Title:A Roswell Homecoming, section 1: the instrument
Author: Chris Kenworthy
Email: Chris_Kenworthy@yahoo.com
Category: Alternate timeline epic. Conventional couples angst leading up to UC in later parts - you have been warned!
Rating: MATURE, for now
Disclaimer: No, I don't own any of the Roswell characters. I don't plan to steal them and lock them up in white rooms either.
I just let them out to play from time to time and see what happens.Distribution: Distribute anywhere you like, based at fanfiction.net: http://www.fanfiction.net/~chriskenworthy
Feedback: YES PLEASE!
Summary: Alien mysteries lead to an interesting year...
Spoilers: Up to 'Ask not'
Notes: This is the beginning of an alternate future fic that flips back and forth between Homecoming night 2001 and flashbacks of the events that have led up to that point. The storyline diverges as of the end of 'Ask Not' so anything about Whittaker being revealed as a skin, the Harvest, Future Max, the Dupes, Christmas, the Granolith, and the Gandarium are all irrelevant lol.
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Alex Whitman smoothed out his sleeves, and then stared critically into the mirror, attempting to determine if his tie was straight. Hmmm. Seemed close enough.
Alex had to admit he looked good in this outfit, despite the fact that he had had nothing to do with its selection. His girlfriend had picked out the charcoal gray tux, and as offended as Alex had been at the time that she showed no confidence in his taste, he now had to confess to himself it was probably for the best.
His girlfriend. Alex broke into a wide grin at the very thought.
"Hey! Boy!!" The voice was calling up the stairs from the living area of the Whitman house. "Get down here. Your 'ride' is here."
There was a definite emphasis of surprise on the word 'ride' in his father's voice, and Alex smiled to himself as he hurried down the stairs and out the door.
A white stretch limo was parked in front of his house, the driver standing with imperturbabe respectfulness next to it, and Alex couldn't help but strut a bit, as if he were walking down the red carpet at the Grammys. Wait - that was *leaving* a limo, wasn't it? Oh well. Now, how would a Grammy nominee walk when getting INTO his limo on the way to the show??
Alex settled for a brisk and confident stride and let the driver open the rear door for him. No-one else was inside the passenger compartment, of course.
"6025 Murray lane next, sir?" the driver asked as he entered the limo himself, sliding behind the wheel.
"Hmm?" Alex grunted in momentary confusion. "Oh, yes, definitely. That's our next stop, sure enough."
The driver pulled out into the street without another word, and Alex Whitman was left alone with his thoughts. Without conscious awareness of his own actions, he pulled on the fine silver chain that hung, as always, around his neck under his shirt. He hadn't taken the thing off for months. Okay, except to shower. And sometimes when he was trying to sleep and just *couldn't* get comfortable with the darn thing. And there was that one time...
Alex cut off his rambling thoughts and pulled the chain up to take one more look at the makeshift pendent it carried. The thing didn't look like much - a flat disk of some sort of smooth metal, with a perfectly circular hole in the center, and finely textured starburst patterns of ridges and grooves on each face, the two sides differing only slightly in the size of the pattern's grain.
To think that this little gizmo had put them all through so much...
* * * *
It had been early October the year before. Skin hysteria was rising among Roswell's 'Aliens among us' club and the new owner of the UFO centre, Brody Davis, had just missed becoming a victim of the paranoia. In a fatal way. Like having his molecules rearranged into something else or blown apart by a very frightened Isabel-and-Michael team. Not nice.
Alex had wandered cautiously into the UFO center the day everything had gone down, motivated by curiosity as much as anything else. Curiosity about this alien abductee Brody and what Max had said about his Dot-com millions. (Who wouldn't be?) And curious about the strange device that Davis had brought with him, that had reacted to Michael with such devastating force (but not Max?) and had also reacted on May 14th, the day that Isabel and the others killed Pierce and got the message from her mother.
The UFO center was undergoing a transformation at the hands of a few determined men and women. Alex noticed that displays on 'Foo fighters' (apparently not the band,) and the hollow earth society were being taken down. What was being put up in their place was considerably less clear.
"Hey, you!!" Alex took a second to realize that the exclamation was probably being directed at him, and he half turned towards the speaker. "Scram," his voice continued relentlessly. "We're not open to the public any more."
It was a voice full of British character, and from that fact alone, Alex could guess who was talking at him. "Mister Davis?" he said without thinking as he turned to face the thirtyish man with short, curly bronze hair. "I'm sorry, I didn't know you were closed."
