Reincarnations

THEY'D NEVER -

This one is Esther Friesner’s fault. No one-and I mean no one-else could have come up with an anthology called Alien Pregnant by Elvis. Mashing tabloid reality, real reality (if there is such a thing), and science fiction together should be illegal. For all I know, it is. Nobody’s busted me for it. Yet.

Mort Pfeiffer slung his jacket over the back of his chair, then plomped his ample bottom into said chair and turned on his computer. Another day, he thought gloomily. He looked around the office of the Weekly Intelligencer.

It looked like a newspaper office: other people dressed no better than he was sat around in front of screens and clicked away at keyboards. Those clicks made it sound like a newspaper office, too. It even smelled like a newspaper office: stale coffee and musty air conditioning with two settings, too hot and too cold.

But it wasn’t a newspaper office, or not exactly. If the Intelligencer wasn’t the trashiest supermarket and 7-Eleven rack filler around, the troops hadn’t done their job for the week. "For this I went to journalism school?" Mort muttered.

He wished for a cigarette. The smoke would have made the place smell even more authentic. But the Intelligencer office had gone smoke-free a couple of years before-it was either that or lose their health insurance. Besides, he was wearing a transdermal nicotine patch. Smoke while you had one of those things stuck to you and you were a coronary waiting to happen.

Behind glasses that were going to turn into bifocals the next time he got around to seeing his optometrist, his eyes lit up for a moment. Transdermal patches… he might be able to do something with that. They were hot these days, and no more than three percent of the lip-movers who bought the Intelligencer were likely to have even a clue about what transdermal meant.

So… the beginning of a headline formed in his mind, 72-point type, sans-serif, with an exclamation point at the end. TRANSDERMAL PATCHES CAUSE…!

"Cause what?" he mused aloud.

Cause heart attacks if you’re stupid enough to keep lighting up while you’re wearing one? He shook his head. That wasn’t scary enough. You didn’t necessarily die from a heart attack, and if you did, it was over quick.

Cause cancer? That one was stale even for the Intelligencer (which was saying something). Besides, the whole idea behind nicotine patches was to keep you from getting lung cancer. Pfeiffer’s ethical sense was stunted (Would I be here otherwise? he thought), but it hadn’t quite atrophied.

Cause AIDS? He shook his head again. Something there, though. Suddenly, like striking snakes, his hands leaped at the keyboard. Letters flowed rapidly across the screen: TRANSDERMAL PATCHES CAUSE AIDS-LIKE SYNDROME! He knew just how to write that one up. When you took the patch off, you went through some of the same whimwhams you did when you gave up smoking (he’d call a trained seal of a doctor for the impressive-sounding quotes he’d need). And some of those whimwhams were enough like early AIDS symptoms to give the piece the germ of truth his editor liked.

Speak of the devil, he thought, because his editor came by just then, paused to see what he was working on, and nodded approvingly before heading off to the next desk. Don’t think of Ed Asner as Lou Grant here. Katie Nelligan looked more like Mary Tyler Moore with red hair.

Mort sighed. If she hadn’t been his boss, and if he hadn’t had a well-founded suspicion that she was smarter than he was (although if she was all that smart, why did she work for the Intelligencer?), he’d have asked her out a year ago. One of these days, he kept telling himself. It hadn’t happened yet.

Katie came back, dropped a wire service report into his IN basket. "See what you can do with this one, Mort," she said.

He looked at the news item. Kids in Japan, it seemed, raised stag beetles (not Japanese beetles, for some reason) as pets. Then they’d put them up on round cushions two at a time to see which one could grab the other by the projecting mouthparts and throw it off. They’d just chosen a national champion beetle.

"Jesus Christ," Mort said. "Sumo-wrestling bugs!"

"That’s just the slant we’ll want on it," Katie said. She nodded again-twice in one morning, which didn’t happen every day. "Can you give me a draft before you go home tonight?"

"Yeah, I think so," he answered. What was he supposed to tell her?

"Good," she said crisply, and went on down the aisle between desks. Mort looked back at her for a couple of seconds before he returned to his computer.

He discovered he’d forgotten what he was going to write next about the transdermal patches. No wonder, he thought. Sumo-wrestling bugs-Lord, that was enough to derail anybody’s train of thought. Bullshit about patches and the truth about bugs… "Hell of a way to make a living," he said under his breath.

