by JoAnn Ross
“No, I haven’t heard a thing. You’re the first person to call since Mr. McCarthy wanted to file a complaint against John Allen’s snowplow blocking his driveway. What kind of lights?”
She switched the phone to the other ear and, reaching over, turned up the police scanner. It was set to the State Police frequency, and over the buzzing static, Kirby could hear numerous voices, all claiming to have seen something strange in the sky over Rum Runner Island.
“If one of you eggheads set off another experimental rocket without notifying me ahead of time, so help me, Nate—”
He cut her off with a rapid-fire spat of denial.
“All right. I believe you. You don’t have to bite my head off. It’s probably just the aurora borealis,” she decided. “I know it’s a little late in the year, but the weatherman on Channel Four said that it’s because of the solar flares, and, after all, you’re the one who told me the flares are what are causing so much chaos with the radio and television frequencies.
“So, although I’d love to have a spaceship land in the town square, just to liven things up around here, I don’t think it’s going to happen.”
They both laughed, but Kirby couldn’t help noticing that her brother’s laughter was not quite as robust as hers. What did he know that she didn’t?
“Well, whatever it is,” she said, “there’s undoubtedly a reasonable explanation. There always is.”
After making him promise to drive carefully on the way to the house, she hung up.
She’d no sooner disconnected the call than the phone chimed again.
And again.
An hour later, after it seemed that she’d talked to nearly all six hundred and forty of the island’s full-time residents, Kirby was left wondering what on earth had gotten into everyone.
Their stories varied, but everyone, from the mayor to Matthew Kelly—whose wood carvings had made him a celebrity among summer visitors who were willing to pay big bucks for a life-size porcupine made out of toothpicks—to Agnes Adams, the town’s librarian for forty-five years, all insisted that aliens had landed on the island.
The descriptions of the alleged spaceship ranged from a shimmering blue light to a white light shaped like a cigar to a silver saucer-shaped spaceship.
Johnny Kelly, Matthew’s son and paperboy for the weekly Rum Runner Island Yankee Observer, reported that he’d seen a gang of seven-foot-tall men dressed in what looked like Reynolds Wrap walking down Main Street, while seventy-nine-year-old Scott MacIntyre, who’d run the Shell station on Maple Drive since long before Kirby had been born, reported that three-foot-tall little green men with a single flashing eye in the middle of their foreheads had dug a hole in the football field at Evergreen High School.
And a hysterical Mildred O’Connor, owner of Mildred’s Shear Pleasures Beauty Emporium, was certain she’d seen a filmy, smoke-like entity going down her neighbor’s chimney.
“Do you think it could possibly be smoke coming out of the chimney?” Kirby asked mildly. She smiled as Mildred’s machine-gun-quick babble quieted.
“Don’t worry about it,” she said after the beautician apologized for calling. “That’s what I’m here for.”
“It must be the full moon,” she decided after the phone had been silent for twenty minutes. “That, along with the flares and the storm. Five straight days of staying indoors can make anyone stir-crazy.”
Kirby knew it was certainly getting to her.
Making a mental note to ask Nate if he knew of any instances where solar flares had caused mass hallucinations, she pulled on her gloves, put on her coat, switched the landline to ring at her house, and waded through the drifting snow to her Jeep Grand Cherokee.
* * *
It was as cold as the glacial plains of Algor.
Sebastian rubbed his bare arms briskly with his numbed hands, trying to get the frozen human blood circulating in his veins.
Wherever he was, he’d definitely plotted the coordinates wrong. Because if this was indeed Venice, California, someone in the archival agency had played a Jupitorian practical joke by exchanging holodiscs. As for proper clothing, for some unfathomable reason, he found himself clad in nothing but a pair of brief orange trousers printed with flowers that left his chest, arms, and most of his legs bare.
Damn it to Hadean, despite all reason, regardless of all the years he’d dedicated to planning this mission, somehow, he must have seriously miscalculated.
Sebastian knew that the entire Logosian scientific community thought him crazy for asking why propelled vehicles must be the only way to bridge the gap between solar systems. Why couldn’t it be that physics, not technology, held the ultimate answer to space travel?
After all, as he had pointed out at the annual meeting of interplanetary astrophysicists, any first-level Logosian was perfectly capable of sending thoughts for hundreds, even thousands of junctures.
By the fourth level, the average Logosian could send those same thoughts in three-dimensional holographic form. And by the time a Logosian reached the eighth level of maturity, he was able to utilize telekinesis to move around effortlessly beneath the planet dome.
So why couldn’t a person, aided by a pocket-size antimatter accelerator device, travel through the galaxies in an astral or ethereal body?
Why couldn’t the component atoms that made up Sebastian Blackthorne be taken apart, transported through space, utilizing the theory of quantum electrodynamics, and be put back together when they’d reached their destination? Indeed, why couldn’t they be rearranged to resemble some entirely different life-form?
Despite continued opposition from first the scientific community and then, when his heretical views became more widely known, from the Logosian ruling council itself, Sebastian had steadfastly refused to abandon his theory.
