"Head out toward the airport," she said, settling back in the seat with a slightly queasy feeling. "We'll make one stop, but it's on the way. I'm leaving the dog at a kennel."

Sasquatch put his front feet on the seat and looked out the window, while Benita ruffled the fur of his neck, taking a certain comfort from the solidity of him. She and the kids had named him Sasquatch. He'd never been away from home, anymore than she had. Except for the few times she had run to the shelter when the children were little, she had never in her whole life taken off like this. Even when Angelica had begged her to come visit them in California last winter, Bert hadn't wanted to go, and she hadn't wanted to go for fear ... for fear of what?

Simple, really. If she'd gone to visit the kids last winter, she wouldn't have come back. At that time, she hadn't been ready to do anything final. Donkey-like, she'd been waiting for the stick to hit her. Well, the house arrest and the foreclosure had been two good whacks, one right after the other. The extraterrestrials and the money were more in the nature of a carrot. Take a bite. Go on, it's delicious!

Stick behind, carrot before, there was no point in waiting for anything. Besides, she'd given her word. She'd claimed to be a person of respect, and she'd given her word. It sounded stupid as all get-out, even to her, but it would just have to do.

Incidents-SUNDAY.

On Pacific time, Rog Wooley's alarm went off, though softly, at four AM, ANd he reacted almost at once to stop it before it woke Susan. She hadn't been sleeping well lately, none of the lumbermen's families had, and if she woke at this hour of the morning, she would only mess up his routine with her doubts and worries. His clothes were in the bathroom, and he dressed there, taking care with his socks and the warm layers of shirts and sweaters, being sure everything lay smooth against his body. Climbing a few hundred feet into the air lugging a heavy saw was enough to tire a man without adding socks or clothing that bunched and bound. By the time he'd topped the first tree, he'd be sopping wet and it would be warm enough to take off a few layers.

Outside, the world was dark and chill, with wisps of fog moving around like ghosts. He had backed the car up the driveway and parked outside the garage door, so he could release the brake and roll half a block before he started the engine. His climbing irons were in the car, along with his lunch. He'd fixed that last night after Susan went to bed. He checked his watch. The van would be at the edge of town by five, and it wouldn't wait for late arrivals.

He was on time, one more sleepy, aggravated timber cutter, trying to get to the work site on Sunday, when the damned tree-huggers wouldn't expect them. Later this morning, they would be there to block the road as they had yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that. Every time one judge signed an order to disperse, some other judge overrode it. Meantime, nobody was making any money, jobs were on the line, and rent payments were coming due. He stared out the window of the van, half dozing, as the jagged skyline emerged from the dark and the sky lightened in the east.

They joined up with several other vans as they crossed the bridge, and the convoy drove the last eight miles in absolute silence. The tree-huggers could be camped out there, and nobody wanted any more confrontations. The bosses were afraid somebody was going to get killed, the toppers and fellers were ready to do the killing, and meanwhile the trees just sat there, benefiting nobody! So they were old growth! That's why they were valuable! Why couldn't the idiot environmentalists see that? Trees that size had to be cut while they were still healthy. They wouldn't do the human race any good if they were left to rot!

They reached the site when the sky was barely light enough to see by, hours before the picketers were out, or the guys that made a big thing out of lying down in the road so the trucks couldn't get by.

Steve Buck and Harry Rider were the other two toppers, the trees were already marked for selective cutting, and that was another gripe! No more clear cutting, even though that was the easier way to do it!

No worry about topping, let them fall where they would! A man could sure as hell make more money that way, though, hell, something was better than nothing. Selective cutting meant they had to limit and clear the fall zones, so they were back to topping trees. While he was doing his thing, the other men would keep busy clearing fall zones until the first big ones were ready to come down. The tractor men wouldn't even arrive until around nine.

The first marked tree was a monster, so big around that he couldn't throw a line around it until he was thirty feet off the ground. Even then it took extreme effort just to heave the rope that held him to the trunk while he spiked his way up. A third of the way to the top he shifted around the trunk to avoid the sun, just poking over the horizon dead level with his eyes. The rope bound and rattled, almost as though something was fooling with it on the other side of the trunk. He hadn't seen any stubs from the ground, not this low on the trunk, but then it hadn't been light enough to see very well. He sidestepped to one side, then the other, but the trunk was clear almost all the way up and without many stubs to drop. Jase Steele was below, clearing away anything he dropped. Jase was a careful man, a good man to have on the ground, one who wouldn't take any chances that ended up getting him hurt and getting the man above him fired.

