Free Starman by Alan Dean Foster

glance and then went their separate ways. There was much to do, and not all of it pleasant.
    Jenny looked over at her passenger. He seemed to have relaxed a little. Instead of staring straight ahead, he was starting to let his gaze roam lazily through the forest, the flowers growing on the highway shoulder, taking everything in. The gun rested in his lap again. Maybe it was too uncomfortable to keep stashed in his belt. Or maybe he just wanted to be able to get to it that much quicker.
    She found she was starting to tremble again and forced herself to clamp down hard on the wheel. “Do you have to keep that thing in your lap like that all the time?”
    He turned his attention away from the trees and back to her. “Something is wrong?”
    “You bet something is wrong.” She nodded toward the automatic. “Those things, guns, make me a little bit jumpy.”
    “Define ‘little bit jumpy.’ ”
    “Well, a little bit’s like,” she held up thumb and forefinger, keeping the ends slightly apart, “that’s a little bit. Small, not much of anything. And jumpy’s like nervous, afraid.”
    “Afraid, yes.”
    “You know that word?” She couldn’t recall his having used it in her presence. “Afraid?”
    “Yes. I know.”
    “How much English do you understand? You know more than you’ve said, don’t you?”
    “I am learning as I listen to you, and to your communicator.” He nodded at the radio, currently silent. “I understand greetings in fifty-four local languages. I understand more English language—little bit. I learn more.” He went quiet again. After several minutes he leaned forward and popped open the glove compartment door. Seeing that it was crammed full of interesting material, he put the gun aside, by his right hip and well out of Jenny’s reach, and began rummaging through the compartment’s contents.
    She watched him curiously. He appeared fascinated by the simplest everyday objects. “Nothing much in there.” He extracted a small leather wallet. “That’s mine. Wallet.” She reminded herself that he didn’t appear to be interested in thievery. Oh no, not at all. All he was stealing was the car—and her.
    He opened the wallet and examined the few bills. Then he started flipping through the plastic sleeves, pausing at the second one.
    “That’s my driver’s license,” she told him. “You need one of those in order to be allowed to drive a car. That’s my picture on it, and my name, Jenny Hayden.”
    He spared her a single emotionless glance just to let her know he heard, finished looking through the wallet. He replaced it in the glove compartment and resumed his foraging. Jenny watched him for a while longer and discovered she was more bored than anxious. The road was a more animated companion than her passenger.
    She stood the silence for a half hour before asking, “Look, what do you want, anyway?”
    He looked up from his work. Her small pen-lite flashlight lay disassembled on his lap. “I want to go to Arizona-maybe.”
    “No, I don’t mean now. What I meant was, why did you come here? To this place. To my world.”
    He put the flashlight back together before replying. “I come—to see inhabitants of planet Earth.” He put the light back into the glove compartment, swapping it for a bottle opener fashioned in the shape of a frog.
    “You mean you’re like, sort of an explorer? You’re just looking around?”
    “Looking around. Yes. I observe, study, have contacts maybe. Learn.” He traded the bottle opener for an old baseball cap, immediately recognizing it from the home movies he’d watched the night before. He turned the battered piece of material over in his hands. Jenny kept her gaze glued to the highway ahead.
    “I see. And, uh, when you go back to wherever it is you came from will you be taking any, uh—” She turned to him, wanting to finish the question but dreading the possible answers.
    What she saw made her forget everything else.
    “Oh my God.”
    The