Displaying a dogged tenacity and drive that was considered, in his secular society of intellects, to be unseemly, he threw himself into his work.
Such inappropriate behavior resulted in his dismissal from his much sought-after position as head of the space council. Although the outcome had not been a surprise, Sebastian had never expected his peers—those very same scientists who’d once proclaimed him to be one of the most brilliant males on the planet—to shun him.
But they had.
And after he’d published his treatise asking what was wrong with rewriting the laws of physics if they didn’t do what you wanted them to, rumors suggesting that lower-class Janurian warrior blood had somehow slipped into his family’s gene pool—a gene pool already compromised by Xanthus Vardanyian’s marriage to an Earthling—had begun to circulate.
Sebastian was accustomed to having his parentage held against him. And all his life, first as a student, then as a teacher at the science institute, he’d worked overtime to prove himself a true Logosian.
But, although he’d always done his best to adhere to the Logosian way, not once, in all his thirty-one years, had he ever considered denying his humanness.
To do so would have been to deny his mother, and since every Logosian child was brought up to respect and revere his elders, such behavior would have been totally without reason.
Sebastian also knew intuitively that such denial would have pained him in some intrinsic way he could not quite understand. Still, the rumors tarnished his family’s name and endangered his sister’s already tenuous position at the institute.
Although Sebastian didn’t give a freebooter’s damn what anyone thought of him, he was furious at those who couldn’t find anything better to do with their time than to criticize Rosalyn for her brother’s actions.
Cursing violently, evoking the names of ancient, forgotten feudal gods long removed from the official Logosian calendar, Sebastian forged his way through the driving snow, teeth chattering violently, his near-naked body turning to ice.
There were times, and this was definitely one of them, when he almost wished he’d taken his parents’ advice and become a twelfth-level Sage, like his father, grandfath
er, and every one of his other male relatives before him, all the way back to Flavian Vardanyian—one of the original Ancient Ones.
“Well, it’s too damn late now,” Sebastian muttered, wondering how long he could last in such hyperborean conditions.
Having chosen California as his destination, he hadn’t paid proper attention to the ways Earthlings had adapted to their planet’s more frigid climes. Such behavior had been shortsighted, unreasonably careless, not to mention potentially dangerous.
It had also been undeniably human.
The deep-seated stubbornness that had caused him so much grief on his home planet rose to assert itself, keeping his feet doggedly moving forward.
He passed what he suspected was, in warmer seasons, a brook. Now it was a sparkling, shimmering sheet of ice. Water froze on Earth at zero degrees centigrade, Sebastian remembered. He didn’t need a thermoscan to know that the frigid winter air surrounding him was a great deal colder than that.
Unfortunately, his body—like that of his terran mother—was seven-tenths water. Did this mean that he was destined to end up crystallized, frozen in place like this glistening stilled creek?
No. This couldn’t be his fate, Sebastian told himself over and over again. His labored breath was a wavering white ghost in front of him, freezing on his face.
His last thought, as first his limbs and then his mind went numb, was that he’d be damned if he’d die before proving that he’d been right.
3
The snow blew against the windshield, piling up almost faster than the wipers could sweep it away. Drifts blew across the roadway, and county snowplows had made high walls of snow along the shoulder. It was dusk, that suspended time between day and night when the world turned a deep purple.
Kirby sat hunkered over the steering wheel, peering through the swirling white curtain, when she suddenly saw something or someone lying in the center of the road.
Slamming on the brakes, she skidded sideways, missing the snow-covered object by inches. Her heart pounding, she jumped from the Jeep and raced toward what she could now see was a man.
He was unconscious and nearly naked. Wondering what on earth had happened to cause him to be out here in the middle of nowhere, wearing only a pair of hibiscus-printed orange jams, she took his pulse, frightened when she found it dangerously weak.
“Hey!”
She ran her hands over his body, feeling for broken bones. Then she checked out his hands and feet and ears, searching for any dead white tissue that would indicate frozen skin.
When she didn’t find any, she began briskly rubbing his arms, his face, his outstretched legs. Ice crystals coated his dark hair and eyebrows. Although he looked vaguely familiar, Kirby couldn’t place him.
Pressing both her gloved hands against his tanned chest, she began to administer CPR, breathing and pushing, breathing and pushing.
Breathe.
Push.
Breathe.
Sebastian felt the sweet warmth against his lips first. Then the hard, rhythmic pounding against his chest.
“That’s it,” the female shouted when his rigid chest began to rise and fall of its own accord. “You’re doing it! You’re breathing. Come on, don’t give up now! Keep going.”
Sebastian read her mind and discovered that she was frightened. The idea that she could care so deeply for another of her kind, especially one who was a total stranger to her, was something he’d have to think about, later, when he was no longer hovering on the dark abyss of human death.
As she continued to pound painfully but surprisingly effectively on his chest, shouting at him all the while, Sebastian decided with a detached sense of wonder that she was every bit as stubborn as he.
He wondered if such a discordant personality trait made her an outsider, too. The idea that two individuals from such dissimilar planets might have something intrinsically in common was pleasing. Nearly as pleasing as the taste of her mouth.
