The Doberman in the truck bed shifted his weight.

Take it easy Fido,Richter thought.Be a good dog, and I'll give you their bones.

CATHY AND JEREMY.

Jeremy lay under the kitchen table while Cathy sat with her feet on him, reading the Sat.u.r.day Capital-Journal and listening to a transistor radio.

"I suppose it was only a matter of time," Cathy said. "Look at this." She tossed the front section of the newspaper under the table. "I'm not talking to you," Jeremy said. "You're forcing me to live like a dog."

"One of us has to be the link, and Ringo likes you better."

"He doesn't like either one of us. Neither do I."

"Look at the top story on page two, will you?"

Jeremy read, " 'New Mexico Radio Astronomer Says Ganymede Broadcast May Be Genuine.' So what?"

"Don't you see?" Cathy said. "Now that the fleshbound population is about to find out that the broadcast isn't Earth-based, we can count on them to show their true maniacal colors. Listen to the radio: Scientific, sociological, and religious 'experts' are fighting with each other about what it might mean if the signal turns out to be from s.p.a.ce. Sounds pretty good."

"Yeah, great," Jeremy said, scratching his neck with a heel. "World leaders are behaving like lobotomized dingos, the public is reacting with shock, anger, and fear, and a number of religious cults, including the Reverend Bill w.i.l.l.y's, are girding their loins for Armageddon."

"Isn't it wonderful?" Cathy said. "With all of that going on, our pro-flesh cousins will realize that they've misjudged the fleshbound. We'll be out of here by Valentine's Day."

Jeremy crawled out from under the table. "Don't start packing yet. Didn't that scientist on the box say that if the Holly broadcastis from Ganymede, that it's 'a wonderful opportunity to expand human knowledge'? That's a point for the opposition, wouldn't you say?"

Cathy made a noise with her lips and tongue that she had learned from watching reruns ofAll in the Family. "How many members of the fleshbound ma.s.ses do you think will listen to him? He's making sense, and they don't respond to that. I'm telling you, they're going to prove themselves to be complete w.a.n.kers." She paused. "I just hope they don't hurt themselves. Not that it's our fault if they do."

Jeremy c.o.c.ked his head. "In other words, the fact that we've come back to our place of origin doesn't imply that we have accepted any responsibility for our fellow humans' fate?"

"They aren't our fellow humans. They've remained flesh-bound. Now shut up, will you? I want to hear what the police are saying."

On the radio, a Kansas State Trooper was explaining that the search for Oliver Vale was no longer a priority. "I'm sure that any officer would take Vale into custody if the suspect happened to show up," he said, "but frankly, we now have to view the situation as a strictly Federal matter. The rest of us are going to have our hands full keeping folks from panicking and looters from taking advantage."

"Taking advantage of what?" a reporter asked.

"Well, with no TV programs to speak of," the trooper said, "we're projecting that people will be going out of their homes more, leaving their possessions vulnerable to burglars, vandals, and malcontents."

Cathy laughed and clapped her hands. "This is great! Modern humanity at its finest-that is to say, terrible!" Jeremy lay belly-down on the floor with his head on his hands. "I'm worried about Vale," he said, "and I think it's our ethical duty to go after him and protect him. It isn't his fault that the El Dorado faction broadcast his name."

Cathy snapped off the radio. "He'll be fine," she said irritably. "Didn't you hear? The police aren't after him anymore."

"What about everyone else?" Jeremy asked. "What if the public goes nuts for fear of an alien invasion and takes it out on him? And what about that Federal agent?"

"I thought you said that Vale got away from him last night."

"Temporarily. The agent must still be close, because if he weren't, Ringo wouldn't be riding in the back of the truck he stole."

Cathy sighed and began reading the comics page. "My ancient love, this thing is almost over, and you yourself just said that Ringo is on the job. If the G-man finds Vale again and does something dangerous, you can use the eye-link to order Ringo to block it-"

"I'm not sure he'll respond."

"-but otherwise, as long as we know where everyone is, more or less, I see no reason to run all over the countryside. Being in the flesh is bad enough without exposing it to the elements."

Jeremy rose to his hands and knees and crawled under the table again, where he curled into a tight ball and shivered.

"Tell me about it," he muttered.

6.

OLIVER.

Volume IV of Mother's diary begins gloomily. The year was 1968. Frankie Lymon (a minor deity, yet still a member of the pantheon) died in February... but his death was not like that of Buddy or of Otis, who had both died at the hands of Fate. It wasn't even like that of Sam Cooke, who had died at the hands of a mortal. Instead, Frankie Lymon's death was his own doing. His and heroin's.

Not that he was the first pop star to die from self-destructive behavior. Johnny Ace had blown out his own brains in a game of Russian roulette in 1954, and Bobby Fuller had died of either carbon monoxide poisoning or drugs (reports varied) in 1966. Even "country" Hank Williams had booze-and-pilled himself to death as far back as 1953.

But Frankie Lymon was the first one to check out after the Summer of Love, and although he had been something of a has-been for a decade, the nature of his death seemed to Mother to be yet another omen.