When he came to the first stub, he checked the area below, saw it was clear, jerked the saw into noisy action and took off the branch. It was short, but as big around as his leg. When it hit bottom, Jase came out of the brush and waved. Rog let the saw dangle at the end of its safety line and heaved himself up another ten feet. He was about eighty feet up and the damned tree was just now beginning to taper enough that it was halfway easy to climb. It smelled weird, too. Maybe because it was cold. Sun-warmed redwood, sun-warmed pine, they both smelled clean, but this smell was different. A real stink. Like something died up here.

Jase yelled something from below, but Rog didn't look down. He still had fifty feet to go to the point where he could top this monster. Now that the trunk was thinner, he could move faster. Jase yelled again, a kind of panicky scream, and Rog shifted to the side to block the sun and let him look down, but as he moved he caught a glimpse of something on the other side of the tree, just a quick look at something hairy and big and good lord God in heaven, look at those teeth . . .

In the Gila wilderness of southwestern New Mexico, a small pack of Mexican wolves, introduced the previous year by the Forest Service, lay in the midmorning sun on a rock shelf above a den still in use by the alpha female and her four half-grown pups. The alpha dog lay beside the bitch, licking his front paws and, occasionally, his mate's ear. Several others of the pack were nearby, and the pups were tumbling over and around him, but he ignored them, eyes half closed in the warmth of the sun and the stone.

The pups were weaned. They were almost big enough to join in the hunt, and this was the time Mack Cerubia had been waiting for. He'd spotted the den months before, a natural tunnel in solid rock that he couldn't dig out, and the mother had been too sly and shy for him to get a good shot at. Mack had killed the last of the former pack sixteen months ago. The Fish and Game people and the Forest Service had a ten-thousand-dollar reward posted for "information leading to arrest," but nobody had claimed it because nobody knew anything. Mack didn't talk about his intentions, unlike some idiots who stuck their faces on TV, making threats. If you knew wolves were vermin, and you knew they needed killing, but the vermin were protected by the damned greenies, you didn't talk about it. You just did it, making damn sure nobody saw you.

Nobody would have suspected him, anyhow. He didn't run cattle anymore. He wasn't getting rid of the wolves because they threatened his stock, he was getting rid of the wolves because his forefathers had killed every last wolf in the U.S. of A. because they'd needed killing! Right along with cougars and grizzlies and lesser vermin like wolverines, coyotes and eagles that picked off lambs. The country was God-given for the people who used and grazed it and hunted on it, and he'd be damned if some government official was going to tell him what was vermin and what wasn't.

He could have shot the bitch months ago, leaving the pups to starve, but it had been early enough in the season that another pair might breed. He'd figured he'd wait until the young ones were a bit grown and the pack was all together. Then he could get the bitch and the dog. Once the alpha animals were dead, the others would be disorganized, easier to kill. He'd made a new kind of silencer and he'd bought a new scope. Yesterday and the day before he'd used fifty rounds with both, sighting in the scope. With any luck at all, he'd have both alphas and some of the pups before the others knew what was happening.

Just now he was working his way up the slope to the ridge across from the den. It would be about a hundred-yard shot, easy with this weapon. When he neared the ridge, he dropped on his belly and crawled up, stopping once or twice when his sight blurred. He took off his goggles and wiped his eyes.

The haziness came and went. He'd noticed it the last time he was here, too. Probably sun-warmed air rising off a rockface down the slope before him.

Raising his head slowly, he looked down on the den. The shelf above it was hip deep in dogs. He counted, eagerly. The four pups. The alpha bitch, the alpha dog, three others. He eased the muzzle of the rifle over the ridge, settled it firmly and applied his eye to the scope, put his finger to the trigger and began to tighten it ...

And damn it, something screamed!

It was a sound so vehement, so near that he completely lost the target as he rolled and looked upward where the sound had come from. His first thought was eagle. Eagles screamed, though he'd never heard one as loud as that. Hell, it would take an eagle the size of a truck to scream like that, and besides there was nothing around! Just sky, and trees, and the line of the ridge, and across the canyon . . . not one damned wolf! Either down the den or gone, hell knows where!

He rolled into prone position again, cursing, staring at the trees around him. Except for the wavery air he saw absolutely nothing. His first clue that he wasn't alone came when something invisible grabbed him by both ankles and yanked him, yelling his head off, straight up into the sky.

