“Maggie.”
They kissed, and that was enough to bring the crowd of gaping onlookers shuffling close Mrs. Rogan, Granny, Elvira, Clara . . . all of them, all talking at once.
“Alex, is that a real spaceship? . . . Did’ja meet aliens? . . . Where’d you get it, Alex? . . . Now what’s goin’ on ’round here? . . . What’s this all about? . . .”
And lastly, pushing through the others, “Where have you been, Alex Rogan?” his mother demanded to know.
“Out,” he said automatically. Standing with his arm around Maggie, he tried to explain the impossible.
“Take it easy, everybody.” They settled down to listen. He took a deep breath and spoke to his mother. “I’ve been on another planet, Mom. Helping the Rylans and the other good aliens, protecting the civilized galaxy from the bad aliens.” He gestured over his shoulder. “That’s my gunstar . . .”
“Like from the Starfighter game?” Louis wanted to know.
“That’s right, little brother. See, aliens put the game here on Earth and on other worlds to find people who qualified as Starfighters, to help defend the Frontier against Xur and the Ko-Dan armada. Just like the game always said.”
“Wow!” Louis said expressively.
Otis pushed forward, Jack Blake close on his heels.
“Well, then, if you were somewhere out there, who was it broke my antenna trying to put it up?”
“Yeah, and stole my truck!” Blake said accusingly, though much subdued.
“. . . And ruined my stove . . . and wrecked my plumbing . . . cut my ‘lectric . . . !” other voices inquired.
Alex made shushing motions with his hands. “That was a Beta Unit, a duplicate of me. A robot.”
“Aw, I knew it all along,” Louis insisted. He looked past his brother, suddenly pointed. “Hey, what’s that?”
The lift was descending again. On it stood a tall, alien shape. The adults in the crowd drew back fearfully, but they had to pull their children along.
“A monster!” one of the women shouted.
“Monster?” murmured Grig as he stepped off the lift and started toward Alex. “Indeed.”
“Go easy on ’em, Grig,” Alex asked him. “Remember, they’re just immature primitives. Like me.”
Grig nodded, stopped short of the crowd.
Granny was trying to push her way forward, clutching her old shotgun. Alex hastened to cut her off.
“Wait! Put down the shotgun, Granny. Everybody, come back. I want you all to meet Grig. My best friend.”
The children were first, breaking away from their parent’s paranoid grasp to crowd unhesitatingly around the alien’s long legs. Urged on by shame and curiosity, their elders timidly joined them.
“Grig,” said Alex brightly, “I’d like you to meet Mr. and Mrs. Boone . . . that means they’re mated . . . Elvira, Otis . . .”
He led Grig down the impromptu reception line. “And this is Granny, and Maggie, of course.” Grig nodded, shook hands with each in turn before they stopped in front of the young female. She regarded him with a lopsided smile.
“Er, hi . . .”
“Remember the English I taught you,” Alex murmured to him. “There are no translator buttons here.”
Grig nodded and took Maggie’s hand. The crowd murmured. Grig made an effort to smile in the human manner and said, with perfect diction, “Charmed.”
Louis once more pushed his way to the fore and began doing strange things with his fingers. Grig found this puzzling, which was not surprising since he hadn’t seen the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
But he recognized the resemblance immediately. “And you must be Louis. I’ve heard good things about you.” He bent to shake the small hand, marveling at the softness of the flesh, so different from his own.
Louis stepped back, eyeing his hand as though it had just magically materialized on the end of his wrist, and turned to his friends.
“Hear that, you slimes? I’m famous!”
Mrs. Rogan was next. She eyed Grig warily.
“And this is my mom,” Alex said.
As Alex had instructed him, Grig took Mrs. Rogan’s hand. But instead of shaking it, he bent and put his lips to the dorsal side. A peculiar custom, though no more so than half a hundred he’d acquired in his travels.
It certainly had the intended effect. Mrs. Rogan was rendered speechless. Alex had warned Grig that this might be the result, so he resumed the conversation himself.
