burned him terribly. He had to do something quickly, and he obviously needed help. He scrambled out of the hole and ran as fast as he could back towards Novato. This was around eight in the morning.
He’d completely forgotten where he’d left his car. He stopped a passing vehicle, trying to make the driver understand; but his story and appearance were so bizarre that the man simply drove on. He was equally unsuccessful with a restaurateur who was just unlocking the doors of a local café, Zee’s Zippy Zone. “Zee” was inarticulate on the best of occasions, and didn’t fare well under pressure (Mindon had once criticized his bœuf latté), so he threatened to knock Min down if he didn’t get out of his way.
That sobered my friend long enough to think clearly for the first time since his grand discovery; and when he spotted Owen M. Owen, a writer for the Pac-Sun, seated at his desk in the newspaper office, he calmed down and tried to make himself understood.
“‘O’!” he said, “you hear about that meteor last night?”
“Yeah?” said Owen.
“…it’s landed west of town.”
“Good!” The man was a bit deaf and had left his hearing aid off, so what he heard was: “…sanded the western down,” which made no sense at all.
“It’s some kind of ship! There’s something inside it.”
Owen cupped his hand to one ear while continuing to work.
“What?”
Mindon reiterated him what he’d seen.
“You’re kidding, right?”
“Swear to God,” Mindon said.
Owen grabbed his jacket and hearing aid and got his car; they picked up a spade at his house on the way out of town. The two men then hurried back to the site, but the noises within the meteorite had ceased. Small circles of bright metal now showed around the top surface of the thing. Air was either entering or escaping the ship with a high, thin, whistling sound.
They listened closely and “O” rapped on the singed casing with his shovel. Nothing happened.
“Gotta be a probe of some kind,” Min said.
“Maybe we should contact the authorities. Also, I need to check with my paper.”
“Just so long as you spell my name right: it’s the ‘Mindon Meteorite,’ OK? M-I-N-D-O-N.”
“Yeah, yeah, sure,” Owen said, pulling out his cell phone and ringing his office as they drove back towards town.
They ran up Main Street in the bright sunlight as the stores were opening their doors for business. Owen stepped into a nearby coffee shop, the Green Tiger, and after taking time to call the police, sat down and e-mailed his paper, quickly putting together a story that would be circulated nationwide within the hour.
By mid-morning a few folks were wandering back into the hills to see the “Ship from Mars” for themselves. Mindon called me as I was finishing a late breakfast. I was excited at the prospect of viewing the artifact for myself, so I grabbed Becky and drove as close as I could to the site. We then started hiking westward.
It was Christmas Eve.
It was the last day that we would ever think of ourselves as alone in the universe.
CHAPTER THREE
AFRAID TO GO HOME IN THE DARK
I’m afraid to go home in the dark.
—Harry H. Williams
Alex Smith, 24 December, Mars Year i
Novato, California, Planet Earth
By the time we reached the site, forty of the locals had arrived ahead of us, with more on their way. We gathered ’round a huge hole in which the alien ship was embedded upright in the ground. The gravel on either side of the opening had been charred black by the impact of the landing, although the vessel itself no longer radiated any heat. “O” and Min still hadn’t returned yet.
Four or five teens were dangling their feet over the edge of the pit, amusing themselves by throwing stones at the bloody thing.
“Stop that!” I said, but they just laughed. Kids!
When I looked around at the bystanders, I recognized a couple of folks with their bikes, among them my yard man, a woman with a stroller, a store owner and his son, and two or three others who nodded back at me.
There wasn’t a lot of conversation. I mean, what could you say?
Most of the people were just staring quietly at the large, egg-shaped end of the ship. After awhile, when nothing else happened, some of them left while others took their place. Even Becky began pestering me to go home. I finally told her to take the car, that I’d join her later for lunch. She reminded me that we’d planned to go shopping that afternoon. After she left, I climbed down into the pit to examine the thing more closely, and thought I heard a movement somewhere inside. But if the top had shifted before, it’d stopped by now.
At first glance the oval just seemed like a large lump of charred rock, but on closer examination I noticed some thin, wavy lines, almost cracks, that permeated the top third of the visible portion of the artifact. The scales that flaked off left a sheen of shiny, unscarred metal underneath. I’m no scientist; I didn’t recognize the yellowish-white surface that gleamed at me in the sunlight, reflecting a glare that almost blinded the onlookers. Even the crack around the lid had an unfamiliar color and texture. Obviously, the probe would have to be examined more closely by our scientists.
And it was pretty clear in my own mind that this was a probe, likely sent from Mars in response to our own explorations on the Red Planet. I didn’t even consider the possibility that the meteorite was natural. The unscrewing of the top, if that’s what it’d been, was similar to the way our rovers had prepared themselves for their journeys across the Martian terrain. I wondered if the artifact might have some message for us, some offering of peace and a sharing of the benefits of our respective civilizations, and speculated on the translation difficulties that might occur. This was the greatest thing that had ever happened to mankind—and I was part of it! I was impatient to see something further, but nothing more actually happened then. About noon I too wandered back to my two-story home on Olivet Avenue.
The Internet was already blaring the news:
THE METEORITE—
MENACE OR MESSAGE FROM MARS?
NON NEWS FROM NOVATO!
ALIENS AMONG US!?
HAS ELVIS RETURNED?
UFOs Attack California!
MARIN MIRAGE—LIBERAL CONSPIRACY?
and so on, getting progressively more lurid with each new rendition.
Mindon had phoned several observatories in the western US, and CNN had already sent a reporter up from San Francisco to provide an “objective” story on the event. Fox hadn’t even bothered, simply announcing that another “Kooky Kalifornia Komedy” was unfolding among the “marinated minds of Marin County.” I flipped through the TV channels, getting progressively more disgusted by the lack of serious coverage.
“It’s as if we didn’t exist,” I told Becky.
“It doesn’t matter, Alex,” she said, putting down her book. “They’ll find out soon enough.”
Once again, I wish in retrospect that I’d paid more attention to my wife’s prescience.
“What are you reading?”
She showed me the garish cover: What the Future Holds!—and What You Can Do About It!!! by Madame Stavroula.
“You remember her,” she said. “She was the one who told your fortune at the Renaissance Fair last year.”
“Oh, yeah.”
I