Lehal Library

calm, cool, collected, and in good shape to sense anything. But you can bet your ass you've got a real problem, haven't you!" Then, from a queasy area of sense-making not exactly intellectually conscious: "It was a 'drone' of some kind -unmanned, controlled from somewhere else wasn't it?" Axel frowned, looking at the slope of the hill we were descending. "What was it doing here?" he asked tentatively. "Well, for chrissakes! It was THIRSTY! Taking on water, obviously. Someone, somewhere needs water . . . so I suppose they just come and get it, "You don't need to be psychic to see that! Yeah! That's it, supply 'ship' Earth! Let's drive over to Earth, go shopping and pick up what we need, that kind of thing." More silent walking until we were again driving down the bumpy road in the van which had unsmashed cigars and sandwiches in it. "You know, Axel," I finally said, "they're really mean to blast away at 'deer and porcupines'. What can possibly be the sense of that. I've read that some landed UFOs incinerate humans. Is that true?" Without waiting for an answer, which I knew I wouldn't get, I talked back to myself. "I suppose it is. I guess we would have been blasted, too, wouldn't we? You guys seem used to this, do you do it every once in a while?" When we finally arrived at the airstrip, which I expected to be a secret one, I found it was thickly populated: with a USA-Alaska mail plane; three Caucasian men in plaid coats and cowboy hats lounging on the wood benches near the small hut; a police pick-up truck replete with two big-bellied "sheriffs"; ten women who I supposed were Eskimo. All these kept their distance from US. Near the plane was what might be called a la-la-land special: a hot-dog cart with an orange and blue umbrella. No one was operating the cart, but the twins walked over to it and made themselves some steaming hot-dogs. "Want one?" Axel asked. Indeed I did, three of them in fact, dripping with ketchup and mustard. "Do they know what you are?" I asked, nodding to the observers. At this I finally got an answer to a question! "Well," Axel responded, "they generally have been told we are wealthy environmentalists and bird-watchers who are assessing acid rain damage."