When she placed her cheek against his chest, his heart kicked.
“That’s better,” she said. “But I can’t lift you by myself. And I certainly can’t leave you here to freeze to death. So, you’re going to have to help me.”
Sebastian opened his eyes and found himself looking straight into hers. Which were as blue as the rare blue diamazimans mined in the alluvial river plains at the base of the mountain range located far outside his climate-controlled domed city. His father had spent a small fortune to have one of the precious stones set in a pendant for his mother for their last anniversary.
“Help you?” he asked, dragging his mind back to the problem at hand.
Since his mother had long ago, due to pressure from the Elders’ ruling council, given up her native tongue, Sebastian had been forced to practice his Earth dialect from Rosalyn’s audio discs. Hoping that his accent was appropriate for wherever this was he’d landed, he was relieved when she seemed to find nothing wrong with his speech.
“We need to get you to the truck.” Her voice had a much more melodic quality than the computerized tones he’d studied. “Do you think you can stand up?”
“Of course.”
He might no longer be on Logosia, but Sebastian was not about to abandon eons of scientific dogma proclaiming the female of the species to be the frailer sex.
Having this Earthling discover him half-dead was bad enough. To continue to display weakness in front of a female would be a shame he’d never live down. Shaking off her touch, he pushed himself to his feet with a sudden burst of energy.
A mistake. Stars swam in front of his eyes, his legs trembled, and his head went light as a flitterfly.
She caught him in mid-sway.
“That’s what you get for trying to be Ironman,” she muttered, putting her arm around his waist to steady him. “Take a few deep breaths. It’ll help you get your land legs back.”
It crossed Sebastian’s whirling mind that she was surprisingly strong for someone of her small stature. The top of her head barely reached his shoulder.
“My land legs?”
“Just an expression,” she answered in unison with the ecumenical translator embedded in his middle ear. “You must not be from around here.”
“No.” Of that he was certain.
“I didn’t think so. Feeling better?”
Amazingly, the deep breathing had helped, immediately clearing his head like a whiff of straight paradoxygen.
“Yes. Thank you,” he said with formal politeness drilled into him from childhood.
She glanced around into the swirling white snow. “Are you all alone?”
“Yes.” He wondered what she’d say if he told her precisely how alone he was at this moment.
“You’re shaking badly.” Her eyes were filled with unexpected concern. “Let’s get you warmed up. Then you can tell me what happened.”
Her ground machine appeared to be an older model than those pictured on the archival holodiscs. As he made his way gingerly toward it, Sebastian wondered if he’d somehow gone back in time as he passed through space.
Not knowing how to ask such a question without drawing any more undue attention to himself, he decided that explanations could come later.
“Fortunately, I always keep blankets in the Jeep,” she told him with a surprising amount of cheer, considering that her own thick lashes were covered with icy white frost.
He climbed into her machine, as she indicated, then sat passively as she wrapped the thick red blanket about his frozen body. He was light-headed, his hands and feet were numb, and the rest of him felt unreasonably clumsy.
“There you are.” She tucked him in as if he were a child, fastened a belt across his chest, then shut the passenger door. He watched as she went around the front and climbed into the machine.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“Sebastian.” Spots were spinning in front of his eyes again. Sebastian tried to blink them away and failed. “Sebastian Blackthorne.”
That said, he surrendere
d to the whirling darkness.
* * *
“Oh, hell.”
Kirby cursed under her breath as he crumpled onto the bench seat, his dark head landing in her lap. Reaching over him, she picked up the radio microphone and pressed a button.
“Rum Runner to Evac Eagle One, Rum Runner to Evac Eagle One. Do you copy, Eagle One?”
There was a crackling static, then, “Ayuh, I copy ya, Rum Runner. What’s the problem?”
“I’ve got a patient for you,” she said.
“An emergency?”
“Yes. Exposure, possible hypothermia. He’s a male, approximately six foot, two hundred pounds.” She didn’t add that the weight was very excellently distributed on his deeply tanned masculine frame.
“Age, around thirty. I found him lying out in the snow.”
“How’re his vitals?”
“His pulse is thready, but his heartbeat’s reasonably strong.”
“Conscious?”
“He wasn’t when I found him a few minutes ago, then he was, but now he’s passed out again.”
“Trauma? Broken bones, anything like that?”
“Not that I could tell, but like I said, his pulse isn’t as strong as it should be.”
“Frostbite?”
“None that I could see. But I’ve only had basic paramedic training,” she said. “This man needs to be checked out by a physician. And Doc Merryman is in Bangor visiting his daughter.”
“Ayuh, I heard Mary had a baby. Boy or girl?”
“A girl. Eight pounds, six ounces. What about my patient, Eagle One?”
“Sorry, Rum Runner,” the disembodied voice said over the crackling static, “but it’s a no-go.”
“What?”
“There’s a blizzard blowin’. I can’t send out a chopper until the weather clears, Kirby. It’s too much of a risk.”
“I know,” she said on a harsh huff of breath as she glared at the driving snow that had been making her life increasingly difficult.
“But what am I supposed to do with him? The damn ferry’s not running because of the choppy water.”