what they say. Love's–the b-word."
   "Bull–"
   She smiled. "Not that b-word. The other one. And you know it isn't."
   "No," Michael agreed. "That'd be too easy." And he knew life was never easy.
   Max would have agreed with Liz's diagnosis of inscrutability as it pertained to him. His behavior was often unfathomable even to himself, and on the occasions of his greatest puzzlement he would take long walks while he tried to work out why he had done as he had. Roswell's sidewalks were pleasant to wander, with their brick paving and their lines of trees, each encased in its own trimly curved iron fence. This evening he was heading for Summerhaven Park, where he had arranged with the other not-ofs to meet after dark but before curfew. The route he was taking was also his way home, that is, the way to the Evans house, which lay opposite the park.
   He appeared not to notice the man who was following him, a stocky man with glasses and an unkempt mop of hair, or the woman with shorter hair and dark lipstick who was following the man in turn. "Larry, please!" she called after him. "Let's go back."
   "I just want to talk to him, Jen. Just talk, that's all." He waved to Max. "Hey, man, wait up!" Max pretended not to hear, but this only caused Larry to accelerate to a trot, while Max maintained his customary slow canter, so that within a few seconds Larry was able to pass him and circle around in front of him, blocking his way. "Gotta talk to you," he said.
   Max tried to slip past him. "Sorry, in a hurry."
   Then Jen appeared. "Larry," she said Jen, with a tug at his shirt, "don't do this. Let's just go. Please."
   Larry put his arm around her. "Meet Jen, the wife. We just got back from our honeymoon. In Las Vegas."
   "Congratulations." Max felt he had to say that.
   "Didn't do a lot of gambling while we were there. Mainly–well, mainly, we were on our honeymoon." He gave a snicker.
   "Larry, he doesn't care about that."
   "Oh, right, right." Larry returned to his point. "Listen, I hate to be a nudge, last thing in the world I want to do is annoy anybody, but I had to tell you I was wrong about you."
   Max received this intelligence with uncertainty as to its import. "Were you?"
   "Of course you know I was. I mean, you know you're not–what I thought you were. And now I know too. That's great, isn't it?"
   "Great," Max agreed. "Listen, I–"
   "What it was was, I had this thing about aliens. I used to see them everywhere–at work, at the market–"
   "On tv?" Max suggested.
   "That too. And I was sure you were one of them. Wasn't I, Jen?"
   "Larry–"
   "But she set me straight. There are no aliens out there. It was all up here." He pointed to his head. "You're a normal, red-blooded guy, just like me. The two of us are just alike."
   Max smiled wanly. "That's reassuring, thanks."
   "Just wanted to tell you."
   "And now you have. See you around."
   Max walked on. "You got nothing to fear from me!" Larry reiterated. Max kept walking. Jen started to pull Larry in the other direction. Then he stopped. "Shoot! Something I forgot."
   "Larry, you said enough."
   "But this is the most vital thing!" He turned around and took after Max again, and Jen had no choice but to follow.
   A block ahead of them, Michael was also on his way to the park. His mind was so preoccupied with his upcoming detention that he was insensible to what was happening around him, including the activity of the small boy farther up the block, who was bouncing a ball and running after it to retrieve it when it had bounced too far. His slightly older sister was walking alongside and a little ahead, but she was paying him no attention either, so that when the ball bounced into the street and he darted out after it, the first his sister knew of it was when she looked up to see a Ford truck bearing down on him.
   She screamed, and her scream brought Michael out of his funk. There was no time to pull the boy out and no time to weigh other options. He would have to ring a change, or do nothing. So he did the first thing that came to him: he changed the rubber of the truck's tires to chewing gum–that is, to the chemical compound popularly referred to as such; it was easiest to focus on when he thought of it by its common name. It had never been meant to be made into tires; they locked, and the truck skidded around in an arc, narrowly missing the boy. His sister ran out and swept him up onto the sidewalk. But now the truck was sliding sideways, toward one of the fenced trees. Seeing it, Michael panicked. His mind stalled; he could do nothing.
   Luckily, however, Max was at hand. He had arrived just in time to see what was going on, and to know what to do. He changed both the tree and its fence to rubber, so that when the truck hit them they bent backwards harmlessly. The truck veered off and grated to a halt.
   The driver was rattled, but basically unhurt. He climbed out to inspect the tires, then the tree, and saw nothing out of the ordinary. Max had changed it all back–except that the tree was now bowed in half. There were probably ways to correct this, but he would have had to think of one, which would have taken too long, and anyway, it was too late.
   –because the boy had seen what had happened, and was now staring at him pop-eyed; his sister had not seen it, but he had. Max raised a finger to his lips and held it there. The boy nodded solemnly. Max knew kids, and knew that his secret was safe.
   But there had been a second witness, halfway down the block. He turned to the woman with him. "Did you see that?" he said, in a tone of awe mingled with gloating. "Did you?"
   Jen had not. "You mean the accident?"
   "The alien! He changed things I was right about him all along!"
   "Larry, we've been through this–"
   "I know what I saw!"
   "What you think you saw."
   "You're in it too! You're part of the conspiracy!" He gazed at her in horror. "And I'm married to you!"
   "That was my error. I thought you were someone I knew." And she walked away–away from him, away from the accident, away from it all. She had had it with this alien nonsense.
   "Jen, wait!" Larry looked from her to the scene half a block up. He knew he had to make a choice, and he did, but reluctantly. "Jen!" he called. "Wait for me!" And he hurried after her.
   By then other bystanders had begun to collect, and Michael had begun to wish his powers included invisibility. He heard a cat-like wail, and saw a familiar beige Rover pull in at the curb. The sheriff stepped out, surveying the crowd at the same time. He made a mental note of the tall kid who was hurrying off down the block. Max was standing farther back, and was able to slip away unobserved while Valenti was busy interviewing the driver of the truck.
