An ancient John Deere tractor, trademark corn-green paint faded to a silver-teal, lay on its side, entwined by rambling weeds along the oiled-dirt driveway that led to the house, as if in some distant age,

the angry earth had rebelled at ceaseless cultivation and, loosing a sudden ravel of green brambles from its bosom, had snared the busy tractor, tipped it off its tires, and strangled the driver.

Micky had not originally intended to visit Teelroy, only to keep a watch on the house until Maddoc arrived. She drove past the farm, and immediately east of it, she saw that the north shoulder of the county road lay at the same elevation as surrounding land; she had her choice of several places where she could back the car among the trees to maintain surveillance from a relatively concealed position.

Before she could pick her spot, she began to worry that Maddoc might already have been here and gone. If she’d come after him, she would be maintaining surveillance while he and Sinsemilla headed out of Nun’s Lake with Leilani for points unknown, untraceable.

She’d chosen a route around Nevada, fearing that the government quarantine of the eastern portion of the state might widen to include the entire territory, trapping her within its boundaries. If Maddoc had taken the Nevada route and had encountered no roadblocks, he had traveled fewer miles to get here than she did.

Each day, she had driven long hours, surely much longer than Maddoc would have wanted to sit behind the wheel of a more-difficult-to-handle vehicle like the motor home. And she was confident that her Camaro had throughout the trip maintained a much higher average speed than his lumbering bus.

Nevertheless . . .

At first opportunity, she swung the car around and returned to the Teelroy farm. Entering the driveway, passing the rusting hulk of the overturned tractor, she slowed and took a closer look. She half expected to glimpse the sun-bleached bones of the bramble-strangled driver that she had previously imagined, because on second view the farm appeared to be an even grimmer place—and stranger—than it had been at first sight.

If Norman Bates, psycho of psychos, having escaped from the asylum and fearing that an immediate return to the motel business might make him easier for the police to find, decided to apply his knowledge of the hospitality industry to a simple bed-and-breakfast, this old house would have delighted him when he found it. Sun, rain, snow, and wind were the only painters these walls had seen in twenty years. Teelroy had done barely enough maintenance to spare himself from grisly death in a spontaneous structural implosion.

Between the Camaro and the porch steps, Micky crossed what remained of a front lawn: bare dirt and scraggly clumps of bunch-grass. The wooden steps popped and creaked. The porch floor groaned.

After knocking, she stepped back a few feet. By standing too close to the threshold, she seemed to be inviting a Jack the Ripper moment. The air could not have been stiller if the entire farm had been covered by a bell jar.

The bruised and swollen sky looked angry, as though momentarily it would take hard revenge on everything below it.

Micky didn’t hear anyone approaching the door, but abruptly it was yanked inward. Into the doorway hove a formidable bulk that smelled rather like sour milk, had a face as round and as red as a party balloon, and wore a beard so bristly that it looked less like hair than like tumbleweed. Bib overalls and a short-sleeve white T-shirt suggested this was a person standing before her, but the impression could be confirmed only by what she saw above a squash-shaped nose aglow and webbed with burst capillaries. Between that nose and a head as utterly hairless as a tomato, two fat-swaddled brown eyes confirmed his humanity, for they were filled nearly to overflowing with suspicion, misery, hope, and need.

“Mr. Teelroy?” she asked.

“Yes—who else?—nobody here but me.” From out of that bulk and beard and bad body odor had come a voice as sweet as a choirboy’s.

“You’re the Leonard Teelroy who had the close encounter?”

“What outfit are you from?” he asked pleasantly.

“Outfit?”

He looked her over from head to foot and back up again. “Real people don’t look as good as you, missy. You’re dressed down, tryin’ to hide it, but you’ve got Hollywood written all over you.”

“Hollywood? I’m afraid I don’t follow you.”

He peered past her at the Camaro in the driveway. “The junk heap’s a nice touch.”

“It’s not a touch. It’s my car.”

“People like me are born to cars like that. Someone looks as actress-pretty as you—she’s horn with a Mercedes key in one hand.”

He wasn’t gruff or argumentative. But he had his opinions and, in spite of his dulcet tones, an attitude.

He seemed to be expecting someone else. Because he appeared to have mistaken her for that person, she tried to start over.

