Roswell Fanatics

"Well, I'll be. There it is...," said Posner, "...looks like we just got lucky."

"Well, the town only has four major roads into it - she had to use one of them."

"Not in that thing she didn't. She could have come in through the desert and picked up any of a couple of dozen of the smaller roads, but that's her alright. Let's get up behind her and put the lights on - see if she's going to pull over or try to make a run for it."

"Looks like she's got a friend, too...," said the driver.

Deputy Marshal Posner was not a happy camper, even after he spotted the jeep. This really wasn't Marshall's office business - any of it. Even before they broke the other car - which was going to mean a long report - and had to walk two miles to get to where their cell phones would work to get someone to come pick them up. The car with the cracked transmission case was still sitting out there in the desert - they'd have to arrange for its pickup and repair later today and it had already been a damn long shift.

But that wasn't what was really bothering Posner. OK, maybe this wasn't their job but that didn't mean he didn't have enough empathy to want to help out a couple of parents whose daughter had been kidnapped by some sex-fiend. What was bothering Posner was the friggin' FBI. Even that wasn't totally true. The junior agent - Special Agent Sanchez- was OK. Posner would have happily worked with Jaime anytime. It was just that idiot Phillips.

"You know, maybe back on the East Coast they have roads everywhere, but the guy is in the Southwest now, for Pete's sake....," said the driver. Posner just nodded. Both of their ears were still burning from the chewing out they'd gotten over the phone from Phillips - the bastard hadn't even left his hotel room but that hadn't stopped him from lecturing them in great detail about how to tail someone and precisely what sort of idiots they were for 'tearing the bottom out of the car,' which they hadn't - they'd just cracked the tranny case. With luck the thing could just be drained and welded. But they'd accepted it stoically - knowing they were going to give their own supervisor an earful about Phillips when they finally did get off this crap detail.

"Hit the lights, Ray," said Posner, "... and let's see what happens..."

Isabel had noticed the head lights of the big dark car sliding up behind them and was not totally surprised when the grill lit up with blue strobe lights. She looked nervously at Alex - knowing this really wasn't fair. She was asking him to take a lot on faith - and her promise to tell him about everything later. 'Yeah, well if you think lying to the police is taking a lot on faith, what do you think is going to have to happen if he isn't going to go screaming off into the sunset once you tell him that you are 'not of this Earth' and - oh yeah - you love him?' said a little voice in the back of her head. She tried to ignore it.

As she pulled over to the side the jeep headlights hit the billboard. 'That I didn't need either,' she thought as she tried to put a smile on her face for the person walking up from the passenger side of the police car.

"Is there a problem, officer?"



"Is there a problem, officer?" the smiling girl had asked. Deputy Marshal Posner was briefly taken aback by the question.

The boy next to Isabel Evans looked nervous - so did the girl although less so. But suddenly Posner was nervous too. It was at that moment that Posner realized he really DID have a problem. They really didn't have any charge against Isabel Evans.

She had never really broken any laws eluding them. Between their desire to keep distance between them for surreptitious surveillance and the girl's off-road driving skills, they'd never even gotten close enough to her to put the lights on. Maybe Roswell had a curfew or something that these two were violating - but if so he didn't know about it - not that a curfew violation would be a federal matter in any event. Same thing for driving. He knew that New Mexico state law didn't permit people to drive between midnight and 5AM until they'd had their license for a year - but likely Isabel Evans met that requirement.

'Just another friggin thing that Special Agent IN CHARGE, Phillips didn't think about when he told us to pull her over...,' thought Posner. He pulled his wallet out and flashed his badge.

"Miss Evans, I'm US Deputy Marshal Posner. I'd appreciate it if you'd follow me. I have someone who'd like to talk to you...," said Posner, not at all sure what he was going to do if the attractive young lady told him to take a flying leap.

But she didn't - she simply smiled and replied, "Certainly officer. Do you want to tell me where we are going ... or should I just follow you?"

'A reasonable question,' thought Posner. Unfortunately he didn't have a reasonable answer. If they went to the sheriff's department there were going to be questions about probable cause and what exactly they were charging the kids with and .... the idea hit him and he had to conceal an evil grin.

'That bastard Phillips thinks he's so smart - let's see how HE handles this.'

"If you and your friend would be so kind as to follow us," said Posner.

"Certainly, officer," said the girl.

Posner got back into the car and the driver looked up. "What now?"

"Take us to that bastard's hotel, Ray," said Posner.

"Phillips'?"

"Got it in one. Since he is so damn 'in charge,' let's see how he deals with this..."

The room was part of a suite – the largest in the hotel. It had a wet bar – 42 inch TV – and two bedrooms – one of which was currently set up as an office. It was the most expensive in the hotel as well but – what the hell – the occupant was on an expense account. Jaime Sanchez was sleeping in another room a quarter the size – on the next lowest floor.

Phillips had been up ever since he'd gotten the phone call about the girl – certain at first that this was the break that was needed.

Valenti, he'd realized, had been right. Even assuming the kidnapper was still in Chaves county – and until he heard about the girl's early morning antics he'd even begun wondering about that – there was a hell of a lot of Chaves County and Phillips had reluctantly concluded that the resources just couldn't be mobilized to do a detailed search of all that land. Oh sure, he'd begged for some help from the Marshal's Service – got six guys detailed to help – but he really hadn't thought it would be enough. And then he got the call about the girl.

He'd been sure that was the breakthrough that was needed – the thing that would crack the case and let him ride off to his next assignment – somewhere in civilization – preferably at headquarters. He didn't really need the girl alive – hell, she was barely alive anyway from what he could tell from the doctors reports. What he did need was to catch the kid – and a capture was all it would take. It was hard telling how long the kids parents could drag this out what with the kid himself being somewhat of a psych job adoptee with a screwed up childhood. But that was not Bob Phillips problem – that was the problem of the US attorney. If he caught the Evans kid, that was all he'd need. If he was able to get the girl's body back, that'd be a plus, but even that wasn't really necessary. Then had come disaster.

How on Earth had those idiots from the Marshal's Service managed to lose the girl? What total incompetence! Bob had been fuming since he'd gotten the call. He'd managed to coordinate getting the idiots picked up and a different car, but he'd been sure that their blunder had cost them their chance to catch the girl in the act of seeing her brother. He'd had several drinks to calm his nerves – and pretty much realized that their only real chance would be to sweat the information out of the girl. Eventually she'd be found – but the longer it took until the girl was tracked down and forced to spill the info on her brother's whereabouts, the longer lead he'd have if he was now on the run. As he started on his fourth drink since that phone call, there was a knock on the door. He opened it to see Deputy Marshal Lloyd Posner.

“What in hell are you doing here?” shouted Phillips. “You are supposed to be after that girl.”

“The girl's down in the parking lot with a friend – boyfriend I think. She volunteered to come talk.”

“Volunteered? Why the hell didn't you arrest her.”

“And what charge would you suggest I arrest her on?”

“I don't care – make something up.”

“As I recall from the very sparse briefing we were given, you said the boy's parents were both lawyers. Since the girl is his sister, I would have to assume that she shares those parents. I have no particular desire to file false charges against her - false charges that are more likely to get ME in trouble than her – and for the life of me I can't think of any laws she has broken.”

“Well if you hadn't been so damn incompetent you'd have caught her with her brother. Then we'd have her for aiding and abetting a fugitive and accessory to kidnapping.”

“Maybe we would, maybe we wouldn't. The point is that coulda – sholda – woulda doesn't help us. I'm not going to arrest her for driving around New Mexico at night. If you want to talk to her – I'd suggest we take her downtown and call her folks.”

“I don't WANT to call her folks. They'll tell her to take the Fifth. No, I've got an idea. Bring her and the boy up here.”

“To your room? Without notifying her folks? I don't think that's a very good idea,” said Posner. Even if he hadn't smelled the booze on Phillips' breath, Posner wouldn't have thought that bringing a minor – and a female at that – to a hotel room to interrogate her was a good idea,, but after smelling the whiskey, he wanted no part of it.

