“Wow, you just mixed a Star Trek and Star Wars reference in the same statement.” Nat mimed shooting me with a handgun. “If there’s any justice, you should be getting hit by lightning any second now.”

  We’d moved away from the location of the invisible structure during this exchange. Now I laid the devices carefully on the ground, in a line.

  “Do we want to try these in any particular order?” Nat asked.

  “Patrick and I tentatively identified a gun and a communicator. Let’s try those last,” I said. “Two of them are touchscreen only—we think—so if we can’t get the screens to light up, we’re out of luck with those. That leaves this one.” I held up the device with the V and I buttons and the small display screen. “Either V and I are letters in the Bigfoot alphabet, or they’re symbols that maybe mean on and off.”

  Nat examined all the items. “I’m betting they’re symbols. Arrows are pretty obviously symbols, and the shower or spray icon sorta feels like one too.”

  “So which one is which, you think?”

  Nat shrugged. “Flip a coin. You know what? Let’s just press buttons until something happens.”

  I held my breath and pressed the V button. There was a vibration in the unit, and the small display screen lit up with what looked like alien text. After a few seconds, the screen dimmed, then went out. I pressed the V button again, and the same text came back, but without the vibration. I pressed the I button, and after a moment, the text vanished, this time without dimming.

  “Looks like V is on and I is off. And this thing is telling us something, but … ” I shrugged. “Barring a Bigfoot/English dictionary, I think we’re S.O.L. as far as that’s concerned.”

  Nat looked up. “And no reaction from the ship.”

  I picked up one of the items with what we’d assumed was a touchscreen and poked at it. “No reaction from the touchscreen. We might not have the same capacitance as a Bigfoot, so it doesn’t register my touch.”

  “That just leaves the communicator and ray gun,” Patrick said.

  Nat nodded absently. “Assuming your guesses are correct.”

  “Even if they are, we really don’t know what the ray gun will do,” I replied.

  “Maybe it shoots out men named Ray.”

  I gave Nat my best long-suffering look. “Well, when I’m playing with the ray gun, I’m going to point it away from anyone.”

  “That’d be nice.”

  I pointed the device in a random direction and pressed the shower button. There was a slight vibration but no other effect. I looked at the buttons again. “I’m going to try purple, then red. The interlock on the red setting makes me nervous. Maybe you guys should stand back.”

  “What, you’re suddenly worried about a self-destruct after that pretty speech earlier? Jeez, Jack.”

  “Okay then. It’s your funeral. And mine.” I set the device to purple and pressed the shower button, once again to no effect.

  I then moved the slider to red, working it around the double-latch. This time when I pressed the button, the vegetation in front of me wilted, turned brown, and started to melt, or maybe leak fluid. “Holy shit! Ray gun verified.” I moved the slider back to blue. “And red means dead. Let’s not play with this one.”

  Patrick, staring at the circle of now-putrefying grass, said, “Uh-huh. Let’s not.”

  I carefully returned the ray gun to my backpack, along with all the other items except the communicator. I held it up. “Last chance.”

  No one chose to comment, so I pressed the V button. The small display screen lit up with more alien text, and there was a small beep. I waited a few seconds, then pressed the I button. “Well, that was a bust.”

  “Why didn’t you speak into it?” Nat asked.

  “Do we really want to announce our presence?” I asked. “What if something answered? What are we supposed to say?”

  “Good afternoon, sir or madam,” Nat replied with an evil grin. “Do you have a moment to talk about our Lord and savior, Cthulhu?”

  Patrick chuckled. “Sure, let’s do that.”

  I looked at the alien device, a sense of helpless rage overwhelming me. “Well, this is just wonderful beyond belief. We have an alien spaceship, but we can’t open it up. We have a bunch of alien devices, but we can’t make them do anything.”

  “Except the ray gun,” Patrick said.

  I looked up to heaven. As usual, no response. “I need a drink.”