   The two boys and Isabel held their meeting, a little later than planned, while perched on one of the concrete benches at the rear of the park. From there they could survey the whole lawn by the clusters of spotlights on the steel poles that were planted along the gravel paths every few yards. Apart from themselves, the park was nearly empty.
   Max had intended to further discuss the artifact, but the events immediately preceding dictated a change of topic. He apprised Isabel of all that had happened. "That was careless," she told Michael untactfully.
   "Not to mention stupid," Max added.
   Michael was already duly aware of his failure and did not try to minimize it. "I choked. Everything happened so fast."
   "What about our pact?" asked Max. "The pact never to reveal ourselves?"
   He was surprised to hear Isabel say, "Come on, Max. That ended when you brought Liz back from the dead. We're still dealing with the fallout from that."
   "I should have let her die?" He looked from one to the other of them.
   Michael shrugged. "People die."
   "Neither of you is exactly in a position to point fingers," Isabel said. "You've both powered up in public before. I've seen you. And if I did, then how many others?"
   "And I suppose you've never cheated?" her brother asked.
   "Of course I have. It was an impossible promise to keep. But I stopped–except for the little things."
   Max began to tick them off. "Lipstick, nail polish, perfume...."
   "They don't count." Both boys immediately thought: Typical girl.    "Why did you stop?" asked Michael.
   "Because I didn't like how it made me feel. I was never sure that what I was doing was right. Or necessary. Or that no one had seen me. And as for mind-binding with humans, that just seemed–distasteful."
   "When did you ever do that?" Max challenged. "Except in a dream."
   "Dreams are different."
   "Oh, so they don't count either?"
   "I stopped that too. I stopped everything. Cold turkey." She turned to Michael. "And you did too. You must have, or I'd have seen you."
   "Yeah, until tonight." He glanced sheepishly at Max. "And now you see why. I try to help, but I only make things worse. Then I don't know how to fix what I've done."
   "Because you don't work at it," said Isabel.
   Michael began to object. "She's right," Max chimed in. "It's your whole approach to life. You only do what makes you happy."
   Michael answered quietly. "You think I'm happy?"
   "He did heal River Dog that time," Isabel noted.
   "Thanks," said Michael, "but"–he hesitated–"I'm not sure that was me."
   "Who else could it have been?" asked Max.
   "Maybe River Dog himself. I don't know. It felt like the time you healed me. Like something was passing through me into him." They took this in silently. "Weird, huh?"
   "Everything's weird with us," said Max. "Maybe some day it'll all make sense."
   "You stopped too, Max," said Isabel. "After Liz."
   "Yeah," Max admitted. The others waited. "It was too much responsibility, all right? Take Liz. Sure I brought her back–but what about all the others out there who need help? Who am I to decide which ones deserve it and which ones don't?"
   "So what do we do?" Isabel demanded. "Go somewhere else? Hide?"
   "No, I won't go. And I can't hide."
   "What, then?" Michael asked sullenly. "You tell us, since you know so much."
   Max always felt sad when Michael made cracks like that; it was as if he had not heard a word Max said. "I don't know. I don't pretend to. But as far as I can see, the only thing we can do is accept who we are, and figure out how to make the best use of our"–the word caught on his tongue–"superpowers."
   The others looked troubled. Max saw he had expected too much of them. "You can't do it, can you?"
   "Some day," said Michael. "Somewhere else."
   "Where? Our home planet?"
   Max had not meant the question seriously, but Michael took it that way. "Maybe so. Anyway, not here. Not when it's just the three of us."
   Isabel rarely agreed with Michael, but this time she backed him up. "If we came out even to that extent," she said, "it would mean giving up our whole life."
   "And if our life is a lie?" Max mused.
   "Are our parents a lie? Is Liz?"
   Max lowered his eyes. "Then I guess we're not ready. Not yet."
   "This might help," said Michael, pulling out the artifact. "If we can ever figure out how to operate it."
   Isabel huffed at him. "Put it away!" she ordered. "We can't even control the powers we have."
   "Maybe we could," said Max, "with that."
   Isabel shook her head, but in disapproval rather than in contradiction. Michael was regarding the object with some disgust. "I haven't been able to get it to do anything. I tried a drill, blowtorch, vertical press–"
   Max stared at him aghast. "You did what?"
   "Aw, don't worry. None of them fazed it."
   Max was beyond words. "You're–you're–"
   "Irresponsible?" Isabel suggested.
   "Irresponsible," Max agreed. "Who knows what harm you might have done to it? Give it back!" He made a grab for it.
   Michael held it away from him. "Nothing doing. I'm not done with it yet."
   "What next, dynamite?"
   "Coach Clay. I want to show it to him again."
   "'Again'?" It just kept getting worse.
   "Michael, he's FBI!" protested Isabel.
   "So what? He knows what it is. I could see he did. Maybe I can trick him into telling me." This sounded a little harebrained even to himself, after he had spoken it aloud.
   "They're the last people we want laying hands on it," Max declared. "Give it to me!" He made another grab, and this time clasped hold of one end while Michael clung onto the other. The two struggled for ownership.
   They did not notice it at first when the thing started to beep, as it had before in the desert. Then all at once it emitted a crackling burst of light, and an electric shock peppered their insides; both let go at the same time, and the artifact dropped to the earth.
   Max looked at Michael questioningly. "It never did that," said Michael. "Even when I used the tools on it. Or when some guys picked a fight with me."
   This was a new worry Max knew nothing about. "What guys were these?"
   "Doesn't matter. Clay put them up to it."
   "So they weren't really angry. And neither were you when you did your–tests. But I was. It must have picked up on that, and that's why it reacted. What else can it do, I wonder?" He picked it up gingerly.
   "Michael!" cried Isabel. "Isn't that the coach?"
   "Where?" said Michael. Isabel pointed to a man who had been standing by a thick pine tree (the oldest in the park) but was now retreating up one of the paths. He glanced back long enough to show his face. "Nah," said Michael, "that's not him."
