Fall 2000 Charles River Review: How Jackson Lee Learned the Horrible Truth about Alien Abductions

This time they came for Jackson Lee in mid-wipe.

He'd been sitting on the toilet, half-awake, the bathroom dark except for moonlight leaking around the curtain in the window and the dull blue glow of the digital clock on the wall. He wasn't normally awake at 3:15 in the morning, but against his better judgement he'd gone for a second helping of Ronnie's microwave chili. His stomach, though, didn't handle unusual foods the way it had when he was 20, or even when he was 45.

Tonight had been focus-group night. Ronnie always wanted to go early. It was fun for her, sitting around a table with a bunch of strangers talking about all kinds of consumer issues. Ronnie had even confided in Jackson her secret desire to be a focus-group leader herself. Of course that would mean she'd actually have to get off her rear and go back to school, so Jackson didn't think it would ever happen. But she certainly had the experience. For the last three years she'd been on a half-dozen contact lists. Four or five times a month she'd get a letter or a phone call, and Jackson knew he'd be eating out of the microwave that night. Sometimes when she returned she'd have more than money. The last group she'd done wanted her to talk about the ideal cat food. The leaders had given her a fistful of cat food coupons after that one. Jackson had a feeling that the microwave chili that was burning out his intestines might have been a coupon too.

Jackson didn't understand Ronnie's fascination with market research, though he knew why she was so good at it. Four hours of television every night and subscriptions to People, and Us, and USA Today would turn anyone into a researcher's dream test subject. But damn it, he thought, he didn't want to think of the two of them as consumers, or statistic composites, or tiny cogs in the vast machinery of capitalism. Or at least, Jackson thought, he didn't want to be like that. As for Ronnie--he suspected that she had yearnings and desires that went far beyond what his salary as a small-shop programmer could meet.

And deep down, he couldn't quite forgive Ronnie, either. He'd wondered, more and more as the years passed by, what had happened to the fire-breathing radical he'd fallen in love with. She was the one who convinced him to join the anti-war protests, sold him on the virtues of people power. Hell, she'd been the one who wanted to open up their back-to-the land commune (and what a smelly, fetid disaster that had been) to the slightly crazy, would-be bomber who'd claimed to be a card-carrying member of the Weather Underground. The only thing he'd managed to blow up the whole time he was there was an old outhouse where he'd dumped a jelly-jar of home-made nitroglycerine he'd mistakenly thought had gone bad. Of course, that hadn't stopped Ronnie from mooning over him like some rock-star groupie. Jackson had had to reach new heights of bullhorn aggression to win her back.

Ronnie had been there with him for all the rest, though: Woodstock, the '68 Chicago protests, the riots after Kent State. She'd breathed in her share of teargas, had spent nights in jail, had smoked pot and done acid and worn those funky rose-colored sunglasses, just like Janis Joplin.

But somewhere along the way the fire had died. The Ronnie whom Jackson saw now was quiet, coifed, more interested in retirement plans and real estate than in saving the world. She'd even bought a digital cell phone--for what, Jackson wasn't quite sure. After all, how important was it that she could reach anyone, or be reached, all the time? It made him wonder if she had some secret life, one that was consuming more and more of her attention.

Not that he was entirely blameless, Jackson had realized. He'd let life pound him into submission, let his head rule his heart. Somewhere along the way he'd lost his sense of passion and outrage, had slowly let go of revolution and causes. Things had gotten muddled and hazy. He couldn't tell the good guys from the bad so easily. Every argument had a compelling counter-argument, every position an opposite side. He felt weighed down, somehow--weighed down by marriage, by a mortgage, by all those duties of life that nibbled at him and robbed him of energy. Burdened by social expectations, carrying the responsibility for living a certain kind of life, Jackson found himself keeping his head down, out of the maelstrom of ideologies, focusing only on what was in front of him. His only form of protest these days was muting the volume on the TV when he heard another commercial use the rebellious, joyful music of the '60s, his time, as a way to sell more useless crap that no one really needed. Cars, movies, adult diapers, snack foods, for God's sake. Marketers, he'd decided sadly, ran the universe.