  I stared at the half-full glass in my hand, trying not to give in to bitter disappointment. Around the table, Patrick and Natalie were having similar philosophical discussions with their drinks. All in all, we’d exchanged perhaps five words since leaving the landing site.

  I leaned back in my chair and looked around. The pub, the Wild Knight Inn, was almost dead empty—unusual for a Saturday. Even so, the place smelled slightly of stale, spilt beer. The TVs were on, silently offering various sporting events, including a darts competition. The one waitress seemed to have given up on getting paying customers and was just leaning against the bar with a faraway expression, probably marking time until the end of her shift. The closest occupied table was a good twenty feet away, and the lone occupant was captivated by the nearest television. There wouldn’t be any trouble with our conversation being overheard.

  I took a deep breath and broke the silence. “We’ve missed something.”

  Patrick looked up. “Eh?”

  “Chewbacca had to have a way to get into the ship. We can’t get into the ship. Therefore, we’ve missed something.”

  “Excellent logic, Jack,” Nat replied. “But not helpful unless we can figure out what, exactly, we’ve missed.”

  I opened my mouth to reply just as my phone rang. I pulled it out and glanced at the caller ID. Alice Kirby? Why would she be calling? We couldn’t have screwed up her order; it hadn’t changed in years. And anyway, she knew to call the store if there was a problem.

  I liked Mrs. Kirby, but she could go on and on sometimes. I sent the call to voicemail, put the phone down, and nodded to Nat. “Okay, what are the possibilities? Just list them for now, no critiques or dismissals.”

  Patrick thought for a moment. “Facial recognition.”

  “Biometrics on the gadgets,” said Nat.

  “Voice recognition.”

  “A sensor plate on the ship you have to press.”

  “Someone inside has to open the door.”

  “You have to press several buttons at the same time, or in a sequence.”

  “One of the touch screens has the ‘open’ command.”

  “We don’t have the door opener.”

  I snapped my jaw shut on what I was going to say and turned to Natalie with a disbelieving expression. She looked embarrassed and continued with a hand wave. “What if we don’t have all the gadgets? What if Chewbacca dropped one when you ran him over? Or it dropped off during all the subsequent handling?”

  “Huh.” I thought for a moment. “That’s not completely implausible. It’s also the easiest option to check, so maybe we do that first.”

  The drive back to the accident site was as silent as the drive to the pub, but the vibe was far more upbeat. And Patrick seemed determined to beat his previous time with each trip, which helped boost my adrenalin even more.

  We reached our destination, but Patrick parked a good fifty feet from the location of the accident.

  “Why so far away?” I asked.

  “If Chewbacca lost some items in the impact, I wouldn’t want to run them over.” Without waiting for a response, Patrick slammed the door and marched toward the accident site.

  When we caught up with him, he was standing in the depression left by the corpse. The grass had almost completely recovered, leaving only a slight contour where the dead alien had come to rest.

  I pointed at the road. “Nothing on the pavement. And if Chewbacca was thrown to here, any gadgets would probably fly this way as well.”

  We searched for half an hour, carefully parting the scrub grass, but came up empty.

  “An item wouldn’t be invisible, right?” Natalie said.

  “I doubt it. The invisibility comes from either the belt or one of the items on it,” I replied. “Everything became visible as soon as we took it off the corpse. I don’t see why some other random item would have its own invisibility generator.”

  “Fair enough,” Patrick said. “Then Chewbacca didn’t drop anything. Here, anyway.” He looked around. “I guess we have to follow the body. Where’d you load it up again?”

  I pointed, and we spent a few minutes checking that location.

  “Still nothing,” Patrick said. “Next, the truck. You haven’t brought it into the shop yet, have you?”

  “Not yet,” I replied. “Monday.”

  “Then we need to get this done now.”

  “Well, hell,” Patrick said. The three of us sat slouched in our favorite chairs in the barn. A search of the truck had turned up nothing. We’d even rechecked the corpse and had come up empty.

  “It was a nice theory,” I said. “Now I guess we have to consider the harder—”

  My cell phone rang mid-sentence. It was Mrs. Kirby again. I knew she would just keep calling until I picked up. So I answered the phone and treated my friends to half of a conversation.