“Dammit Posner, nobody asked you for your opinion. I'M in charge of this investigation, and I'm telling you to get those two up here right now.”

Posner gritted his teeth briefly before replying, “ I'll go ask the young lady if she would like to come speak to you...,” said Posner walking out and closing the door behind him.

“You better damn well get her up here,” said Phillips to the closed door, “...and the boyfriend too...”

It had been a long time since Deputy US Marshal Posner felt quite as uneasy about working with a fellow law enforcement officer as he did tonight. The problem was obvious – the solution was less obvious. One thing for sure, the law was clear. The FBI had primary jurisdiction in all kidnapping cases. Of course, that didn't mean he could let something happen that might imperil these two kids. Since he'd gotten them into this situation he clearly had responsibilities toward them. He also wasn't all that happy about the potential repercussions to his career and to that of Ray – his partner – if this went as bad as it might. So before Posner went down to the parking lot he made a short stop one floor below Phillip's suite to pound on the door of Special Agent Jaime Sanchez.

Wham. Wham. Wham.

Wham. Wham. Wham.

Jaime pulled himself out of bed and staggered to the door. Looking out through the peephol;e he recognized Posner and opened it.

“What the heck is going on? It must be 4 AM...?”

“Closer to 5 AM, and we got trouble. You need to get dressed and get up to Phillips' room.”

“You found the boy?”

“No, his sister took us for a ride and managed to lose us this morning. Eventually we caught up with her and a friend – and Phillips wants to interrogate them without notifying their parents – up in his room. We got nothing we can charge either of them with but Phillips doesn't care. I'm pretty sure he's been drinking too.”

“Oh damn – I'll get up there as soon as I'm dressed,”

“Look, I know Phillips isn't the sharpest knife in the drawer, but – damn. I'm going to have to talk to my boss about this – even if it goes well. This is just plain stupid.”

“Agreed,” said Jaime. “you try to support your partner even if you have doubts, but I think it's finally gone too far.”


It was about five minutes later that Phillips heard a knock at his door.

“Come on in,” he said and Posner opened the door, motioning for Isabel Evans and Alex Whitman to precede him. They came and sat next to one another on the couch, Posner and his partner then entering to stand along the wall, with Jaime Sanchez coming in last and closing the door behind him.

Sanchez - apparently a light sleeper - came over to where Phillips was standing and looked back at the girl and the boy on the couch. "Bob," he said, "...I think this is a real bad idea. If we are going to talk to these people it ought to be downtown - after notification of their parents and reading them their rights - and preferably with a tape recorder running."

"Jamey, shut your damn mouth and sit down. As Posner has pointed out - we aren't arresting these people - simply inviting them to sit down for a little conversation."

"But..."

"I don't want to hear any of your beano 'butts', just sit your ass down and watch. I'm the senior agent here and that's an order. The girl's been to see her brother and we damn near caught her - she KNOWS where he is - and we need to get the information from her. She made a mistake when she made this kid her alibi. If it had just been her she could have stonewalled us forever. But a secret stops being a secret when the second person knows it. As soon as we get him to say something different from her - we'll have her. This kid is her alibi and once she loses that alibi, this'll be all over."

"I still think...."

"Don't think - just sit down. That's an order, junior agent."

Sanchez shook his head angrily but pulled out a chair from the small dining table and sat down.

Phillips was pretty sure of just what happened – he had files on both of these two. Isabel Evans was a cheerleader - reigning queen of the local Ice Princess Posse and not even actually a friend of Liz Parker – at least not before her accident. Since then she'd become closer to the Parkers and they still retained a degree of friendship toward her – even after her brother had kidnapped their daughter. Prior to that Miss Evans' reputation had been somewhat of a – well, not really cold-hearted – but certainly detached. Unflappable and unaffected probably best described her. Aloof and unemotional – perhaps just a little snobby – she was going to be a tough nut to crack. Of course, if he could prove that she'd really been out seeing her brother, Phillips knew he could put a lot of pressure on her. Even the most haughty bitch would think twice about spending a few decades in a federal women's prison as an accessory to kidnapping. The problem was going to be to disprove her alibi.

Seeing Alex Whitman encouraged Phillips. The kid came from a whole different school social strata from the girl – what Phillips would have called the geeks and freaks section. He was a friend of Liz Parker's – a computer geek and music freak – not on anyone's list of pretty people in the high school social scene. If he was her excuse then the Evans girl might be in serious trouble. The two had hardly known each other – hard enough in a small town like Roswell when you were in the same grade at the same small High School – until they'd been brought together by Liz Parker's accident – but even after that they'd only had coffee a few times as far as Phillips was aware. That was a pretty tangential relationship for the two to be together at 4;45 AM.

No, Phillips knew who to go after if it came to that. The girl would be tough as nails but the computer guru? Hell, he was looking real nervous and uncertain already. If he could put enough pressure on the kid, Phillips knew he could break him – get him to turn on the girl – and there were ways of doing that, Those ways, he knew, would be much safer than trying to bring pressure on the girl herself – a girl who was not only an Ice Princess but had two parents who were lawyers.

“A little late for you to be out driving around, isn't it Miss Evans?” he asked making the 'strong eye contact' recommended by the FBI book on interrogation. He wasn't surprised when she didn't seem fazed by it. She looked him straight inn the eye without blinking.

“It was a beautiful night. I thought I'd take a drive.”

“And where did you drive to?”

The girl intertwined the fingers of her right hand with the left hand of the boy sitting beside her. “Alex and I went star-gazing.”

“Star-gazing?”

“Alex knows quite a lot about stargazing. He was pointing out the constellation Aquila, and Scorpius, and Libra and – did you know that we are right at the peak of the Perseid meteor shower, Agent Phillips? It was a brilliant display.”

“Is that true, uh – Mr Whitman, isn't it?”

“Yes...” the young man muttered, looking at the floor.

“Which – that your name is Whitman or that you were stargazing.”

“Whitman – I mean – both.”

“So Miss Evans picked you up at your house?”

“Uh-huh.”

“But that isn't the direction she went when she left her house. She went out in the desert. You don't live out in the desert, do you?”

Phillips noticed Alex looking more uncertain – more guilty – and heard him nervously stutter, “N n-n-no.”

“I thought when I left my house that I was being followed by someone so I took them out in the desert to lose them,” said Isabel quickly, tightening her grip on Alex's fingers. “Then I went back and got Alex.”

"I was speaking to Mr. Whitman, Miss Evans," said Phillips. The fact that the young man was looking uneasy told him he was on the right track. He'd just keep pushing - as hard as he needed to. The fact that Isabel Evans was trying to do most of the talking for the two of them confirmed his feeling that the decision to pick up the Whitman kid for an alibi had been hasty and ill-conceived. Increasingly, Phillips was feeling in control of this situation. The boy was the key. Break him and he had her......

Alex was getting increasingly nervous about what he was going to say. Not about lying to the FBI for Isabel – strange as that seemed to him. Maybe it had been all those years of dancing in his dreams with his own Izzy – it was amazing how different his dream-Isabel had seemed from the Ice Princess herself – but how similar they'd turned out to be once he'd really gotten to know her. Even the way they intertwined their fingers when they held hands – it was just like he and Izzy did in his dreams. No, he found himself trusting Isabel Evans – trusting her implicitly.

'I guess I really loved her in my dreams all these years,' he told himself. 'Even the mannerisms of the dream-Isabel I invented are her mannerisms – mannerisms my subconscious must have noticed – because I don't remember thinking about them consciously.'

Of course the problem all these years was the same as the one facing him tonight. He'd never really been able to picture himself – even in his dreams – getting to second base with her. Hell, he had been flabbergasted when he somehow he'd actually let himself kiss her this morning – and even more surprised when she'd indicated the attention wasn't unwelcome. He would have never believed that possible.

But to claim they'd gone farther.... even in his dreams he'd never gone farther … how credible could that sort of claim be really? No, even when he'd dreamed of her actually being his wife – bearing his children – he'd never really believed she could be physically attracted to him and – thinking that – his fantasies had pretty much been limited to dancing. He'd never once actually visuallized the two of them doing - it. Not even copping a feel.