Earlier that evening Jackson had watched Ronnie take the containers of chili from the brown paper bags. They'd been encased in neon-bright cardboard, covered with glowing red words like "New" and "Improved." When he saw the packaging, he wondered if the designer had had a nervous breakdown. He asked Ronnie why she bought the chili. "I'm not really sure," she said. "I saw it on the Food Channel a couple of nights ago. The tomato sauce works with the beef to help fight cancer." Jackson had wondered, fleetingly, about the real relationship between the Food Channel and the American Chili Production Association.

Fighting cancer or not, Jackson was paying the price now, perched on the toilet while his bowels knotted up. He was just beginning to feel normal again when the room filled with white light. He had enough time to pull up his pajama bottoms before he felt a familiar tug on his internal organs, as though he were being turned inside out. Jackson was surprised: the last time they'd come was nearly three weeks ago. He'd just started to believe that, just maybe, they were done with him, but then he floated up through the roof of his house, suspended momentarily over the yard, watching everything shrink beneath him.

Then he was once again in the painfully bright interior of the alien spacecraft.

As usual, the transporter (or whatever it was the aliens used to move him around) left him dazed and sprawled like a landed fish on the floor of the UFO. Jackson stood slowly, listening to the popping noises from his arthritic knees. Thank God, he thought, at least this time he was wearing slippers, though his feet were still aching from the icy floor. He placed his hand above his eyes to block out the bluish glare from lights suspended high above. Peering into recesses of the room, he recognized some familiar faces. Kermit was there, of course--he (or it) was always there. Jackson thought he might be the commander. Kermit stared back at Jackson, huge black almond-shaped eyes dominating his gray and lipless face. Oscar was there as well, standing at a bank of controls. There were others, too--some that Jackson had named, others that he had only seen once or twice flitting in and out of the various chambers. Jackson gave the creatures Muppet names initially as a way of coping with the utter strangeness of what was happening to him. After a while it was just easier to refer to them that way.

Over the last three years, ever since the first time that he'd been ripped from his bed, the small aliens had examined and penetrated every orifice in his body. They flooded his eyes with mysterious goopy syrups, deafened him with loud noises, and assaulted his nose with vile odors. They force-fed him unidentifiable substances, and then watched him to see what effect they had on him. They exposed his skin to heat, cold, wet, dry, rough and smooth textures. All this while he had been bound with some kind of slimy netting to an icy-cold examination table, his mouth frozen open in a constant silent scream of horror and protest. After a while, the aliens moved on to psychological tests. There were 3-D puzzles, and maze problems, and even written tests that seemed a lot like the IQ tests he had taken in elementary school. Lately, though, the small, gray creatures seemed content just to show him holograms and observe his reactions.

He looked around the vast room. It reminded him of a ballroom he'd once seen pictured in an architecture book, all white walls with black and chrome accents. There was a huge wooden table in the center of the room. And placed around the table were twelve sleek, executive-style swivel chairs on casters. There were metallic pitchers on the table, gleaming with condensation, water glasses, and pads of paper at each seat. Even futuristic-looking pens, Jackson saw, neatly lined up next to the pads. It all looked as if a high-level board meeting was about to start. Wondering why the table, which seemed so out of place in the middle of a UFO, Jackson pulled out one of the chairs and sat. The two aliens across the room watched him. When they first started taking him, their intense gaze reduced him to near-catatonia.

Jackson had tried to tell people when the abductions began what was happening. He'd started with Ronnie, who listened, concentrating, while he told his story. She was silent for a few moments after he finished. "Well," she said. "That's some story, isn't it." Ronnie pursed her lips and looked at him.

Jackson could see something in her eyes: worry, maybe.

"Honey," Ronnie said, finally, after giving him a long look, edging away as though he had some disease she was afraid she'd catch. "Maybe you should take a rest, get away for a few days, you know? I think you're working too hard." She backed away then, down the hall, and escaped out to her car. She returned a few hours later, laden with bags from Lord and Taylor. She cheerfully pretended that they'd never had that particular conversation and had taken to humming the first few bars from "Eve of Destruction" whenever Jackson mentioned aliens or UFOs or those hideous tests.

