Cat In An Alien X-Ray

It was eerie how unpopulated this street was, how dark Las Vegas could be at night without its constant halo of neon and spotlights. She’d allowed Farnum to get her here so late because the Vegas Strip was pretty safe when it came to street crime and because she couldn’t sleep and Matt sure wasn’t going to show up at the Circle Ritz until the dawn patrol and she wasn’t sure she wanted to see him if he did. And because even Midnight Louie had gone out after she’d put a favorite but frenetic movie musical, Moulin Rouge, on the TV before Farnum had called her.

“You don’t want to daydream past the big reveal, Miss Barr,” Silas T. urged, tapping her on the shoulder and pointing up with his cane.

Her gaze lifted beyond the unpromising construction to the aurora borealis of the Strip peeking like the earthrise shot from 2001 over the familiar silhouettes of its landmarks.

As she watched, some of the eye-blinking points of light flared even brighter. They separated from the huge nebula of neon and started moving slowly, moving together into a vee formation like migratory birds, only their size increased with motion and also the detail. Nine sleek silver UFOs bearing all the glimpsed futuristic bells and whistles Hollywood could invent swooped and spun over the Strip.

Even here, Temple could hear a rise and fall of excited screams, as if New York–New York’s tower-circling roller coaster had broken—or been torn—free of its tracks and its passengers were howling for their lives.

Temple’s jaw dropped as she seized Silas T. Farnum by his skinny forearm. “What is that? You must know. You concocted this.”

“That, Miss Barr, is the girl in the fishnet hose and pink satin bustier. What you really want to see is right in front of you. There. Look.”

She forced her focus down from the show in the sky to find one of the damn things had landed, silently, right in front of the new construction. It was gigantic, and hovered above a narrower shaft of swirling color and light, like a pseudopod it had lowered. She thought of a mushroom cloud equipped with a death ray the size of the Superdome tethering it to Earth.

This all being a conventional film version of a flying saucer spewing down alien lights was not reassuring. Her sky was now a huge hunk of alien metal hovering like a sting ray shadow over the entire lot, pulsing with surface tension and emitting the odd watery phosphorescence of exotic undersea creatures.

The saucer’s thick “edge” alone was two or three stories high. Its circumference was … not visible. Temple was aware of shrill ringing in her ears, but that was probably her blood pressure hitting a high C. As far as she knew in her current altered state of stupefaction, this UFO did not sing like the one in Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind. She heard no reassuring, blurted mellow chords that reminded Temple of an engaging—and harmless—kiddie toy.

She barely heard a muted pulsing sound she’d describe as the mating call of a sprinkler system and a legion of seriously leg-chafing crickets. Mechanical yet natural, and even somewhat … calming, like white noise. Her fluttering pulses were evening out. She found herself breathing more slowly and deeply.

The concentrated stalk of light, the softly shifting dark shadows behind the saucer’s beaming edge gave her a sense of quiet and peace, as if she were meditating, chilling out in a rosé wine happy hour all of her own. As if she was being … hypnotized.

And was that so bad? Everything light and bright and … what was that small black dot, that minuscule floater on an eye chart’s lighted screen, that tiny, invasive, moment-ruining spot doing? Streaking across the light-bathed ground, shifting shape into an arch of black, and then into a vanishing point, a horizontal line?

Temple blinked. If she hadn’t seen a startled cat streaking away like a superhero …

Her senses reassembled. That pinch on her elbow was Silas T. Farnum’s gnarly age-curled fingers. The ripple pattern under her shoes she’d taken for that last lick of waves on a tropical beach was the gritty, stone-strewn ground. The dazzling gigantic magic mushroom of an unearthly space ship was … once again a roughed-in ten-story building with a few security lights glowing here and there.

Looking toward the Strip, she watched the last of the bouncing balloons vanishing south toward Arizona.

She turned on the only possible target. “Silas T. Farnum, this is a hallucination. Your entire project is a hallucination. And probably the money behind it. Unhand me! You’ve probably been dusting me with psychedelic something.”

He released her and stepped back, leaving Temple to wobble without support, which she much preferred to being suckered.

She ground her soles deeper into the detritus. “I have friends in police places,” she told him. “And here you are violating a crime scene.”