But tonight he had to claim he'd been laying on a blanket up at Lookout Point – and everyone knew what you did there. First of all, despite her reaction to the kiss, he couldn't really visualize that ever happening. And if it had – well, a gentleman didn't kiss and tell – and since he really hadn't kissed – or at least since he hadn't done any MORE than a kiss – saying that he had was not only not true -but tended to dishonor Isabel. Not that it would have been any better if they HAD done something – unlikely as that possibility was – because a gentleman still didn't kiss and tell.

No, what was making him nervous was having to claim that he'd gotten past first base with someone who – though he would have dearly loved to have her feel THAT way about him – he was absolutely sure he would never get past first base with – even though he'd have given anything to think that she might actually someday feel THAT way about him. The stupid thing was that half the guys at West Roswell would have loved to have been able to brag in the locker room that they'd gotten somewhere with the Ice Princess – even if they'd been lying. Alex didn't think of her that way. He wasn't in to counting sexual coup – but right now that's what was required.

“So, when Miss Evans ALLEGEDLY picked you up and took you somewhere – what were the two of you doing? Going to see her brother?”

Alex wanted to say the words – wanted to help Isabel out. It wasn't that he had doubts about her – she'd said that she'd explain it all later – it was just – how could he sit there beside her and tell three guys that he'd been making out with her? He couldn't bring himself to do it. In the end, Isabel did it for him.

“What we did,” said Isabel, “... was go up to Lookout Point and lay out on a blanket and watch the stars... and also make out a little.”

Phillips looked quickly at Isabel Evans. No way was this Alex kid going to get to second base with her. As he looked back to the blushing Mr. Whitman he knew he had them. Whitman was still the weak link - and he was a teenage boy. Teenage boys were remarkably easy to provoke - especially with an excuse like this one.

"That right, kid?" he asked Alex. "You been doing a little groping tonight? Maybe doing a little titty-sucking? A little muff-diving?"

Isabel felt Alex's hand pull out of hers - saw his fists clench as he stared at the man with anger.

"Don't say that," said Alex.

Bob Phillips just smiled. "Well, that's what the lady is claiming, isn't it son? Assuming she is a lady -of course...."

As Alex stood up, Isabel knew she'd made a terrible mistake bringing him into this. It had - she decided - probably been more her emotional need than any logic that had made her do it. So much was going on that was so frightening - knowing her brother was in agony watching Liz slowly fade and being unable to do anything about it - watching her parents come apart from losing their own son - watching Liz herself put such a brave face on as she faced oblivion in the abyss.

No, far more than logic, what had driven her to bring him into this mess was the emotional need for him. All those years of dancing in his arms in his dream-orb - feeling safe and wanted and ... and loved. This wasn't about needing an alibi so much as it was about needing emotional support - but she hadn't thought that her need for emotional support would put him at risk.

Isabel got to her feet - tried to intertwine her fingers in his - but met only a closed fist as Alex glared at Phillips.

"I said don't say things like that. Don't insult her," Alex said, glaring at Phillips across a distance of eighteen inches.

Phillips smiled. Inwardly, he really smiled. He had this kid right where he wanted him. Teenage boys were so easy - hormones and bluster and fragile egos striving for manhood. All he had to do was push - nothing obviously illegal - nothing that could really be interpreted as more than bad judgment. Just keep tauntingthis kid until the kid threw the punch - once he did that he had him on assault on a federal officer in the performance of his duty. If the kid so much as threatened him it constituted assault and would earn him a year in jail, and if he got him to throw a punch - which he had every intention of goading him into doing - it would be assault and battery and the kid would be facing an eight year sentence.

Of course, Phillips didn't expect the kid to actually spend eight years in jail - but then he didn't intend to let the punch hit him any harder than necessary to meet the legal requirement for assault, either. He'd just watch for it - roll with the punch - and scarcely feel it. But once he had the kid on charges, the kid would be in a world of hurt. They'd be able to really interrogate him then - in detail - and have the kid's own parents pressuring him to give up the girl to get a plea deal on the assault charge. Yes, it was an old street cop trick to push a young male - particularly in front of a young lady that he obviously had the hots for - if no realistic chance of ever consummating that desire. The mistake was the girls - she should have just brazened this out - something the Ice Princess before him would have likely had little difficulty doing. Instead she'd tried to use this kid as a pawn against the FBI - as represented by Special Agent Bob Phillips - and because of that he would now make her pay the price for that mistake.

“Kid,” you are just being plain stupid,” said Phillips. “She's using you – that's all....”

Isabel winced. She was using Alex – it was true – just not in the manner that Phillips meant.

“I think maybe we better go now,” said Isabel. “This is starting to just be abusive.”

“I agree,” said Jaime Sanchez, “.... this has gone far enough, Bob.”

“You just shut up, Jamey. I'm in charge here – you aren't. Besides – this fool needs to know what he's getting into.”

Jaime looked at Posner and his partner. This was a law enforcement agents worst nightmare. One of their own – armed – and apparently drunk. What was worse was that Phillips was getting more agitated and aggressive – and his own service automatic was a floor below – safely locked in his gun box. Posner and his partner looked equally concerned but unfortunately where they were standing they were even in a worse position than he was to intervene if this got serious – and it could get serious if Phillips kept pushing that young man.


Alex knew the guy was pushing him and he was angry – but trying to keep in control. It wasn't that he was afraid of this guy and he would really like to have pasted him one but Isabel needed his support. If he let this guy provoke him into doing something stupid it would hurt her.

“You're right, Izzie,” he said. “Let's go.”

Phillips stepped up closer to Alex – time for another old street cop trick. Humiliation takes a number of forms – verbal – violating the subject's physical space like he was doing getting in his face like this – and finally – demeaning touching. Technically, it was assault – no less than what he was trying to tempt the boy into doing. Unlike that, however, this had deniability. A stiff index finger impacting in the sternum was difficult to tell from a finger pointed at someone for emphasis – except to the individual getting the poke. There was little tissue other than skin over the sternum and even a stiff finger good be extremely painful – but more than that, it was demeaning.

“You don't understand,” said Phillips, poking Alex on the chest once as if for emphasis.
“She's playing you – playing you for a fool. You aren't in her league and even you must know that...”

Alex felt the pain and the humiliation as the agent screamed in his face – as he smelled the whiskey on his breath – and as he felt the index finger poke him hard in the breastbone. He clenched his fists but as the words hit him he realized they were true. Not that Isabel was playing him for a fool – not that – but that he really wasn't in her league. He wasn't – and never would be – but still, she was his friend and she'd asked for his help. His right fist trembled but he was determined not to let this guy provoke him.

Jaime watched Phillips in disgust. He too knew the old street cop trick – but Phillip's left hand was resting on the butt of his service automatic. Right now Jaime didn't want to challenge Phillips – that would be too dangerous. Hopefully the kid would have the good sense to keep his temper and give Phillips no excuse to do anything. Jaime's eyes watched Alex intently – fearing that one of those fists would suddenly come up at Phillips face. Phillips would be watching for that.

Posner and his partner watched helplessly – their eyes on two things. The first was Phillips left hand – resting casually on the grip of his service automatic. The second was the boys fists hoping he didn't do anything stupid. Posner looked sideways briefly at Jaime Sanchez – if they could just get the two teenagers out of here the other three of them could handle Phillips – if only Alex Whitman kept his cool and didn't do anything that would provoke the out-of-control FBI agent. Posner watched the teenagers fists – hoping he just calmed down.

Phillips could see the look in Alex's eyes. Just a few more pushes and he'd have him. He thumped his chest again for emphasis as he shouted in his face, “She doesn't care about you – a computer geek. She could have any kid in that school, and you know that. She's laughing at you, kid, ….. laughing at your stupidity and gullibility and how pathetic you are thinking you are ever going to get any of that. Hell, son, look at her – look at you – it ain't going to happen. She's just a cold hearted bitch who is teasing you to get what she wants from you – and there ain't no way you are ever going to get what she's jiggling in front of you. How stupid are you, anyway?” The boys hands were shaking and he was quivering with rage.