  “Hello … ? Yes, hi … No, not that I know of. What does it look like … ? Oh, actually, yes, that is mine. Can I come over and get it … ? Great, thanks. Bye.”

  I hung up feeling slightly foolish and turned to the others with a smile on my face. “So, uh, Mrs. Kirby was just calling me to ask if I dropped something of mine when I was delivering her groceries. A beautiful metallic blue, she says. She thought it might be a cell phone.”

  Patrick chuckled. Nat asked, “How did it end up at her place?”

  I opened my arms, palms up, in an expansive gesture of helplessness and futility at the sadistic randomness of the universe. “Fell out of the burrito onto her delivery when I was loading in the corpse? Who knows? At this point, who cares?” I glared at Patrick. “Why aren’t you already starting the car?”

  I walked slowly back to the Duster, staring down at the item in my hand. It was a perfect match for the rest of Chewbacca’s tech. And it did kind of resemble a cell phone—one of the older ones, before iPhones and Galaxies redefined the shapes. Maybe—if you were in your nineties and your vision wasn’t as good as it used to be. And you considered color TV to be the newest newfangled thing that you cared to own.

  I hunched my shoulders. That was unkind. Mrs. Kirby was doing just fine. She lived on her own, and had found a level of technology that was comfortable for her. It could be easy to forget sometimes that no one was actually obligated to be up on all the latest.

  Meanwhile, though, we had another shot at the flying saucer. I grinned and waved the gadget as I opened the car door. “To the Bat-Saucer, Robin.”

  “Bite me. Robin never drove. That makes you Robin.”

  I turned to Nat. “And you’d be Batgirl?”

  “Batwoman.”

  I looked closely at the gadget. “Interesting. Look at the symbols on the buttons.” I held it out so they could see it.

  “Same V and I buttons,” Nat said.

  “So on and off. Or maybe open and close?”

  “Let’s hope,” Patrick said, and started the car.

  We made it out to the accident site even more quickly this time. Practice combined with excitement resulted in a ride that could charitably be described as hair-raising. Patrick parked in the same spot as last time, and we piled out of the car. I stopped for a moment to look both ways. This road really was deserted. I’d be surprised if there was more than one car every ten minutes. I could see how I’d taken Chewbacca by surprise.

  The others had moved ahead of me, so I rushed to catch up, and we hiked out to the landing site. Natalie did the zombie thing for a moment, then announced, “Yep. Still here.”

  “Now wouldn’t that have been a kick in the crotch, if it had left in the meantime?” I muttered. Reaching into my pocket, I pulled out the new gadget and held it in the air. “The moment of truth. Anyone want to make a speech?”

  “Or kiss their ass goodbye?” Patrick added.

  “Do we really want to do this?” Nat said.

  “Same logic still applies, Nat,” I replied. “We can’t sneak up on this or do it incrementally. We press the button or we give up the discovery.” I waved the device. “What’ll it be?”

  Nat stuck out her chin. “I don’t want to rot in this town. Push it.”

  I glanced at Patrick, who had a slightly wide-eyed look, not quite deer-in-the-headlights, but certainly getting there. “Well?”

  He sighed. “Aw, who am I kidding? Nat’s right. Life in Dunnville is just a slower form of death. At least if we get disintegrated, it’ll be quick. Push it.”

  So that was that. I tried to avoid thinking about what this said about our lives. Nodding as much to myself as to my friends, I pressed the V button.

  Chapter Four: Open Sesame

  There was a double chirp and two parallel rows of lights flashed in midair, in sync with the sounds. Immediately, a curved section of metal hull appeared between the lights and began to lower itself like a drawbridge.

  “It double-chirped,” Patrick said with a laugh. “It friggin’ chirp-chirped, like my dad’s Toyota. It’s a friggin’ key fob. This is beginning to feel like the world’s biggest practical joke.”