A Forest Service officer climbed to the same spot later in the day, to check on the den as he'd been doing at weekly intervals ever since the female pupped. He found the rifle lying at the top of the ridge.

All around and on top of it were torn fragments of denim and flannel and knit cotton and leather, some of them bloodstained, like feathers someone had plucked from a chicken. There was no sign of anyone, however. Not even any bloodstains on the ground.

Sunday was a working day at the Waving Palms Motel, or what would be Waving Palms when the twelve-acre site was drained. The trick was, so Bubba Miller claimed, to get the acreage drained over the weekend, and do it so fast nobody had time to know about it. That way there'd be no complaints, no EPA challenges, no outcries about endangered species. Besides, it wasn't any big deal, only twelve acres, and it had been in Bubba's family since Grampa Miller took it on account of an unpaid repair bill, back in the fifties. It was plenty big enough for a small motel, and there were no recent changes of ownership papers floating around, requiring surveys or confusing things. The permit to dig a foundation that was posted on the road had been issued for a dry piece of land a half mile away. The permit had a mistake on it indicating that other piece of property. Just two numbers twisted around was all. Nobody's fault, if anybody caught onto it. It just happened that way.

So, Bubba and his brother Quentin, who had fallen heir to the twelve acres along with their cousin Josh, all of whom had agreed to throw in their shares for the Waving Palms project, had Bubba's front loader and a backhoe they'd rented, and they were digging a nice big pond at the lower, western end of the ten acres and running a good-sized ditch into it along the swamp on the north. Bubba didn't own the ground on the north or the south side, where another good-sized ditch led into the swamp. Everything the backhoe dug out of the pond and the ditches got dumped on the eastern edge of the property, along the road, to raise it up. It'd be muddy as hell for a few weeks, full of dead frogs and snakes and all the stuff that squirmed around down in that muck, but when the eastern end had a chance to dry out a little, they'd dump a few loads of fill dirt and gravel on it, grade it out and really dig the foundations. By that time, they'd be able to fool with the ditches some, make them look more natural, and plant some other stuff around.

"Hey, Bubba," yelled Quentin, when Bubba cut the engine for a minute to clear some brush from the bucket-teeth. "C'mon over here. See what Josh found!"

Trampling through a patch of rare and endangered orchids, Bubba stomped over to the other two men who were standing in a patch of ferns on a little hillock, one they hadn't planned to touch.

"Why the hell'd ya smash it?" he asked, more interested than irate. The patch of ferns looked as flat as a pool table, though it might be very slightly dished at the center.

"C'mon," Quentin admonished. "Look addit! We din do that."

It seemed to Bubba likely they hadn't. The general flatness had been accomplished through repeated pounding by something large, like a section of log, like the heavy tampers used to settle fill dirt around drainpipes, or foundations, stuff like that. Must be a big man or more'n one did it. Something that size would be a heavy ole bitch of a thing, almost two feet across.

"Whaddaya think?" asked Quentin.

"I think somuddy buried somethin," Bubba replied. "And when he set them ferns back on top, he smooshed the whole thing down tight. Probly, just did it. A week from now, they'd all be growed up again, and we wouldn'a seen it."

"You think maybe money?" asked Josh, thoughtfully.

Bubba looked around. "Nah. I think more likely a body. It's too wet here for money or paper. Most likely a body."

"We gonna dig it up?" asked Quentin.

"Why'n hell we do that?" his brother replied. "Get all messed up in somethin none of our business!

Let dead bodies lie, that's what I say."

They returned to their work, making considerable progress by early afternoon, when they stopped work, parked the machines, and got into Bubba's pickup to drive to the nearest town for sandwiches and beer. After some jollity between them and Dolly, the clerk at the convenience store, they took an extra six-pack, got into their car and drove back the way they'd come. At least so Dolly told the police when they came asking, having found a receipt with the store name on it in the empty seat of the pickup.

That was the last she saw of them, she said, driving off down the road, waving at her.

"They were okay?" asked the police, "not fighting among themselves?"

"Oh, hell, no," said Dolly. "Those boys'd have to be sober to fight about anything, and they ain't been sober since high school. I've known 'em forever, since then, anyhow. They're just happy drunks."

If so, they'd died happy. The backhoe was right where somebody left it, and the front loader. The truck the men had arrived in was parked by the road. Scattered around the machines were six empty beer cans, two shoes (unmatching), one shirt sleeve, a pair of dark glasses and a blood-soaked item later identified as a hernia truss. Trodden into the muck were the missing men's bones, all three skeletons, the medical examiner said, when he'd had a chance to sort them out and reassemble them. No flesh. Just bones.

