"Wow," Miranda said. "You're just totally clueless, Van Doren."

"Thanks for the vote of confidence," Van Doren said.

"She doesn't it mean it as an insult," I said. "She means it literally."

"I'm not following you," Van Doren said.

"Joshua," I called.

"Yo." He poked his head over again.

"I'd like to show our friend here exactly where we are," I said.

"No problem," Joshua said.

The cube disappeared. The Earth hovered below us, the moon off to one side.

Jim Van Doren screamed higher than I had ever heard a grown man scream before.

"I think we have some sedatives back in the ambulance," Miranda said, after we had Joshua re-tint the cube.

"Nah," I said. "He maintained bladder control. He'll be fine."

Van Doren leaned on the side of his Escort. For some reason he had a death grip on his radio antenna. "Holy shit," he said.

"I remember having that very same reaction once," I said.

"Are we really in space?" he asked.

"Oh, yes," I said.

"What the hell is going on?" Van Doren asked.

"Jim, remember that time in my car, when you asked me to tell you what I was up to?"

"Sort of," Van Doren said. "I'm not thinking too well at the moment."

"Try," I said. "It'll help."

Van Doren closed his eyes to concentrate. "You told me that you were doing something with space aliens," he said.

"Right," I said.

"I thought you were just being an asshole," he said.

"Just goes to show," I said.

He pointed over to Joshua's ledge. "And the dog is an alien."

"Mostly. It's sort of a long story," I said.

Van Doren's mind was working furiously now. "Is....," he began, looked towards the ambulance, and then back at Miranda and me. "Michelle Beck's an alien, isn't she? Something's happened to her and now you have to take her back to the mothership?"

Miranda giggled. Van Doren scowled. "I'm sorry," Miranda said. "I think the word 'mothership' did it to me."

"Well?" he said, to me. "Is Michelle Beck an alien?"

"No," I said. "At least, not yet."

"Not yet?" Van Doren said. "What does that mean? Are they going to assimilate her into their collective?"

Miranda burst out laughing.

"What?" Van Doren was shouting now.

It was a second before Miranda could catch herself. Then she gently touched Van Doren's arm.

"Jim, you've got to stop watching so much science fiction," she said. "It's making you talk funny."

"Ha ha ha," Van Doren said, peevishly, and pulled away. "Look, I'm just trying to figure out what's going on."

I considered Van Doren for a moment, trying to decide what I was going to do with him. Joking aside, murdering him wasn't an option. But he now knew more about the existence of the Yherajk than anyone outside of me, Miranda and Carl, and that could be dangerous to us. I was loyal to Carl and Joshua, and Miranda was loyal to me, but Van Doren wasn't loyal to any of us. Certainly not to me. Quite the opposite, in fact, since he in the last few weeks he'd been doing his damnedest to cut my career out from under me.

Well, I thought. Time to change all of that.

"Jim, why do you work for The Biz?" I asked.

"What?" he said. "What does that have to do with anything?"

"I'm just wondering," I said. "You make no bones that it's a shitty little magazine, and that you're doing shitty little jobs on it. But you're still there. Why?"

"I don't know if you've noticed this, but journalism is not exactly a rapidly expanding profession," Van Doren said. "Particularly in Los Angeles, where you basically have to put a gun to peoples' heads to make them read."

"You could always move," I said.

"What, and miss all this?"

"I'm serious," I said.

"So am I," Van Doren said. "Would you want to be an agent in Omaha, Tom?"

"No, but that's not where my business is," I said.

"Well, neither is mine," Van Doren said. "I write about the entertainment world. Have to be here to do that. I'm writing for a magazine that's near the ass-end of that world, I admit that. But you have to start somewhere. Think of it as the journalism equivalent of working on a straight-to-video flick."

"Why write about entertainment?" I asked. "Really, who gives a shit about it? It's not really important. It's not real news. You're just wasting your time and talent, such as it is."

"Nice cheap shot," Van Doren said.

"I try," I said.

"And you're wrong," Van Doren said. "It's not a waste. You're so stuck in the belly of the beast that you don't notice it, but our entertainment is the single most successful export America has."

"Shucks," I said. "And all this time I thought our most successful export was democracy. Guess that was just another lie I learned in school. I hear evolution's kind of a crock, too."

"Look," Van Doren said. "Other countries pass laws requiring that their movie theaters, television networks and radio stations have to play a certain percentage of home-grown entertainment. Because if they didn't, Hollywood would wipe it all out. We're not a world leader because we have nuclear missiles and submarines. We are because we have Bugs Bunny and the Dukes of Hazzard. Our planet is what Hollywood has made it."

"Planet Hollywood," I said. "Catchy."

"I thought you might like it," Van Doren said.

"But that's a stupid argument," I said. "The only people who believe that Hollywood sets political agendas are nuts on the left who are scared of action figures, and nuts on the right who are scared of nipples."

"Who's talking politics?" Van Doren said. "We're talking about how people around our world want their world to be. And the world they want it to be like is the one they see in our films, and in our TV shows and hear in our music. That's power. Hollywood that's where the world culture starts. If someone wanted to address the world today, he wouldn't do it from Washington, or Moscow, or London. He'd do it from Hollywood. That's why I work in LA, Tom."

"Sure," I said. "And as a bonus, you get to meet stars."

"Well," Van Doren admitted, "There is that too."

"Joshua," I said. "You wouldn't happen to have been listening to this little diatribe, would you?"

"As it happens," Joshua said, from his perch. "I've been hanging on every word."

"Does it sound familiar to you?"

"A little," Joshua said. "Of course, I said it better."

"Jim," I said, turning back to Van Doren. "I have a proposition for you."

"Do you, now," Van Doren said, and leaned back on his car. "This is going to be good."

"I don't suppose you can guess why I, of all people, am the one that knows about these aliens."

"It's a stumper, yes," Van Doren said.

"It's because I'm their agent."

"Their what?" Van Doren said.

"I'm their agent," I said. "In one of those bizarre and strange coincidences, Jim, their outlook on things is remarkably similar to yours: if you want to get the attention of the world, you have to go through Hollywood. So they decided to hire an agent. I'm him. As such, I'm authorized to make deals for them."

"Wow," Van Doren said. "How do you collect your fee?"

"After this is all done, I get New Zealand," I said. "Now, are you going to shut up and let me tell you what I have in mind?"

"By all means," Van Doren said.

"This offer stands for the next ten minutes. After that, you're out. No second chances or second thoughts. Are we clear?"

"Sure," Van Doren said.

"Here's the deal," I said. "You get the story. Exclusive."

"What story?" Van Doren said. "Your story? I have that already."

"This story," I said. "The first contact between humanity and an intelligence from another world. It's the single most important story in the history of the planet, Jim. And you'll be the only one who's in on it from the start. The only one who knows the whole story. Everyone else will have the reaction story. You'll be the one who gets to tell the world how it happened and what it all means."