Phillips could feel it – he had the kid now. When the fist came up he'd roll with the punch – bringing his service automatic up to clout the side of the kids head to subdue him – then the cuffs – the arrest – the interrogation – and then using him to get to the girl. One more push would do it.

Alex looked at the man in impotent rage. It wasn't what the man was saying about him – computer geeks get a lot of putdowns – he'd heard worse in the junior high school gym – and maybe before he'd known her he wouldn't have taken so much offense about Isabel being called a cold-hearted bitch but he'd seen her work with Liz and even in just those coffee dates he'd come to know that the Ice Princess stuff was just a cover – a cover for someone who cared deeply – but hid her feelings behind that Ice Princess persona. 'I don't care if he is an FBI guy,' he thought, “... if he badmouths Isabel one more time....'

He could see the look in the kids eyes now and he watched the kids fists – ready to club him to the ground with his service pistol when he threw the punch – as he said the words that he knew would put the kid over the edge.... “Face it kid, when that little gal plays hide the salami, it ain't going to be your salami that gets hidden,” he finished, poking Alex's chest once more for emphasis He watched Alex's fists – waiting for the punch to be thrown.

All four of the law enforcement officers were watching Alex – waiting for him to lash out - and all four knew he'd been pushed too far. As Alex started to move his right fist Phillips was ready for the blow – he was watching for it – which is why the open handed slap from Isabel caught him totally by surprise and sent him sprawling onto the ground, impacting his head against the wall.

A lot of people don't understand evolution – even many people who castigate others for not believing in it. They make insults – like saying their opponents 'aren't evolved enough to understand,' evolution or are 'Neanderthals' proving as they do so that they don't understand evolution themselves. Evolution isn't about intelligence – although human intelligence is a by-product of evolution. It isn't about about everybody evolving into pacifists – sitting around in harmony singing 'kumbaya' in a huge circle of fellowship. No – evolution isn't about social justice either.

At its most basic, evolution is about an eternal conflict – a conflict between the law of entropy and the primordial drive of life itself. Heavy, huh? It works like this.

Briefly stated, the law of entropy says that matter wants to randomize - that disorder is the way of the universe – that hot things cool off and cold things get warm and that everything moves toward the lowest common denominator. It's sort of like a cosmic Murphy's Law, anything that can go bad – will go bad.

Contrariwise – this primordial drive of life is just the opposite. While some people try to boil it down to the twin biological drives - ' survive and reproduce' – that's also an inexact explanation. It is that – but it is more than that – it's a reversal of entropy – an organization rather than disorder – a negation of entropy. But for the purposes of this illustration survival of the species in general and survival of the genetic material of the individual is a basic part of this primordial drive and evolution is the tool that this process uses to keep one jump ahead of entropy.

No. evolution wasn't about goodness – it wasn't about conscience – or social consciousness - it wasn't about the quality of one's soul – it was about the mean rough and tumble of survival and the genes that enabled that survival and it was intensely selfish and protective of that survival.

The total picture was sort of a a yin and yang thing, the primordial drive of physical life and the soul (or sentient consciousness for those nonbelievers) working as complementary opposites within a greater whole. But the basics were physical survival in the here and now and continued survival of those genes in the future by passing them to offspring. Now THAT is evolution.


Which gets us back to our story.

At the 99.9 % level Isabel's genes weren't any different than the average humans – they were in fact human genes. She had about 0.1% of her genes that had been hybridized from a species that was about 40,000 years older than humans. That didn't mean – necessarily – that she was going to be either smarter than other humans or more 'civilized' and certainly not more believing in 'social justice.' Cockroaches have been evolving for 325 mi;lion years and they don't seem any more civilized, smarter, or socially aware than they were way back when. The reason is that cockroaches are doing pretty well just the way they are. The mutations involved in evolution are random and rare– they are retained in the gene pool only if they have a significant advantage for survival. Remember 'survival of the fittest'? Isolated mutations tend to die out through something called genetic drift unless those mutations confer a big survival advantage. Which brings us back to that 0.1% of Isabel's genes that weren't like everyone else's.

In what kind of environment, one might ask, does the ability to use telekinesis – limited telepathy – to powerblast – the ability to heal serious injuries with a mental connection - make you the fittest? Make you and yours the ones who survive when those without these genes don't? A damn rough one, that's what kind.

These genes may have evolved by random chance but they'd dominated because those with them survived their environment and those without them didn't. No, wherever these genes had come from, evolution was continuing – pushed hard by a very hostile environment – and Isabel had those genes and with them those powers. Yea though Isabel walked through the valley of the shadow of death she need fear no evil – because she – and those like her – were the most capable SOBs in that valley.

It wasn't even Isabel's conscious mind that triggered it – more just her primordial biological drive. You don't dreamwalk every male in the whole damn class to find the one who suited you perfectly then let some drunk FBI agent demean and threaten him – not when you are the most capable SOB in the room you don't. It wasn't even a conscious action – it was all reflex – programmed into her DNA.

A lot of people don't really understand human physiology – the thought process itself or how the body translates that thought to action. The brain – for that matter the whole central nervous system – works on electricity. Not like the electricity conducted by wires though – that electricity traveled at 186,000 miles per second. The human body used electrochemical reactions – flows of ions to carry signals in the brain and take those signals to the muscles where actin and myosin used ATP to contract those muscles to cause movement. That's not exactly as laborious as it sounds – nerve conduction velocities are about 80 meters per second allowing the muscles of the forearm to initiate a slap only about a hundredth of a second after the brain tells it to. Of course then the actin and myosin have to do their thing – the inertia of the arm must be overcome – it may take as much as three tenths of a second for the arm to really move very far. Of course, that was human physiology. Isabel was basically human, and that's the way she normally worked, normally being the operative qualifier in that sentence. Normally wasn't when her chosen mate – even if they hadn't come anywhere near mating yet – was threatened.

Antarans, apparently, were monogamous, and mated or not, he was the one her primordial biological urge had settled on. When Phillips threatened Alex he wasn't just threatening Alex – he was threatening the continuation of those genes that had been hybridized into Isabel and those genes had – over the last 40,000 years handled a lot more challenging things than one drunk FBI agent. That didn't mean Isabel's primordial drive had anything against Phillips really – assuming he'd take the hint and back off – but if he didn't …. well, not everyone apparently is fit enough to survive.

Normally all those normal things would have been done – but this wasn't normal – because by threatening Alex the creature called Phillips threatened her mate – threatened the children she one day wanted to bear him – and that was – unacceptable. The alien genes activated.

It wasn't a decision on Isabel's part – decisions take time – it was an instinctive act of the primordial life force within her. Oh, the message was sent laboriously through the central and peripheral nervous systems telling the arm to bitch-slap that annoying FBI agent that was threatening her would-be mate, but it was sent telekinetically as well.

Telekinesis worked – instantaneously. Unlike electrochemical signals that took a few hundreds of a second – unlike even electricity that traveled at the speed of light – telekinesis and telepathy worked instantaneously. 'Instantaneous' is not something that human physics dealt with well, the special theory of relativity being based on the fact that the speed of light was the fastest thing in the universe. That, in fact, was why Max was never going to make any progress with the textbooks in understanding the stasis chambers. It would be almost two hundred years before human science would finally test telepathy and accept that it wasn't limited to light-speed. Then – and only then – would they start to understand and develop the type of theories that allowed faster-than-light travel and the use of stasis chambers.

But this wasn't human physics – this was a primordial life force working through those alien genes. The force had the arm moving immediately – inertia not an issue – the speed of the arm limited only by the impact force with the cheek it could sustain. The arm did – in fact – continue to accelerate even as it impacted the cheek sending it – and the attached head and body – sideways toward the wall.

