Wasn’t anything else to do but to do it, he decided laconically. He’d worked most of his adult life in a dangerous profession and knew that sometimes you just had to throw the valve and see what resulted.

Gripping the mini Mag in his teeth, he slowly slipped his right arm beneath the corpse. Nothing arose to contest the gesture and he felt only cool dirt beneath the dry suit. His left hand went beneath the three legs. He lifted, and the body came up easily in his arms.

The alien felt light but might have been more of a burden to someone smaller than Ross Ed. It weighed no more than fifty, sixty pounds, he estimated. Certainly nothing he couldn’t handle with ease.

Crouching low, he turned and started back toward the entrance. Once through the cleft he was able to straighten. Cradling the alien against his chest, he slipped the Maglite and keys back in his pocket.

The three legs and three arms lay slack, but the head remained upright. Whether this posture was a consequence of alien anatomy or some internal support mechanism he didn’t know and couldn’t tell. Rigor mortis, maybe, he told himself. Did the alien even have a skeleton? Feeling of the dangling legs, it was hard to tell.

Returning to the picnic site, he found no sign of the boisterous family which had impelled him to climb the granite outcropping. That suited him fine. He had no desire to encounter them or anyone else, lest he might be asked to explain his peculiar burden. A light was visible in one of the distant transient trailers, but no one emerged from within.

The big Caddy remained as he’d left it, sunlight glinting off the chrome. The same light allowed him to view the alien face with greater clarity. The dun-colored, slightly mottled flesh did not appear mummified or desiccated. Ross Ed suspected that in life his prize was just naturally gaunt.

The same went for the rest of the body, though there was a noticeable thickening where shoulders and hips ought to be located. Pressing one ear to the faceplate, he heard nothing.

Unlocking the car, he put the ice chest and the half-empty chicken bucket back in the trunk. He was about to add the alien when a mildly mischievous thought caused the corners of his mouth to twitch upward.

Slamming the trunk shut, he walked around to place the corpse in the spacious passenger seat, taking care to seat it in an upright position. No telling how long the poor fella (despite the lack of any proof he had decided to think of it as male) had been stuck in that damn cave. Time he saw something of the country. It would be nice to have a driving companion the rest of the way to California.

While the head remained perfectly upright, the limbs lolled loosely. Splaying out the three legs kept the body securely positioned.

Leaving his find, he relocked the car and returned to the cave. An extensive search revealed nothing else; no signs of a ship, no tools, no bits of suit fabric, no other caves, nothing. But on occasion, when stepping over a log or kicking aside a pile of pinecones and needles, or gazing up through the branches, he would see strange skittering creatures or great suns or hazy worlds rotating ponderously on their endless path through the cosmos. They would pop up unannounced and then fade from view, like the dots that appear when a bright light is abruptly flashed in one’s eyes.

Flashbacks, he told himself. The longer he walked the less frequent they became.

Convinced there was nothing else to be found, or at least nothing else that he could find, he returned to the parking area. The alien was as he’d left him, seated motionless in the passenger’s seat. Ross flipped the key in the ignition, pulled off the dirt, backed onto the pavement, and headed down the highway toward Alamogordo.

No one glanced in his direction as he made his way down the winding road and out of the mountains. To see his passenger another car would have to come within a foot or two of the Caddy. Even if someone did, at most they might think there was a funny-looking mannequin propped up in the passenger seat.

Ignoring the usual tourist-oriented billboards and blandishments, he drove straight through Alamogordo, not stopping until he reached the town’s western outskirts. There he pulled into a Quickstop. A glance at the fuel gauge had revealed that the Cadillac was almost as thirsty as he was.

Popping the massive hood, he checked water, oil, and battery while the gas pump click-clicked away dollars as efficiently as any slot machine. Throughout, his passenger offered neither comment not advice but instead sat patiently, awaiting a return to the road. Iridescent eyelids flashed briefly as Ross Ed worked his way back to the pump.

He winced at the amount on the meter, a by-now-reflexive response. The total was always greater than he expected. The price of comfort, he reminded himself resignedly.