   "That's not the man I saw," said Isabel. She looked around. "But there's no one else." She felt a sudden chill, which she attributed to the artifact. "Put that away, will you?" Max obediently tucked it into his jacket, and this time Michael did not object.
   The sheriff was still musing over the incident outside the park when he came home. A blare of music and voices directed his attention to the living room, where Kyle was stretched out on the brown leather sofa in front of the tv. "You'll melt into that sofa some day, you don't watch it," Jim cautioned him.
   "Yeah, how you doin' yourself, Dad?"
   His father stopped and stood at his back long enough to assess the quality of the entertainment. "Movie," Kyle volunteered. "Title's Stranger on My Pillow."
   "Women's channel?"
   "What else?"
   "Is it any good?"
   "Nah, but the wife in it takes a whole lot of showers."
   Jim watched with rather more interest than before. "Kyle," he said, as if it had just occurred to him and he had not been planning it all the way home, "how well do you know this kid, what's-his-name, Guerin? Friend of Max Evans?"
   "Michael Guerin? I don't know him at all except through Liz. Why?"
   "Thought maybe you could invite him over some time, so me and him could have a chat."
   Kyle was silent for a long moment. "So it's him you're shadowing these days?"
   "Hey, I'm not shadowing anybody. I just asked, was all."
   "Uh-huh. And if I was to ask why you're asking?"
   "No reason," Jim said innocently.
   Kyle did not have to turn his head to know the look that went with that tone. "Uh, yeah, Dad, reason." He got to his feet. "Make you a deal, okay? The day you start sharing with me, I'll start sharing with you." He nodded at the tv. "Leave it on?"
   "Nah, I'm going out again."
   Kyle clicked it off with the remote. "But you just got in!"
   "I'm going for a drink with Amy at the Reata."
   "Amy? Maria Deluca's mom?" Kyle rolled his eyes. "Jeez, Dad."
   Valenti looked down at the hat in his hands. "And you wonder why I don't share more." With a shake of the head, he went to change.
   Kyle wished now he had not made the comment. I'm one to talk, he said to himself. But it was too late to do anything about it, except apologize–and where was the point in that?
   His father and Amy had their date, but Jim had her home by ten; both of them had things to do the next day, and besides, Amy was hoping to get in before her daughter, who had not been home when she left. As it happened, Maria was back, but had gone to bed early–which was almost as good for Amy's purpose. She knew Maria disapproved of her (or perhaps any adult) dating, and especially dating the man she was; she had broken it off with him once and had now resumed, but had not yet acquainted her daughter with the later fact. Not that she was trying to conceal it, exactly; she was simply not going out of her way to tell, or to give any hint.
   When Jim brought her back home, the house was dark, but there was someone standing in the drive. Maria did not know this, and Amy never found out; as soon as the headlights appeared, but before they could show him up, he slipped into the side yard and hid behind the shrubs. Earlier in the day he had made it up with Maria (mainly so he could beg a ride from her to his detention the following morning), but had ended the evening early, determined to study the map again. He had soon tired of it as usual, and decided he would rather go and be with her, after all, but had arrived to find the place dark. That had been only a couple of minutes before.
   He waited for the car to pass him, but it never did. Finally he peered around the wall to see a vintage black Mustang parked at the curb, its rear window sporting a decal that read "Support Your Local Sheriff." His breath caught in his throat.
   The passenger door opened, and he quickly pulled back into the bushes. Amy stepped out. She shut the door gently, so as not to disturb her daughter (if she was stirring), and walked up the drive, a few feet from their visitor. He could have revealed himself to her, could have explained his presence, but he had a feeling she would have been as embarrassed as he would. And the sheriff was still lingering, probably to make sure she got inside safely; the lurker did not want to have to account to him for his being there. So he remained hidden.
   Amy's was not the only tryst to occur that Friday night. But Liz's was not planned, or at least not by her. She was standing at her floor mirror in a close-to-new negligee, assessing the figure that it draped so flatteringly (as even she had to admit) when she happened to look toward the window and saw a face looking back at her. She gave a start–and then, a second later, recognized whose face it was. "Max!"
   He ran his eye along her unconcealed lines, in unconcealed admiration. Liz was far more pleased than embarrassed, but tried not to show it. Immediately–but not all that speedily, Max noticed–she took a robe from the closet and covered herself with it. "May I come in?" he asked. Liz weighed the risk against the reward, and beckoned him inside. As he bent to fit through the window, she became conscious of her heart thumping; now why was that?
   In a minute Max had gained the floor and was standing upright. "I need something from you," he said.
   Liz's heart was still at it. "Oh?" she said, her breath almost overpowering her voice.
   Max took from his jacket a now-familiar object. "Will you keep this for a while?" he asked. "And hide it where no one can find it?"
   Liz felt obscurely disappointed. "But why me?"
   "It's not safe with me. And even less safe with Michael." Liz stared at it without enthusiasm. "Please?" said Max.
   "Well–since you said 'please.'"
   Relieved, he handed it over. "Oh, one word of advice. Try to avoid having any–intense feelings in its vicinity."
   Liz's antennae went up–not the ones on her Crashdown uniform, but her invisible, intuitive ones. "Why, exactly?"
   "They could induce a sort of"–he searched for the right term–"energy burst."
   "Is that another way of saying 'explosion'?"
   "Tiny one. Nothing to worry about." Then he remembered. "As long as you don't make any sudden movements in its direction."
   "Like a pit bull. I don't want this in my room!"
   She thrust it back at him, but he dodged her. "The cafe, then." He thought again. "But probably not in the kitchen. On account of the heat."
   "Max, I really don't think–"
   "Have to be getting home now. Thanks, Liz." He darted out the window and across the deck to the fire ladder.
   "Yeah," she muttered, "you too–Maximilian." For once Michael's nickname seemed to suit. She looked at the object with distaste. Then she carried it to the hiding place in the wall, where she laid it (very carefully) alongside her journal. She started to make an entry about it but then changed her mind; for now, it had best remain an unwritten secret.
