Above it all, pigeons perched on cornices and held their heads at malicious angles.

Nowhere did Mickey see any sign of a flying saucer.

Clem dove the Bug into another alley, back into traffic, and finally into the park once more. "Lost him," he said.

There was no sign of a police car behind them. No flashing blue lights. No siren, except for a plaintive growling in the distance.

And no roadblock at the exit.

"It is time," said Clem Padiddlepopper, "to get out of this burg." As he spoke, he spun the Bug on two wheels onto a major boulevard and headed for the nearest freeway ramp.

13. Encounters of the Strangest Kinds

Like many urban freeways, this one walked on elevated stilts over and past the decaying factories and warehouses and tenements that fringed its city. From this new vantage Mickey Gorgonzola once more glimpsed flashing blue lights, but only in the distance. The cops seemed to have no idea of where they were now.

Certainly no squad cars roared into view behind them.

The roadway descended. Open s.p.a.ce appeared. Individual houses with yards and tiny swimming pools, already covered against the coming winter. Community tennis courts and bouncing grandparents.

There was no sign of weirdness. No Bullwinkles and Elvises. No hydrant-woofers. No can-crushers or belly dancers. No backwards singers or padiddlepoppers. No flakes. No flakes at all.

"Where are we going?" asked Rocky.

The Bug whined on. The yards gave way to trees. Bicycle paths appeared. A barn. A field. A small herd of half a dozen cows. And in the air above that herd, descending in a fluttering stoop...

Suddenly Mickey was screaming, "They were real!"

"What is it?"

Mickey could not answer her. It was not a b.u.t.terfly. It was much too large, and it did indeed look more like a fingerpainted flower that flew by flapping its petals. But there really wasn't anything one could call it except a b.u.t.terfly.

"Of course they were," said Clem. "You don't think the tabloids make their stories up, do you?"

"I've checked them out a thousand times," said Mickey. "And not one of them was true. Though that at least had a few crude paintings to back it up." He said where he had found the paintings. "And my agent wants me to do my next book on the trip."

Rocky had turned around to kneel on the Bug's back seat and keep watching the strange creature. Now she shook Mickey's shoulder. "What is it doing?"

"Jesus." The cows were running, circling the perimeter of their pasture, bellowing in panic, while the "b.u.t.terfly" followed above. "If only I had a camera..."

Clem Padiddlepopper pulled the car to the edge of the road and stopped.

Then he too turned in his seat to watch.

He was just in time to see the "b.u.t.terfly" orient on one of the cows, swoop down, lift it into the air, and...

"How can it do that?" cried Rocky. She was holding one hand over her mouth.

"At least he isn't killing and mutilating her," said Clem.

Then he started the Bug rolling once more. "We're almost there."

They rounded a curve on the country road the highway's next off-ramp had led them to. Ahead of them stretched an arc of impressively decrepit shacks on either side of a ramshackle house and a "Vacancy" sign. Just past this ancient "motel" was a sign that said "Targay Sh.o.r.es." An arrow pointed down a dirt road that pierced a wall of trees. Some of the trees were evergreens. Many still clung to autumn leaves.

"Ugh," said Rocky Forte. "I wouldn't want to stay here."

Clem laughed as he turned the Bug into the dirt road and woods engulfed them. "It just looks bad. We don't want local tourists."

"Local?" The "b.u.t.terfly" had convinced him, even though Clem never had said what it was. He had been right all along, and at the moment his only question was whether "local tourists" meant people from the city or people from the planet Earth.

The answer was not long delayed. The dirt road debouched into a broad clearing almost entirely filled by a tent of mottled green and brown camouflage cloth. There was no sign of a lake.

Beneath the tent was...

Kilroy barked.

Rocky gasped.

Mickey said nothing at all.

The thing beneath the tent blurred its outlines as the light shifted under the breeze-rippled cloth. Still, it did not take Mickey long to see that it was dome-topped, dish-bottomed, and round. Its rim was marked by a hundred oblong windows, much like those on an airliner. It stood on a dozen legs that looked just the way they would look if a human engineer had built them to be hydraulically extended on landing.

A broad, rectangular portal faced them. From it stretched a ramp a little too steep for wheelchairs. At the head of the ramp, on the lip of the entrance, stood several ordinary looking humans dressed in skin-tight blue coveralls.

"That's not a hoax," said Mickey Gorgonzola. It was far too elaborate a structure.

"Oh, no," said Clem Padiddlepopper.

It was just what Mickey had craved for most of his life.

It had to be, it was, a genuine flying saucer. All it lacked was little green men.

On the other hand, the people standing by the entrance were accompanied by several quadrupedal creatures that looked more than anything else like...

Mickey turned to stare at Kilroy, who was lolling his tongue in a very canine grin. "Oh, no," he said.

"Amazing what you can do with a little make-up, eh?" said the dog.

"So that's how he knew as soon as I said we should kidnap someone. You must have some sort of transmitter under your hide."

"In my left collar bone, to be precise."

14. Make Jokes, Not War

At the top of the saucer's entrance ramp there appeared two short, squat aliens. The others backed away perceptibly. Kilroy growled and said, "No one likes the Hydrans very much."

"Why not?" asked Rocky.