If he was trying to make conversation, he was actually doing a poor job of it. I thought he sounded false, even silly, though I guessed that the glittery chatter was another ploy—this one intended to disarm me in some way.

“Then I hope it’s just what you needed,” I said, playing along.

“Oh, it is,” he told me. “But it’s just one thing. One thing out of many.”

Now what did that mean? I wondered. Because I had a strong feeling that it meant something, that every word Ted Merrill had said to me since he sat down at the bar was freighted with subtext. All I could do was wait for him to decide when, and if, he was going to make himself any clearer.

As it turns out, I didn’t have to wait long at all. The next thing he said was, “There are a lot of different things people need. Special things, sometimes. Don’t you agree, Laurie?”

Was I really surprised that he knew my name? Not really, though it did give me a chill. And when he lit up the megawatt smile again, it seemed decidedly menacing. I had the sudden thought that if I had my dog with me I could have told him to take a bite out of Ted Merrill’s leg. I wasn’t exactly sure how I would have conveyed the message, but I was sure that Digitaria would have received it, and just the thought of my little shadow-colored pet digging his incisors into Ted Merrill’s shins emboldened me.

“No, Ted,” I said. “I don’t, really. Myself, I don’t feel in need of anything special. Why do you ask? Do you?”

“Oh, maybe,” he said. He downed the rest of his drink, then picked up the pen again and resumed doodling on the napkin. “I find that it’s hard to be specific about what I might need these days. But sometimes, someone gives me something and it turns out to be exactly what I needed at a particular moment.”

“Do things like that happen to you a lot?” I asked.

“You know,” he said, “they seem to. I guess I’m just lucky.”

He finished whatever he was sketching on the napkin and then held it up to examine his work. “Not bad,” he said. “How about if I sign it and give it to you as a present?”

I didn’t reply, but apparently, that wasn’t necessary. He placed the napkin on the bar in front of him and added an elaborate signature. Then, he lit up his smile again, this time making it a little lopsided, which also brought out a web of crinkles around his eyes. The smile was beginning to seem like it led a life of its own, cleverly deploying itself in many different, useful versions. This was clearly the endearing version, one that had won countless fans. I, however, was not among them.

Ted Merrill put a hundred dollar bill on the bar and pushed it over to me, along with the napkin. “Time to go,” he said. “But it’s been nice talking to you, Laurie.” He tapped his finger on the napkin. “I hope you’ll keep this as a souvenir of our time together.”

As soon as he got off the stool, the members of his entourage all stood up and made ready to leave with him. Each one seemed to have assigned places and they formed themselves into a kind of human exoskeleton that surrounded the movie star. Then they all walked out together, moving as a unit.

Once they were gone, the waitress came back to join me at the bar. She was a young, pretty girl with very long hair dyed the color of ink; in her black uniform, she seemed to only partly emerge from the darkness of the bar. I focused on the pale disk of her face, a little moon bobbing in the nearby shadows.

“Wow,” she said, seeing the money on the bar. “The guys at the table only left me a ten.”

“I’ll split it with you,” I said.

I was actually tempted to give her the whole thing, since I had a feeling that the money came wrapped with an invisible helping of very bad vibes. But I didn’t have much time to dwell on that idea because the waitress was now examining with a studied interest the sketch on the napkin Ted Merrill had left behind.

“Well, look at that,” she said.

“What is it?” I asked her, since I hadn’t yet glanced at what Merrill had drawn. I didn’t really have a lot of interest in some doodle he’d signed—just more bad vibes as far as I was concerned.

But I’d asked, and so she showed it to me. The drawing on the napkin seemed to depict a kind of ribbed cone lying on its side, spilling out a variety of things that I took to be apples and peppers and maybe a small pumpkin or two.

“I guess he’s no artist,” the waitress said, “but you can see what it is.”

I certainly could. It was a cornucopia.

I asked the waitress to spell me for a moment and carried the napkin to the back, where our lockers were, folded it carefully and placed it in my shoulder bag. Then I did my best to put a mental shield between myself and the last half hour so that I could finish the rest of my shift. The less I thought about Ted Merrill and the message he’d drawn for me on the napkin the better off I was until I could call Jack. Because that was my plan, to call Jack. I couldn’t think any further than that.

When I finally got off work, I dialed Jack’s number as I was heading down the road at the far end of the airport that ran between the warehouses where the food service trucks dropped off their pallets of packaged meals. He didn’t pick up, but I hadn’t expected him to since he was still on the air at this hour, so I left him a message and kept on walking in the direction of my bus stop. It was a cool spring night, netted with stars.

He called back when I was on the bus, just as we were passing by Flushing Meadow, where there was a lake that looked like black glass. Tiny red lights seemed to skip across the lake’s dark surface like bursting bullets, then disappear, then suddenly sizzle back into view again; but this was an optical illusion, the reflection of the blinking airplane warning lights that topped the high-rise apartment buildings on nearby Queens Boulevard, which were right under the flight path leading to the airport.

“Guess who came into the bar tonight?” I said. “Ted Merrill.”

“Oh?” Jack replied. For a moment he sounded puzzled, as if he were wondering why I had bothered to call him about this, but he quickly made the connection. “Oh,” he repeated. “I gather it wasn’t a coincidence?”

“I don’t think so,” I said. “For one thing, he knew my name. For another . . . well, he drew me a picture, on a napkin. He even signed it.”

“A picture of what?” Jack asked, sounding like he already knew he wasn’t going to like the answer.

“A cornucopia,” I said. “In other words, a horn of plenty.”

There was a long pause in our conversation. My bus had passed the lake now, and was turning off the parkway into the residential streets of Queens where the monolithic ranks of apartments gave way to rows of small brick and stucco houses leaning one against the other, and all shut up against the night.

Finally, Jack said, “They’ve got the radio. Now they want the antenna.”

“That’s what I thought,” I replied. “But why?”

Jack fell silent again. The bus rolled on through sleeping neighborhoods, past shuttered stores and empty streets.

“Well,” he said finally, “maybe when your intruders broke into your apartment, they were after the Blue Box, but once they saw the radio, and saw that it said Haverkit—just like your box—they knew to take that, too. Or someone told them to look out for it. The Blue Awareness considers itself to be a religion and religions have sacred objects: maybe Avi’s Haverkit radio is one of those things. Only it’s missing an important component: a very unusual antenna.”

“I still don’t understand. How would they know about the radio?”

“Remember I told you that Avi and Howard Gilmartin had some kind of relationship way back when? Well, before it fell apart over the Blue Box thing, Avi and Howard likely exchanged alien encounter stories. Howard saw something—someone—tinkering with his radars. Avi had a niece who told him that she saw a very similar figure years later, adjusting the tuning dial on his radio receiver . . . and don’t argue with me right now about whether or not that actually happened, okay?”