   Though no longer in charge of the item, Michael had not given up the idea of finding out more about it, somehow, from the coach. His detention, he hoped, would give him the opportunity; he was almost looking forward to it. So he was in unexpectedly good spirits when he arrived on campus early the next morning. Maria wheeled Amy's red Jetta onto an access road that ended near the gym. As Michael swung the door open, she clutched his arm. "You sure you want to go through with this?"
   "No choice. You heard Wiley."
   "You've told Max and Isabel, right?"
   "No need. And don't you go telling them. I can take care of myself."
   "Yeah, taking care of yourself was what got you into this in the first place."
   "Clay got me into this. Might as well see what else he's got up his sleeve. And what he knows that we don't." Maria's face showed her misgivings, and he shared them. But he was also feeling a confidence in himself she apparently lacked; it might not go deep or last long, but it might suffice to enable him to get what he needed out of Clay–if Clay did not get him first. "You go on to work," he told her. "I'll walk back."
   Maria watched unhappily as he disappeared around a corner of the building. How would she be able to work today with such an awful gnawing in her stomach?
   The side door was standing open. Michael stepped in to survey the room and, seeing no one there, entered farther. He heard a ball bouncing and turned to the sound. The coach was now behind him, standing in the corner by the door. He had a basketball and was dribbling to a slow beat, like the beat of a tom-tom: Donk. Donk. Donk. He left his corner and began pacing deliberately toward Michael. Donk. Donk. The rhythm seemed to take over Michael's heartbeat. Donk. "Where is it?" Clay asked.
   "Where's what?" Maybe he would learn its name, if it had one.
   "You know," Clay said.
   "Haven't got it on me. See?" He opened his arms wide.
   "It's foolhardy to cross me, stripling. As you'll learn before we're through."
   He talks weird for a coach, Michael thought, or for an FBI guy. "Yeah? Do I lose my free throw or what?"
   "You trying to be funny?" This sounded more like Clay. He was now holding the ball in his hands; suddenly he hurled it at Michael's head–faster than before, faster than seemed humanly possible. The volley caught Michael off guard, but his own reflexes were so quick he was able to elbow it aside. "What, no balloon this time?" said Clay. As before, the ball somehow came back to him, and he continued his advance.
   Michael retreated. "You really don't want to do this, Coach."
   Clay smiled. "Oh, yes. I do." Then he dropped the smile. "Where is it?"
   Michael tried not to sound scared, or to be scared. "First you tell me what you know about it. Then maybe we can work a deal."
   Clay detected the genuine curiosity that underlay the bluff. "You really don't know. I thought–" The discovery seemed to have thrown off his calculations, and he hesitated.
   "I know who you are," Michael boasted, trying to sound less ignorant than he was. "I didn't before, but I do now."
   Clay regarded him with a slight change of expression. "Good for you."
   "You shouldn't have showed your hand so soon, you know. Topolsky was smarter."
   "Who's Topolsky?"
   "Don't try to b.s. me."
   "Why should I bother? I don't give a damn about this Topolsky, whoever he is."
   Michael, strangely, believed him. "Guess your section chief should have briefed you better. What'd he tell you about that thing, anyway?" He still had hopes of finding out something about it, though he knew this attempt was weak.
   Clay gave a contemptuous laugh, but for another reason. "You think I'm one of them? Them? They couldn't recover a missing dog. Their only achievement is to run about in circles–and the circles grow ever wider."
   "Sounds to me like you know plenty about them."
   "I should. They've been tracking me since 1959."
   Michael stared at him: this, he had not foreseen. Clay (to grant him the identity he had most recently stolen) directed his gaze to the floor. A spot appeared on it and lengthened into a curving line an inch deep, with rough edges, as if it were being etched into the varnished wood by an invisible finger of fire. It expanded into a circle and was then joined by two more lines, one on each side, like parentheses. Michael recognized the symbol from the map, the same one he had burned into the library lawn to attract the attention of the person, or being, whom he had been waiting for, the only other known emigré from their home planet–who was now standing before him. He stared up at Clay again. "That's right, Michael," he said, smiling, almost gloating. "You summoned me." He stepped into the figure he had etched. "Now deal with me."
   Unknown to either, Maria was listening from the hall. She had changed her mind about going, and now she was glad of it. One of the row of doors was half-open; the sign on it identified the office as Clay's. She could phone Liz from there. But Liz would be at work, and powerless to help anyhow; Max could, but he would be working too, and might prefer not to reveal himself to someone who was not an ally, as Michael had expected, but an enemy.
   Beneath the sheet of glass that covered most of the desktop Maria spied a phone list; Wiley's name was included. He was now her best bet, strange as that seemed. On punching in his number, she got a recorded instruction to leave a message at the tone. "Mr. Wiley?" she said. "Pick up if you're there." He did not. "Okay, then come to the basketball gym right away. There's going to be trouble between Michael and the coach. Get here soon. Please." When she spoke the last words, she had already hung up.
   On the desk sat a stack of unopened mail and a stack of untouched papers, both dating back two weeks. Maria began searching the drawers for a weapon, or some object to distract Clay, as well as to gratify her own curiosity. In the upper right drawer she found two unlabeled pill bottles, one half empty, the other one full. Of course, they might have belonged to the real Clay, but she did not think so; West Ros had a zero-tolerance policy respecting drugs, one that applied to the faculty as well as the student body, and Clay was, or had been, a by-the-book type. Maria was sure she knew whose pills they were-and she gathered they must be important for him to keep a spare in reserve. Whatever their function was, he needed them.
   Inside he and Michael stood facing each other. Michael could hardly believe that the encounter he had looked forward to for so long had turned out to be another ordeal, another persecution, another fight. He waited for the next move.