Drawing his battered wallet from a front pocket, he entered the store and found himself in line behind a slim teenager who had adopted the protective sandy coloration of the nearby desert and a stout rancher slicked with grease. Patiently the man counted out dollar bills to pay for the two tanks of gas consumed by his enormous, extra-cab pickup.

While he waited to pay, Ross Ed let his gaze wander around the rest of the store. Sticky Slurpee machine, magazine racks, room-length glass-doored refrigerator crammed full of cold drinks, box displays of candy, cookies, road medicine and cheap souvenirs, forlorn baby cactus, and in the distance, a scarred restroom door whose cryptic handprint hieroglyphics all but cried out, “Abandon hygiene all ye who enter here.”

His eyes came to rest on the single book rack, eighty percent of which was devoted to the tattered works of Louis L’Amour. The remainder was a mixed bag of large and small paperbacks. Several in particular not only caught his attention, but succeeded in drawing him out of the line.

All dealt with the same subject matter. The titles meant nothing to him. The Roswell Incident. Cover-up at Roswell. UFO Compendium 1945-1995. Not did the cheap reproductions of photos and drawings purporting to show flying saucers particularly intrigue him.

The book he did pick up showed an alien, the same sort of alien everyone seemed to be seeing these days. There was the narrow, egg-shaped head featuring gigantic eyes much too large for the skull, the minuscule nose, and the tiny, pinched arc of a mouth. All in all it looked about as much like the being he’d removed from the cave as his aunt Pamela.

Flipping through the book supplied nothing of interest. Replacing it on the rack, he sampled another, with the same result. Each volume seemed to have its own agenda to push, each author claiming to be the one in sole possession of “the real facts.” The thread that unified them was something called “the Roswell Incident,” which claimed that the air force and the government had conspired to cover up the crash of a UFO near the town of Roswell, New Mexico, back in 1947.

He hadn’t gone through Roswell, having passed well to the south of it, but the presence of so many books on the rack together with that of a certified alien in his car compelled him to read on. Not only was he a fast reader, but living and working on an oil rig out in the Gulf of Mexico afforded one the opportunity as well as the desire to indulge in every available type of literature.

Each book included long-winded discussions of such matters as weather balloons, government warehouses, witnesses of dubious probity, and secret laboratories. To the assorted authors a government cover-up seemed a foregone conclusion, though Ross Ed thought their arguments, as presented, pretty specious. Real National Enquirer-type material.

Except … right now he was traveling through southern New Mexico with an alien in his car.

Could the proponents of the Roswell theory maybe be half-right? All sorts of scenarios were possible.

Regardless of the truth, the supposed incident appeared to have spawned an entire local industry founded on the premise that something odd had happened in New Mexico back in the late forties. He considered purchasing one or more of the books, reflected on his present penurious circumstances, and decided that he’d acquired the gist of the story through his browsing. For all the bored young man behind the cash register cared, Ross Ed could have spent the rest of the afternoon reading everything in the store. It would take a far braver soul to shout “Hey, bud, this ain’t no library!” at someone the size of the visiting Texan.

The line of people waiting to pay had evaporated and he shelled out cash for the gas, thanking the attendant as he departed. His thoughts were churning. There was no longer any question in his mind that he had not only an alien, but the famous Roswell alien. So what if it didn’t resemble any of the drawings? Farmers and ranchers made notoriously poor witnesses and were inclined to tell interviewers anything they wanted to hear.

Suppose his alien’s spaceship had actually looked like a weather balloon? Talk about your potential for confusion. In that event it meant that both the air force and the eyewitnesses were telling the truth. Contradictory truths.

“How ’bout it?” he asked his motionless companion. “Mighty long walk from Roswell up into those mountains.” As expected, the child-sized corpse did not reply.

He’d have to proceed carefully, he realized. His book browsing had revealed the existence of a coterie of enthusiasts who would probably stop at nothing to exploit his discovery.

“What should I do?” he deliberated aloud. “Should I turn you over to the saucer folk, or to the government? Should I set up a tent and charge folks to look at you? Or should I just dump you at an auction house in Dallas and have ’em sell you to the highest bidder?” As before, the corpse did not respond.