Davis looked Alex over with suspicion. "How did you know who I was?" he asked narrowly.
Caught by surprise, Alex sifted through several possible responses before realizing that the relatively straight truth would do. "I'm friends with Max Evans. He said a very little about you."
Davis softened about thirty percent. "You another alien nut?"
It took Alex a few seconds to realize that meant not 'Are you a crazy alien like Max' but 'Are you crazy about aliens like Max'. Especially since Alex wouldn't normally have described Max as crazy about aliens, or crazy at all. "I've been known to follow the encounter circles," he said cautiously, wondering how Davis would react to that.
Davis didn't react to that. He didn't really have a chance, considering that his attention was distracted by something else he noticed while Alex had been talking. "No, no!!" he called out to one of his assistants across the room. "Exhibits two, six, and nine go into the analysis area with-- Hey! Listen to me when I talk to you, please - you won't get another warning. Well, then, why did you tear that picture down..." His voice faded somewhat as Brody Davis walked calmly towards his erring minion.
Alex was left behind alone, and he noticed that Davis had left something behind on a nearby table-top. It was a reasonably large piece of white paper board, perhaps sixteen inches by twelve, with a variety of items taped to it. Most were slips of paper with notes on them - some written, some typed. Near the center of the board was a small metal disk with a hole in the center, taped down in three places, but not completely covered by the tape.
Alex couldn't help but edge near it and start reading the notes: "Alien washer?? ??"
"Supposedly taken from the special FBI warehouse of crash-related artifacts hidden near Roswell."
"Inert for years, but reacted to the May 14th pulse with a stunning static charge."
"Others have reported a varying static effect upon touching it, since May 14th, but only one time per person."
"I got a bit of a shock the first time I laid bare fingers upon it myself. Imagination or alien mechanisms?? How can it know when a particular person has already touched it? Analysis shows no electrical circuits inside as we understand them. Experiments with subjects unaware of the object's properties were completely inconclusive. BD"
That last note was a long handwritten scrawl, with the initials flourished - Davis signing off his own experiences and reactions to this particular artifact, Alex realized. The other notes were either typed, (most of them,) or hand-printed much more legibly, and related outside facts and myths relating to the object.
Alex looked around. Davis and his workers were all still busy, and none of them were paying attention to him. Alex couldn't push down the temptation to touch the disk himself. He edged a fingertip into contact with some of the uncovered metal, noticing its starburst texture pattern.
ZZZAAPP!! The feeling was overwhelming, like a channel of pure energy flooding up through Alex's finger, coursing up his arm, and then diverging, some of it overflowing to engulf his body while the most brilliant waves of current headed straight for his brain...
"Hey, hey there." The next thing Alex knew, Davis' voice was repeating itself at him. He turned slightly and realized that the UFO fanatic was now standing right next to him. He had been across the room when Alex had checked, which meant that he had lost time... "I'm sorry," he mumbled. "I was just..."
"Looking at one of my pieces?" Davis finished, gesturing to the whiteboard. "That's okay. This one is just a trinket I picked up because of its association with May 14th. Don't think it really has any significance." Alex stayed silent with an effort.
"Look," Davis continued. "I have to get back to work, but you can come by Monday at seven if you want to see more. Oh, and if you see Max Evans, tell him I might have some work for him tomorrow, if he's still interested." Brody smiled in a friendly fashion that left absolutely no doubt that he intended Alex to leave now.
"Okay," Alex said, still a little dazed by his experience with the 'trinket.' "Goodbye." He headed back out the door of the UFO center, noticing idly that one of Davis' workers was taking the sign down. It certainly seemed that Davis wanted to make the center less of a public business establishment than a... what?
Someone was sitting on one of the big stone blocks his mother had had put in the front lawn as Alex walked up towards his house. He recognized Isabel Evans a second before she shook the long golden hair out of her face.
A leap of joy threatened to burst out of Alex's heart as song, just that she was nearby, but he restrained himself with effort. No sense letting his hopes fly high at the slightest excuse. "What's up, Iz??"
Isabel's response came in one rushed string with hardly any punctuation. "Look I meant what I said that we can't be any more than friends and you've got to accept that but what kind of friends are we if we hardly ever hang out and never speak to each other so, bearing all that in mind do you want to see this video or not?" A plastic case, with a VHS tape barely visible through its clouded transparency, was thrust toward him.
Alex couldn't help but indulge a soft chuckle. Isabel had obviously been waiting for him, and thinking about what she was going to say, for considerably too long.