After that Jackson was more cautious. He wasn't close to many of his co-workers, but he thought that Tim, a developer two cubicles over, might be sympathetic. Tim was young enough to be Jackson's son, but he and Jackson shared an appreciation for Hendrix, Zeppelin, and the original Fleetwood Mac lineup (before Peter Green left). Besides, Tim could get his hands on the most outrageously fine pot. Sometimes he and Jackson would share a joint at one of the picnic tables randomly placed on the unnaturally green lawn behind the low-slung office park where they worked. They had a long conversation one day, hiding the joints inside cupped palms, the summer sun beating down hard on Jackson's balding head. Jackson told Tim about the abductions and what the aliens were doing to him. Tim had responded, putting in all the correct "whoa" and "no way, dude" but Jackson knew, even through his hazy high, that Tim didn't believe him either. And Jackson couldn't really blame him or Ronnie or anyone else. After all, everyone knew that people who said they'd been abducted by aliens were refugees from outer kookland.

In desperation he'd even called the News of the Globe tipline. Every week he'd seen the lurid tabloid in the shelves at the supermarket checkout. If anyone would listen, he thought, they certainly would. After navigating the voice-mail system (press "1" if you've seen Elvis, press "2" if you know who murdered Marilyn, press "3" if you have a live Bigfoot, and so on), Jackson finally spoke with a live person. Not a reporter, but Muriel, an assistant to one of the editors. He didn't even rate a reporter, Jackson thought bitterly, just a flunky. He shrugged mentally and told Muriel about his abductions.

"Really," she said, sounding like a government clerk in some dreary office. "That's it? That's why you wanted to talk to a reporter?"

"Well, yes," Jackson said.

Muriel sighed, a long, drawn-out sigh that told volumes about her deadly dull, frustrating life. Jackson could hear her moving around, opening and closing drawers. She breathed heavily for a moment, as though she'd had to pick up something. "OK. Let's see here. Any physical evidence? Burns, or scars, holes, any changes to your skin or body that you don't remember seeing?"

"Uh, no."

The interrogation went on for several minutes. Muriel asked question after question, about seeing Elvis, about cattle mutilations, about black helicopters. She even asked about the experiments the aliens had performed on Jackson. Her voice was monotonous, almost bored during the whole thing, and Jackson had the distinct impression that she was reading from a script, or maybe an instruction manual. "You don't believe me, do you?" he asked. "This could be big--bigger than Monicagate, bigger than Y2K, bigger than anything, and you don't believe me."

"Sir, we get a hundred calls a week like this. Quite frankly, unless you've got a dead alien in your trunk, live video, or at least a landing site, there's no story. At least not for us."

"That's it?" Jackson asked. "I've been abducted by aliens, and that's all you have to say?"

"I'm sorry, sir. We are in business to sell newspapers, you know." Muriels's voice dripped with condescension. "Thanks for calling the News of the Globe. Have a great day." Then the phone clicked in his ear.

Wearily, Jackson shook his head. He'd never been much of a conspiracy theorist, even after Bobby and Martin had been murdered, after Nixon and the whole Watergate thing, even after Reagan and the contras. Random acts, he'd always thought. People taking advantage of circumstances. But this--this refusal by anyone to believe in the reality of alien abductions; well, it had to be a conspiracy. Just had to be.

A movement across the room caught his attention. A human woman, dressed conservatively in a gray business suit and ivory blouse, had entered through one of the slits in the walls that the aliens used as doors. Jackson stared at her, goggle-eyed. Ronnie? What the hell was Ronnie doing here? Ronnie saw Jackson and stopped, surprise playing across her face. "Jackson," she said, "you're not supposed to be here." She turned toward the aliens, twisting her hands up in a universal somebody screwed up big-time gesture.

Jackson sat in his chair, stunned, mouth open. He had trouble getting his breath. Ronnie? He kept asking himself, his Ronnie? Ronnie, who pretended not to believe his stories of abduction? What was going on? She looked so confident, so in-charge of things. She carried herself as though it were the most natural thing in the world to be strolling through a UFO, dressed for a corporate meeting in some executive conference room. All she needed was the line of assistants and lackeys following in her wake to make the illusion complete. "Ronnie?" he finally managed to squeak.

Behind her Jackson saw more movement. There were several more humans heading for the table. As they came closer he saw they were a mixture--some white, some black, some Asian, even one who looked as though he might be an Aleut or American Indian. The group of humans stood uncertainly, like strangers waiting at a bus stop, trying to look around and assess the situation but being careful not to be offensive. One by one they slowly approached the table and sat down.