  “Well, common design requirements,” I said. “You wouldn’t want the loading ramp to squish people when it came down, so warning beeps make sense.”

  Nat was obviously not impressed. “Yeah, that’ll work right up to the point where it doesn’t. Just make sure you’re not standing under something when that happens.” She gestured at the ramp, which had completed its descent, showing a set of stairs leading to the interior.

  I moved my head sideways to get a different angle. The entrance hung in midair, seemingly attached to nothing, like a green-screen effect, and opened into some kind of vestibule or antechamber. I walked slowly around the ramp, feeling like reality had come slightly loose. From behind the ramp, nothing was visible. My friends seemed to be staring upward into thin air, their jaws in danger of coming unhinged. As I came around all the way, the entrance reappeared.

  “Are we going in?” Nat said.

  “After you,” Patrick said, motioning to me.

  “No, no, I insist,” I replied. “You first.”

  “Oh, I would never be so rude. Please, be my guest.”

  “I couldn’t possibly. After you.”

  “Oh, surely not—”

  “Assholes,” Nat snarled, and stomped up the stairs.

  Reluctantly abandoning the Chip and Dale routine, Patrick and I followed. The stairs had a very low rise, probably in keeping with Chewbacca’s short legs. This resulted in a shallow incline and an easy, if awkward, climb. At the top of the stairs, Nat stood in the vestibule, waiting for us.

  The floor appeared to be either a fine carpet or a spongy mat. It was hard to make out, but the surface was definitely soft and slightly springy. It was a more muted version of the robin’s-egg blue of the gadgets, while the walls and ceiling were a pale greenish-yellow. The area was well-lit, but the light didn’t seem to be coming from anywhere in particular.

  There was a set of buttons at the top of the stairs, with the same V and I icons as the key fob. At the other end of the vestibule was a door, vaguely reminiscent of the hatches found in submarines and military ships, but more delicate in design.

  And beside the hatch was another set of buttons, with the same icons.

  “Well, this seems pretty straightforward,” I said, pointing at the buttons. “I guess this is an airlock of sorts.”

  “Very tasteful,” Nat added. “Chewbacca had good color sense.”

  “Maybe he was wealthy, and this was his yacht.” Patrick bobbed his head back and forth. “I’m not sure if that would be better or worse than some of the alternatives.”

  Natalie went to the buttons by the hatch and, before anyone could object, pressed the V.

  Nothing happened.

  “Interlock,” I muttered, and pressed the I button at the top of the ramp. There was a single chirp, and the ramp began to rise.

  As the ramp locked into place, all outside sounds cut off, like a switch had been thrown. A few seconds later, the smells of outdoor Taft County disappeared from the air. Normally, I didn’t notice the ever-present odors of dust and dry grass and just a hint of manure, but the sudden absence of anything tweaked something in my mind.

  The air also felt cooler, maybe sixty-five degrees. The speed with which the air had been conditioned and cleansed, particularly without anything like a fan coming on, was impressive.

  Nat placed her finger over the V button again. “Last chance. We don’t know what’s on the other side of this door.”

  “I couldn’t live with myself if I chickened out now,” Patrick said. “Let’s do this.”

  Natalie nodded and pushed the button. The hatch did a complicated twisting/folding thing and swung open.

  I stepped through last and eyed the door mechanism as I went past. Interestingly, it appeared the design was intended to resist overpressure from either side. Any overpressure in either direction would simply seat the door more firmly. It was a brilliant design, and I made a mental note of it.

  The corridor beyond the door led in a straight line for twenty or thirty feet, with several doors—doors, not hatches—on either side. They looked vaguely Star Trek-like in that they had no handles, just buttons to the right. On a whim, I pushed one. The door retracted with a faint hiss similar to an elevator door opening. “No whoosh, thank God,” I said, grinning at my friends.

  The room was unoccupied and appeared to be an office or work area. Desks and chairs, their proportions all wrong in some undefinable way, sat in focus-group circles, each with a monitor and what might have been some alien variation of a keyboard.