Nobody glanced over at him to see why he was talking to himself. People at the Intelligencer did it ever day. Nobody, but nobody, was ever a bright-eyed, eager eighteen-year-old getting himself ready for a hot career writing for a supermarket tabloid. It wasn’t a job you went looking for, it was a job you fell into- generally from a great height.

"If I weren’t Typhoid Mary, I wouldn’t be here," Mort said, again to himself. He’d worked for four different papers in three years, each of which went belly-up within months of hiring him. The jobs had disappeared, but his rent and his car payment and his child support hadn’t. He’d been here five years. Whatever else you said about it, the Intelligencer wouldn’t go broke any time soon. What was that line about nobody going broke overestimating the stupidity of the American people?

A guaranteed regular paycheck-yeah, that was one thing that kept him coming to the office every morning. The other was something he hadn’t thought through when he’d taken this job: now that he’d worked for the Intelligencer, no real newspaper would ever take him seriously again.

He saved the patch story, got to work on the sumo-wrestling stag beetles. He took a certain perverse pride in the way he reworked it to fit the Intelligencer’s style: breezy, breathless, no paragraph more than two sentences long, no words more than three syllable if he could help it. Besides, Katie’d given him a deadline for that one, and he always met deadlines.

He was just heading into the wrapup when the lights went off.

"Oh, shit," he said loudly, an editorial comment echoed and embellished all over the office. When the lights went off, so did the computers. Mort hadn’t saved the stag beetle story as he worked on it, so it was gone for good. He’d have to do it over from scratch, and doing it once had been once too often.

Besides which, with the power gone, the inside of the Intelligencer office was black as an IRS man’s heart: no windows. The publisher, three floors up-he had a window, and one with an ocean view. The peons who did the actual work? They got peed on, as their name implied.

Katie Nelligan’s voice cut through the chatter: "Does anybody have a flashlight at their desk? There’s supposed to be an emergency kit in here somewhere, but we haven’t needed it for so long, I’ve forgotten where."

No flashlights went on. Mort didn’t even have a luminous watch. He just sat at his desk, figuring the only thing he was likely to do in pitch darkness was stumble over somebody’s chair and break his fool neck.

Wouldn’t that be a great way to go? If a network correspondent cut himself shaving while he was covering a war, he turned into a national hero overnight. But if a tabloid reporter killed himself trying to get out of his office, he might make page seven on the inside section of the newspaper. Having his passing altogether ignored was a hell of a lot more likely.

Somebody else did get up, and promptly tripped. Feeling smugly virtuous, Mort stayed put.

Then, all of a sudden, he could see again. Standing in the doorway were four slim, manlike shapes, each glowing a slightly different shade of bluish green. All together, they put out about as much light as a nightlight.

"Give me a break," Mort said. "Who’s the practical joker?" Slim, glowing aliens were as much an Intelligencer hallmark as no funnies was with the New York Times. He’d written at least half a dozen stories about them himself. They all contradicted one another, but who kept track?

"I’ll bet I know who did it," Katie Nelligan said: "San Levy at the News of the World." The News of the World specialized in aliens, too, generally warty yellow ones; Levy, who held down Katie’s job over there, was a notorious prankster. Katie turned to the glowing quartet. "Okay, boys, you can knock it off now. We’re wise to you. How about turning the lights back on, too?"

The four guys in the alien suits (Mort thought of them as John, Paul, George, and Ringo, which does a good job of dating him) didn’t answer. One of them- -George-started walking up toward the ceiling. There weren’t any steps, but that didn’t bother him. He just went up and up, as if the air were solid beneath his feet.

A couple of people broke into applause. "Hell of a special effect," someone called.

Mort gaped along with everybody else. It was a hell of a special effect. He would have been impressed seeing it on a movie screen. Seeing it for real, live and in person, was… unbelievable. You could put somebody in a suit that made him look like a freeway emergency light, yeah, but Mort knew for a fact that the ceiling didn’t have any wires in it. Which left-what? Antigravity?

"Holy Jesus," he said hoarsely. "Maybe they are aliens."

The chorus of derision that brought down on his head couldn’t have been louder or more scornful at an Air Force UFO debunking unit. People who worked for the Intelligencer wrote about aliens, sure, but they weren’t dumb enough to believe in them. That was for the yahoos who bought the paper.

Then the fellow in the suit up by the ceiling pointed an (inhumanly?) long finger at Katie Nelligan. He didn’t keep a flashlight in his fingernail, а la ET, but, with a startled squawk, Katie floated slowly off the floor and up toward him. "Somebody do something!" she yelped.