The local paper carried the sheriff's musings on the subject, which were largely focused on the likelihood of satanic rites or upon greens who had gone mad with enviro-rage and blood lust.

Benita-MONDAY.

First thing Monday morning, Benita phoned Congressman Alvarez's office, then took a cab to the Congressional Office Building. The young woman at the desk in the outer office looked at her curiously, then invited her to sit while she went into an inner office. The door wasn't shut all the way, and through the crack Benita could see into the office where her namesake representative sat behind his desk, going through a stack of messages. The young woman handed him a note, and he looked up, saying in an annoyed voice, "Who is this Alvarez woman, Susan?"

"She said she's your cousin, Congressman. Benita Alvarez, Joe Alvarez's daughter. She says she's not a nut, not a hysteric, not looking for money or to get any kind of bill introduced, but she has something that was given to her to put into the hands of authority, and she thought you would be the one to decide who authority was because she is one of your constituents, and even though she didn't vote for you, you still represent her interests."

He barked laughter. "All that?"

Eavesdroppers never hear good of themselves. Benita flushed and turned her head away from the door, but she didn't stop listening.

The young woman went on, "When she called, I suggested she bring whatever it is by and leave it, and she said no. It had been entrusted to her to put into someone's hands, and she was going to put it into someone's hands she could trust and she didn't know me from Eve."

"Lord save us. She could have mailed it. That's a long way to come."

"She's waiting outside. What do I tell her?"

Benita could visualize him, looking up at the ceiling. He did that during debates, looked up at the ceiling, as though hoping for a sign.

He said, "I don't remember Joe Alvarez, though I don't doubt he was some kind of cousin, umpteen times removed, and so far as I can remember, I've never heard of Benita. Better err on the side of kindliness than go the other way and have her turn out to be the widowed sister of the state Democratic chairman. I can see her now. I should have about five minutes before the lumbermen get here, or is it the tree-huggers?"

"That's tomorrow. Today it's General Wallace and the Forest Service."

Benita straightened. She'd actually met General Wallace, well, heard him speak, at a conservation seminar she'd attended. He had made a big name for himself at the Pentagon before retiring to the family ranch in Arizona. Evidently he felt his years of service entitled him to be heard on a whole range of civilian topics. Range being the operative word among cattlemen. In Benita's part of the country, the people who ran cattle in the national forests did not like laws protecting the environment, or protecting endangered wildlife. If it wasn't something a human being could eat or make money off of, it wasn't important.

The congressman said, "Why don't retired generals fade away like they're supposed to? Why is he so involved in this grazing issue? He's working me into a real bind. If I vote to protect the land, my constituency will howl, because they prefer to do things the way they've done them for three hundred years, despite the fact that three hundred years ago there were only a few hundred people cutting timber and running cows where several thousands want to do it now!"

"I'm sure it's very difficult, sir."

"Oh, no, hell, as one recent visitor rancher told me, the world is coming to an end soon, so it won't matter whether there is any range or rivers left or not."

There was a long silence. Benita visualized the young woman standing patiently, saying nothing.

She'd probably heard it all before.

"End of speech," said the congressman in a tired voice. "I'll see Ms. Alvarez."

He opened the door himself. The way he pushed it back, fully open, told Benita he didn't plan for her to stay long. If the door was open, he could walk people out, chatting, arm around the shoulders of whoever it was, casually reaching down from his six-foot-four-inch height to take a visitor's hand, to murmur something about nice of you to have come by, you take care now, have a nice day, bye-bye.

She'd seen him do that at campaign rallies. Congressman Gregorio Alvarez was actually Greg Kempton on his birth certificate, but he ran for election on his mother's maiden name, and that side of the family had always called him Gregorio. He really was a sort of cousin, through a many times great-grandfather.

His mother had been short, like most of the Hispanics of the Southwest, but his father, Brad Kempton, had been six foot five.

She got up, putting on her careful smile, wondering what he was thinking. She had taken pains to dress like a woman who deserved to be taken seriously. She'd gone to the hairdresser at the hotel first thing this morning, her suit was well made, and so were her shoes. The cube was in a shopping bag, so she could look like any ordinary shopper, except for the bruise greening one cheek, just under her dark glasses. She saw Representative Alvarez's eyes settle on it, just for a moment, and his lips tightened.