Of course this surprised five different people in the room - all the 100% humans , Isabel was STILL in instinct mode – controlled by that primordial biological urge. But it didn't surprise them as much as it would have done if they'd actually been looking at her and seen the blazing speed of that arm as it stuck more quickly than a striking cobra. Of course, none were more surprised than Bob Phillips.

One moment he'd been in control – about to break that weakling computer geek – the next moment he was stunned and on the floor – unsure of just what had happened. Even before he recovered his wits enough to realize where he was – even before he had yet felt the pain – Bob Phillips was reacting instinctively as well. He had been hit unexpectedly – he still didn't know exactly how – but the only logical threat was the kid who he'd seen had been about to strike him. That's why he reacted instinctively and pulled the service automatic from his holster and pointed it at Alex Whitman – and it was a mistake that could cost him his life.

The primordial life force in Isabel hadn't really been toying with Phillips – it had been more of a friendly warning. OK, maybe not all THAT friendly – an intentionally demeaning gesture to tell Phillips in no uncertain terms not to demean or verbally threaten her mate. But the weapon changed that instantly – this was now more than a verbal threat, it was a threat of lethal force. But even yet the primordial force in Isabel wasn't unduly concerned. It wasn't watching Phillips – watching required the electrochemical detection of the rods and cones of the eye – and that too took time. What humans see – by the time they see it – is almost a tenth of a second behind what is actually occurring. But Isabel – or at least what Isabel had become – wasn't using her eyes. No, tendrils of telekinetic activity went out and were sensing Phillips activity in real time – and those tendrils of telekinesis turned Bob Phillips eyes away from Alex to bring them to look at the eyes of Isabel Evans – temporarily being possessed by that primal force. The connection opened for a final warning.

It was the yin and the yang again – the complementary opposites within a greater whole. Had it been Isabel opening the connection – Bob Phillips would have been seeing in to her soul. But instead what he saw was the primordial force of life within her – the force whose mate he was threatening.

Phillips wasn't sure why – when he should have been covering Alex Whitman – his eyes turned to the eyes of Isabel Evans – but as he saw those eyes – was briefly lost in those eyes – he felt the living fury – ferocity and capability - the savagery – of that force.

The effect on Phillips was also primordial. A moment ago he'd been the predator. Now – like a seal chasing a fish who had blundered into the jaws of a great white shark – he was totally outclassed. He didn't know what Isabel was but viscerally he knew the nature of what she had become. Both his urinary and rectal sphincters released and he wet and soiled himself. In sheer terror he brought the firearm to point it in the direction of the new threat – knowing intuitively as he did so that it wouldn't do him any good. Whatever looked out of those eyes – he knew it had him – and it knew too.

Everything had happened so fast all three law enforcement officers still standing were too shocked to react – and then it was too late. Phillips pulled his service automatic out and started to point it at Alex Whitman – then quickly pulled it to the side – his hand shaking as he pointed it instead at Isabel Evans. As he started to pull the trigger he knew he was going to die - three law enforcement people thought Isabel Evans was about to die – and Alex Whitman wasn't taking any chances. He jumped down – grabbing Phillips' wrist with one hand – forcing the pistol away from Isabel – while the other hand struck out and caught Phillips' chin – knocking him down. Jaime and the two marshal's quickly pounced on Phillips, immobilizing his hands and removing his weapons.

Even being restrained Phillips shook with terror as he regarded Isabel. "She's a killer - a monster," he muttered quietly as the odor of his fear and feces slowly filled the room.

In the end Alex truly was a hero – a second later Phillips would have died in a powerblast and Isabel's life would have been changed forever. As it was, with the threat now passed Isabel's mind finally caught up with what her body had been doing and she rushed to Alex's side and collapsed into his arms.

"Thank you Alex," she said, nestling her head on his shoulder, "....you saved my life."

Isabel too was shaking with the emotion of what had just occurred. A frightened and uncertain Alex reached around her and hugged her to him to comfort her - it seemed to help both of them.

Isabel looked up at Jaime finally. "I think I've had just about as much of law enforcement as I can take for one night. Alex and I are leaving."

"We are going to need statements about this - depositions...."

"No you aren't. The man's a drunk.... all three of you saw that. Get him treated and for all I care this never happened - but make sure he stays away from Alex and me. Neither of us care much for the guy."

With that she took Alex's hand and together they walked out the door.

Jaime looked at Posner in disbelief. "What do we do now?"

"Well, we still don't have a charge to hold either of those two on. Know what I'd do if I were you? Contact the Agent in Charge at El Paso - tell him what went down. I'll bet he takes the young lady up on her offer. Phillips clearly DOES need treatment. The FBI really isn't going to want the world to know that a seventeen year old cheerleader and her boyfriend can do this to one of their agents. Besides - I'm not sure I want to cross that young lady."

"Me neither," said his partner Ray, shaking his head...

It was three hours later that Saturday morning when Jim Valenti showed up at the Crashdown for his morning breakfast meeting with Phillips and Sanchez. Except Phillips wasn't there. Jaime Sanchez sat in the booth by himself, waving at Jim as he entered the door. Valenti really didn't mind Phillips not being there- Phillips was the sort of guy who could really cheer up a room by his absence - but since the senior FBI agent had been the one that had insisted on these meetings it was a little curious.

"Phillips sleeping in?" asked Valenti as he slid into the booth opposite Jaime.

"Phillips is with Posner and his partner on his way back to El Paso to see Donovan - who will pull his badge and take his gun - from Donovan, the gun we've already pulled - then if he wants to continue to have a job he'll go into detox for alcoholism through the Employee Assistance Plan and be entered into a year-long follow up before he gets his badge or gun back - IF he gets his badge or gun back."

"Damn! What happened - or am I allowed to know that."

"Well, under normal circumstances the answer would be no - but there wasn't much about this morning that I guess you could really classify as normal, so I suppose you have a need-to-know, sighed Jaime. "this morning there was a little .... altercation."

"Altercation is one of those words that can cover a multitude of sins," said Jim, fighting back the urge to smile.

"Yeah, well in this case it started with an early morning call from Posner. He and his partner were staking out the Evans house and about 3AM she decided to go for a drive with her jeep. They called Phillips asking what to do and they got told to follow her - Phillips hoping she'd lead them to her brother and Elizabeth Parker it seems. Anyway, the girl apparently made the tail - took them on a wild goose chase off-road north of here. They tore out their transmission on a rock and had to walk a couple of miles to phone in - then wait around until one of the other teams picked them up and they got a new car. Phillips was ... less than pleased with them ... and apparently started drinking after he got their call to calm himself down."

"Not good," said Jim Valenti, sipping on the cup of coffee the waitress had sat in front of him. He was enough of a regular that the woman knew his habits.

"It got worse shortly thereafter. They saw the jeep again - maybe an hour later - and pulled it over. The girl had a boyfriend with her - claimed they'd just been out to someplace called Lookout Point which I take it is a local teen make-out spot."

"THE makeout spot - at least for serious making out, although I didn't think Isabel Evans was anywhere near that serious about anyone. Most people in this town probably think she never will be."

"Then I think they don't understand the young lady's very well," said Jaime. "Anyway. Evans and her young man followed Posner to the hotel where Posner talked to Phillips - apparently he'd been drinking steadily for an hour or so by that time - who ordered him to drum up some sort of charge. Posner refused and Phillips told him to go get the two kids - that he'd interview them there in his room..."

"Without notifying their parents or even taping it?" asked Valenti in growing concern.

"Yeah, well Posner didn't like the idea much either but Phillips told him to shut up and color. He got me up on the way back down to the parking lot to fetch the kids. I got up to his room just as they got there. The boy seemed .... kind of scared and uncertain but Evans herself said that she'd made the tail - went out to the desert to lose them - then backtracked o pick the young man up to go out to Lookout Point."

"And the young man was....?"

""Alex Whitman."

"Hmmm," said Jim Valenti. "I think that she may have been telling you a story. Isabel has quite a reputation as an ice princess. Yeah, they've had coffee together a few times - but they aren't in the Lookout Point category. I'm not altogether convinced they ever will be. Neither of them is really all the passionate type."