   Then he heard a loud pop overhead. And another, and another–many of them in quick succession, like the noises of popcorn popping. He raised his eyes to the ceiling, which was festooned with baby spotlights; they were changing, one by one, to basketballs, or spheres that were like basketballs, but bigger and heavier, so heavy that one of them snapped loose from its mount and crashed to the floor, making a small crater. Then they were all doing it, breaking off, raining down, and Michael was shifting this way and that to dodge them. As their popping spread across the ceiling, it was drowned out by the thunder of their landings.
   At last came one Michael could not dodge; it was plummeting straight toward him. With scarcely a moment's thought, he changed it to a soap bubble, which broke harmlessly over his head. Now that he had discovered the trick, he used it on the others as they fell, one by one, and made of them a whole sea of bubbles; hardly had it appeared when it dissolved.
   "That's the best you can do?" Clay mocked him. "And you claim to be one of us?"
The basketball in his hands changed to a meteorite, and gained in color until it glowed red-hot. He raised his arms for a throw, and Michael fled to the bleachers. "Best run, cub," he heard below and behind him, "or I'll finish you!" The projectile whizzed past his ears into the rows above, where it exploded in a tussock of flame. A second later the steel he was standing on changed to glass, cracked under his weight, and then shattered, sending him from the third tier up to the floor, which he met with a hard bump. "Why are you doing this?" he cried out.
   "Because you're weak, like the humans. And the weak must be eliminated."
   They heard a girl's voice from the hall door. "Hey, you! Mork from Ork!" Maria was back.
   Michael attempted to wave her off. "Get out of here!" he shouted.
   Maria ignored him, as she was accustomed to doing. While he with an effort picked himself up, she strolled out to the center of the court, her hands behind her back. "If you're so all-powerful," she asked, in her most innocent voice, "then what are these for?" She brought out her hands, with a pill bottle in each.
   As often, her hunch paid off. "Give them to me!" Clay ordered.
   "What, these? No, you know, I don't think so." She twisted the lids off both, upturned them and poured out the contents, shook it empty, and then called into play her best dance step to grind the litter into the heavily dented floor.
   "Stop her!" Clay ordered Michael, who was ten yards away from her, to Clay's thirty. Then he turned his own eyes on her. Almost immediately her top and jeans began to sizzle; wisps of smoke rose from them. She could feel their heat scorching her.
   "Stop him!" she ordered Michael.
   "What do you owe humans?" Clay countered. "Except sixteen years of grief."
   "Says the guy who just tried to kill you."
   "Only to bring you to life!" This was a switch from the abuse he had been doling out, an obvious attempt to win Michael to his side. And yet....
   Michael did feel alive. More alive than he ever had before. In fighting for his survival, he had shown what he was made of; he had been a hero–a superhero, almost a god. So this was what it was like to be himself as he was born to be, unhampered by humans or his own incapacity (which he was inclined now to blame on humans and their planet); this was what it felt like to be–him.    "Decide, Michael," Clay said. "Her kind or your own."
   "And preferably sooner rather than later," she put in, "or her kind will be no kind."
   Michael stood immobile for what seemed like an eternity. Then he turned toward her. But he did not stop what Clay was doing; he stopped what was being done. Maria felt her clothes grow wet as they hung on her; they began to sweat water. Within a few seconds they were clinging to her body, cold and clammy.
   Then her feet gave way; an oil slick was gushing across the floor and she found herself lying in it–and then sliding in a beeline toward Clay. She tried uselessly to brake herself. Another basketball had appeared in his hand. He began to twirl it, and as he twirled, it changed to a ball of lightning that sparked and crackled and spun and continued to spin, faster and faster. And it was getting bigger and bigger with every second, until it was almost her own size.
   Her slide on the oil had brought her almost to Clay's feet. He drew his arm back to hurl the lightning down on her, like Zeus from Olympus. Maria cringed. But then Clay halted, rocking a little on the soles of his feet, as if the strength had been suddenly drained from him.
   Before he could recover, a voice sounded out: "Let those kids be!" The voice was Wiley's. It seemed to revive Clay to an awareness of what he was doing–and in an instant all was back to normal: he was holding a plain basketball; the ceiling lights and the bleachers were intact. The only marvel remaining was the symbol gouged into the floor, but a moment later the wood had healed over and it was gone too. Maria had never seen the changes rung on such a scale or at such a tempo; she felt as if she were dreaming the whole thing. Wiley was clutching his head as if to keep his brains from falling out. He had confidence that a sensible explanation existed for what he had just witnessed, but it was opaque to him at present.
   Clay was fleeing for the front doors. "Get back here, mister!" Wiley barked. Clay did not stop.
   Maria picked herself up with a groan. She was still sore where she had fallen; Clay had neglected to change that back. Michael approached her. "You all right?" he asked. Maria shook her head, but not in answer to his question; the denial was more extensive. She was looking at him in a way she never had before–somewhat as if he had left her stranded in the dead of night on an unfamiliar street corner, on an unfamiliar planet.
   Wiley joined the two of them. By then he had recovered his composure a little. "Tell me what happened here."
   Maria sidestepped the task. "Guess you got my message. You got here so fast."
   "I don't know anything about any message. I just felt a–kind of need to look in. Outside, I met Pete–the new man." He looked toward the side door, where a tall, bearded man was standing, wearing a grey maintenance uniform. Neither of the students could recall having seen him before. "Under control now, Pete," said Wiley. The man slipped away. "Never saw the coach behave like that," said Wiley. "I can't figure it." He surveyed the room again. "Just can't figure it."
   Michael found the phrase to sum it up. "Coach hasn't been himself lately."
   At the park that evening he described for the others, as well as he could, all that had happened. Maria was not on hand to assist him; after the incident she had gone home alone, called in sick to work, and had not been seen since. Liz, however, was there, having escaped her house arrest by inventing a task that would keep her in the kitchen after her parents had retired upstairs. Eventually if they did not hear her come up they would check on her; she could not risk being gone for more than a few minutes.
   After Michael finished his account, everyone was silent for a few moments, taking it in. "You're sure it was Nasedo?" said Max.