“Mr. Teelroy, I’ve just come to hear about your UFO experience and to ask—“

“Of course you’ve come to ask, because it’s one of the great stories ever. It’s a blockbuster, what happened to me. And I’m willin’ to give you everythin’ you need—after the deal is made.”

“Deal?”

“But I expect honesty from anyone I do business with. You should have driven up in your real Mercedes, wearin’ your real clothes, and straight out told me what studio or network you’re with. You haven’t even told me your own name.”

Now she understood. He believed his UFO experience would be the next Spielberg epic, with Mel Gibson in the Leonard Teelroy role.

She didn’t have any interest in his close encounter; however, she saw a way to use his misapprehension to get the information that she really needed. “You’re a shrewd man, Mr. Teelroy.”

He beamed and seemed to swell in response to this compliment. His unnaturally red complexion brightened further, as boilers always brighten in cartoons just prior to exploding. “I know what’s fair. That’s all I’m asking—just what’s fair for a story this big.”

“I can’t reach my boss on a Sunday. Tomorrow, I’ll call him at the studio, discuss the situation, and come back with an offer in an entirely professional manner.”

He nodded slowly twice, as a courtly gentleman might acknowledge agreement with a lady’s kind proposal. “I’d be gratified.”

“One question, Mr. Teelroy. Do we have competition?” When he raised one eyebrow, she said, “Has a representative from another studio been here already this morning?”

“No one’s been here till you.” Suddenly and visibly, he realized that he ought to leave her with the impression that enormous sums had already been dangled before him. “One fella visited yesterday”—

he hesitated—“from one of the big studios.” Poor Leonard didn’t lie well; his boyish voice thickened with embarrassment at his boldness.

Even if someone had been here on Saturday, inquiring about the UFO, he couldn’t have been Maddoc. At most, the Prevost might have rolled into Nun’s Lake a few hours ahead of Micky.

“I won’t say which studio,” Teelroy added.

“I understand.”

“And not thirty minutes ago I had a call about all this. Man says he came here from California to see me, so I’m sure he’s one of you people.” The hesitancy and the thickness had gone out of his voice. This was no lie. “We have an appointment shortly.”

“Well, Mr. Teelroy, I’m sure you’ve heard of Paramount Pictures—haven’t you?”

“They’re big-time,”

“Way big-time. My name’s Janet Hitchcock—no relation—and I’m an executive with Paramount Pictures.”

If Maddoc proved to be the man with an appointment, she hoped to prevent Teelroy from mentioning her in such a way that the doom doctor would realize who’d been here before him. Now there would be no reference to a nameless “actress-pretty” woman in a dusty old Camaro. Teelroy would instead be eager to drop the name Janet Hitchcock of Paramount Pictures.

“Pleased to meet you, Miss Hitchcock.”

He held out his hand, and she shook it before she had time to think about where it might have been recently. “I’ll give you a call tomorrow,” she lied. “We’ll set up a meeting for the afternoon.”

Although the man was a grotesque, though he was trying to work a scam, though he might be delusional, possibly dangerous, Micky regretted lying to him. He’d shed all suspicion, but his eyes still brimmed with misery and need. He was more pathetic than offensive.

The world held too many people who couldn’t wait to shoot the wounded. She didn’t want to be one of them.

Chapter 63

CURT IS SITS in the co-pilot’s chair of the parked Fleetwood, gazing through the windshield, wondering if the nuns will risk water-skiing with a storm soon to break.

He had arrived here in Nun’s Lake Saturday afternoon, in the protection of the Spelkenfelter sisters. They settled in a campground on a site that offered them a view of the lake through framing trees.

During the past twenty-four hours, Curtis has spotted no nuns either on the lake or engaged in activities on its shores. This disappoints him because he has seen so many wonderful caring nuns in movies—Ingrid Bergman! Audrey Hepburn!—but has yet to glimpse a real live one since his arrival on this world.

The twins have assured him that if he is patient and watchful, he will see scores of fully habited nuns water-skiing, parasailing, and jet-boat racing. They have made these assurances with such delightful giggles that he infers that nuns at play must be one of the most charming sights this planet offers.

