Touched by an Alien

want to know why I could see the gate here and at the crash site but not in the bathrooms.”
    “They’re cloaked. Duh.”
    “Uh-huh. So how can you see them?”
    He looked over his shoulder. “Keep up. And, yeah, okay, the cloaking doesn’t actually work on anyone with A-C blood. We can see the cloak but we can also see through it, because the light waves aren’t moving too fast for us. They’re too fast for any human or human-made device. And, before you ask, the parasites and the superbeings don’t have A-C blood, so they can’t see through the cloaking, either.”
    I wasn’t sure if I believed him, but I got the impression he wasn’t lying. “So you’re saying that there are no A-C-based parasites?”
    “Not that we know of.” Martini sounded sincere, but I wasn’t as sure about the lying this time, particularly since he pointedly wasn’t making eye contact. But this brought up a question all the excitement had washed away. “What happened on your planet when the parasites arrived?”
    Martini didn’t answer me. Him not talking was shocking in and of itself, but this was pretty damning. I caught up to him and grabbed his arm. “Tell me what happened when they got to your planet.”
    He stopped walking and turned to face me. Martini’s expression was unusual—solemn and tense. “They never came to Alpha Centauri.”
    I decided to take this news calmly. I ran through all the questions this statement brought up and decided to go with the bottom line. “Why not?”
    “We aren’t sure. Once the Ancients arrived, it was the ‘there are other inhabited worlds’ wake-up call for us. It might just have been that our ozone shield worked to keep the parasites out.”
    “Ozone shield?” I wondered if Al Gore knew about this, and I figured he didn’t or we’d already have a documentary about how much better the Alpha Centaurions were at protecting their precious resources.
    “Same issue as Earth has right now. We just figured out how to create a world shield that keeps the good stuff in and filters the bad stuff out. It’s similar to the cloaking technology.”
    “Why hasn’t someone shared this with Earth?”
    He sighed. “You don’t have the right raw materials to make it work. We have some elements on A-C that don’t exist on Earth. Maybe because of the double suns, maybe just because of how our world evolved. Like our ability to travel at hyperspeed. There are some things we can do that a human will never be able to.”
    “Could you export the materials to us?”
    “Possibly, but the parasitic threat is much more real and much more serious. A few superbeings could destroy the world tomorrow. And these days hundreds can show up in the course of a week.”
    “These days?”
    “The number of parasites reaching Earth is increasing each year. In the sixties, it was a few, almost like a military advance team. Now? Now it’s all we can do to keep up with them.” He let that sit on the air for a few moments, then continued. “We got the shield up on Alpha Centauri a few years after the Ancients arrived. We’ve never had a parasite sighting. We do get messages from home, three to five years after they were sent. Those your governments do intercept, but they’re in our native language.”
    “And we’re too slow to understand it, right?”
    “Slow only in the physical sense.”
    This begged another question. “Then how did you know what was going on? Why did you come here?”
    He started walking again, quickly, and I had to trot to keep up. “We told you. You needed us.”
    I thought about this as we raced to the building that was marked “Administration.”
    “The parasites couldn’t get through the shield, but I’ll bet you saw them knock on the door. We’re farther out from the galactic core than you are. They couldn’t get in at your place, so they headed to ours.”
    Martini held the door for me. “You’re taking this very well. I’ll be sure to tell the kids about it all the time.”
    “So, why your family group? I mean, if you all are really related?”
    We entered the building. It looked like every military headquarters I’d ever seen on TV or in the movies—lots of terminals, screens of all sizes, desks with papers, much hustle and bustle from the many people moving about with purpose. Only the vast majority of the personnel were really great-looking men. There were some ordinary guys mingled in, all wearing Air Force uniforms. These I took to be humans.
    The