   "Isn't that what I said?"
   "It's not like he told you his name."
   "He didn't need to–"
   "Excuse me," Liz interrupted, "technically Nasedo isn't a name. It's more of a title–it means 'visitor.' And, strictly speaking, you're all visitors in that sense, so–"
   The others were staring at her. "Liz," Max whispered, "it's not that important. In the circumstances."
   "I suppose not." Max started to put another question. "I mean, if accuracy isn't important to you. But in that case, you might as well–"
   "Aren't you supposed to be at home?" Isabel inquired pointedly.
   "I asked her to come help," said Max.
   "Then help," said Isabel, "or keep quiet."
   "Sorry," said Liz, more meekly than before.
   Michael had been waiting impatiently to answer Max's question. "It is like he told me his name. He said I summoned him here. He knew the symbol."
   "But why would he try to kill you?" said Isabel.
   "Well, that's what he does, right? Isn't that what you all have been trying to tell me this whole time? Only I was too stupid to get it before."
   "He doesn't kill his own kind," said Max.
   "That we know of." The qualification came from Liz. "He might have, and then disposed of the bodies, mightn't he?"
   Max reflected. "He didn't do that with the others. The humans."
   "Except Coach," said Michael.
   Max frowned. "Do we know that for sure?"
   "Nobody's seen him, have they? Since Nasedo took his place?"
   "Of course not," said Liz. "To impersonate him successfully, he'd have to get rid of the original. If it was me I'd use a lye bath. And for the bones, a chainsaw...."
   She realized the others were staring at her again, and she shut up. "You're scary sometimes," said Max.
   He turned back to the group. "He usually leaves a trail. And I think it's deliberate. He wants people to know he's out there. Wants them to be intimidated by him–that is, by us. Aliens.."
   "You're assuming he's sane," Liz observed. As they all considered this, she gave Max a peck on the cheek. "Better get back before someone decides to check up on me."
   "Thanks," said Isabel, grudgingly. Liz smiled at her as she hurried off.
   Michael was not smiling. "So this is the great Nasedo. This is the whole deal. Figures."
   "Sorry," said Max. "I know you'd been hoping–"
   "Yeah, hope is great. But other people have a way of screwing it up."
   "I think you'd be wisest to stay out of his way until...."
   "Until when?"
   "Don't know," Max confessed.
   "Ditch gym for the rest of the semester? Then I will be suspended. Guaranteed."
   "He may not come back," suggested Isabel, "now that Wiley's seen him in action. I hope he didn't see you."
   "Wiley doesn't know what he saw. By the time he locked up and went home, he'd half convinced himself he never saw anything."
   Isabel laughed. "Typical human reaction."
   "If he does come back," said Max, not referring to Wiley now, "we'll face him together. The three of us."
   "And then what?" asked Isabel.
   "We do what we have to. Or what we're able to. Since he's not–local, there'll be no complications."
   "Complications?" repeated Michael. "What complications?"
   Max was reluctant to use the word. "Survivors."
   Michael had not quite understood until that moment what Max was talking about. Now that he did, his whole being–at least the part of himself he knew–rebelled against it. "No!" he shouted. "You can't!"
   His reaction surprised them. "He'd do the same to you," Isabel pointed out.
   "Why not?" asked Max. Michael did not answer. "You can't still believe he's–" Michael's eyes grew wide, and for that moment his face lay as open as a baby's for others to read. Max had not realized. "You do. Oh, Michael...."
   Feeling exposed and confused, helpless to cope with so much trauma at once, Michael did the only thing he knew to do: to run away. "Come back!" Max shouted, to no avail. He turned to his sister. "Now what do we do?"
   "Wait for him to see sense," she said, "and hope he doesn't get himself killed in the meantime." Max nodded. "The usual," Isabel added.
   When Michael got back to his apartment building he found Maria waiting at the side door. "You coulda gone in," he said. "Why didn't you?" He had made her a key himself (manually), and knew she carried it with her on a separate chain–one of her mother's creations, with a flying-saucer fob.
   "Wasn't sure I'd be welcome," she said. Michael did not know how to answer; for her, that was answer enough. But she went on regardless. "I never thanked you today. For saving my life and that."
   "We're even."
There was a pause. Michael had in his hand the key to the door but made no move to open it. And Maria made no move to leave. "You know"–he hated himself for what he was going to say–"it's late and–"
   "Why did you hesitate?" She said it quietly, but hurt throbbed in every word; Michael could not pretend he did not hear, or understand. "When you had to choose sides, you hesitated. Why?"
   Now he hesitated again. "Maybe he was right."
   "Right how?"
   "If it comes to a showdown–may as well say use the word, a war–I won't get to choose. The choice will be made for me." He looked away. "It won't be the choice I made today."
   "And what about us?" asked Maria. She found that for some reason her voice would hardly serve her.
   "Which 'us' are you talking about?" Michael could tell that this affronted her, and he had not meant it to; he made a last effort to explain. "If other humans find out what I am and what I do, you think they'll let me keep wandering around loose? I'll end up in a cage–or on a slab. Max and Isabel too. That's how it is between your people and mine."
   Maria saw a gulf between them which until then she had imagined to be no more than a pothole that could easily steered around. "So no matter how much any of us put out for you–I'm speaking metaphorically here–in your mind we're still the enemy. All of us." She waited. "Tell me I'm wrong."
   He looked more severe than she had ever known him to. "I don't think I can," he said. "Because I don't think you are." He let himself in and pushed the door shut behind him, without a goodbye or any other word.
   Maria felt as if she had been punched in the gut. She stood for another minute or two–or five, she could not tell afterwards–until she had recovered sufficiently to be certain of being able to guide the Jetta safely out of the carport. Michael listened to it from his window. The sound of it was like breathing, and faded as it grew more distant: soon he could not hear it at all.