Ronnie walked to the table. Carefully avoiding Jackson's puzzled stare she placed a metallic box before one of the women, then withdrew into a huddle with Kermit. Jackson watched her as she stood next to the gray figure. No words were spoken, but Ronnie's face was animated. She shrugged twice, then seemed to come to some kind of an agreement with Kermit. Telepathy, of course. Somehow Ronnie had learned to communicate with her mind. Jackson wondered if she had been reading his mind as well.

Ronnie returned to the table. "Ladies and gentlemen, thanks for joining us." She continued to ignore Jackson, staring straight ahead. "Before we get started I thought we should introduce ourselves. I'll start. I'm Veronica Lee. Originally I'm from Wisconsin, in the USA, but for the last few years I've been working under contract with a large, multi-system consortium."

Veronica? Jackson thought. She hadn't called herself Veronica since God knew when. He wondered just how well he really knew his wife. What else had she been doing all those years? Jackson wanted to get out of his chair, demand some answers, but he felt weak, almost paralyzed.

Several of the aliens edged closer. They stood in a huddled group just outside the cone of bright light cast by the lamps hanging over the table. Jackson stole a quick glance at his fellow humans. No one was looking directly at Ronnie, but everyone was listening to her. He was sure everyone was aware of the aliens standing just behind them, but no one said anything. Three other aliens had joined Oscar and Kermit. Two of the new arrivals held black trays with small paper bowls. The bowls reminded Jackson of the pill containers hospitals used.

Ronnie made a quick gesture with her hand, and the aliens walked behind Jackson. He cringed, expecting that they were going to grab him and pull him away from the table. Instead, like waiters at an elegant restaurant they placed one of the paper bowls before him. They quickly did the same for the other humans. Within a few moments each person had a group of three paper cups. Jackson looked inside the cups. Each held something that looked very much like corn chips, dyed red, purple, and orange. He bent his head and sniffed. There was a faint aroma of--fruit? He couldn't quite place it.

At the head of the table Ronnie cleared her throat. Along with the other slightly stunned humans, Jackson stared at her raptly. She seemed so normal, somehow, that she was more outlandish and surreal than the aliens, or the UFO, or even the huge conference table. "Well, shall we get started?" she asked brightly. Blinking in confusion, Jackson and several of the others nodded slowly. "Please take one of the red chips and taste it," she commanded.

Like an automaton Jackson brought the red chip close to his nose and sniffed cautiously. It smelled salty. He licked the chip. It tasted spicy, like a taco chip or a Frito. He looked around the table. Some humans were gazing speculatively at the small white cups in front of them; others were testing the chips. One man across the table had forged ahead. He had already eaten one of the chips and was chewing appreciatively on another. The man didn't start frothing at the mouth or fall out of his chair clutching his abdomen as though one of those icky creatures from Alien were about to burst from his chest, so after a moment's reflection Jackson cautiously put the chip in his mouth and bit down. He felt almost mesmerized by Ronnie, too stunned to resist her commands.

The taste was disappointing. A mild, salty kind of tang, like potato chips gone stale. Instantly forgettable, Jackson thought.

"So, what do you think?" Ronnie asked. The aliens hovered behind her in a small group, their black almond-shaped eyes focused on the group of humans with laser-like intensity.

The man across from Jackson spoke. "Not bad, I guess. Kind of reminds me of bulk food at BJ's, you know?" Several others nodded in agreement. Jackson wondered crazily if the universal translator turned BJ's into the appropriate cultural equivalent. After a few additional comments, Ronnie turned to a paper pad on an easel and wrote a few lines.

"Okay," she said. "Now I want you to try the purple chips." Again Jackson sniffed at the chip cautiously. He felt like Goldilocks, trying different bowls of porridge before finding one that was just right. Several of his fellow humans popped purple chips in their mouths. He did the same, then immediately spat out the crumbs.

