Christ! What’s your plan, anyway? Where are you trying to go?”
“Home,” the alien said. “But first I have to rendezvous at the pickup point.”
“Where’s that?”
“You think I’m stupid?”
“Shit,” Amanda said. “If I meant to turn you in, I’d have done it five minutes ago. But okay. I don’t give a damn where your rendezvous point is. I tell you, though, you wouldn’t make it as far as San Francisco rigged up the way you are. It’s a miracle you’ve avoided getting caught until now.”
“And you’ll help me?”
“I’ve been trying to. Come on. Let’s get the hell out of here. I’ll take you home and fix you up a little. My car’s in the lot on the corner.”
“Okay.”
“Whew!” Amanda shook her head slowly. “Christ, some people are awfully hard to help.”
***
AS SHE DROVE OUT OF the center of town, Amanda glanced occasionally at the alien sitting tensely to her right. Basically the disguise was very convincing, Amanda thought. Maybe all the small details were wrong, the outer stuff, the anthropological stuff, but the alien looked human, it sounded human, it even smelled human. Possibly it could fool ninety-nine people out of a hundred, or maybe more than that. But Amanda had always had a good eye for detail. And the particular moment she had spotted the alien on South Main she had been unusually alert, sensitive, all raw nerves, every antenna up. Of course, it wasn’t aliens she was hunting for, but just a diversion, a little excitement, something to fill the great gaping emptiness that Charley Taylor had left in her weekend.
Amanda had been planning the weekend with Charley all month. Her parents were going to go off to Lake Tahoe for three days, her kid sister had wangled permission to accompany them, and Amanda was going to have the house to herself, just her and Macavity the cat. And Charley. He was going to move in on Friday afternoon and they’d cook dinner together and get blasted on her stash of choice powder and watch five or six of her parents’ X-rated cassettes, and Saturday they’d drive over to the city and cruise some of the kinky districts and go to that bathhouse on Folsom where everybody got naked and climbed into the giant Jacuzzi, and then on Sunday—Well, none of that was going to happen. Charley had called on Thursday to cancel. “Something big came up,” he said, and Amanda had a pretty good idea what that was, which was his hot little cousin from New Orleans who sometimes came flying out here on no notice at all; but the inconsiderate bastard seemed to be entirely unaware of how much Amanda had been looking forward to this weekend, how much it meant to her, how painful it was to be dumped like this. She had run through the planned events of the weekend in her mind so many times that she almost felt as though she had experienced them: it was that real to her. But overnight it had become unreal. Three whole days on her own, the house to herself, and so early in the semester that there was no homework to think about, and Charley had stood her up! What was she supposed to do now, call desperately around town to scrounge up some old lover as a playmate? Or pick up some stranger downtown? Amanda hated to fool around with strangers. She was half tempted to go over to the city and just let things happen, but they were all weirdos and creeps over there, anyway, and she knew what she could expect. What a waste, not having Charley! She could kill him for robbing her of the weekend.
Now there was the alien, though. A dozen of these star people had come to Earth last year, not in a flying saucer as everybody had expected, but in little capsules that floated like milkweed seeds, and they had landed in a wide arc between San Diego and Salt Lake City. Their natural form, so far as anyone could tell for sure, was something like a huge jellyfish with a row of staring purple eyes down one wavy margin, but their usual tactic was to borrow any local body they found, digesting it and turning themselves into an accurate imitation of it. One of them had made the mistake of turning itself into a brown mountain bear and another into a bobcat—maybe they thought that those were the dominant life-forms on Earth—but the others had taken on human bodies, at the cost of at least ten lives. Then they went looking to make contact with government leaders, and naturally they were rounded up very swiftly and interned, some in mental hospitals and some in county jails, but eventually—as soon as the truth of what they really were sank in—they were all put in a special detention camp in Northern California. Of course, a tremendous fuss was made over them, endless stuff in the papers and on the tube, speculation by this heavy thinker and that about the significance of their mission, the nature of their biochemistry, a little wild talk about the possibility that more of their kind might be waiting undetected out there and plotting to do God knows what, and all sorts of that stuff, and then came a government clamp on the entire subject, no official announcements except that “discussions” with the visitors were continuing; and after a while the whole thing degenerated into dumb alien jokes (“Why did the alien cross the road?”) and Halloween invader masks, and then it moved into the background of everyone’s attention and was forgotten. And remained forgotten until the announcement that one of the creatures had slipped out of the camp somehow and was loose within a hundred-mile zone around San Francisco. Preoccupied as she was with her anguish over Charley’s heartlessness, even Amanda had managed to pick up that news item. And now the alien was in her very car. So there’d be some weekend amusement for her after all. Amanda was entirely unafraid of the alleged deadliness of the star being: whatever else the alien might be, it was surely no dope, not if it had been picked to come halfway across the galaxy on a mission like this, and Amanda knew that the alien could see that harming her was not going to be in its own best interests. The alien had need of her, and the alien realized that. And Amanda, in some way that she was only just beginning to work out, had need of the alien.
***
SHE PULLED UP OUTSIDE HER house, a compact split-level at the western end of town. “This is the place,” she said. Heat shimmers danced in the air, and the hills back of the house, parched in the long dry summer, were the color of lions. Macavity, Amanda’s old tabby, sprawled in the shade of the bottlebrush tree on the ragged front lawn. As Amanda and the alien approached, the cat sat up warily, flattened his cars, hissed. The alien immediately moved into a defensive posture, sniffing the air.
“Just a household pet,” Amanda said. “You know what that is? He isn’t dangerous. He’s always a little suspicious of strangers.”
Which was untrue. An earthquake couldn’t have brought Macavity out of his nap, and a cotillion of mice dancing minuets on his tail wouldn’t have drawn a reaction from him. Amanda calmed him with some fur-ruffling, but he wanted nothing to do with the alien, and went slinking sullenly into the underbrush. The alien watched him with care until he was out of sight.
“You have anything like cats on your planet?” Amanda asked as they went inside.
“We had small wild animals once. They were unnecessary.”
“Oh,” Amanda said. The house had a stuffy, stagnant air. She switched on air-conditioning. “Where is your planet, anyway?”
The alien ignored the question. It padded around the living room, very much like a prowling cat itself, studying the stereo, the television, the couches, the vase of dried flowers.
“Is this a typical Earthian home?”
“More or less,” said Amanda. “Typical for around here, at least. This is what we call a suburb. It’s half an hour by freeway from here to San Francisco. That’s a city. A lot of people living all close together. I’ll take you over there tonight or tomorrow for a look, if you’re interested.” She got some music going, high volume. The alien didn’t seem to mind, so she notched the volume up more. “I’m going to take a shower. You could use one, too, actually.”