   If Maria had been asked, she would have sworn that nothing could make her feel lousier than she had at Michael's. But that was before she reached home and found a beige Range Rover filling the drive. Displaced to a parking space on the street, she was feeling resentful on this count alone when she went in. Almost at once, her eyes were met with the sight of the vehicle's authorized keyholder reclining in the lounge chair and looking more at home there than Maria liked. He promptly sat up, as if he had been caught doing something illicit.
   "Sheriff," she said, trying to strike a balance between sounding surprised and not at all surprised.
   For his part, Jim tried to sound easy and comfortable with her, which he clearly was not. "Maria. Hey there. Your mom's just getting ready."
   It took Maria a moment to absorb the import of this. When she did, she gave forth with what Jim would have described as a wail: "Mo-o-om!"
   Amy was at her bedside mirror threading a pair of hoop earrings when her daughter marched in to demand of her, "Okay, what's going on?"
   "Going on?" she echoed, in as innocent a tone as she could muster on such short notice. "Why, what could be going on?"
   "What's the Lone Ranger doing out there?"
   Amy had known this moment would come sooner or later. "You mean Jim? Well, the two of us have a dinner date, if that meets with your approval." In back of her own reflection she caught sight of Maria's, peevish and sulky. This got Amy's back up. "No, you know, actually it doesn't matter if you approve or not, because I'm the parent here." She grabbed her coat from a chair.
   "You told me you'd stopped seeing each other."
   "Did I? I suppose I did. Well, we've started again. We've been out for drinks a couple of times."
   "You didn't tell me."
   "No," Amy said. With that, she walked out. Maria followed her out to the front, where Jim was waiting. He rose as she entered. "All ready, steady?" she said, winking at him. "Let's do it."
   Jim grinned. "You look mighty apprehendable."
   Amy gave the appearance of blushing (except for the actual blush). "Oh, I bet you say that to all the felons." Eeew, thought Maria. She made a silent vow never to flirt past the age of 30.
   Jim turned his grin on her. "Some day soon, you and I'll have to sit down and have us a chat."
   "Preparing my alibi already."
   Jim chuckled unconvincingly. He and Amy moved together to the door. "Don't wait up for us," Amy enjoined Maria. When did I ever? thought Maria–and then she thought, Us? The two went out, and Maria watched through a window as Jim held the car door open with the smooth air of a Southern gentleman. Amy made little flirting gestures with her fingers and dangled them for him to kiss, which he did with the same genteel air while she giggled and simpered. Eeew, Maria thought again. How did people become grown-ups, anyway? Was it due to some kind of virus? Could she escape somehow?
   Michael had gone for a walk, partly to shake her from his mind, but also with a larger purpose, for which he had planned it in the first place. His first destination was the public library. The distance to it was not so great (compared with what was to follow), and he covered it in about an hour.
   On arriving, he stopped in front of the building and crouched down on the lawn. With a wave of his hand, he changed a section of the grass to unplanted dirt, and with a second wave he made it level. He took from his jacket the replica map and unfolded it on the ground. Then he took out a small canvas sack and poured into his hand what it contained: the five yellow stones.
   Only now they were glowing blue. Am I doing that? he asked himself. But he knew better instantly. "It's the place, isn't it?" he said. "You guys are picking up something from it." From having them with him most of the time, he had formed a habit of talking to them as companions (though the conversations were inevitably one-sided.) "Yeah, I feel it too. Something here plugs into the Balance. Or is the Balance–whatever the Balance is. That's what these places have in common." Maria had said there was something, and had been right; momentarily Michael looked forward to sharing the discovery with her, and then remembered.
   Above him hung the shining V that he had earlier identified, by an intuitive flash, as the constellation of Aries. He kept meaning to confirm this identification with Liz, who was taking astronomy, but he had not gotten around to it yet. Looking from the map to its celestial original above, he re-oriented it so that the two were in the same alignment. Of the six sites on the map, all located in and around Roswell, and all (he now believed) having to do with the Balance, the library was the only one that was known; tonight he would go hunting for the others.
   He reviewed the map again. The symbol with the parentheses marked where he was; the one nearest it was the miniature solar system, which lay south southwest. Whatever it was, if he walked far enough in that direction he would hit it. But how far would he have to walk? He had no way of gauging the scale of the map. "But Roswell ain't all that big," he said. Nor was it–by the measure of, say, Santa Fe or Albuquerque.
   Suddenly he glimpsed something out of the corner of his eye–a flicker, a shift of light–which prompted him to look at the big library sign: "Basic Binary," it read. That's wrong, he thought. He looked away and then back. "Public Library," it read now; the words were back to normal. He must have been seeing thing–and no wonder. He returned the stones to their sack, pocketed it along with the map, and then began walking as the crow flies, or nearly. Passing below a row of twin-headed street lamps in their identical curlicued holders, he did not notice that each pair in turn flared up and dimmed as he moved into their light and out again–no doubt the work of the stones, still charged, still as if alive.
   Two blocks on he came to a row of houses that lay squarely in his path. Such a possibility had never occurred to him. He considered blazing a trail through them (literally) but decided against it. Instead he circled around and took up his course again on the other side. Presently another row of houses blocked him, he circled around again, and then he confronted a labyrinth: the streets ran seemingly in all directions, except the one he wanted. He realized this was how it was in a city, even ain't-all-that-big Roswell. He pressed on nevertheless, trying to hold to south southwest by using the figure in the sky as a compass, but he could not tell how far he had deviated to one side or the other; for all he knew, he might have strayed outside the map's precincts altogether.
   So it was a happy surprise for him when he hove into sight of a likely landing, the Roswell soap factory, which had been the site of a notorious police raid earlier in the year, and a city landmark since the turn of the century. He reached confidently for the stones–and found to his dismay that they were not glowing, even a little; this was not the right place.
   In front of him stood a bronze marker on a concrete stand with a facade of cracked stone. "Roswell Soap Factory," read the inscription. "Opened 1899. Closed 1948." The building behind had reopened later as a different kind of factory, and then closed again, at least a generation before Michael, yet for various reasons had never been torn down. It stirred his curiosity–but only as a matter of local history; it was not what he was looking for tonight.
