5

Since childhood Pace had been interested in people’s stories about their interaction with extraterrestrials. Most of these accounts were ludicrous if not patently ridiculous, of course, but occasionally someone sounded convinced that he or she had actually been contacted by or had some sort of relation with emissaries from planets other than Earth. Pace rarely read science fiction or watched television shows or movies that involved space travel. What fascinated him was personal testimony, hearing people talk about their intimate experiences with aliens. Usually these individuals could be heard on radio programs in the middle of the night, telling how small gray or tall blue beings, some without mouths or with three eyes, had appeared in barns on isolated farms or kidnapped the subject and taken him to their own planet to experiment upon. Often these witnesses or participants sounded so sincere that Pace knew they believed what they were saying. Delusional or not, Pace remained curious as to what transpired in these people’s minds to allow them to describe in such vivid detail their unearthly experiences.

Sitting at the desk in his cottage late at night, or lying awake in bed, Pace acknowledged to himself that he would not mind having an encounter of the third kind, as such contacts were called. If he was taken away to another galaxy it would unburden him from trying to figure out a reason for existence. Not that he expected to be given or have revealed to him an explanation; it would be enough, Pace decided, to know there was more than one answer or no answer. Pace did not believe in God, he never had, but he understood why doing so was a comfort to so many people. He just enjoyed the idea of going somewhere else, someplace unimaginable.

When he received a letter from Marnie three months after he’d returned to Bay St. Clement, telling him that she had married Digger and was bound to devote herself to his well-being for however long that might be, Pace was not surprised, but for a moment he wished he were on another planet.