Strangers

are the aspects of humanity that are in His image. Which is the message I'm taking to Brendan. I believe Brendan's crisis of faith was related to a memory of an encounter with a race vastly different from us - and so shatteringly superior to us - that he subconsciously believed it put the lie to what the Church teaches us about mankind being in God's image. I want to tell him that it's not what they look like that matters or whether they're far more advanced than us. What indicates the divine hand in them is their capacity to love, to care - and to use their God-given intelligence to triumph over the challenges of the universe that He gave them."
        "Which they've had to do in order to come so far," Parker said.
        "Exactly!" Father Wycazik said. "I'm sure when the brainwashing loses its hold on Brendan, when he remembers what happened and has time to think about it, he'll come to the same conclusion. But just in case, I want to be there beside him, to help him, guide him."
        "You love him very much," Parker said.
        For several seconds, Father Wycazik squinted into the tumultuous white world ahead, progressing more slowly and cautiously than when he'd been following the reflectors along a known road. At last he said, in a soft voice: "Sometimes I've regretted entering the priesthood. God help me, it's true. Because sometimes I think about the family I might have had: a wife whose life I could share, who'd share mine, and children to watch grow… The family that might have been - that's what I miss. Nothing else. The thing about Brendan is… well, he's the son I never had and never will. I love him more than I can say."
        After a while, Parker sighed and said, "Personally, I think the CISG was full of crap. First contact wouldn't destroy us."
        "I agree," Stefan said. "Their fallacy lies in comparing this situation to our contact with primitive cultures. The difference is that we aren't primitive. This will be the contact between one very advanced culture and another super-advanced culture. The CISG believed if there ever was contact it'd have to be concealed, if at all possible, and that news of it would have to be broken to the public over ten or even twenty years. But that's wrong, dead wrong, Parker. We can handle the shock. Because we're ready for them to come. Oh, dear God, but we are so desperately and longingly ready for them!"
        "So ready," Parker agreed in a whisper.
        For perhaps another minute they bumped and rocked along in silence, unable to speak, unable to put in words exactly what it felt like to know that mankind did not stand alone in creation.
        Finally, Parker cleared his throat, checked the compass, and said, "You're right on course, Stefan. Ought to be less than a mile to Vista Valley Road. This man in Chicago that you mentioned a while ago… Cal Sharkle. What was it he yelled to the cops this morning?"
        "He insisted he'd seen aliens land and that they were hostile. He was afraid they were taking us over, that most of his neighbors had been possessed. He said the aliens tried to take control of him by strapping him in a bed and dripping themselves into his veins. Initially, I was afraid maybe he was right, that what had come down here in Nevada was a threat. But on the trip from Chicago, I had time to think about it. He was confusing his incarceration and brainwashing with the landing of the starship he'd seen. He thought it was aliens in pressurized space suits who'd kept him captive and stuck him full of needles. He witnessed the descent of a starship, and then these government men in decontamination suits came, and by the time they'd rammed all that stuff into his subconscious and weighted it down with a memory block, he was completely mixed up. No aliens apprehended him. It was his fellow men who mistreated him."
        "You're saying government agents would've worn decontamination suits until it was clear whether or not the alien contact carried a risk of bacteriological contamination."
        "Exactly," Stefan said. "Some guests at the Tranquility must've approached the ship openly, so they had to be considered contaminated until evidence to the contrary was turned up. And we know some at the motel have distinctly remembered men inside decontamination suits: a few soldiers, brainwashing specialists. So poor Calvin was driven insane by a misconception arising from his inability to remember clearly."
        "Must be