   He was ready to leave, resuming his quest, when something unexpected happened: the stand began to vibrate. From vibrating, it went to quivering, and from quivering to quaking. Michael took a step back, and then another.
   What happened next he would not have believed if he had been human. The stand began to swell up as if air were being pumped into it, enlarging in every direction, but from side to side the most, until it attained a width of twelve feet. And as it enlarged it also changed shape, becoming–there was no mistaking it–a giant bar of soap. Michael could almost have laughed at the sight, but it felt like nothing to laugh at. Then the monstrosity began bubbling, furiously and obscenely; lather drooled down its sides and streamed away across the ground. And Michael knew who was doing it. "Where are you?" he called out.
   "Where's who?" a voice answered him. It came from a few yards behind him, and it was not Clay's voice. But then, Clay–that is, Nasedo–could be anybody. Michael swung round with his fists clenched.
   When he saw who it was, he unclenched them. It was possible she was Nasedo in another form, but somehow he knew she was not. "Topolsky," he said, and then corrected himself: "Excuse me, Agent Topolsky." She was alone, and unarmed. He had not expected to see there, but that was only because he had not seen her recently; if she was now back in circulation, she would be as apt to pop up there as anywhere else. The black Impala that had brought her, but whose approach he had never heard, was standing athwart the entrance to the parking lot.
   The former high school teacher and undercover agent regarded her former student and surveillance target in a strangely provocative manner, which he remembered as typical of her. "Michael Guerin," she said. "Of all people." That made it sound as if the two of them had previously enjoyed a special rapport, whereas to his recollection they had only spoken two or three times. "Who were you talking to just now?" she asked.
   "Myself."
   "Yourself," she repeated skeptically. "You do realize it's past curfew? You're not supposed to be here."
   "Then I'll leave."
   "No." She touched his sleeve lightly. "Not yet." She moved her eyes to the marker. It had returned to its former shape, but a coat of snow-white froth painted the stand and the ground around it. "Did you do this?" She answered herself. "No, I don't believe you did. What do you know about it?"
   Michael smiled. "You first."
   "I know nothing. Since I was relieved of my teaching assignment, the Bureau's been keeping me in the dark."
   "I thought you liked the dark. Isn't that why you took the job?"
   "I took the job–" She stopped. "Story for another day. And you wouldn't believe me, anyway."
   "Do I have reason to?"
   "Perhaps not." She faced him eye to eye. "Michael, it was never you and your friends we were after. Oh, for a while the sheriff had a cockeyed idea that Max might be this serial killer we're tracking–"
   "Nasedo," Michael automatically filled in. Too late, he realized his slip.
   "Nasedo? What kind of a name is that?"
   "Mesaliko. But it's more like a title. It means 'visitor.'" Liz's pedantry had proved useful , after all.
   "'Visitor.' Appropriate–wouldn't you agree?"
   Michael deflected her probe without meaning to, by taking the discussion on a different route. "And if there are other 'visitors,' they must all be like him, right?" His accumulation of resentments was starting to show.
   "No, one killer doesn't make a race of killers. Or where would humans be?" She ran her eye along the trail of foam, as if seeking a pattern in it. "You know, I've had a couple of–setbacks lately. One of them was engineered by your friends–not that I'm blaming them for it. But you owe me in a way." I owe you nothing, Michael thought. But he figured she knew that as well as he did. "You can help me recover my credibility," she concluded.
   "You mean with your FBI buddies?"
   "Not only that." She was speaking almost in a whisper. "And to make it work I need information–information you have, or can get."
   Was she trying to recruit him to be her snitch? This was as fantastic as the metamorphosis he had just witnessed; life just kept getting stranger and stranger. He was too busy processing the discovery to do other than answer her truthfully. "Ms. Topolsky, right now I'm not sure what I know. Let alone who I can trust."
   This was approximately what she had expected to hear. And she knew the feeling herself. "All right–for now. Come on, I'll drive you home."
   "I'll walk."
   "Can't." She tapped her wrist meaningfully. "Curfew."
   Elsewhere in the area, the same city ordinance that obliged Michael to accept her offer was being applied to a different purpose: to give the sheriff exclusive domain over an area it had taken him nearly an hour to reach: a circular plateau off 285 south, named (for no reason known to anybody now living) Angels' Ground. It was the favored parking spot of the town's high school students–others too, but them mainly–and a small fleet of cars and pick-ups was to be seen there until all hours every Friday and Saturday night, in flagrant violation of the law. Usually the law looked the other way, but tonight, unexpectedly, a beige Range Rover with a county insignia on its doors appeared over the crest of the drive and wheeled to a stop.
   The whole parking area, which had lain tranquil to all appearances, whatever might have been going on in the car seats, instantly sprang to life. Engines revved up, headlights blinked on, cars slunk away one by one, leaving the place entirely to the couple in the Rover, and nobody else. "So this was why you brought the squad car," said Amy.
   Jim was looking pleased with himself. "Could be."
   "You enjoy having this kind of power. Admit it!"
   "Kinda. Don't you?" Amy nodded, laughing.
   He pulled up at the edge of the rim overlooking the town and he shut off the engine. After the last of the exiles had passed out of hearing, the two of them sat taking in the quiet around them and the starry dome overhead. "Haven't been here since I was in my teens," said Amy. "Late teens–but still."
   "And they still come. It's a Roswell tradition. Do you happen to know if Maria and her boyfriend...?"
   "Jim! Would she tell me? And if she did, would I tell you?"
   He made a sound of assent. "How much do you know about that kid?" He tried, as with Kyle, to make the question sound casual.
   "Michael? I had my doubts about him, I must say. But, Jim, he's a good kid. Hard-working–supporting himself, going to school–and he cares a great deal for Maria." It was fortunate for Michael she had not heard their last conversation.
   "Don't you think he's a little secretive?"