Mort sprang up, sprinted down the aisle, and grabbed her around the waist (he’d fantasized doing things like that, but not under these circumstances). He tried to pull her back down to mother earth. Instead, she rose higher and higher-and so did he.

He let go of Katie as soon as his feet left the ground, but that was too late. Up he went anyhow, toward the-well, if he wasn’t an alien, he’d do until somebody showed up with Mars license plates.

About halfway to the ceiling, Mort remembered that once upon a time he’d been a pretty good reporter, and here he was, floating up to the biggest story in the history of mankind. "Get a camera!" he yelled at the top of his lungs. "We’ve got to have pictures!"

"Oh, good for you, Mort," Katie exclaimed. "God, we’ll sell fifty million copies and we won’t even have to make anything up." No matter that she’d been captured by aliens and was probably heading for a fate worse than taxes-she worried about the Intelligencers circulation ahead of her own.

Down on the ground, first one flash camera and then another started going off, strobing away until the office reminded Mort of nothing so much as a psychedelic ‘60s dance. Had the aliens smelled like pot smoke, the illusion would have been perfect, but they didn’t smell like anything.

Only after he shouted for a camera did Mort stop to wonder whether the aliens would mind having their images immortalized in the Intelligencer. If they had minded, things might have turned decidedly unpleasant for the person on the wrong end of the Nikon. But they didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

Then he wondered if anybody kept a gun in his desk or her purse. He didn’t think the aliens would be able to ignore bullets like flash photography. If anybody was toting a piece, though, he didn’t open up. That removed one of Mort’s worries.

A bigger, more urgent one remained: now that the aliens had Katie and him, what would they do with them? The beings the Intelligencer featured were always looking out for humanity’s best interests, but how likely was that really? Was a species that could invent pasteurized cheese food product worth saving anyhow? Mort had his doubts. Which left-what?

The first thing that sprang to mind was experimental specimen. That was a long walk off a short pier. Number two was zoo specimen. That might have its moments if they tried to establish a breeding population with him and Katie Nelligan, but in the long run it wasn’t much better than number one: medium- to long-term insanity as opposed to instant anguish.

He flapped his arms and kicked his legs in midair, none of which changed his trajectory a bit. Whatever the aliens were going to do to him, he couldn’t stop them.

His feet were still within grabbing distance of the ground, but when somebody-he didn’t see who-made the same sort of run at him as he’d made at Katie, one of the aliens who’d remained by the doorway held up a hand like a traffic cop and his would-be rescuer bounced off an invisible wall. Pictures the aliens didn’t mind; they wouldn’t put up with anything more.

The one floating up by the ceiling-George-made a come-hither gesture to Mort and Katie, who duly went thither. The closer Mort looked at George, the less he looked like a human being, or even a Star Trek makeup job. For one thing, his head was too small. Making a head look bigger than it really is wasn’t any great trick, but how did you go about shrinking one unless you were a South American Indian?

Nose, ears, mouth-details were all wrong: nothing you couldn’t manage with makeup on any of them, maybe, but why would you? Besides those come-hither qualities, George’s fingers had a couple of extra joints apiece. He had no nipples, further down… well, Mort was damned if he’d let a makeup man do that sort of thing to his family jewels.

And if George wasn’t an alien, what was he doing up here by the ceiling, and how had he got Katie and Mort up here with him? Mort’s gut had needed a little while to catch up with his brain, but now he believed all over.

The alien extended the middle finger of his left hand toward him, the middle finger of his right toward Katie. Mort wanted to flip him off right back, but didn’t have the nerve. George’s finger touched the center of his forehead. He’d expected blazing heat. Instead, it was cool.

After that-the only person who understood what happened to him after that was Katie Nelligan, and only because it happened:o her, too. He felt his brains getting systematically emptied and copied, as if he were a floppy being backed up onto an enormous hard disk. Everything he remembered, from the Pythagorean theorem to losing his cherry under the football stands in high school, got sucked up and flowed out through the alien’s finger.

So did things he’d never imagined his brain retained: what he’d had for breakfast five years ago last Tuesday (two eggs over medium, wheat toast, grape jam, weak coffee); what his father had said when, sometime under the age of one, Mort spat up on the old man’s best suit (not to be repeated here, but prime, believe me). Amazing, he thought, and hoped he’d keep one percent of what the alien was getting.

Even more amazing, though, was the backwash he got, as if a few random little documents from the hard disk snuck onto the floppy while the floppy played out onto the hard disk. Some of them came from Katie: the smell of her corsage on prom night, a sixth-grade spelling test where she’d missed the word revolutionary, what cramps felt like, and a long-distance call to her sister in Baltimore the spring before.