"Really? I think you all may be misjudging those two. Easy enough to do I guess - Phillips did too. I rather imagine in his drunken stupor he figured the boy was the weak link emotionally and the girl was the weak link physically. He was trying to intimidate the boy - turn him against her by claiming she was just using him. When that didn't work he started insulting him - trying to provoke him into doing something physical thinking that he could then arrest him and put pressure on him. He got in his face - kept poking him in the chest and screaming insults at him about himself and the girl. I really was afraid the kid was going to throw a punch at him too, because Phillips was just waiting to deck him when that happened."

"So what did happen?"

"Well, we were all watching the boy and all at once the girl just absolutely bitch-slapped Phillips ... I mean she put him on the ground. I used to box golden gloves but I swear I've never seen hand-speed like that from anyone. Anyway - nobody blamed her - the bastard had it coming - but then we had a drunk on the ground who grabbed for his gun. He pointed it at the boy first - then apparently realized who had hit him - and aimed at the girl. I don't know, he was drunk you know, but something about her just scared the crap out of him - and I mean that literally. He looked like he was about to squeeze the trigger but before he could do anything the boy forced his gun away from the girl and popped him one in the chin. After that the other three of us grabbed Phillips. We tried to get the girl to come in and give a statement but she and the boy clung to each other for a moment - like they were making sure each other was really OK, and then she said they were going .... that they'd had all the law enforcement they needed. I called Donovan and he said to just let them go and to get Phillips back to El Paso - he told me I was in charge - but to defer to the local authority," Jaime nodded at Jim Valenti, "... in the handling of the case. So I guess we still have the federal resources - minus Phillips..."

"Who wasn't much of a resource anyway," said Jim Valenti.

"Who wasn't much of a resource," agreed Jaime, nodding his head, "... anyway, we're here to help ... and I do really mean that this time ... and, well, what can I do for you, Sheriff?"

"For the time being, just what you have been doing, Jaime. I need to sit down and talk to Evans and Whitman - try to find out what really was going on."

"Just a suggestion, Sheriff. Be real polite to that young man - at least if what you call an Ice Princess is around. Phillips has this hand-shaped mark on his left cheek right now - the outline of Isabel Evans' hand ... in bruising. She doesn't seem to tolerate people picking on him very well. Just a whole lot of emotion when that happens .... for an Ice Princess."

"So what becomes of Phillips?"

"Well, if he successfully completes his alcohol rehab, Donovan has already arranged for him to be sent somewhere less stressful for the year he'll have to work admin before he can go back to the field with a badge and a gun again."

"Less stressful? Where?"

"Turns out we have a field office in Juneau, Alaska. Mostly works on illegal seal trapping in violation of the marine mammals protection act, I understand. Population of the whole town is only 30,000 - and it's on an island. Not quite the East Coast, I'm afraid."

It started as a smile from Jim Valenti, then a chuckle from Jaime Sanchez. Somehow it took on a life of its own and within 20 second the two law enforcement officers were laughing uncontrollably.

It was 11:45 and Alex was fifteen minutes early as he slid in to the very Crashdown booth that - coincidentally - Jim Valenti and Jaime Sanchez had used earlier that morning.

Between the events of last night and the time he'd lain awake wondering about them, he'd gotten precious little sleep - and even in that sleep he had been so occupied in a truly bizarre dream that it felt like he'd done nothing but concentrate on Isabel Evans - Isabel or Izzy one or the other - since the knock had come on his window this morning.

Ever since getting up this morning - only about 90 minutes ago - Alex had been reassessing his true feelings toward the real Isabel Evans because - it appeared - reality had completely intruded on his fantasy.

For so long he'd told himself that - physically attractive though she was - he could never really be interested in someone like her, someone who kept the world -and everyone in it - at arm's length. Apparently he'd been lying to himself all that time.

Oh, he knew he was physically attracted to the girl - what guy wouldn't be - but other than using her physical form for the template of his dream-girl Izzy - he'd thought that he was pretty much immune to the attraction that other guys had for her. Apparently he'd been wrong. Somehow he found himself more emotionally attracted to her than he'd have ever believed possible.

Part of it, of course, was that Isabel Evans never really was the unfeeling inhuman person she'd appeared to be for all those years when he had only watched her from afar. Once Liz had her accident it pretty quickly had become obvious to Alex that Isabel Evans was just as compassionate and caring and human as anyone else. Despite that, he'd managed to keep in denial about how he really felt toward her.

But last night - last night things had happened that had broken through that denial - then things had really gotten weird.

First of all, of course, was Isabel asking him to help her. It had been obvious from the start that this was about establishing an alibi for her with the police, when she had been out doing - well doing something, he hadn't known at the time exactly what. Before Liz's accident - that is, before he actually thought of her as a human being - he wouldn't have even considered it. But he HAD gotten to know her - and he hadn't even hesitated to agree. That alone told him that things had greatly changed in his opinion - and feelings - toward Isabel Evans.

The kiss out at Lookout Point had been the second thing. He wasn't sure what had come over him, really. Maybe it was all those years of dancing with his own Izzy in his dreams that had somehow desensitized him to what he was doing. Even as his lips had touched her he'd felt shocked disbelief that he'd actually kissed the REAL Isabel Evans. He'd been certain that Isabel would pull back angrily from the kiss and half-expected a slap in the face as well. The fact that she'd actually - well - cooperated, was simply stunning - and when he'd apologized and she'd said he had nothing to be sorry for and that she certainly wasn't sorry - he'd thought his heart was going to explode. Yeah, definitely he wasn't thinking about her as an untouchable Ice Princess after that - even if maybe he should be.

The fact was, that cop had been right - drunk or sober. He was a geek - and geeks didn't wind up with girls like Isabel Evans - except last night he had.

They had both been shaking when they had left the FBI guys hotel suite - a drunk FBI guy with a gun was a rather scary proposition - and he'd sort of expected her to drop him off and head for home. She hadn't - at least not at first. Instead she'd driven the jeep to another romantic overlook - this one closer and without quite the reputation of lookout point. T

hat kiss she'd initiated. Oh, he was sure she was just being kind - expressing her appreciation for his help this morning. He wasn't under any delusion that Isabel Evans was or would ever be hopelessly in love with him.

She had apologized for getting him in to this - and admitted what he'd already pretty well figured out - that she had been out late somehow helping Max out. She'd asked him to believe that Max would never hurt Liz - that the things the Albuquerque Police had said were untrue - and that her brother was doing the best he could - the best anyone could - to help her.

Coming from anyone else he probably would have never believed it, but when he looked down at her eyes looking up at him, it was almost like he was looking into her soul and he couldn't bring himself to doubt her. She said she was sorry - that she'd never ask him to do it again - but she had just really felt the need of some emotional support, and then she'd put her head on his shoulder and asked him to show her some more constellations.

Somehow, with her head on his shoulder - feeling the warmth of her against him in the cold night air - for just a second he could almost believe that there could truly be something between them - until he remembered who he was and who she was and how impossible it was for the geek and the goddess to ever be a couple. He thanked her for the kiss and the lovely moment, and said they both probably ought to get home - that it was getting late.

So she'd driven him home. As she'd watched him get out of the car she'd thanked him again for his help - and then looked briefly up at the starry sky. What she said then undoubtedly set him up for the weird dream he had subsequently.

He remembered it well.

• Alex, when we were up at Lookout Point we talked about the stars and the possibility of intelligent life out there. Max read a quote to me once - I believe it was from Carl Sagan. It went something like this...
  
  'Either we are the only intelligent life-form in the universe, or we are not. Either possibility is staggering.'

He'd gone inside and just laid in bed looking up at the ceiling for several hours - his mind abuzz with thoughts of Isabel and the morning they had spent together. Eventually he'd fallen asleep. That's when things had gotten truly weird.

Izzy had shown up in his dream claiming to really BE Isabel Evans. Only this 'Isabel Evans' was an alien - at least partly - and was doing something called 'dreamwalking' and her brother Max was taking care of Liz in some podchamber - trying to figure out how to keep her alive until a cure could be found. Alex knew it was a dream but it had actually seemed almost believable.

