Free Strangers From the Sky by Margaret Wander Bonanno

with a bump. This one piece of local news was the only thing that could make him sit up and pay attention.
    Word of a new and particularly resistant strain of kelpwilt had been rampant up north for months. None of the usual treatments worked, and the disease had been spreading inexorably in Agro III’s direction. Stations to their north and east had already reported losses of up to a quarter of their acreage.
    Yoshi shook his head, incredulous. Until this morning his most pressing task had been scooting up and down the access lanes in the hydrofoil examining random samples of the weed for possible infestation. Now he could sit content in the middle of his acreage and happily let it rot out from under them, as long as no one came near him and demanded he hand over the aliens.
    He asked himself the same question Tatya had asked herself. What was he afraid of?
    Nothing terrible would happen to him and Tatya. At most they might need some outside “help” to forget what they’d discovered. Their lives would resume their normal course, and it would be as if they had never discovered the aliens, or as if there had been no aliens at all. Wasn’t that what he wanted?
    But if he let them do what they wanted, what would AeroNav and the intelligence networks and the PentaKrem and the powers-that-were do to the aliens? And why did he care?
    Yoshi told himself he wouldn’t care, if it weren’t for Tatya. He had a violent allergy to controversy; it was one of the reasons he’d sought the seemingly lonely life of the agrostations. Was he so caught up in Tatya’s romanticism about other planets that he was suddenly willing to risk his life to prevent what could only be the misunderstanding, the hysteria, the detention and interrogation and possible exploitation—or worse—of two total strangers who just happened to look vaguely human, who just incidentally spoke a human language, and about whom he knew absolutely nothing else?
    What if they had incredible super powers which, once awakened, could crush two isolated humans like bugs on a wall? What if they were criminals escaping from their own world, bent on murder and mayhem? What if they were the vanguard of an invasion force, whose mission was to infiltrate, win over poor unsuspecting humans, and conquer Earth?
    And what if they were just two innocent star travelers who had lost their way and almost died and were now totally dependent upon the kindness of strangers? Well, what if?
    There were very few things Yoshi would risk his life for; he’d be the first to admit it. Unlike his adventurous partner, he’d never aspired to anything more grandiose than what he had here. The twenty-first century with its crowds, its noise, its technology, its potential for getting a person too deep into things too big and too complicated, intimidated him. All he’d ever wanted was to spend the rest of a long and uneventful life contemplating the sea, counting the stars, worrying about nothing more threatening than kelpwilt, and staying out of harm’s way.
    He might have turned the aliens in himself as soon as they’d gotten back to the station—to at least get them medical help, he’d reasoned—if it hadn’t required more assertiveness than he possessed. And if he hadn’t been certain Tatya would break every bone in his body.
    And if the female alien hadn’t spoken to him, in his own language.
    Yoshi sighed, and flipped the channel.
    “…reportedly a defective recon satellite believed to have splashed down somewhere to the west-northwest of Easter Island…”
    Yoshi stood up abruptly, capsizing his beanbag chair and making his sore ankle throb violently. He dialed the volume up.
    “…AeroNav vessel dispatched in an attempt to recover any portion of the satellite which may have survived. In other news…”
    “Well, there it is,” Yoshi said aloud.
    “I’ll bet it’s the Whale,” Tatya said from the doorway of the sleeping room. Yoshi hadn’t realized she was there; they