After Curtis revealed his true nature on Friday evening in Twin Falls, Cass and Polly volunteered to be his royal guard. He had tried to explain that he descended from no imperial lineage, that he was an ordinary person just like them. Well, not just like them, considering that he possesses the ability to control his biological structure and to change shape to imitate any organism that has a reasonably high level of intelligence, but otherwise pretty much like them, except that he has no talent as a juggler and would be paralyzingly self-conscious if he had to perform nude on a Las Vegas stage.

They, however, apply a Star Wars template to the situation. They insist on seeing him as Princess Leia without either ample br**sts or elaborate hairdo. The transmission for their sense of wonder has been engaged, shifted into high gear, and set racing. They say that they have long dreamed of this moment, and they are ready to dedicate the rest of their lives to helping him perform the work that his mother and her followers came here to do.

He has explained his mission to them, and they understand what he can do for humanity. He has not yet given them the Gift, but soon he will, and they are excited by the prospect of receiving it.

Because they have been so kind to him and because he has come to think of them as his sisters, Curtis was at first reluctant to remain with them and thus put them at risk. Since his lapse on Thursday, he has been Curtis Hammond without fail, in full and fine detail. He is less easily detected by his enemies now than he has been at any time since he arrived on this world, and hour by hour he blends better with the human population. Yet even when he can no longer be detected at all by the biological scanners that he has spent so much time and effort dodging, both human and extraterrestrial hunters will continue to search for him. And if the wrong scalawags ever find him, those who are aligned with him in his work—like Cass and Polly—will be marked for death as certainly as he himself is.

During his six frantic days on Earth, however, he has grown up; his terrible losses and his isolation from his own kind have forced him to the understanding that he must not merely survive, must not simply hope to advance his mother’s mission, but must seize the day and do the work. Do the work. This requires the strong assistance of a circle of friends, a reliable cadre of committed souls who are good of heart, quick of mind, and courageous. Much as he dreads having to assume responsibility for putting the lives of others at risk, he has no choice if he is to prove himself worthy of being his mother’s son.

Changing a world, as he must change this one to save it, comes at a cost, sometimes a terrible price.

If he must assemble a force for change, then Cass and Polly are the ideal recruits. The goodness of their hearts cannot be doubted, nor the quickness of their minds, and between them, they have enough courage to sustain a platoon of marines. Furthermore, their years in Hollywood have sharpened their survival skills and motivated them to become masters of weaponry, which has already proved useful.

They have brought Curtis to Nun’s Lake because they would have come here anyway if they’d never met him. It had been the next stop on their UFO pilgrimage, and they’d taken a detour to the Neary Ranch when the government cordoned off part of Utah in search of the crazed drug lords that all clear-thinking people knew must actually be ETs.

Besides, after the violent encounter at the crossroads store, they believed it would be wise to get farther from the Nevada border than Twin Falls, Idaho.

Now, after a much needed day of rest, as the twins confer in the dining nook, studying maps and deciding where best to go next, Curtis watches the lake for nuns at play. And he occupies his mind with such big plans for a world-changing campaign that his ten-year-old brain, though organically augmented more than once at his beloved mother’s insistence, feels as if it might explode.

Even when plans are being busily spun to save a world, dogs must pee. Old Yeller makes her urgent need known by pawing at the door and by rolling her eyes at her brother-become.

When Curtis goes to the door to let the dog out, Polly rises from the dining nook and warns him to stay inside, where he will be less easily detected if agents of the evil empire are in the vicinity with scanners.

He’s told them that there is no empire aligned against him. The true situation is in some ways simpler and in other ways more complex than standard political entities. The twins are staying with the Star Wars template nonetheless, perhaps hoping that Han Solo and a Wookie will show up in an Airstream travel trailer to add to the fun.

“I’ll take her out,” says Polly.

“No one needs to go along,” Curtis explains. “I’ll let her out by herself, but I’ll stay with her in spirit.”

“The boy-dog bond,” Polly says.

“Yeah. I can have a look around the campground through little sister here.”

“This is so Art Bell,” Polly says, referring to a radio talk-show host who deals in UFO reports and stories of alien contact. She shivers with the thrill of it.

Old Yeller jumps from the motor home to the ground, the sisters reconvene over the maps, and Curtis returns to the co-pilot’s seat.