Strangers

while the jet escorts wheeled and barrel-rolled and swooped and zoomed in the sky above and to the east and west. Now, as on that wondrous night, her breath caught, her heart pounded, her breast swelled with turbulently mixed emotions, and she felt as if she were standing before a door beyond which lay the meaning of life, a door to which she had suddenly been given the key.
        Sandy said, "It came down in the barrens beyond I-80, at that place some of us knew was special, though we didn't know why. The jets were buzzing it. Everyone at the motel and diner just had to get down there, couldn't hold us back, my God, nothing could've held us back! So we piled in cars and trucks and took off-"
        "Faye and I went in the motel van," Ernie said out of the darkness in the troop transport, no longer breathing hard, his nyctophobia burned away in the heat of memory. "Dom and Ginger went with us. That pro gambler, too. Lomack. Zebediah Lomack from Reno. That's why he wrote our names on the moon posters in his house, the ones Dom told us about. Some dim but urgent memory of riding with us in the van, down to the ship, must have almost busted through his memory block."
        "And Jorja," Sandy said, "you and your husband and Marcie and a couple other people rode in the back of our pickup. Brendan, Jack, and others went in cars, strangers piling in with strangers, but in some way none of us were strangers any more. When we got there we parked on the berm, and a couple other cars pulled up coming west from Elko, people were running across the divider, cars driving in from the west just stopped right on the highway, and we all gathered on the shoulder of the road for a minute, looking out there at the ship. The glow around it had faded, though there was still a… a luminous quality to it, amber now instead of red. It set some clumps of sagebrush and bunch-grass on fire when it first touched down, but those burnt out almost entirely by the time we got there. It was funny… how we all gathered along the edge of the road, not shouting or talking or noisy in any way, you know, but quiet, all of us so quiet at first. Hesitating. Knowing we were standing on… a cliff, but that jumping off the cliff wasn't going to be a fall, it was going to be like… like jumping off and up. I can't explain that feeling too well, but you know. You know."
        Jorja knew. She felt it now, as she had then, the almost-too-wonderful-to-bear feeling that humankind had been living in a dark box and that the lid had just been torn off at last. The feeling that the night would never again seem as dark and foreboding or the future as frightening as it had been in the past.
        "And as I stood there," Sandy said, "looking out at that luminous ship, so beautiful, so impossible there on the plains, everything that had happened to me when I was a little girl, all the abuse and pain and terror… didn't matter as much any more. Just like that - " She snapped her fingers in the dark. "Just like that my father didn't terrify me any more." Her voice cracked with emotion. "I mean, I hadn't seen him since I was fourteen, more than a decade, but I still lived with the fear that some day he'd walk in again, you know, and he'd take me again, make me go with him. That was… that was silly… but I still lived with the fear, 'cause life was a nightmare for me, and in bad dreams those things happen. But as I stood there watching the ship, with everyone silent and the night so big, the jets overhead, I knew my father could never scare me again even if he did show up some day. Because he's nothing, nothing, just a sick little man, a speck, one tiny grain of sand on the biggest beach you can ever imagine…"
        Yes, Jorja thought, filled with the joy of Sandy's discovery. Yes, that was what this ship from beyond meant - freedom from our worst and most inhibiting fears. Although the vessel's occupants might bring no answers to the-problems that beset humanity, their mere presence was in a way an answer in itself.
        Her voice thickening even further with emotion, beginning to cry now, not with sadness but with happiness, Sandy said, "And looking at the ship out there, I felt all of a sudden as if I could put all the pain behind me forever… and as if I was somebody. All my life, see, I'd felt I was nothing, less than nothing, filthy and worthless, just a thing that had its uses maybe, but nothing with… dignity. And then I realized we're all just