I’ve been on the road too long, he thought. Bad enough when you start talking to yourself. But talking to dead aliens? He shook his head slightly and grinned. Still, you never knew when a dead alien might reply.

“Guess we’ll keep thinking on it,” he murmured softly. “I’m headed for California. Want to see the Pacific. If that’s okay with you, well, you don’t have to say anything.” He paused briefly before adding, “That‘s what I thought.”

As he motored westward he found he could no longer think of his passenger as simply “the alien.” There’d been an uncle on his father’s side who’d never said much. Just walked around wearing a little smile all the time that suggested he knew more than everybody else. The rest of the family thought he was weird, but Ross had always gotten along well him. Uncle Jedediah had been a good fella.

Though a fine and solid old name, Jedediah was a bit unwieldy for everyday use. Plain old Jed, now, that was easy on the palate. He glanced over at the alien.

“You ever seen the ocean, Jed?” He allowed a moment for the expected no-response. “Didn’t think you had. Me, I’ve seen a lot of the Gulf, but people say the Pacific’s a lot different. We’ll decide what to do with you once we get out there. If that sounds goud, you just sit tight and relax and leave everything else to me.” Jed complied with admirable restraint.

As the miles between Alamogordo and White Sands slid past, Ross Ed kept up a steady patter with his companion, describing the passing scenery with jovial gusto. Unlike some passengers he’d had in the Caddy, Jed never griped or tried to act the backseat driver. He was a fine fellow traveler: clean, neat, uncomplaining, and an excellent listener. Not did he need to go to the bathroom every five minutes like some of Ross Ed’s ex-girlfriends. Only in the area of reciprocal conversation did he fall noticeably short.

Ejection seats, Ross found himself wondering. Were they or some similar device standard equipment on alien spacecraft? Maybe that’s how Jed had arrived on Earth. It would explain the absence of a crash site in the vicinity of the cave.

A station wagon full of gray-haired retirees came up behind him and hummed past. One of the passengers studied the Caddy’s occupants and did a double take worthy of Harpo as she caught sight of Jed, but the wagon didn’t slow. It accelerated until it disappeared.

Ross Ed chuckled to his new friend. “Got ’em that time. Jed.” If the rest of the trip was going to be this much fun, he might even be able to survive the absence of Dairy Queens.

He let both hands rest easy on the wheel. “Bet they don’t have Lone Star on your planet. Do they even have beer? For that matter, do you drink? What’s supposed to go through that funny-looking mouth of yours, anyway!” He grinned as he swerved smoothly around an unidentifiable lump of roadkill. “Seein’ as how I found you in New Mexico, that makes you practically a Texan.” He gestured at the fields of gold that lined both sides of the highway.

“California poppies. Calling us west. Too bad you won’t be able to see any bluebonnets. This country’s too dry for them.” Resting his arm on the doorsill, he broke into song. The wind rushing past was warm, but not hot enough to justify running the gas-hungry air-conditioning. Certainly his passenger wasn’t sweating.

He ran through some Guy Forsythe and Muddbone tunes before his attention was distracted by the flashing lights in the rearview. They shattered his mood as effectively as a fishbowl dropped from the top of a rig.

“Damn!” Reflexively, he glanced down at the speedometer. He was only doing sixty, a relatively safe speed in a fifty-five zone. Insofar as he knew, everything on the Caddy was in working order, and he wasn’t trailing any loose bits. So what was up with the cop? Maybe his girlfriend was riding the rag.

He slowed gradually to make sure it was him the patrolman was after, then eased off onto the gravel shoulder. Sure enough, the big Kawasaki pulled in behind him, its lights alternating merrily. At least the officer hadn’t used his siren, which meant he wasn’t too exercised. Maybe he just wanted to deliver a warning, though for the life of him Ross Ed didn’t have a clue as to what he might have been doing wrong.

Had the cop had a bad day? Had his favorite team lost badly last night? Was his digestion bothering him? Had the coffee been hot enough this morning? On such small incidents did large fines frequently hang.

Ross leaned out the window, careful to keep both hands on the wheel and in plain sight. “Something wrong, Officer?”