and repellent than anything his imagination could conceive.
In an infinite universe, the potential number of intelligent life-forms
was also infinite--as he had discovered from the books he'd been
reading lately.
Theoretically, anything that could be imagined must exist in an
infinite realm.
When referring to extraterrestrial life-forms, alien meant alien,
maximum strange, one weirdness wrapped in another, beyond easy
understanding and possibly beyond all hope of comprehension. He had
brooded about this issue before, but only now did he fully grasp that
he had about as much chance of understanding this traveler, really
understanding it, as a mouse had of understanding the intricacies of
the human experience, the workings of the human mind.
The dead crow shuddered, twitched its broken legs. From its twisted
throat came a wet cawing sound that was a grotesque parody of the cry
of a living crow.
A spiritual darkness filled Eduardo, because he could no longer deny,
to any extent whatsoever, the identity of the intruder who had left a
vile trail through the house on the night of June tenth. He had known
all along what he was repressing.
Even as he had drunk himself into oblivion, he had known. Even as he
had pretended not to know, he had known. And he knew now. He knew.
Dear sweet Jesus, he knew.
Eduardo had not been afraid to die. He'd almost welcomed death. Now
he was again afraid to die. Beyond fright. Physically ill with
terror. Trembling, sweating.
Though the traveler had shown no signs of being able to control the
body of a living human being, what would happen when he was dead?
He picked up the shotgun from the table, snatched the keys to the
Cherokee off the pegboard, went to the connecting door between the
kitchen and the garage. He had to leave at once, no time to waste, get
out and far away. To hell with learning more about the traveler. To
hell with forcing a confrontation. He should just get in the Cherokee,
jam the accelerator to the floorboards, run down anything that got in
his way, and put a lot of distance between himself and whatever had
come out of the black doorway into the Montana night.
He jerked the door open but halted on the threshold between the kitchen
and the garage. He had nowhere to go. No family left. No friends.
He was too old to begin another life. And no matter where he went, the
traveler would still be here, learning its way in this world,
performing its perverse experiments, befouling what was sacred,
committing unspeakable outrages against everything that Eduardo had
ever cherished.
He could not run from this. He had never run from anything in his
life, however, it was not pride that stopped him before he had taken
one full step into the garage. The only thing preventing him from
leaving was his sense of what was right and wrong, the basic values
that had gotten him through a long life.
If he turned his back on those values and ran like a gutless wonder, he
wouldn't be able to look at himself in a mirror any more. He was old