No one will pay much attention to his pa.s.sing,she wrote.He was "Why Do Fools Fall in Love?"not "Strawberry Fields Forever" or "Rainy Day Women #12 & 35." He wasn't part of the Movement, part of the new g-g-generation. And even if he had been, well, he didn't die of the hip drugs, of acid or gra.s.s. He died of heroin. In the newspaper it says that heroin has been a problem for big-city Negroes for decades. Big-city anybody is my guess.

Things are only going to get worse. I keep hoping for the UFOs to come for me, but sometimes I think that they never will. 1968 will be a bad year.

I was eight, and I remember most of it: The USSPueblo was seized by North Korea. The Tet offensive made Vietnam even bloodier. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert Kennedy were a.s.sa.s.sinated. Police in Chicago went berserk.

And then, in early September, Mother receiver a telephone call from Grandmother. It was the first time they had spoken in almost a year. Grandmother had just been told that Uncle Mike was dead.

His death was "accidental," the result of a mistake with a Claymore. Buthow Uncle Mike died meant nothing. Dead is dead. Even at eight, I knew that. I had not forgotten what I had learned from the death of Sam Cooke, from the reality of a squirrel smashed in the street.

For Mother, though, it had become easier to forget what was real and to hope for what was not.

Buddy, Sam, Otis, and even Frankie are not dead at all,she wrote.They are still alive because I can still hear them sing.

But I can't hear Mikey. Except for a few times on the phone, I haven't heard him in nine years.

Does that mean that he's gone forever? Or can the letters he wrote serve the same purpose as 45 rpm records? If I read those letters over and over, will he still be alive? If you can think of someone, picture him as solid as flesh, can't you say he's really here?

Even if you can't, what does that matter? I can't picture the other soldiers in Mikey's unit, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist. Nor can I picture the ancient Atlanteans or their machines of flying light, but others have, so I don't have to. They exist as surely as I and Oliver do, as Buddy Holly does, as President Johnson does, as poor sweet C. does in my heart.

Say h.e.l.lo to C. for me, Mikey. Take a ride together in a machine of flying light and tell me what you find.

Even though I had never known Uncle Mike, I was sad that he was gone. Many times in the months after his death, I would awaken at night with the idea that there was a young man in an Army uniform sitting beside my bed, looking at me.

Things seemed better in October when the nation's long hiatus from s.p.a.ce ended with the successful flight of Apollo 7. Then, in December, Apollo 8 went all the way around the moon and back, and I was ecstatic. (I wished that they hadn't done the Bible reading, though. It reminded me of Vacation Bible School.) During the Apollo 8 launch, Mother said something like "If the government would put money into UFO research, they wouldn't have to spend so much on those rockets." "You're crazy!" I shouted, watching the Saturn booster rise on a pillar of smoke and flame.

When I finally glanced at Mother, her eyes were wet. I looked back at the TV.

1968 was a bad year.

1969 was worse.

School was dismissed early one Wednesday in April because of a sewer backup that flooded the halls, and I found myself at home alone at 2:30 in the afternoon. My after-school baby-sitter would not arrive until a quarter to four, and Mother would not come home until six.

I did what any nine-year-old would do. I took the opportunity to get into things I wasn't supposed to get into.

I had long been curious about Mother's black notebooks. She had told me that they were her diary, but she had also told me that their contents were none of my business. You don't tell a kid that. At least, you didn't tell me that. I knew that she kept her current volume in the top drawer of her dresser, but I was afraid she might notice if it were disturbed; so instead, I searched for the volumes already completed.

I found them in a box under her bed and began to read Volume I, stopping every few seconds to look at the alarm clock on the nightstand. I was terrified that my baby-sitter would catch me and report my perfidy.

Volume I began at Mother's sixteenth birthday, and its early entries were boring: who liked whom, who was mad at whom, who was taking whom to the sock hop, etc. I began flipping pages to see whether I could find anything that other might have written about her husband, my father, about whom I knew almost nothing except that he had died before I was born. Mother always deflected my questions with answers like "No, he wasn't a soldier." "Yes, he was a nice man." "No, I don't have a picture I can show you." "Yes, you look a little like him."

What I found was the description of my conception. I didn't understand all of it, especially the sentence in which Mother wroteit all dripped out on the seat. But I knew that I had discovered something that I would wish I hadn't.

I read further, feeling sicker and sicker, all the way to my birth. Then I went back and read it all again.

It seemed to say that Mother and my father had not been married. But that wasn't possible. People who weren't married couldn't have babies.

The apartment's front door opened while I was still sitting on the floor of Mother's bedroom. Panicking, I crammed the notebooks back into the box and shoved it under the bed, then rushed into the living room. My babysitter had just come in. I blurted that I had just been to the bathroom, and she gave me a look that said she didn't really care about my bodily functions.

That evening, Mother felt my forehead. I was flushed, and she was worried that I might have a fever. I told her that I felt fine, honest. I was fine, school was fine, everything was fine. She said that I didn't have to get so agitated about it. She believed me.

The next day at school, I sat atop the monkey bars with my best friend, Steve, during morning recess.