At least right up until the last part - the part where Izzy said that she - that is Izzy as the REAL 'Isabel Evans' - actually was in love with him. That was the first unbelievable thing in the dream. Unbelievable thing number two was that Izzy told him that 'Isabel' was holding off - was afraid to commit to him - because she knew he wanted children and wasn't sure she could actually bear his children. That was the second impossible part - the part where he'd awakened.

But now, waiting for her to arrive for their long ago prearranged lunch date, Alex looked at the door - wondering if she'd even show up - and wondering what he would feel if she did show up. Oh sure, the dream was just that - a bizarre dream - although incredibly sweet in its own way, but dreams don't change reality and the reality was that Special Agent Phillips was right - if somewhat crude in how he phrased it. Maybe a geek like him could dream about Isabel Evans loving him - but it wasn't going to happen.

'Heck,' he thought to himself,'...there probably IS as good a chance that Isabel is some sort of alien as there is that she'd ever really be serious about me...'

But even so, as he saw her come through the door and give him a big friendly smile as she walked back to the booth where he sat, it was difficult to not wish that his dreams- bizarre as they were - could somehow come true.

As she entered it, Isabel really didn't pay much attention to the building. She simply thought about it as the Crashdown – or more commonly to high school students, 'the Crash.' But it actually had quite an interesting history.

Its correct name, technically, was the Purvis building – that was even chiseled on to a stone in the facade when the structure had been built. It was, in fact, the first conventional brick building in town – the previous buildings being either adobe huts, wood frame buildings, or a combination of wood frame buildings and tents – often with the classic old west building facade. The Purvis Building was different – not surprising since Ezekial Purvis himself was just a little different.

The development of the town that would eventually become Roswell NM had really started in the mid-1800s due to the presence of water which attracted cattle drives going to market along what would eventually become a branch of the old Chisholm trail. By 1869, Roswell began to take shape when professional gambler Van C. Smith came to town. In 1871 Smith filed his land claim and changed the settlements name to Roswell Smith, in honor of his father Roswell Smith. Eventually people just called it Roswell.

Ezekial Purvis was the son of Jedediah Purvis, one of the Chicago Purvises, and in 1879 decided to go out West and make his fortune – well, increase his fortune anyway, the Purvis family was pretty well off.

With nothing more than a horse, a bedroll, and a letter of credit from Daddy Jedediah for $27,000 – a princely sum at the time although only a fraction of his trust account – Ezekial went to pursue his dream in eastern New Mexico. He chose Roswell because that was where the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe intended to run a spur line – he paid almost a thousand dollars to one of the railroad surveyors to see to it that the spur was going to run there – and he intended to build the Purvis House hotel in Roswell to get rich the way most of the people out west who did get rich got rich – providing goods and services to the hard-working people who were busy 'winning the West.'

Unfortunately, the surveyor didn't stay bought and the spur line went to Las Cruces instead – leaving Purvis with a partially completed hotel in a small cowtown on the way from northern Texas to the soon-to-be-built rail spur in Las Cruces. He quickly modified the design.

Instead of the fine restaurant, the ground floor became a bar and cantina, and instead of a hotel, the second and third floors were converted to a boarding house. There were eight rooms on the second floor - a common room for eating and seven sleeping rooms, and four sleeping rooms on the third floor.

Purvis sold the facility at a considerable loss and moved further west to California where he found that all the good opportunities were already taken by those who had come west with the the 1849 gold rush. Eventually he wound up in Hawaii where he was rather successful at stealing land from the Hawaiian natives and eventually wound up with most of a small island worth of cane sugar and pineapple plantations – but that's another story. We're still discussing the building in Roswell.

Apparently the boarding house was actually operated as a boarding house for over six weeks – to the utter amazement of the locals who recognized the natural fit of the building in a town where the main industry was fulfilling the needs of the drovers of the passing cattle drives.

Eventually the boardinghouse found its natural niche in a frontier town where the men outnumbered the women by almost three to one and it became a full time brothel – the large common room on the second floor being used for a waiting room and the other eleven rooms being used to service the clientele.

That arrangement went on for almost twenty years until the minister of one of the larger churches in Roswell started a campaign against 'sin and public licentiousness' and a few of the city fathers were compelled by the city mothers picketing the establishment to threaten the revocation of the cantina's liquor license if the brothel wasn't closed. Of course, two years later the Women's Christian Temperance Union got Prohibition passed, and the cantina got shut down as well.

Even when Prohibition was eventually repealed the US was right in the middle of the Great Depression – and the building was vacant for almost twenty years except for the pigeons nesting in the upstairs room with the broken window.

It was reopened in 1940 – the first floor as an officer's club for the Army troops out at Roswell Army Air Corps base and the upper floors – scrubbed clean of pigeon poop – for office space for the Army. Like much of the country, the Purvis building demilitarized fairly quickly after the bombs hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the building itself – now obsolete and not in very good shape – had a number of businesses operate out of the old cantina with limited success for the next 20 years before being shuttered again.

Sixteen years ago a young couple bought the Purvis Building to make it in to a restaurant using a small business loan and a grant from the city of Roswell which was trying to clean up its deteriorated old downtown area. The couple - Jeff and Nancy Parker – moved in with their infant daughter to what had been the old boarding house/brothel. The downstairs cantina was remodeled as were the public bathrooms on the first floor and bathrooms on the second and third floors.

Eventually – when she turned fourteen – the daughter moved up to the top floor which now consisted of a large bedroom that had originally been two sleeping rooms, a bathroom, and two storage rooms that had once been sleeping rooms.

Of course, for the last 14 months the daughter hadn't been in that room. Twice a week a tearful Nancy Parker would come dust it – gently hug her teddy bear and other childhood toys – and then slowly go back down to the second floor living area – not currently sure if her daughter was even still alive. No, Elizabeth Parker was no longer there – in fact was no longer even Elizabeth Parker – at least not in the eyes of the 'authority' of the abyss. No, Liz's body was over twelve miles away – despite having been married for weeks still virgin and inviolate – unlike her room which had seen way more than it's fair share of carnal activity – albeit a century previously.

But this really isn't about what was going on in Liz's room. It's about what was going on next door – in what used to be the storage room next door.

While Isabel was entering the front door of the Crashdown, Jeff Parker was sitting at a table with a notebook computer in the room adjoining Liz's bedroom, logging on to the internet. He had cleared a decade and a half of old junk out of the room two days after Liz's kidnapping, most of it going into the dumpster in the alley behind the Crashdown, what little of it was truly worth keeping going in to a small rental storage unit. This room had been converted into something else - he thought of it as his war room. The walls held maps of Chaves county and the adjoining counties, the small closet held the shotgun and other items he had purchased to assist him in his quest to recover his daughter and to find - and bring to justice - her kidnapper.

Jeff wasn't a scientist - but he shared the same sense of what he believed to be realism that Liz had. He really didn't think in terms of Occam's razor, but nonetheless knew intuitively that every passing day made it less likely that he would see his daughter again. What's more, he believed the doctors that had treated her. Even if her body was recovered - even if it were still breathing when that happened - it wouldn't really be Liz. Liz, he feared, had been beyond recovery even before the kidnapping.

The room and the mission it symbolized wasn't really about getting his daughter back - it was about an abyss in his own soul. It was about a a sick empty void in his own heart that would never again be filled by the smiles and laughter of the child he'd watched with delight grow from birth to young woman-hood. It was about his failure as a father - a failure to protect that young lady. A dozen times a day he would spontaneously think about her as if she were still healthy – the way she had been – and then the flash of pain would come with the sudden realization that she was that person no more – and never would be again.

No, Jeff Parker knew to the bottom of his own soul that he had failed his only child. No day went by that he didn't regret not taking Maria home that night himself. His mind spun endless things he might have done to interrupt the sequence of events that lead inexorably to Liz's accident. When not doing that it dwelt on things he could have done to protect her from kidnapping by Max Evans.