The purple chip tasted foul and rancid, like meat left to rot on a hot day. Then Jackson felt a rush of blood to his crotch. All of the women, including Ronnie, suddenly began to look incredibly lush, like lingerie models. "Whoa," Jackson mumbled. What was that all about? A couple of the men were actually pawing at women sitting next to them, while across the table a raven-haired beauty was giving Jackson a very pouty stare. As quickly as it came on, the erotic urge disappeared. Jackson continued to wonder what exactly was in that chip, but something else jittered in his mind. He had a nagging feeling that this situation was familiar. Ronnie, he thought. What are you doing? Why do I feel as if I've seen this before? He thought suddenly of Ronnie, talking about those evening meetings, all the interesting people she met, the different products they were testing. Jackson looked around at the table and the humans, Ronnie up there with her marker and pad of paper, the aliens huddled in a group just beyond the reach of the lights. It was a focus group. For some reason, they wanted to know what humans thought of those chips. But why? You only tested things if you, if you--

They want to trade with us, he realized. They want to sell us stuff. We're a market for them. We're consumers in that multi-system consortium Ronnie talked about. A Who lyric spun crazily through his mind, over and over like a record skipping on an old turntable. "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss." Roger Daltrey's betrayed roar echoed in Jackson's mind.

"No," Jackson roared, surprising himself, finally finding his voice. The other conversations stopped dead. Everyone looked at him, even Ronnie. "No," he said again, quieter now. "This is too much. It's bad enough our own kind does this. But," he pointed an accusing finger at the aliens near the table, "are we going to let them do it, too?"

The other humans stared at him. Jackson suddenly felt exposed and alone.

"That's enough, Jackson." Ronnie's voice was steel. "That's quite enough of that." She walked behind Jackson's chair and spun it around. "Let's talk for a minute," she whispered to him. She looked at the group around the table. "Please excuse us," she said, anger thinning her lips to a narrow line. "Everything's fine. We'll just take a break for a moment, shall we?" Ronnie pulled Jackson from the chair by one sleeve and led him across the chamber. One of the aliens trailed her, and stood a few feet away. "What are you trying to do?" she hissed. "Do you want to ruin everything? I've got a delicate situation here."

"Ruin what? Your little party?"

"Look. Settle down, and I'll explain it to you, OK? I feel like I owe you that much, at least."

Jackson breathed deeply, once, twice. "OK, Ronnie. Explain it to me. Make it make sense, because right now it doesn't. What are you doing here? Why am I here?"

"I can understand," Ronnie said, after a moment. "They've been taking you for years, done all kinds of things to you, and you never knew why. I'm totally sympathetic to that. I was an abductee, too, you know. That's right." She nodded furiously. "They were taking me before they decided to use you instead. Scared the crap out of me. I felt like something out of a high-school biology experiment. All that poking and prodding." Ronnie shuddered. "But," she leaned into Jackson's face, dropping her voice to a conspiratorial whisper, "once I figured it out, I saw an opportunity. A huge opportunity. One that made getting in on the ground floor of amazon.com look like chump change." She drew back from Jackson and gazed off into space. "All those tests? Market research. They wanted to understand us, not kill us, or turn us into slaves. Once I figured that out, the rest was easy. Who better to help them than me, the queen of focus groups? Of course, I had to find a substitute for myself. That's where you came in."

Jackson watched her cautiously. This woman looked like Ronnie, sounded like Ronnie, even smelled like Ronnie. But this was Ronnie as he'd never seen her, not in all the 35 years they had been married. Her eyes were alive with a strange light, as though she were a psychotic killer relieved to finally have someone to whom she could confess. Who knew what she would do next? Jackson decided to stall for time. He nodded at the aliens by the table. "Don't they already understand humans?"

"Physiologically, sure. Even cognitively. But you know we don't buy based on cognition. We buy psychologically. We buy based on emotions. Market research is about finding an emotional need and convincing you that a product will fill that need. I know that. That's what I did. That's what I do."

"So the focus groups are what, exactly?"

"They have a pretty good idea what we will trade for. But they wanted to make sure. So the groups are a way to confirm the desirability of the product."

"I still don't understand. Why trade? Why a relationship between them and us?"

Ronnie stared at him for a moment. That odd sparkle was still in her eyes, but there was something else, too; something that was making Jackson very uncomfortable. "Wars cost money. Lots of money, and resources, and lives. It's a lot harder to make a profit from a dead world than a live one."

"Profit?"

"Are you so anthropocentric that you think humankind is the only species in the universe interested in profit? Profit is like breathing, Jackson. It's a fundamental part of intelligent life. It's like the speed of light or the gravitational constant. Every sentient being wants to make a profit."