And some of those little documents had to come from George the alien: using those peculiar private parts in the manner for which they were intended, what felt like a college course on how flying saucers or whatever they were worked (which would have been worth a mint, and not a chocolate one, if Mort had understood the concepts), the taste of fancy alien food (by comparison, that ever-so-ordinary breakfast seemed nectar and ambrosia).

Mort also picked up a few impressions about what George thought of mankind. In two words, not much. He went about his job with all the enthusiasm of an Animal Regulations officer counting stray dogs around the city dump, except an Animal Regulations officer might actually like dogs.

The alien didn’t like humans. Mort could think of a lot of reasons why benevolent aliens wouldn’t like humans: they were busy polluting their planet; they fought wars; they discriminated on the basis of color, gender, sexual preference, and the size of your bankroll. If any of that had been in the backwash from George, Mort would have been chastened but not surprised.

It wasn’t. George felt about humans much as a lot of nineteenth-century British imperialists had felt about the peoples they ruled: they were wogs. They were ugly, they smelled funny, they had revolting habits, and, most of all, they were stupid. George’s view of what humans had in the brains apartment was somewhere between a badly trained dog and what that badly trained dog was liable to leave on your front lawn when it went out for a walk.

Given that George was currently pumping him and Katie dry of everything they’d ever known, Mort had to admit that, from his point of view, he had a point. But if George was a benevolent alien, he devoutly hoped he’d never run into one in lousy mood.

All of a sudden, he was empty. The inside of his head seemed to be making the noise a soda straw does when you’re still sucking but the soda’s all gone.

A couple of more impressions backwashed into the sodaless expanse between his ears. One was a mental image of two scared-looking rubes in hunting gear getting the same treatment he as undergoing now. I’ll be damned, he thought. They weren’t making it up after all.

The second was a flash of alien mentation: As long as we have todo it, this is the perfect spot for the survey. They’d never- He never found out who they were or what they’d never. The document was incomplete.

George turned to his buddies by the door. He wiggled his ears. Mort didn’t know what that meant, but the rest of the green-and-glowing Fab Four did: job’s over for today. They went out the door. They didn’t bother opening it first.

The floating alien looked from Mort to Katie and back again. Mort got the idea that if it had been up to him, he’d have dropped them both on the floor, kersplat. But maybe he had a supervisor watching him or something, because he didn’t. He floated them down the same way they’d come up, only faster.

As they were descending, George went down the invisible stairs he’d gone up before. He left the Intelligencer office the same impossible way his colleagues had, except he left his nether cheeks on this side of the door for a couple of seconds while the rest of him was already on that side.

"Jesus," Mort said. "The moon from outer space."

Katie laughed-hysterically, sure, but can you blame her? Mort couldn’t see what anybody else was doing, because the room was dark again now that the nightlights that walked like men had gone.

Then the lights came back on. It was as if that broke a spell; for all Mort knew, maybe it did. People started jumping and hollering and running to the door (but not through it) to find out if the aliens were still in sight. Mort didn’t run to the door. Having seen the aliens more up close and personal than anybody but Katie Nelligan, he didn’t want to see them again.

Katie said, "Whoever was taking those pictures, get them developed this instant, do you hear me? This instant! Don’t leave the shop while they’re being processed, either-wait for them right there."

That got three people out of the office. Mort glanced down his watch, wondering how long he’d floated by the ceiling, hat he saw made him blink and exclaim, "Katie, what time do you have?"

She looked at her watch, too, then stared at him, bright blue eyes wide with surprise. "It felt like we were up there for an hour, not a couple of minutes." She pointed to the wall clock. "But that says the same thing. Weird." She was not the sort of person to let weirdness overwhelm her; that was one of the reasons she was editor and Mort, older and arguably more experienced, just a staff writer. "We’ll do drafts of the piece right now, while we still member everything. When we’re done, we’ll compare notes. This one has to be perfect."

"Right." Mort all but sprinted for his computer. He’d never imagined being in the middle of a story like this. Woodward and Bernstein, eat your hearts out, he thought as he hit the keyboard.

He plunged in so hard and deep that he started violently when Katie tapped him on the shoulder. "I just wanted to say thanks," she told him. "That was brave, what you did."

"Oh. That. Yeah. Sure," he said. "Listen, why aren’t you writing?" Katie laughed softly and went away.