Steve had other best friends besides me, but he was my only one. Pretending that I had read it in a book I'd found on a sidewalk, I described the things from Volume I that I had not understood. Steve was smart, and I figured that if anyone could explain those things to me, he could.

He laughed. "You found a dirty book! Didn't you know that? Was there a naked lady on the cover?"

"No."

"Well, there should have been," Steve said. "Did you read the whole thing?"

"Most of it," I mumbled, climbing down to the ground. I didn't want to talk anymore.

Steve followed me. "Did the girl in the book get pregnant? My brother says that a chick who'll do it in a car is a s.l.u.t, and that s.l.u.ts always get pregnant."

I started walking toward the building. My face burned as if it had been stung by wasps.

"Come on," Steve said, hurrying to walk beside me. "Tell me about the book. Did the s.l.u.t have a b.a.s.t.a.r.d baby?"

I turned and hit him in the mouth.

He stared for a few seconds, and then his face contorted and he swung a fist, hitting me in the left eye. I fell on my rump in the dirt, and Steve dropped on top of me, pounding furiously. I pounded back, and we rolled over and tore at each other's clothes. Two teachers pulled us apart and dragged us to the princ.i.p.al's office.

What happened there was the same thing that has happened in princ.i.p.als' offices ever since there were such places. When it was over, Steve was no longer my friend, and my nickname at school, said in whispers when no teacher could hear, became "Ollie the b.a.s.t.a.r.d Baby."

The princ.i.p.al telephoned Mother that day, of course, and she had to leave the radio station early to come to the school. She didn't seem upset, though. She simply listened to what everyone had to say, and then she said that she would punish me.

When we got home, she cleaned my sc.r.a.pes and said, "No skydiving for a month." She didn't ask me what the fight had been about. Her mind was on other things.

A few days later, on Sat.u.r.day evening, my baby-sitter showed up while I was watching TV, and Mother appeared from her bedroom wearing a dress and makeup. She was going on a date, and she told me nothing about it.

I glared at her as she sat on the divan to wait. She asked me to stop it, but I wouldn't. My baby-sitter sat cross-legged against the wall and pretended to read a magazine.

The doorbell rang, and Mother went to answer it. The man she let into our apartment was tall and had bristly blond hair, a reddish moustache, and freckled skin. "Oliver, this is Keith," Mother said. "He's the new midday on-air personality at the station."

"I'm at school at midday," I said, trying to make it plain that this Keith person had no place in my world and never would. I kept hearing Steve say the words.l.u.t.

Keith squatted and held out his hand. "How ya doin', pardner?" he asked.

"Watching television," I said, turning to face the screen. I kept my eyes fixed there until they were gone.

"He seems real nice," my baby-sitter said. "He sounds different than he does on the radio, though."

"Big deal," I said, and didn't speak again that evening.

Mother dated Keith from April to July, and I did my best to be a brat about it. I even turned our radio dial away from KKAP so that I wouldn't have to hear Keith's voice on commercials. Mother turned it back a few times, then let me have my way.

Fortunately, I didn't see what Mother wrote in Volume IV during those months. Most of the entries are so erotic that the ink virtually smokes. Even now, I can't read those pa.s.sages without experiencing a weird nausea that I can only describe as voyeuristic-Oedipal shock: I had forgotten what it was like to feel reality. Fingers touching, stretching the skin of his back, b.r.e.a.s.t.s pressed to chest, strands of my hair sticking to our faces, my calves locked over his-Those are real. UFOs, Vietnam, Atlantis, Mikey's death, Mama's hate, my son's pain, Nixon's jowls- Those are unreal. At least, they seem that way when I'm with Keith. Nothing exists at those times except the touch, the kiss.

I am never so alive as when lying with Keith. Nothing else makes the universe so sharp and clear.

Nothing else makes me feel so sane.

Reading that now, I know that Mother was trying to heal herself of Buddy's death, of my father C.'s suicide, of Grandmother, of everything. She might have done it too, if she had been blessed with a different son. Or a different mother.

Mother's relationship with Keith came to an end in July.

They were both scheduled to work on the Fourth, so they were given Thursday, July 3, off and had planned a long date for that afternoon and evening. My existence created a problem because my usual baby-sitter was out of town and there were no others to be found. I insisted that I was old enough to stay home alone, but Mother disagreed. At first, she suggested that I accompany her and Keith on their picnic, but I replied that I wouldn't go anywhere with the two of them even if it meant that I would die if I didn't.

Her next suggestion was that I spend the holiday weekend with Grandmother.

She wasn't deliberately sending me into the lion's den, because things had changed between Mother and Grandmother-at least, they seemed to have changed. Ever since Uncle Mike's death, they had spoken to each other on the telephone at least once a week, and recently, Grandmother had been expressing a wish to know her grandson better.

So that Thursday afternoon, Mother drove me to Grandmother's house. I was to stay until Sundayevening. I refused to kiss Mother good-bye when she left.

"Well, young Oliver," Grandmother said when she had me seated at the kitchen table, "what would you like to do today?" Her voice was so stern that I had the impression that I wasn't supposed to like to do anything.

I shrugged. I saw no reason to treat Grandmother any better than I was currently treating Mother. In fact, I could think of several reasons for treating her worse.