"But what do we have that they could possibly want?"

"What don't we have. Peanut sauce, sit-coms, horses, ukuleles. Frisbees. They really like Frisbees."

"Can't they just use their spaceships to swoop down and steal all the things they want?"

"It's a question of economies of scale. There are trillions of buyers out there. The market is insatiable. In the long run it makes more sense to gear up production. But there have to be incentives, rewards. Especially for humans. We're generally considered to be the laziest species in the galaxy."

"And in return? What do we get?"

"Follow me." Ronnie started walking to one of the slits in the walls. After a moment Jackson followed her. They pushed through a thin membrane into a small room filled with clear bags of chips. The orange chips, Jackson realized. Like the ones in the paper cups on the conference table. Ronnie picked up one of the bags and tore it open. "Here," she said, holding out a chip to Jackson. "Try it."

He hesitated.

"They're good, really." Ronnie put the chip in her mouth and bit down. "See?"

Jackson took a chip. He sniffed cautiously, then licked it. It tasted salty, spicy, and fruity, reminding him of a Frito smeared with strawberry jam. He put the chip in his mouth and crunched it between his teeth.

Instantly his mouth was flooded with an exquisite flavor, as though all of the world's best snack foods had been combined. "This is good," he mumbled. "This is really, really good."

Ronnie smiled, a quick twisting of her lips that made Jackson think of worms on the sidewalk after a rainstorm. "I know." She reached into the bag and pulled out a handful of chips. "Go on, have some more."

"Don't mind if I do." Jackson crammed the whole handful in his mouth. Along with the taste he noticed his body was suddenly warm. He felt a tingling in his loins. He looked at his wife and pictured her nude, splayed out on a waterbed in some by-the-hour room in a cheap motel. "Whoa," he said again. He blinked his eyes. "What was that?"

"Think about it, Jackson. What are the most basic human needs? What do you get when you boil everything down to the gut level, the reptile brain, the selfish gene?"

Food and sex, Jackson realized. Food and sex. He thought about the chips, about the exquisite taste, the warmth and the tingling down there. "Oh, man," he said. "They figured it out, didn't they? Package an aphrodisiac with a taste humans crave."

"Ladies and gentleman, I think we have a winner," Ronnie said. "It's the perfect product. Guaranteed to be irresistible. There'll be riots when people can't get enough."

"And your angle is?"

"Jackson, I'm tired of being poor. I'm tired of driving a ten-year-old Corolla. I'm tired of living in an old house that doesn't have a family room. I'm tired of not having a personal trainer. I want stuff, and I want to do things. I want to live, not just exist."

Jackson searched Ronnie's face for any hint, any sign at all that the old Ronnie he'd known and loved was still in there. But her face was impassive and cold. She stared back at Jackson.

"So you'll sell out," he said. "Sell out for a family room and a Lexus. Sell out humanity. Sell out me."

"Life is betrayal, Jackson. Don't you watch TV?"

"You don't care, do you? You know what will happen once people start eating those chips," Jackson said. "Food and sex, I mean. It'll be like a rabbit warren down there."

"They know. It's inevitable. But we like to think of it as a long-term growth opportunity."

Jackson started laughing, huge, uncontrollable guffaws that shook him and made his jowls quiver. "Of all the ways to see the world end. Jesus, I bet no one ever thought of this. All this time we thought about how aliens would come and conquer our planet. 'Take us to your leader', they'd say. Or 'resistance is futile.' Or they wouldn't say anything, just blow everything up with their giant ray guns. But 'give us your Frisbees and ukuleles'?" Jackson started laughing again, tears rolling down his cheeks. "'Eat our super tasty, guaranteed to make you horny snack food'? We're doomed. We are so screwed." Ronnie's blue eyes became watchful, and Jackson choked down a last giggle. He realized, suddenly, that he was in trouble. Big trouble. He wasn't sure about the details, but he had a bad feeling he now knew stuff he probably wasn't supposed to. No way were Ronnie and her alien buddies going to let him return to the conference table as though nothing had happened. He had to get away--now. Ronnie reached forward to grab the sleeve of his white robe. Jackson twisted away, pulling his arm from her grasp.

