One Door From Heaven

vehicles; the other windows are small, and the metal shell largely screens his special biological-energy signature from the electronic devices that can detect it. Third, he has been Curtis Hammond for approximately two days, and the longer that he settles into this new life, the harder he is to find, so he probably poses little danger to them.
        "My dog could use a bath, too."
        "We'll give her a good scrubbing later," Polly promises.
        Past the galley, a door stands open to a water closet on the right, which is separate from the rest of the bathroom. On the left, a vertically stacked washer-dryer combination.
        Directly ahead is the bathroom door, and beyond it lies the last eighteen feet or so of the motor home. The sole bedroom is accessed through the bath.
        Old Yeller stays behind with Polly, and Cass shows Curtis how to work the shower controls. She unwraps a fresh cake of soap and lays out spare towels. "After you've undressed, just toss your clothes out the bathroom door, and I'll wash them."
        "This is very nice of you, ma'am. I mean Cass."
        "Sweetie, don't be silly. You've brought us just what we've been needing. We're girls who like adventure, and you've seen aliens."
        How her eyes sparkle on the word adventure, only to sparkle even more bewitchingly on the word aliens. Her face glows with excitement. She all but quivers with expectation, and her body strains against her clothes just as the powerful body of Wonder Woman forever strains against every stitch of her superhero costume.
        Alone, Curtis removes his small treasury from his pockets and puts the cash aside on the vanity. He slides open the bathroom door just far enough to toss his clothes out in front of the washer, then slides it firmly shut again.
        He is Curtis Hammond enough to blush at being naked here in the sisters' bathroom. At first this seems to indicate that he's well settled in his new identity, already more Curtis than he is himself, and becoming more Curtis all the time.
        Peering in the mirror, however, he watches his face darken to a shade of scarlet that he's never noticed in other people, suddenly causing him to question whether he's fully in control of himself. A blush this fierce is surely beyond the range of human physiological response. He seems to be as red as a lobster cooking in a pot, and he's convinced that anyone, seeing him like this, would suspect that he's not who he pretends to be. Furthermore, he looks so sheepish that his expression alone would fill any policeman with suspicion and predispose any jury to convict.
        Heart beating fast and hard, counseling himself to remain calm, he steps into the shower before turning on the water, which Cass advised him not to do. It's immediately so hot that he cries out in pain, stifles the cry, mistakenly cranks the water hotter still, but then over-compensates, and stands in a freezing spray. He's lobster-bright from top to bottom, and his teeth chatter so hard he could crack walnuts, if he had walnuts, and it's just as well he doesn't have walnuts, because the shells would make a mess, and then he'd have that to clean up. Listening to himself babble to himself about walnuts, he's amazed that he has survived this long. Once more he tells himself to be calm-not that it did much good the last time.
        He remembers that Cass advised a quick shower because the motor home isn't connected to utilities; the system is operating off the vehicle's storage tanks and the gasoline-powered generator. Because he failed to obtain a precise definition of quick, he's certain that he's already used more water than is prudent, so he soaps up as fast as possible, rinses down, remembers his hair, pours shampoo straight from the bottle onto his head, realizes at once that he has seriously overused the product, and stands in rising masses of suds that threaten to fill the shower stall.
        To dissolve the suds as quickly as possible, he cranks the water to cold again, and by the time that he finally shuts the spray off, his teeth are rattling like an electric-powered nutcracker once more. He's sure that he has so drained the motor home's water system that the vehicle will topple sideways out of balance or suffer some catastrophic failure resulting in great financial loss and possibly even the destruction of human life.
        Out of the shower, on the bath mat, vigorously drying himself, he realizes that