Up went the curtain and an unseen hand shoved him forward, sending him stumbling out on stage. Apparently this was an accepted mode of entry, because the crowd roared at his appearance. Backed by an incomprehensible rampage of sound, he stared out at the mob. The club was a milling sea of expectant faces, outrageous hair, and enough pierced body parts to do a tribe of nineteenth-century Papuans proud.

The combination of deafening music and braying crowd sounded like a well blowout on hold. He tried to say something to the bass player, without success. The man was wearing industrial-strength earplugs and didn’t acknowledge him. Helpless, he turned to the seething, boiling mass of postpubescent humanity. Tealeaf was right; it was the standard packed-house Hollywood crowd: riot-in-a-box, with applause the coupon on the back.

He wasn’t sure the activity many of them were engaged in could be called dancing. Certainly it was a long way from doing the cotton-eyed Joe. Glancing into the wings he saw Caroline smiling encouragingly and an anxious Tealeaf gesturing for him to do something, anything. Caroline had on a new outfit, he noticed. It looked expensive.

Taking center stage, he pulled out his harmonica and began playing. Though he wondered how they could possibly pick out the homely hum of the harp from the background bellow, the crowd noise immediately ratcheted up a notch.

Something soared past his head to land in the vicinity of the drummer, who kicked it aside without missing a beat. Not especially familiar with feminine hygiene products, Ross Ed was unable to identify it. Without waiting for him, the band launched into another song. Though he didn’t know it, it was actually quieter on stage than out front beneath the towering obelisks of gigantic black speakers. Occasionally a member or two of the audience would pause to caress the speakers in a pantomime reminiscent of a particularly famous scene from a well-known movie.

Ross Ed thought about trying the harmonica again. Instead, he found himself looking down at Jed. How anyone could hear anything he said in his alien voice he couldn’t imagine, but Tealeaf was waving frantically and pointing at the crowd. Caroline smiled encouragingly, fingering the new necklace that adorned her neck.

He couldn’t just sit there, he knew. Settling Jed on his knee, he did his best to improvise.

Something must have engaged because the suit began to glow. This time the light was pale green. Axing away, the lead guitarist grinned at him. Ross found himself mumbling the words to a favorite old song. Results were immediate.

The hundred or so kids who found themselves actually dancing on the ceiling didn’t miss a step, but it did slow the band for a minute. Mattress the drummer kept pounding out the backbeat rhythm, however, and the two astonished guitarists soon picked up where they’d left off.

As for the dancers, they weren’t fazed in the slightest. Progeny of a technologically sophisticated society, they embraced the inversion of natural law as readily as they would a new ride at Disneyland, to which the more thoughtful members of the mob were already comparing the experience.

Experimenting, Ross Ed soon had them bouncing off the walls, ceiling, and floor simultaneously. Dance moves were tried that had previously existed only in levered imaginations as the club scene was subsumed in a mad Einsteinian jitterbug. “Swing your partner” took on meaning that country had never intended.

The stage remained relatively inviolate. Why climb on stage to throw yourself back into the audience when you could bang your head on the roof? It was advanced moshing of a kind that made Samoan fire dancing look like the fox-trot.

Shrieks of delight and screams of pleasure rose above the roar, inspiring the band to even more frenzied riffs in which Ross Ed’s alien song-speak was submerged but not lost. He amused himself by trying to separate the males in the crowd from the females. Given the variations in attire, hair, and bodily adornment it proved an impossible task, a result which would have delighted the participants.

There was no panic. The youthful audience adapted to the gravitational alternations as if they’d been doing so all their lives. Some of the spins and gyrations they invented were wondrous to behold. Occasionally Ross Ed or one of’ the band members would have to fend off overly exuberant dancers by shoving their flying bodies back into the seething maelstrom of the audience, much to the latter’s delight.

When Ross changed to another song and the crowd gently drifted back to earth, there were a few shouts and howls of disappointment. These vanished when the monsters began appearing among them and started choosing up panners.

Not really monsters, some of them were simply monstrous in appearance. They were other aliens, in a remarkable plethora of sizes, shapes, and colors. Another of the suit’s miraculous defensive mechanisms had been deployed, he decided. How it had determined that the dancers were a threat he couldn’t imagine, unless one considered a wild-eyed, madly gyrating seventeen-year-old girl clad mostly in buckles, braces, and leather a danger.

Marvelously detailed and possessed of more than a little solidity, the aliens included males, females, neuters, and a couple who were a walking education in reproductive adaptation. He wondered how many the suit was inventing and how many it had dredged up from some vast stored memory of images. If the latter, then the universe included a great many more intelligences than anyone suspected, some sufficiently outrageous as to skate believability. Not one looked remotely like Jed.

Caroline was enjoying the show from the wings while Tealeaf tried frantically to talk on her cellular phone. Even with one hand over her other ear the colossal din must be making it impossible for her to make herself understood to the party on the other end. While the band managed to preserve its equipment, the crowd started to take the club apart. Feeling themselves invulnerable and super-invigorated, they began with the lighting fixtures and moved on to tables and chairs. Confronted by a raging mob of rampaging aliens and teenagers, the outnumbered bouncers sensibly sought refuge in the comparative safety of the manager’s office.

A first cousin to the giraffe thing Ross Ed had seen on Tealeaf’s television kept bumping its head into the lower light fixtures. Sparks and electrical flashes flew, adding to the general air of uncontrolled celebration. There wasn’t much he and the band could do except play on. It sounded like someone was banging a derrick on the roof.

A girl with rings in most visible parts of her body leaped up on stage. Throwing her arms around Jed, she planted a big fat kiss on the transparent faceplate. Ross Ed started to push her away.