He looked at the video. 'The Princess Bride.' One of his favorite movies, an undisputed classic of modern cinema.
"Sure," he said, still wondering if there would be further surprises. "Come on inside. My dad has classes late tonight at the college, but Mom's off work so there may actually be dinner."
Isabel laughed softly at that. She was still keeping her guard mostly up, Alex could tell to his chagrin. But she was ready to open up at least enough to have a little fun, and Alex was glad of that.
"So, friend Alex," Isabel said with a little giggle as they stepped through the front doorway. "How's your day been?"
"Pretty boring," Alex admitted ruefully. "Dropped in at the UFO center to see this Brody Davis guy for myself. He's certainly intense about aliens." He paused for a second and a half. "You?"
"Also rather dull," Isabel reported. "Tess has been driving Michael and I crazy with questions about River Dog and stuff."
"River dog??" Alex repeated wonderingly. "Well, I guess that makes sense. After what happened..." He choked himself off too late, realizing that a reminder about recent events might not be too comfortable for Isabel.
But though Iz's perfect skin had paled with Alex's allusion, she continued the thought without pause. "After what happened to Nasedo, River dog is Tess's closest link to her own history, yeah." Isabel took the tape back from Alex, inserted the tape smoothly into its predestined slot, and sat down, not on the couch, but the plush chair set at right angles to the screen.
She'd have to crane her neck slightly to see the action from there, but the reasoning for her choice was clear. There would be no opportunities for physical contact between the two of them. At least, not without Alex sitting on the arm of the chair or Isabel's lap. Tempting though those possibilities were, (especially the second,) Alex definitely lacked the guts to try versus Isabel's negative signals.
So he settled down on the couch himself, near Iz but not too near. "Maybe Tess should go and see River Dog herself."
"She may *demand* just that," Isabel said with a peculiar emphasis. "Personally, I'm not sure it's a good idea. Tess is terminally blunt and River Dog is a bad guy to offend. Remember when he though Michael was lying to him??"
"That was a misunderstanding," Alex protested through a frown that he hoped Isabel couldn't read. As touching as Isabel's manic concern for Michael had been at the time he came down with a fatal alien equivalent to heatstroke, it was more than a little disturbing in hindsight as foreshadowing of the revelation that Iz and Michael had been romantically linked in their past alien lives. Still, Alex fought bravely on with his thought. "River Dog didn't mean any real harm to Michael - he just had him taken out of the camp. Once he realized Michael *was* sick, he came through well enough."
"Yeah," Isabel said noncommitally. "On the other hand, what was he doing letting Michael stay in the sweatlodge, knowing that if he was a genuine 'visitor' it could kill him? Seemed like an awfully nasty 'test' to me."
Alex couldn't think of an answer to that, so he shut up and went back to watching the movie.
* * * *
A funeral of some kind. Enormously sad and lost people - (well, not quite people as he ordinarily thought of them...) grieving whoever were inside two silver caskets. Two more waited at the front of the (cathedral?) for their mates to join them.
A... - a laboratory? Some kind of experiment or procedure being conducted - with genetic diagrams posted up on every square foot of the walls. A book - a flash of pages bound together like an old spiral notebook. Letters and symbols unlike any Alex had ever seen before.
And a giant computer, with a small recess near its center, in which a small metal ring sat...
Alex kicked into a half-sitting position with a start. "Boy, that's definitely the weirdest dream I've ever had." And his finger was smarting.
* * * *
The next day, Alex went over to Max Evans' table in the cafeteria at lunch. He wasn't usually all alone, but Maria was apparently on a Liz day, Michael would be off who-knew-where Alex guessed, and Tess was apparently giving the poor boy some space. Isabel held court on the back lawn with the pretty and popular, of course.
Alex's video night with Iz had been... nice. And thouroughly as 'just-friendly' as she had vowed. Alex sighed. It wasn't that he didn't understand how Isabel might feel, or that he thought she was obligated to feel for him as much as he felt for her. Alex was just tired of being everybody's best friend and nobody's special someone.
"Problem, Alex??" Max spoke without looking up from his mystery meat loaf, (which couldn't be *that* absorbing.) Alex suddenly realized that he had sighed a bit too loudly and probably given Max the impression that he had come over to unburden himself.
"No, not really," he hastily disclaimed. "Just came over here to hang out, see what's the what, you know?"
Max looked up to survey him at that point, and Alex almost gasped with the surprise. He had seen Max many times before, of course, but now it seemed that he had seen a face that was *not* Max's, yet LIKE Max's, very recently. Where?