Across the room he could see one of the slits in the wall and ran toward it. Passing the huge conference table Jackson heard confused shouting from the humans and a kind of sibilant hissing, as though air were leaking from a punctured inner tube. He pushed his way through the slit and emerged in a dark corridor, dimly lit at irregular intervals by glowing globes of bluish light that seemed to float against the ceiling. He could hear an odd, disjointed pounding approach from the room he had just left. Realizing the aliens were coming, he turned to his left and began to run again.

The corridor curved to the right and gradually dropped away. The curve seemed to be increasing, as though he were running on a spiraling ramp. He passed several of the wall slits and silently prayed that a crowd of aliens wouldn't vomit forth and attack him. None did, and he jogged around one final curve and entered a low, dome shaped room. There was a hole like a manhole in the center of the floor. Was this how the aliens disposed of trash? Or maybe it was a sewage grate? As Jackson approached the opening, he thought he could smell the night air of Earth, filled with the scent of grass and trees and good old-fashioned dirt.

He'd been convinced that the aliens had taken him billions of miles away to do their experiments. He stood next to the hole and sucked in a deep breath. He swore he could smell--pine needles? He decided either that the aliens had bought the universe's largest air freshener, or, in fact, the UFO had never left the planet's surface.

The noise of pursuit drew closer. The odd, uneven thump of the aliens' gait echoed from the curving corridor behind him. It would only be moments before they reached him. He looked around, searching for another way out of the room. He looked around the room. Only one way in. And only one way out. Jackson felt his pulse beat faster. He ran to the hole in the floor. Behind him the aliens flew into the room and charged for him.

He cast one despairing look at the oncoming pack, then closed his eyes, and jumped into the hole. He felt himself falling, falling, falling--. Wham! His breath whooshed from his lungs. He fell to his knees on the soft pine needles and looked up.

Floating above, almost close enough for him to reach up and touch, was an immense plane of burnished metal. The hole through which he had jumped was directly above him, the glow from the interior of the UFO lighting his upraised face. Jackson knelt for a moment, then his brain re-engaged. Got to keep moving, he thought. Have to get away from here. The aliens, and Ronnie too, were only moments behind. Jackson climbed unsteadily to his feet and ran for the deep shadows just outside the cone of light. He dove into a clump of small bushes. Branches raked his face and caught in his hair. He fought them aside and moved deeper into the woods.

Emerging from the low brush, he entered a large field. Above a low range of hills Jackson could see a glow in the sky from the lights of a small town. He altered his course and ran across the field, heading toward the hills and the town beyond. His lungs were searing stabs in his chest as he ran, gasping for air. His legs hurt in a dozen different places. His knees were on fire, and he swore he could hear the grinding of calcified cartilage. Sweat ran into the cuts on his face. His fear was a black curtain, hovering at the edge of his vision, threatening to engulf and drown him in panic.

Jackson ran as if he were 19 again, sprinting away from the cops after a protest rally, smelling the tear gas drifting across the campus like wood smoke. He was afraid, of course. Afraid of being captured, afraid of what the aliens would do to him, and even more afraid of what Ronnie, his wife, his betrayer, would do to him. But he was also strangely exhilarated. He hadn't felt this alive since those beautiful, golden days when right was right and wrong was wrong, and he knew exactly where he stood on everything.

And the longer Jackson ran, the lighter he felt. He could feel his old life sloughing off like a snakeskin the farther he was from the UFO. Good-bye, uncertainty. So long, mortgage payment. Sayonara, pension plan. Farewell, Ronnie. There was a peculiar freedom in betrayal, Jackson thought; he didn't feel as if he had an obligation anymore to hold up his end of the social bargain once the lies had been exposed. He paused for a moment to take off his pajamas. He tossed the ripped, sweat-soaked clothing aside and looked down at his feet. The rough ground had cut his slippers to ribbons, but he thought there was enough sole left to make it to the town. He wondered what the townspeople would think of him--a perspiring, panting middle-aged man running down Main Street, naked except for a pair of tattered slippers. Well, the hell with it, he thought. His life had been turned upside down in less than a day. He would cope, somehow, though, and the rest of the world would just have to cope, too. Besides, assuming that he wasn't immediately locked up, his appearance might be just the shock that would get someone, somewhere, to pay attention. He crested the low ridge and looked down on the streetlights of a small town. Somewhere, someone down there was bound to believe him. And if not, he would just keep running until he found someone who did.