The next thing mort remembered apart from words flowing from his mind to the computer was the pictures coming back. For that he was willing to get up from his desk. He’d expected something would go wrong-they’d be fogged, or black, or something. But they weren’t. There was the alien, doing the mind-probe on him and Katie while all three of them floated in midair. There were the other aliens by the door. Shot after perfect shot-it was just a matter of picking the best ones.

"We’ve got ‘em," Katie said. Everybody nodded.

Five o’clock came and went. Mort never noticed. Neither did Katie. Finally, at about half past six, she printed her story. Mort said, "I’ll be done in just a few minutes." He pulled his sheets out of the laser printer when he was through, then said, "We both must have run way long. Shall we"-he hesitated, then plunged-"compare and cut over dinner?"

She gave him not the wary, thoughtful look he’d expected, but a sidelong glance and half a smile, as if she knew something he didn’t. "All right," she said. "Let’s go to Napoli. It’s right down the street, and we have a lot of work to do to get this the way it has to be."

They went through each other’s stories alongside lasagna and Chianti. Time on real newspapers had made Mort sharp at writing lean and tight; he boiled away a quarter of Katie’s piece without touching the meaning at all.

She attacked his differently, looking more at what it said than how it did the saying. About halfway through, she looked up and said, "Backwash? That’s a good way to put it. I felt it, too. I wondered if you had. But somebody reading the piece is going to need more explanation than you’ve given it here." She scribbled a note in the margin.

Over spumoni ("To hell with the waistline; today I earned it," Katie said), each looked at what the other had done. Most of Katie’s comments asked for more detail here, less there, and made Mort’s story more tightly focused and coherent. He tipped the cap he wasn’t wearing. "Thanks. This’ll help."

"I like what you’ve done with mine, too," she answered. "It’s lot crisper than it was. We make a pretty good team."

"Yeah." Mort beamed. He’d had just enough wine to improve is attitude, not enough to hurt his thinking.

Katie dabbed at her lips with a napkin. "Now let’s get back to the office and hammer ‘em together."

Mort almost squawked, but he didn’t. What did he have to go home to? An empty apartment and celebrity dog wrestling on ESPN? Real work, important work (something he’d never imagined at the Intelligencer till now) was more important than that, and the company better. He took out his wallet, tossed bills on the red-and-white checked tablecloth, got to his feet. "Let’s go."

"Hey, I was going to pay for mine," Katie said.

He shrugged. "I’m not broke, and I’m not trying to take advantage of you. If you want to buy for both of us one of these lays, I’ll let you."

She gave him that funny sidelong look again, but rose from the table without saying anything more. The night watchman scratched his head when they went back to the Intelligencer office. "You folks don’t usually work late."

"Big story-a real ‘Hey, Martha!’ " Katie said solemnly.

"Yeah?" The watchman’s eyes lit up. "Does it have Madonna in it?" When Mort and Katie both shook their heads, his shoulders slumped in disappointment. "How can it be a big story if it don’t have Madonna in it?"

They went inside without answering, then settled down to work side by side. A couple of hours later, sheets slid into the laser printer tray, one after the other. Mort scooped them up, saying, "Let me go over these one more time. I’ve been using a computer for ten years now, but I still edit better on hard copy."

"Yeah, me too." Katie read over his shoulder. They each made a last few changes, then printed out the altered pages again. This time Katie took them from the printer. She slid them into their proper places, made a neat little pile of the story, and stuck a paper clip in the top left corner. "It’s done."

"Wait," Mort said. "Let me have it for a second." He took it over to the xerox machine, made two copies. "I’ll take one of these home, and I’ll stash the other one in my desk-just in case."

"In case the aliens come back, you mean?" Katie said. He nodded. She went on, "I don’t think it’d help, but it can’t hurt, either. First thing tomorrow, I go upstairs and lay this"-she hefted her own copy of what they’d done "-and the photos on Mr. Comstock. If he says no, I quit."

"Me, too," Mort said. Some things, by God, were more important than a job.

Katie yawned. "Let’s go home. It’s been a long day."

"Boy, hasn’t it just?"

Everyone in the Intelligencer office stared nervously at the door through which the aliens had departed. Mort wasn’t anticipating their return; like the rest of the tabloid crew, he was waiting for Katie Nelligan to come back from her conference with the publisher. She’d been up there a long time.

The door opened, which proved it wasn’t the aliens coming back. Everybody jumped all the same. In stamped Katie, looking the way a Fury might have if she were Irish instead of classical Greek.

