Strange Highways

be met with all the savagery of a Hare Krishna panhandler on a megadose of PCP. Well, he hadn't put it quite that way, but I got the message. So I shot Graham Stone in the chest, pointblank, because I had no way of knowing what he might be able to do to me.
     The bullet ripped through him, and he sagged, folded onto the desk, fell to the floor, and deflated. Inside of six seconds, he was nothing more than a pile of tissue paper painted to look like a man. A three-dimensional snakeskin that, shed, was still convincingly real. I examined the remains. No blood. No bones. Just ashes.
     I looked at the Smith & Wesson. It was my familiar gun. Not a Disney .780 Death Hose. Which meant that this hadn't been the real Graham Stone but - something else, an amazing construct of some kind that was every bit as convincing as it was flimsy. Before I had too much time to think about that, I beat it back into the corridor. No one had heard the shot. The thrashmasters on the bandstand were doing a fair imitation of Megadeth - a bitchin' number from Youthanasia - and providing perfect cover.
     Now what?
     I cautiously checked the other two rooms that opened off the hallway, and I found Graham Stone in both. He crumpled between my fingers in the first room, as solid in appearance as any face on Mount Rushmore but was, in actuality, as insubstantial as any current politician's image. In the second room, I shredded him with a well-placed kick to the crotch.
     By the time I reached the dance floor again, I was furious. When you blew a guy away, you expected him to go down like bricks and stay down. That was how the game was played. I didn't like this cheap trick.
     In the washroom, I rapped on Bruno's stall door, and he came out with his hat still pulled way down and his collar still turned up. Face wrinkled in disgust, he said, "If you people don't bother flushing, why even put the lever on the toilet to begin with?"
     "There's trouble," I said. I told him about the three extra Graham Stones and demanded some explanation.
     "I didn't want to have to tell you this." He looked sheepish. "I was afraid it would scare you, affect your efficiency."
     "What? Tell me what?" I asked.
     He shrugged his burly shoulders. "Well, Graham Stone isn't a human being."
     I almost laughed. "Neither are you."
     He looked hurt, and I felt like a blockhead.
     "I am a little bit human," he said. "Certain borrowed genetic material ... But forget that. What I should have said is that Graham Stone doesn't really come from any alternate Earth. He's an alien. From another star system."
     I went to the sink and splashed a lot of cold water on my face. It didn't do much good.
     "Tell me," I said.
     "Not the whole story," he said. "That would take too much time. Stone is an alien. Humanoid except when you're close enough to see that he doesn't have any pores. And if you look closely at his hands, you'll see where he's had his sixth fingers amputated to pass for human."
     "Sixth-finger-amputation scar - always a sure indicator of the alien among us," I said sarcastically.
     "Yes, exactly. There was a shipload of these creatures that crashed on one of the probability lines seven months ago. We've never been able to communicate with them. They're extremely hostile and very strange. The general feeling is that we've met a species of megalomaniacs. All have been terminated except Graham Stone. He's escaped us thus far."
     "If he's an alien, why the British-sounding name?"
     "That's the first name he went by when he started to pass for human. There have been others since. Apparently even aliens seem to feel that being British has a certain connotation of class and style. It's also a constant on eighty percent of the time lines. Although there are a couple of realities wherein being from the island-nation of Tonga is the epitome of class."
     "And what the hell has this alien done to deserve death?" I asked. "Maybe if a greater attempt was made to understand him-"
     "An attempt was made. One morning, when the doctors arrived at the labs for a continuation of the study, they found the entire night crew dead. A spiderweb fungus was growing out of their mouths, nostrils, eye sockets .... You get the picture? He hasn't done it since. But we don't think he has lost the capacity."
     I went back to the