Free Starman by Alan Dean Foster Page A

visitor had donned the baseball cap. Now he was grimacing at her with a passable copy of Scott’s sly smile. Even the angle of the cap on his head was exactly the same as it had been in the movies. She continued gaping at him until the right front wheel complained and she wrenched the Mustang back onto the pavement. Gravel went flying, ticked against the window. She didn’t care if she’d nicked the paint. She didn’t care about anything else except the impossible vision from the immediate past which sat on the seat next to her. She was starting to sweat.
    The starman—might as well call him that as anything else, she thought wildly—looked pleased with himself. “I look like—Scott?”
    She had the Mustang under control again, which was more than she could say for herself. She inhaled deeply several times before she trusted herself to speak rationally.
    “Yeah, you do—I guess.” Something caused her to frown and stare more closely at him. “At first you do, anyway. But not really. Not if you look hard. Your nose is different because it’s straight. He broke his twice. And there’s something else, I dunno, something spooky about your eyes.”
    “Define ‘spooky.’ ”
    That much was easy. “Spooky is what you are. You’re spooky.” She glanced back at the road, chewed on her lower lip. “I saw you last night, in there on the living-room floor. You know. Flopping around, growing. Turning from a baby into a boy into a man.” She was amazed at the sound of her own voice. How calm she was, how quiet. How controlled. Easier to relate to the impossible from a distance, she thought.
    “Tell me something. Could you have made yourself into anything you wanted? Like a dog or a bird?”
    He nodded. “If duplicatable material of sufficient quality available, yes.” He was watching her now, not the woods, not the road ahead. Watching for her reactions.
    “Then why be what you are? Why do you want to look like Scott?”
    “Difficult to explain. I have not enough right words yet. I want to look like Scott because I see you in images last night with Scott. I want you not be little bit jumpy. You not little bit jumpy in pictures with Scott.”
    She stared at him, then reached down to switch on the radio. She needed to mull that one over, because it implied a great deal. Among other things, it suggested that he was concerned about her state of mind. Well, he had company on that one. But it wasn’t the sort of reaction you’d expect from someone who meant you ill.
    The radio picked up an oldie but goodies station. That was fine with her. The last thing she wanted to listen to just then was the news.
    Bing Crosby was crooning at her from out of a simpler, more comprehensible past. Good old Bing. The song was familiar: “and would you like to swing on a star, carry moonbeams . . .”
    Uh-oh, wrong lyrics. Hastily she leaned over to punch up another station.
    The hangar reminded Shermin of a football stadium on a Thursday morning: vast, empty, and quiet. Within its cool high depths the S-76 looked like a nesting sparrow on the West Texas plains. Not that it was devoid of activity. He strode briskly toward the center of the hangar. Uniformed technicians were hard at work there, moving equipment into place, uncrating electronics, setting up and testing instruments. Within the hangar, a complete chemical and physics laboratory was being erected.
    Resting nearer the back was the meteor, or whatever it was. It was already surrounded by sophisticated electronics. More were being cabled together and set in place as he drew close. By the end of the day the entire setup would be on-line and ready to go.
    Three men were hard at work atop the meteor. He recognized Bell and two technicians who had taken the place of the two airmen from the impact site. They’d drilled a larger hole in the top of the object and were trying to create a wider gap by using a hydraulic jack on the opening.
    Despite being well anchored the jack was