Jeff Parker wasn't inherently irrational. Under normal conditions – something that hadn't occurred now for well over a year – he would have perhaps been more rational when it came to Max Evans. He realized – even now – that he owed Diane Evans for the actions she'd taken with the insurance company. He'd seen the effort and compassion that Isabel Evans had shown his daughter. Under normal circumstances he would have been more understanding and compassionate – if only toward Diane and Isabel – after all, he had a teenager he loved as well. But these were NOT normal circumstances. He had lost his loved one and – unfair as it was – guiltily blamed himself.

No, Jeff had failed to keep his daughter from having her devastating injury and the guilt of that failure threatened to consume him. It was now too late to keep that accident from happening – too late even to keep her from being kidnapped by a disturbed young man who had never cared for her – but now seemed obsessed by her. His daughter was gone and he doubted that he would ever see her again alive. All he had left to fill the void in his heart was guilt and anger. No, he couldn't bring his daughter back – but he could take out his anger and assuage his guilt by finding and punishing Max Evans. That he could do.

Jeff checked hie email – then immediately logged on to the website run by the GPS tracking company. He'd set the parameters of his tracking to go on immediately once the GPS was outside of the Roswell city limits and update its position every two minutes. That produced a series of points – their distance from one to the next defining the speed for that interval and their locations defining the track of the jeeps travel. He had rather hoped it would show the jeep leaving town and going immediately to some location out in the desert where the boy was hiding – hopefully with a still-alive Liz Parker – staying in that position long enough to get several hits as the vehicle was parked and then returning directly to town. Reality obviously wasn't that straightforward. It was obvious the girl had traveled in a circuitous route – both on and off road – at varying speeds. But if she had stopped at all, she had stopped for less than two minutes on her first trip out of town.

The second trip she'd kept to the roads. That one had started and stopped at Alex Whitman's house with a brief stop at Lookout Point. That one – in Jeff's view – was an alibi for the first trip.

Jeff looked at the series of points from the first trip marked on the Chaves county map. Somewhere along that course – likely within walking distance – was Max Evans' hideout. Unfortunately that course was over twenty-five miles in length.

'But that doesn't matter,' he told himself. 'She'll have to make more trips – probably changing her route each time - and you can plot those too. Eventually you'll narrow it down to a certain area that's common to those trips. Then when she leaves town you can get there first and be in a position to observe when she offloads the supplies – then track the boy in the darkness to wherever he's hiding.'

No, punishing Max Evans wouldn't bring his daughter back – at least not alive and vibrant like she had been before the accident. But if it lessened his feelings of guilt and anger – that would be enough.

He quickly went back on the internet to order an additional item to add to his rapidly growing armory of things to help him catch – and punish – Max Evans.

As she walked across the floor toward the booth and Alex Whitman, Isabel was surprisingly happy.

Oh, she wasn't unfeeling about Liz's situation - or Max's - she certainly had concern and compassion for both of them, never really having been the Ice Princess she'd pretended to be, but the fact of the matter was that she was doing pretty much all she could do - helping Max and Liz out with supplies and astrophysics textbooks on loan from New Mexico State and UNM.

So while she was concerned about the two of them, she didn't have quite the sort of feelings of guilt about the mishap that were now plaguing Jeff Parker. Certainly, her happiness was clearly tempered by concern for her brother and sister-in-law and – for that matter - everybody else that had been affected by the tragic accident, that concern couldn't entirely stop her immediate sensation of happiness.
The fact was that Isabel had not known all that much happiness in her life - but this morning she'd had an epiphany. She actually DID have a chance at real happiness now - and she intended to take it.

You see, Isabel had always been a 'glass-half-empty' sort of person, and less than two hours ago she'd decided the glass was really half full.

In fact, this change in Isabel had been brewing for some time. It had begun with the realization - way back on that horrible day when Max had heard the radio and walked out and driven to Albuquerque that a pod person really could love a normal person so totally that even his sister's constant attempts to dissuade him wouldn't make any difference.

Then actually getting to know Liz - even just in the abyss - had been an enlightening experience. Normal humans weren't quite the xenophobic people that she'd somehow always believed them to be. And Maria's finding out the truth - and accepting it without going bonkers at the thought of not just finding out that Isabel was an alien - but being extremely involved with Michael – with apparently no intention whatsoever of the knowledge that he was an alien changing that involvement - had really gotten her to thinking.

Granted, Michael and Maria were a special case. They seemed to regard conflict between the two of them as something akin to foreplay in a sort of 'break-up/make-up/make-out/make-love/and repeat' cycle that they got some sort of a unique feedback from.... but even so.

But yesterday - yesterday had been the best day of her life. First of all – she'd spotted the car tailing her. Somehow she'd always pictured the feds as something more than human. She had spent her life in terror of some slight clue of hers attracting the FBI who would instantly – perhaps through some clairvoyance of their own – be able to tell what she was, anticipate her actions, and quickly capture and imprison her. Hadn't happened. She'd lost the tail – finished what she needed to do – and built herself a pretty good impromptu alibi. The senior FBI, when she finally did confront him, had been a drunk without a whole lot on the ball.

Secondly, Alex had kissed her out at Lookout Point. Clearly, in the grand scheme of things that had occurred to couples out at Lookout Point, a simple kiss might have not seemed all that significant. But she'd dreamwalked Alex for years – long enough to know how shy he was. It was a good start.

Thirdly, the way she had reacted instinctively to the threat against Alex had been a little scary – but it too had told her something about herself. She hadn't realized until then just how much she did care. She would have – she realized – killed that drunk if that had been necessary to save Alex – and in doing so revealed her secret to everyone. Alex really mattered to her at even a subconscious visceral and instinctive level - not merely as a friend. She could no longer deny that to herself.

So, OK, she'd told him the truth, only in a dreamwalk, of course, but it was a start. Even that was an eye-opener. For almost her entire life she had been afraid that she – or one of her fellow podlings – would say something inadvertently that might hint about their status – provide some little clue that would enable their origin to be somehow ferreted out – and the world would come crashing down around them. The reality, she had noted with ironic amusement was that when Liz and Alex had each been told the entire and complete truth, neither of them had believed a word of it.

But the epiphany was as simple as it was stunningly clear. It really didn't matter.

Liz had actually gone so far as to marry Max – without really believing he was an alien-human hybrid - without even believing that the personality she saw in the abyss was even real, most likely. There was a reasonable chance that Max and Liz were in the abyss together right now – possibly even doing what newlyweds seem to do. Isabel could only hope that eventually Max would find a way to put both of them in stasis until a cure was developed. Once they came out – and Liz was restored to health – she'd find out the truth. If Liz then freaked out about being married to an alien, they could call the whole thing off – they wouldn't even have to have it annulled, it had only happened in the abyss. If – as Isabel strongly suspected – Liz was so in love with her brother by that time they could then finally physically consummate their relationship in the real world.

What Isabel had decided was that – having told Alex the truth in the dream world – her conscience was clear. She didn't have to worry about the bearing his child business until he actually put the issue on the table by suggesting their own marriage (or at least physical consummation) at which time she could indicate her willingness – even her willingness to attempt bearing his children - but remind him that she'd told him in his dream-orb that such a thing might not be possible.

That gave her, from this morning until whenever that occurred, time to share a totally normal teenage romance with him – a chance for what he felt for her this morning to develop into something that – once he both knew and BELIEVED the truth – would make her important enough to him that he'd take the risk that they might have to adopt those babies he wanted to share with her.

So that was the plan – to get Alex to see her not as an Ice Princess, but as a human being. A human being that he could envision sharing his life with. If that worked, she'd risk reminding him that she wasn't ALTOGETHER human.

Isabel smiled as she strode up to the table. He was obviously expecting her to take the bench across the table from him. Normally she would have – but the memory of the closeness of him this morning as they had kissed and looked up at the stars together was just too sweet to allow a table to separate them.

“Hi, Isabel,” said Alex, looking up at her as she came to the booth.

"Hi, Alex,” she said, sliding in beside him, “...kind of a short night for both of us, I guess. Did you have pleasant dreams?”