“Look, hon, I don’t know if that’s such a good—”

There was a scintillating, actinic flash. Every hair on the girl’s head, of which there were a fair number, promptly stood straight out. Remarkably, so did the hair of her eyebrows and for all he knew, any hair that remained anywhere else. She was wearing a lot of metal, which he suspected had aided in conducting the charge. There was also a certain amount of heat involved, because the lipstick had melted right off her mouth. It ran in a purple streak down her face and onto her chest.

Arms and legs spread wide, she staggered backward, eyes staring straight ahead, and tumbled backward into the crowd. It accepted her with a roar, like some vast, amorphous, carnivorous animal. Her expression as she was swallowed up was a mixture of shock and divine delight. Someone put her back on her feet and Ross saw her blink, reassuring him that she wasn’t dead.

Her shocking experience precipitated a rush toward the stage by every young woman within twenty feei. Many were dressed as if they’d failed metal shop in school, and had decided to make projects of themselves.

As they threatened to overwhelm the stage, they suddenly smashed together in a great writhing mass of female confusion. When one girl tried to pull herself free, she found herself immediately snapped back into the pile. Nose rings, earrings, and innumerable other rings, together with an astonishing assortment of additional objects metallic in origin had suddenly become magnetized, silver and copper as well as steel.

Stumbling, screaming, and staggering, the compacted mass of adolescent feminity staggered about until it fell back into the crowd, still stuck together. As a defense mechanism it equated or exceeded anything the alien suit had exhibited thus far.

Though it seemed impossible, the noise level inside the club had intensified. In the distance he saw people from off the street, who having heard the joyous cacophony, were trying to force their way inside through the single narrow entrance. That son of cramming would bring the fire department and close on their heels, the police, neither of which Ross Ed wanted to have to deal with.

In fact, he’d reached the conclusion that if this was what contemporary show business required, he much preferred the kind of simple, low-key ventriloquist act he’d perfected at the bar in the El Paso Sheraton. Rising, he determined that he and Jed had just given their first and last onstage performance.

The light from the alien suit shifted from green to a deep, ominous purple. As it did so, the air in the club began to change. Sensitive high-tech equipment for atmospheric analysis wasn’t necessary to detect the shift. The atmopshere was thickening, as if the cavernous room was filling with a pale mauve fog.

At first it didn’t affect the dancers, who continued to thrash and mosh energetically. While the exotic mist thickened around them, sucking up the alien arrivals, the air remained clear and fresh on stage. Then, without warning, the giddy celebrants began to slump where they were standing. There was no coughing or hacking, no gasping for air. People simply keeled over; sometimes in tandem with their partners, more frequently by themselves. The more resilient crumpled atop those who had succumbed first. To a one, all wore the look of the happily high.

That’s when Caroline burst from the wings. “Ross Ed, don’t you see what’s happening? You’ve got to make it stop!”

“Don’t reckon I can, Caroline. Shoot, I don’t even know what’s going on.”

Wearing a murderous scowl, one of the managers was charging the stage. He didn’t quite make it before the fog caught up with him. His expression underwent a shift startling in its suddenness, from the homicidal to the sublimely stupid, as his eyes rolled back in his head and he fell over in a heap of customers.

Only when none were left standing did the band finally pack it in. No one made any obvious jokes about “laying them in the aisles” or “knocking ’em dead.” For one thing, no one was dead. As proof of this a loud whine filled the club’s interior. Instead of the sound of ten hands clapping, it was the drone of a hundred throats snoring, interspersed with the occasional semicomatose giggle.

Drumsticks dangling from one hand, a perspiring Mattress put a comradely arm around Ross Ed’s shoulders. The band members hadn’t thought much of him at first, him not being a musician and all, but the prematurely terminated show had changed their opinion.

“Too cool, dude. Like, when’s the next gig? Imagine doing this at the Forum, or like, Anaheim Stadium!”

Ross Ed politely disengaged himself and took Caroline’s hand. It had an unnatural feel to it. Looking down, he saw that it was newly adorned with rings. He tucked Jed higher under his other

“Let’s get out of here.”

Behind him, the lead guitarist wiped hair and sweat from his face. “Hey, man, you be at the studio next week?”

“Sorry, guys, but I think I’m out.”

“What!” The leader of the backups cursed and threw his instrument down on the stage. “You can’t quit on us now, man! Look at what you’ve done!” He gestured at the slumberous audience.

’That’s why I’m leaving.”

“Sweetie baby darling, you can’t do this!” It was Tealeaf, her phone back in her purse. “What happened out there, anyway?”

“I told the guys. I don’t know. I only hope I didn’t hurt

“You didn’t hurt anyone.” She pointed. “See?”

Ross Ed turned. People were starting to rise. Many put their hands to their heads. Others inhaled deeply. A few wandered about wide-eyed but blind, bumping off the wails and each other. Those who returned first from the fog into which the fog had put them began to clap. Several cheered, feebly but with becoming enthusiasm.

“You see?” Tealeaf was at her encouraging best. ‘key love you. They want more. Our contract with the club calls for you to—”

“Screw the club.” Caroline locked her arm firmly in Ross Ed’s. “We’re going back to the beach house.”

The diminutive producer eyed them appraisingly. The woman was implacable, the Texan immovable. “All right, you go ahead. I know this has been rough on you. Overnight success is tough on everybody. Get some rest. I’ll deal with management. But I’m warning you: when word of what happened here gets out, I won’t be able to cope with the offers. You’re going to be a very rich, very famous oil worker, Ross Ed Hager.”

“C’mon, Caroline.” Unsure whether he wanted to be very rich or even a little bit famous, Ross guided his two companions, one more alive than most and the other exceedingly calm, toward the backstage exit.