"Mrs. Alvarez?" He smiled very nicely and kept his voice gentle. Well, he'd sponsored a lot of anti abuse legislation, and the public knew all about how his mother had died. "I'm intrigued by your message."

"Are you, really?" She was pleased. "I tried to make it intriguing. I know you must be pestered to death, and the last person you want to talk to is some mujer loca from back home." She looked around his office, a little flustered, summoning up her daytime, working-woman self, the one who dealt with people all the time.

She went to the chair he gestured toward and seated herself when he did, just across from him, with no desk between.

"Tell me about yourself," he asked, smiling. "You're from New Mexico? Married? With children?"

"Two. They're both in college in California." He started to say something then caught himself. She guessed he was going to say she didn't look old enough. People often said that. The truth was, she wasn't old enough. There were still too many Hispanic girls like her, having babies at fifteen or sixteen, more among Hispanics than any other group. Among her people, familia had always been more important than anything, and babies born too soon, though grieved over, were accepted.

"Now, what brings you to Washington?" he asked.

She took a deep breath and said firmly, "I was hired. They paid me to bring this thing to someone in authority."

She bent toward the shopping bag, unwrapped the tissue and came up with the shiny cube, reached over and handed it to him. He took it as though it might be a bomb and almost dropped it when it immediately turned firecracker red. He was old enough to remember when kids played with firecrackers, and he held it, feeling it.

Benita knew it felt like leather. Not soft, precisely, but yielding. Not like plastic or wood. He turned it over, and it screamed at him. He almost dropped it.

She reached for it and turned it over, at which point it stopped yelping. "It has a right side up," she told him. "And it yells if you upset it or leave it alone. So long as you've got it near you, it stays quiet.

When it turns blue, it's okay. You can feel it kind of buzzing? On your fingers?"

He stared at the thing. She knew he could feel the vibration, and the color had faded somewhat toward the purple. "What does it do?" he asked.

"They didn't say. They just said it would do all the convincing and explaining that was necessary. I kind of expected it to do it when I gave it to you. Maybe not, though. Maybe it won't turn on until it gets to the president or somebody like that?"

He snorted. "I can picture that. The Secret Service would just love it. A sealed container with who knows what in it!"

"I thought it might be a bomb," she agreed, nodding. "Except it went through all the machines at the airport. There was even a sniffer dog, and he didn't twitch."

"Probably looking for cocaine," he muttered. "Who gave this to you?"

"They were strangers to me," she said, using the phrase she had decided upon during the plane trip.

Strangers were acceptable. Aliens might not be. "They came up to me in the mountains, where I was hunting mushrooms, and they gave me that cube and some money, and they asked me to take it to someone in authority over our country."

He started to ask the sensible questions, like where, and when, and how many of them had there been, when a loud voice in the outer office made him turn in that direction.

". . . never mind, I'll just go on in," the voice boomed, and in he came, tall and bulky, straight up and down as a post, white hair and broad shoulders, a drill-sergeant Santa Claus, seeming to take up all the air in the room just by saying hello. She recognized him at once, both from having heard him speak and from the constant news coverage he received. He crossed to the congressman, who was gaping, one hand holding the cube, the other raised in surprised greeting.

"Good to see you, son, and what the hell's that?" the general asked, grasping the congressman's free hand. He gave it one quick pump, then took the cube from the other hand, like a child finding a surprise .

And they all went somewhere else.

The three of them seemed to be standing in space, far, far out in space, with galaxies whirling and dust clouds gently surging and a godlike voice speaking from the center of the universe, saying, "Ladies and gentlemen of the human race, may we introduce ourselves. We are of the Pistach people, originally of a double star system toward the center of your galaxy and ours, long-time space farers, who have recently become aware of the interest your race has expressed in the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence."

The scene changed abruptly to a mountain trail, where the three of them stood on an outcropping of rock watching two uniformed persons who looked only slightly exotic handing the cube to Benita, then bowing and departing. The godlike voice went on: "It is our habit to approach a single member of a new race to receive our initial contact. Despite your recent spate of fables concerning alien abduction, no one from your planet has been abducted. We can find out all we need to know about any creature without kidnapping or vivisecting it. We choose this method of introducing ourselves to limit the risk which always comes with surprise. We are happy that our message has been brought to (. . . click, click, click . .

.) General Wallace and (. . . click, click, click . . .) Congressman Alvarez by (click, click) his kinswoman, Benita Alvarez, and we ask that you take this message to the highest authorities of your nation."

They were abruptly back in the congressman's office.