Mort could find only one reason for her to look like that. "Mr. Comstock won’t go for it?" he exclaimed in dismay.

"Oh, no. He will. We lead with it, next week’s issue." Katie bit of the words one by one. Little spots of color that had nothing to do with rouge rode high on her cheeks. "But he doesn’t believe it. He doesn’t believe us."

Cries of outrage echoed from walls and ceilings. "What does he think, we made it up to sell his stinking papers?" Mort yelled. We’ll all go up there and tell him-"

"No we won’t. I told him the same thing, and he said we’d regret it if we tried." Katie’s scowl grew darker. "And yes, that’s just what he thinks. On the photos, he thinks he spotted the wires holding us up in the air."

"Jesus!" If he hadn’t already been starting to bald, Mort would have torn his hair. "There weren’t any goddamn wires!" le memory of yesterday’s terror flooded back, sharp as a slap in the face.

"I know that as well as you do, Mort," Katie said. "So here’s what I’ve got in mind: we’re going to pretend we don’t care what Mr. Comstock says. We’ll put this out the right way, and people will believe it."

The staff sprang to work with the fire and dedication mutiny in call forth. They threw themselves at the story with the dogged, fatalistic courage of English infantry climbing out of their trenches and marching into German machine-gun fire at the Somme. Mort was astonished at what some of the people- men and women whose total illiteracy he would till now have reckoned a boon to mankind-could do.

"You know, Katie," he said when the editor walked by, "this is gonna be a ‘Hey, Martha!’ to end all ‘Hey, Marthas!’ Everybody will want to read it."

"I think you’re right. And we’ve got a real Freddie Krueger of a picture on the front page to grab ‘em and pull ‘em in." She bristled. "I had to stop Comstock from using the one that looked right up my skirt. That man!" She clenched her fists till the knuckles whitened.

Mort looked at his watch. It was getting close to five. "Do you want to drown your sorrows in another bottle of Chianti?" he asked.

She’ll say no, he thought with the automatic pessimism of a man who’d been through a divorce and taken a few knocks afterwards for good measure. But she said yes. And after a truly Lucullan feast at Napoli (or Mort thought so, anyhow, but he was too happy to be objective), she went back to his apartment with him. The mess it was in proved he hadn’t expected that. If it bothered her, she didn’t let on.

Afterwards, still on the disbelieving side but happier-much happier-than he had been at the restaurant, he ran a hand down the smooth skin of her back and said, "What made you decide to-?" He let it hang there, so she could ignore it if she wanted to.

She gave him that I-know-something-you-don’t-know look again, the one he’d seen on her face when he asked her to dinner the day the aliens came. It stayed there long enough that he thought she wasn’t going to answer. But she did, if obliquely: "Remember the backwash?"

"Huh?" he said, but then, realizing what she had to be talking about, he went on, "From the alien, you mean? Sure. What about it?"

Katie hesitated again, then said carefully, "I didn’t mean just from the alien. Bits came from you, too, just like you got bits from me. And one of them happened to be… how you feel about me. It’s hard to be sure about a man-I suppose it’s hard for a man to be sure about a woman-but this time, I didn’t need to have any doubts. And so-" She leaned forward on the rumpled bed and kissed him.

Absurdly, he was jealous. He’d gotten bits from her, sure, but nothing like that (as far as he was concerned, the prom corsage didn’t count). The one he remembered most vividly had come from the alien, that contemptuous They’d never that broke off unfinished.

From what had happened since, Mort was beginning to think he knew who they were and what they’d never, but he didn’t tell that to Katie. He might have been wrong-and even if he was right, what the hell could he do about it?

IF you went into a market or a convenience store a few weeks ago, you probably saw the Intelligencer on its rack, jammed in there with the rest of the tabloids. You probably took a look at the front page photo, shook your head, and walked on by to get your beef jerky or pipe cleaners or whatever it was you needed.

And even if you plunked down your eighty-five cents and read the whole piece, odds are you just took it in stride. After all, a tabloid’d do anything to sell copies, right? You’d never believe in aliens, would you?

Katie cried when the story went belly-up. The late-night talk-show hosts didn’t even take it seriously enough to make jokes about it. Mort wasn’t surprised. The green-and-glowing guys had known just where to take their sample, all right.

But don’t think this is a story without a happy ending. Mort and Katie are getting married next month. They still have a lot of planning to do, but they’ve agreed on one thing: the wedding won’t be in the Intelligencer.