“You should be proud of your son, Mrs. Rogan.” He looked past her at the assembled crowd. “You should all be proud of him. He saved the League and hundreds of worlds, including Earth. He is the greatest Starfighter ever. He will teach other potential Starfighters and help us to build a permanent core of citizens ready to insure that such attacks as we have just suffered will not occur again. Their very existence will be a deterrent to future war.” He glanced solemnly at Alex.
“Which reminds me. We are expected back to begin work. It is time to leave.”
Maggie frowned. “Leave?”
“Alex?” said Mrs. Rogan.
He kissed her gently on one cheek, nodded.
“I have to, Mom. I promised. You heard Grig. I have a job to do. An important job. And I’m the only one who can do it.”
She sighed. “I always knew you’d leave here, Alex. I just never wanted to face that moment. I don’t imagine any mother does. Still, I guess it’s not so very different from going off to the University. What are you going to do about your studies?”
He grinned, waving toward the star-filled sky. Just like his mom, trying to couch the impossible in everyday terms.
“Somehow spending four years preparing to be a computer technician doesn’t seem quite as important as it once did, Mom. Don’t worry. I’ve got plenty to learn, out there.”
“Yes, I suppose that you would.” She looked meaningfully toward Grig. “You’ll watch after him, won’t you?”
He nodded. “It will be a pleasure. I hope only to do one-tenth as good a job as you have done.”
For the second time that night Jane Rogan found herself speechless.
“Gee, can I come too, Alex?” Louis wondered, staring worshipfully up at his brother.
Alex knelt until they were eye to eye. “Sorry, squirt. But I’ll be back to visit, lots of times. You didn’t think I was going away forever, did you? But you can’t come.” He gestured back at the gunstar. “There’s only room for me, Grig, and Maggie.”
Maggie swallowed. “Me?”
“Of course.” He took a step toward the gunstar, but she held back, uncertain, and he turned to her again. “Why else do you think I came back? I told you that we’d always be together.”
“Yeah. Together here, or at school, or in the city. Not . . . out there, Alex.”
“You always told me you wanted to travel and see faraway places.”
She didn’t meet his eyes for a moment. “I meant San Diego, or maybe someday New York. This Rylos of yours . . . you can’t even see it from here.”
“You can’t see New York, but you can see Rylos, Maggie.” He put his arm around her, turned her so they both faced the sky, and he pointed. “There it is . . . right there.”
“Oh. It’s bright.”
“You gotta come with me, Maggie. I’ll be back, but I don’t know when. Setting up this training program’s going to be a lot of work, and I promised. Don’t you see? This is our big chance. It’s like Otis said. When it comes, you gotta grab it with both hands and hold tight. I can learn a lot and help a lot of good people at the same time. It’s something I have to do.”
“What about Granny?”
Alex gave her a look easily interpreted to mean, “Not that old excuse again,” and she knew that he knew what she really meant. So why continue hiding it?
“You’re right, Alex. I’m scared of leaving here. I’m scared of leaving this trailer park, for all my big talk about traveling and seeing the world, never mind other worlds. Why can’t you stay? Someone else could start that school.”
“It’s not just that, Maggie. Don’t you see? I’m not just a kid from a trailer park up there. I’m a Starfighter. I’m the Starfighter, and I’ve got new friends who are counting on me. I can’t let them down. This is . . . Maggie, this is a lot bigger than me, or even you and me. It’s bigger than anything.”
From inside the ship a voice sounded over a speaker, gentle but insistent. “Alex.”
He whirled and replied almost angrily, though Grig would know it was only Alex’s frustration speaking. “Just a minute!” A low whine rose as the drive was activated.
“I can’t talk anymore,” he told Maggie. “Anyway, I’ve said everything. I gotta go.”
He hugged her hard, forced himself to move on to his mother, to Louis. Then he waved goodbye to the others, the assembled faces he’d known since childhood. They stared back at him reassuringly, solid as the desert, alive with the light from the gunstar.