Chapter 27

She joined me in the kitchen again as I put together the trout and some roasted asparagus, but conversation tonight was a little stutter-step. We'd be chatting idly one moment, the next she grew silent and pensive, and it went back and forth that way.

As we sat down to eat she popped up with something completely unexpected, at least to me.

"You know, I figured it'd be kind of an adventure coming up here, but I never anticipated meeting an honest-to-God LGM."

"A what?" I asked.

"LGM," she repeated. "You know, Little Green Man."

I was baffled. "He's not green," I said.

She smiled. "It's just a name, kind of a term of art. I've got a teen-age nephew." She saw my raised eyebrows. "My sister's kid. Older sister. Twelve years older, actually. Anyhow, he's into science fiction everything—movies, TV, books, games, you name it—and he's always talking about LGMs. It means aliens, people—or things or whatever—from other worlds and all, they don't have to be little or green or even men, but they're often shown that way in the films, I guess to make them stand out more as something unearthly, so that's what they're called. Kind of a generic term."

"Oh," I said. I couldn't think of anything to add.

"Yes." And she lapsed back into thought again, and we did most of the meal in silence. She did compliment me on the food, but it was kind of desultory, an afterthought, and I just said thank you and we went back to eating and not talking.

I made coffee again after dinner and we again took it into the living room, but I was expecting a fairly short and non-conversational evening. So I was again surprised when she chose to open up a bit to me about her thinking.

"Nick, you haven't mentioned anything at all about getting Asmedogh to the authorities," she started.

I just looked at her.

"You must have thought about it," she persisted.

"Yeah, I did," I told her. "For maybe about a nanosecond or two. It's one-billionth of a second, it compares to a second the way that second does to about thirty-two years," I explained when I saw she didn't understand the reference.

"How come?" she asked.

"Couldn't see how anybody'd gain if I did. There's sure no gain for me. I don't see how Asmedogh could gain, his people clearly aren't ready to meet us yet or they'd have made contact instead of hiding. And your 'authorities, ' what would they get out of it?"

"Aren't you taking kind of a lot on yourself?"

"How's that?"

"Well, look, Nick," she said in a tone that was maybe a little too carefully reasonable. "I know you feel like Asmedogh's your friend, and maybe he is. But he's first and foremost one of his own people, or species or whatever you want to call it. And we have no idea at all, really, what they have in mind for us or for Earth. We know they can live here, and couldn't it be they think it might be a pretty good place to live? And that we're, well, we're just in their way?"

I shook my head in annoyance. Why did the human response to the unknown always have to be fear? "Camilla, you spoke with him, you touched him. You were in his mind for that time as much as he was in yours. OK, it's not a really deep connection, mostly just the surface, but how is it possible to maintain a lie during that kind of link? He couldn't lie to you any more than you could lie to him. And did you get any sense, any at all, of anything like what you're saying?"

"No," she agreed slowly. "But would he necessarily know, he himself? I mean, the president, the big military generals and admirals and everything, they don't share all their plans with people like you and me, do they? Couldn't it be the same with his people?"

This had been the big reason Asmedogh and I had agreed on the effort to maintain his cat disguise in front of her. For some reason far too many people are afraid to make their own decisions; they'd rather turn any significant problem over to "the authorities," who are somehow perceived to have omniscient powers to decide correctly but are really just the same fallible human beings as are we all.

I'd hoped for better from her, but this was a problem I'd have to face squarely. And try as hard as I could for a good resolution, but be ready for the worst. Her last question, though, was pretty easy to answer; it was one I'd asked myself early on and had satisfied quickly in my own mind.

"They've been here for a long time, Camilla, a couple of hundred years." Asmedogh had surprised me considerably when he'd told me that, since the UFO reports, at least the ones I knew about, only went back about sixty or seventy. But maybe people just hadn't categorized them the same before; and the history of aviation itself wasn't that much longer.

"So let's take a look at it," I continued. "Two hundred years ago we had single-shot rifles and gunpowder and we used horses and oxen for transportation. They've sat up there for all this time and watched us develop nuclear weapons and armored automotive equipment and superson­ic aircraft and space rockets and God knows what-all else, and they've made no move. And now they're ready to make war on us?" I arched my eyebrows questioningly and simply looked at her.