A picture. A portrait or likeness... from the dream!! That was it. A visage not quite human, but with almost the same contours as Max's face. Ruddy skin with a hint of purple, midnight blue hair, and eyes that seemed to glow a yellowish green...
"What?" Max's voice broke into his reverie once again. "What is it... am I getting a zit or something man?" Max's fingers searched his cheek, trying to pinpoint the spot where Alex was staring.
Alex laughed. It was such a normal thing for any teenager to say that visions of alien lifeforms seemed too strange to even consider. (And it was in that roundabout way that Alex realized the significance of what he had seen - Max, not as a human teenager, but an alien king. Either that or he had imagined it.)
"I hate to say this, but I've gotta ask," Max rambled, a cautiously concerned look on his face. "What is *with* you today?"
Alex tried to calm down. The last thing he wanted to do was have to spill about the dream to Max - not before he had some idea what it meant himself. "Nothing, just a bit of a... sugar rush," he rationalized to the other guy, even though he hadn't had any lunch yet. "Or... what's the opposite of a sugar rush?? When the blood sugar to the brain dips too low and you start to get weird?"
Max shrugged slowly, the look of concern on his face not going away. Alex charged valiantly on. "Doesn't matter. By the way, I stopped into the UFO center yesterday and had a bit of a talk with Mister Davis."
"Who? Oh, Brody??" Alex didn't see any particular way in which Max was on a first name basis with 'Brody,' but he nodded.
"He says he wants you to work for him after all, if you're interested."
Max mulled that over a little. "Might as well, I suppose. Can always use gas money for the Jeep the way we have to go chasing to and fro all the time, and it was handy having access to Milton's files last year. Not to mention the premises." Max shuddered slightly, probably remembering the tense final conflict with Pierce. Alex knew *he* was.
"We'll have to be a lot more careful though," Max mused. "Brody may be obsessed, and a bit of a nut job, but he's a lot more on the ball than Milton was."
"Do you have any idea what he's *doing* to the center?" Alex asked curously. "When I was there, it looked like he was practically tearing the whole place down."
"I overheard one of his assistants talking, a lit..." Max broke off as a new figure came up next to Alex's chair.
Alex looked up to see who the newcomer was. Maria. Alex still hadn't gotten used to her long hair, but it was definitely Maria. (She had said the extensions were gorgeous on her and couldn't possibly be told from natural hair. True as far as that went, but it completely ignored the fact that anyone who had seen her pre-extension *had* to be able to figure it out. Hair just didn't grow that fast; it wasn't humanly possible. Hmm... maybe she was trying to distract attention from Michael and the *real* aliens...)
Maria smiled with slightly nervous impatience. "Hey, girlfriend," she said softly to Max. "What's up?"
What she wasn't saying was perfectly clear to Alex. "You guys want me to clear out so you can plot out how to get Max back with Liz," he announced just as quietly as Maria had spoken. "And maybe Maria back with Michael - I'm not sure about that one."
"It'll have to wait a bit longer," Maria sighed, sinking into a seat at the end of the table, next to both of them.
"You don't have to go, Alex," Max said, as the other guy began to stand up. "I mean, I don't mind at all if you stay, and I don't think Maria does." He shot a glance over at his co-conspirator, but her reaction was hard to read. "I mean, as far as that goes, you could... um, help out. If you're interested." He looked nervously over at Maria again.
Maria sighed. "Sure. The way things stand with you and Isabel, you're a candidate for project Girlfriend if anybody is, Alex." Something clicked in Alex's brain. The fact that Maria had been calling Max that wasn't an emasculating joke, (well, not entirely,) but also a reference to this little plot of theirs. 'Girlfriend.' What Max wanted to get Liz back as, and what Maria wanted to be to Michael again.
Alex slowly shoved his chair away from the table and stood up.
"Uh, thanks for thinking of me, but that's okay," he mumbled. "I'm disappointed by the way things have turned out between me and Iz, but trying to scheme my way back into her heart doesn't sound like the best of plans either." Lest two of his best friends think hard enough to take offense at that, he swiftly carried on. "I guess I'll go find Liz and occupy her while you hold your strategy session. Wouldn't want her to tumble to the plan too early, would we?"
"Thanks, Alex. I think she said she'd be in the library all lunchhour," Maria called quietly as he left.
* * * *
The West Roswell High student library wasn't very big, but it still took nearly ten minutes for Alex to find Liz Parker. She was leaning with her back against one of the bookshelves, between the shelving area and the exterior wall. When Alex had quickly 'checked the stacks' for any side of his friend, he had simply walked down the rows of shelves and sighted along the corridor formed by each of them, missing his friend entirely because one of the shelves had blocked her completely from view.
