Free Last Call For Caviar by Melissa Roen Page A

alien “captives” and strange doings. All this myth and secrecy was too damned intriguing to resist. So one night, I went with a group of friends to see if we could get close and see for ourselves if any of these rumors were true.
    For the adventure, it seemed appropriate to enhance our wanderings along those dark desert roads with a few fat buds of Acapulco Gold. After a couple of tokes, we were definitely open to welcoming strangers to our strange land.
    I never knew that the night could feel so alive, like one vast organism, or that it could hold so many shades and textures—from the deep purple of shadows to hollows of indigo blue.
    The starlight etched the saguaro cactuses against the starry sky, and the faces of my friends seemed to be dusted by a fine iridescent powder. The Milky Way was a gauzy mist flung across a black velvet vault, as the stars winked on and off. Occasionally, a shooting star plummeted across the midnight sky like a fallen angel.
    Even though I was surrounded by friends, as I lay on the hood of the car, scanning the heavens above, I felt alone in that vast, ancient emptiness of desert and night sky. Experiencing their immensity and power, and recognizing how little we knew, anything seemed possible. I felt like I was falling upward into the infinite sky. In that moment, I wished more than anything for a telescope to explore the heavens that hung before my eyes; my love of stargazing was born.
    Needless to say, we never got very close to Area 51 or made the acquaintance of visitors from faraway worlds. But we did meet the private security personnel who patrolled the perimeters of Dreamland—shadowy figures who kept us pinned in the glare of spotlights while they called the Lincoln County Sheriffs to run off another group of spaced-out tourists looking for extraterrestrials.

    I shook off my memories of wandering on distant desert roads and moved cautiously down the path towards the Astrarama.
    Only the sigh of the wind broke the stillness as I approached the observatory; the sand-colored walls of the building, storage shed and garage blended into the vegetation and rock formations of the peak. I strode across the large viewing deck that seemed to hang suspended over the crags and scrub brush; the world spread out before me, endless sea merging into the sky.
    I checked to see if the key to the padlocked metal double doors was still hidden behind a loose brick in the low wall to the right of the small domed structure. The hinges were rusted and the doors looked slightly warped, but in a groan of protesting metal I heaved them open and let the sunlight pour into the domed interior. I flipped the light switch near the door and was surprised to find the electricity was still on. I heard the low hum of the back-up generators kick in.
    The building was about 150 square meters in size, and just inside the open doors of the main domed room stood the shrouded form of an older-model Celestron10 StarHopper Dobsonian telescope, ready to be wheeled outside. I don’t think they make this model anymore, but it remains a classic for its simplicity of design and ease of use.
    Dust mantled the tables and folding chairs stacked against the far wall; the bookshelves were crammed with charts of constellations, astronomy texts, UFO pamphlets, and science fiction novels. The two long sofas stood at angles to each other, and an assortment of armchairs were arranged in a corner, the leather on one sofa cracked and smelling faintly of old cigarettes and mildew. With the lights dimmed, the concave ceiling of the dome overhead lit up in a map of our galaxy, the stars and constellations little pinpricks against a black background.
    I saw that the dust coating the tiled floor lay undisturbed, indicating that no one had been here in the last six months. If you weren’t a member of this amateur stargazing club, you wouldn’t know this building existed.
    Last year at the beginning of September, not long after we had seen the