Finally, after checking every other part of the tiny research center exhaustively, Alex began heading up and down the archive passageways and quickly caught sight of her. "Hey, Liz. Whatcha reading??"
Liz looked up, smiled briefly at Alex in recognition, and held the book up to briefly flash the cover at him. 'The high frontier: colonies in space'
"Read it," Alex said with a small smile. He had... he'd been interested in space travel and the like long before he'd known that alien hybrids were in the midst of the student body. In fact, an excess of book learning on the subject was probably the reason he'd had such a hard time accepting the big secret... but now was no time for extended reflection. "It was good," he commented, still about the book. "How are you doing, Liz-ster?"
Liz smiled again, in a bittersweet way that Alex would probably categorize as 'wan,' even though he didn't know exactly what that word meant. "I... I'm dealing, I guess. How about you?"
"Keeping it together," Alex assured her. "Isabel isn't avoiding me any longer, but she's still making it pretty clear that it's no more than friends." He sighed. "I can accept that, I think... but then we were never as... as anything as you and Max." Alex wondered belatedly in retrospect if he should have actually said the M word to Liz.
But Liz's smile grew a little warmer. "I can deal too... at least, I think I can." She said it as a confident declaration, but her voice trembled. "I have to - I won't be doing Max any favors by taking him back... trying to hold on to him, when his destiny is waiting."
"But..." Alex checked around carefully to make sure that there was nobody around to overhear their conversation, and that Liz seemed to be okay with further discussion on this topic. "How do you know that it's an either-or choice? Why can't we be part of that destiny, now? You've been part of Max's life, more than that, you've been his world, ever since that day when none of us had a clue what was going on. Do you really think you can change that just by staying away from him?"
Liz stared at him bitterly. "Max has Tess now."
"He doesn't want Tess!! I mean, yeah, he's accepted her as a friend and a part of the group, but he doesn't love her, not even close. Just because they were married... well, that says it all, doesn't it? 'Were.' This is a new lifetime for them all, and new lifetimes mean new choices..."
"Don't!!" Liz suddenly half-yelled at him. "Seriously, Alex, don't do this, okay? I already have Max and Maria double-teaming me about all this kind of stuff. I don't care if they put you up to this or not, I just can't take it from you too, okay?" Her voice was softer now, but an unmistakeable hard edge of emotion was still in it. "I've made my decision."
Alex eased up immediately. "Sorry," he said, reaching out for Liz's hand in a comforting gesture. "I didn't mean t-"
At that instant, Alex's fingers touched Liz's again, and once again he felt that odd static sensation, like he had felt touching that weird gizmo the day before. No, not quite. It wasn't the same feeling as before, of raw energy pouring into his body. This time it was, like... what? He couldn't be sure. Like something within him was... was reacting to Liz's touch? Not in a romantic way... in an alien energy kind of way. He was sure of that.
And Liz was looking at him strangely. "What? It's just static cling, Alex. You get it on the carpets here, don't you know?"
Alex shook it off, and tried to get back to the point he was making. "Um, t-to debate you on the issue or anything. But just one more thing... if you've made your decision, do you expect to hold the rest of us to it? You've decided that Max and Tess belong together, how about Michael and Isabel? Because I can tell you that Maria isn't ready to give up on Michael yet. What if she gets him to take her back? Would you... would you hold that against her, or anything??"
Liz looked up at Alex, and he saw there was a hint of tears in her eyes. "Of course not, Alex!! Maria's been my bestest friend for ever and ever, if she's decided she wants to make it work with Michael, then I wish her the best. My choices are my own." She sighed, feeling the weight of worlds on her shoulders perhaps. "The same goes for you with Isabel, if you want to start pursuing her again."
"Somehow I don't think I'd stand much chance," Alex moaned. "But seriously, if Maria was with Michael, and I was with Isabel, and the end of the world didn't immediately come, how long do you think your willpower would last?" He grinned teasingly at her.
"Shut up!!" Liz chuckled merrily and tossed the book at Alex in a half-threatening gesture, but Alex caught it easy. Without saying anything, he nodded agreement to her imperative, and nodded his head towards the library's exit in friendly invitation.
"Hmm..." Liz considered. "Sure." She smiled at Alex and led the way out of the stacks. Alex quickly caught up, making soft inquiring noises and pointing to his firmly closed mouth.
"Naw, I don't think so," Liz said, giggling. Alex loved seeing her giggle, and he was willing to play the rules of this little game, but he wasn't about to let her win for too long.
So, as they walked out of the library, Alex threw his hand around Liz's shoulder in what might have been too familiar a gesture for a platonic friend, But his fingers exerted pressure on Liz's far shoulder, just hard enough that she'd be able to feel it.
"Hey!!" Liz protested. "Okay, okay, you can talk again."
"Thanks," Alex said quickly, releasing his hold immediately. "So, did you hear about this mega party that Courtney Banks and her brother are throwing??"
Liz took a second to digest that. "Courtney Banks... the Courtney who's working at the crashdown now?"
"Yeah," Alex reported. "She's in our grade, and her brother's older, some bigshot at the radio station. No parents, at least that's what the grapevine has to say..."
* * * *
"Come on, Alex. What good is sitting around and waiting going to do you with Isabel?"
Alex sighed into the phone. "As if the only thing that mattered in my life was getting back with Isabel Evans." He took a breath. "But even if we do assume that matters... what good does it do me to wait? Let's see, well, it gives her some time to work through her issues and uncertainties without building up any more bad associations to myself in her mind."
"And what if she works through her issues with somebody else??" Maria DeLucca countered. "I saw the sparks that were flying with geology boy last week ago - Sornssen. I didn't want to throw that in your face, but..."
"Wai- wait a second," Alex interrupted. "Grant Sorenson? The one who dug up Pierce's bones?"
"The very son-of-a-bitch," Maria spat.
Alex shook off her venom as a byproduct of how Sorenson's discovery put Michael in jail and got back to the subject. "That's totally gross. He must be what, twenty-six? And Isabel's still a teenager."
"Sad, possibly illegal, but true," Maria insisted. "You think being mature and ruggedly handsome is a turn-off to girls? Why do you think Iz 'volunteered' to go and find out what the guy was up to?"
Alex sighed. This was fighting dirty, but it was working. "So what are you suggesting, I take a loudspeaker out under her window and sing 'Stand by me' until she runs down the stairs and jumps into my arms??" he asked, not without a trace of sarcasm.
"Now that you mention it... no, bad plan, if only because her parents might call the police," she decided. "Just do something to keep youself in the game. The smaller, the sweeter, the better. Send her a long-stemmed rose. No, think of something yourself. Something personal, meaningful." Maria sighed long-sufferinly. "The kind of thing Michael would never, ever do for me, you know?"
Alex smiled. "You never know. Goodnight, Maria."
"'Night, Alex." The line clicked as Maria rang off. Alex put his receiver back in its cradle and thought a second. Something personal, something meaningful. Something small and romantic.
His first thoughts were of sitting with Iz on the Frasier woods camping trip, explaining what little he knew about the stars to her. But what was he going to do, have a star named after her? That might work on television, but there was a corny edge to it in real life.
He ran over every significant incident they'd had in the past year, (not a particularly wide field,) eliminated all those with unpleasant assiciations like alien babies or jail visits, and tried to come up with insightful (and not frighteningly expensive) gift ideas from the rest.
Finally, he settled on potted azaleas, which had figured in this art flick he and Isabel had seen together, and she said they were pretty. Unfortunately, by the time he had settled on that, all the florists were closed. Ah well, he supposed countering Grant Sorenson could wait for a day.
Alex got ready for bed that night mechanically, anxious about his dreams of the previous night, and whether they would come back. As jumpy as he was feeling, he wondered if sleep would even come.
It didn't have to. As soon as he lay down in bed and closed his eyes, a new volley of images leapt into his mind. Aliem Max again, a holographic projection of him, rotating grandly about in the middle of a high-tech laboratory. Someone paging through the book he had seen in his first dream - a brown leather-like cover with designs on it that he couldn't quite make out. The pages were stiff, almost metal-like but not quite, and the 'letters' were cut entirely out, like stencils.
Again the 'disc computer' - a gigantic machine that seemed entirely focused on the disc... yes, it had to be the same metal slug that Alex had touched in the UFO center. A gigantic bank of equipment, that seemed to be essentially four globular compartments, each filled with goopy slime. A spaceship taking off into a yellow sky, broke by rays of blue sunshine.
With an effort of will, Alex forced his eyes open and immediately picked up the phone. He could hardly wait for the ringing to stop hefore he announced, "It's Alex. I need your help."
"Um, okay, Alex..." Max Evans said uncertainly.
TO BE CONTINUED...
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