happened now, it seemed that it was up to me.
As I was climbing out of the car, a second vehicle approached. This one drove up beside the sedan, and in short order produced an attractive woman of about forty, with short brown hair, large brown eyes, and a fixed expression that, if it wasn’t absolute terror, would do until the real thing came along.
“They got you, too, huh?”
She managed a nod. “Now what?”
“I was just about to find out.”
I approached the nearest box slowly. It looked . . . very much like a box. There were only three sides to it. It was gray on all of them. It was not larger on the inside. It was not full of stars. In fact, there didn’t seem to be anything in the box at all. Anything . . . except. I took a step closer. There was a light. A small light. Another step. It was kind of amethyst colored and pulsating slightly. Slowly. Brighter. Dimmer. Brighter again. It was a little erratic, not regular like a heartbeat. It was almost as if it was beating out some message in Morse code.
I stepped right to the lip of the nearest box. The little light was at the very back, high up in a corner. There seemed to be something beside it, a few words written in small letters. I could almost make them out. But not quite.
“Look,” I said, glancing back toward the woman. “I’m going to step inside. Just for a second. If you hear me screaming or something, get back.”
She hadn’t taken one step away from the car that brought her. “Oh, you don’t need to worry about that,” she replied.
I stepped into the box, bringing my face up very close as the light flashed dim, dim, bright. “Mind the gap,” read the very small letters. I looked at the phrase for a moment and shook my head. “This whole thing is some kind of joke,” I said, speaking loudly enough for the woman to hear. I turned around to step out. “There’s just . . . just . . .”
The playing field was gone. Instead I was looking into a very dark space lit by a single circle of light cast by a lamp high, high overhead. There was a sudden loud thudding sound, and it took me a moment to realize it was my heart pounding so hard that it was making my eardrums flutter.
I pressed into the box, the flat gray wall against my back, and stared out at the darkness. “Hello?” I said, in a voice that was reduced to a hoarse whisper.
“Hello!” came a booming reply. “Welcome!”
The voice was deep, smooth. It sounded like the voice that might be used for big-G “God” in a television show. It also, even in just those two words, sounded amused.
I waited for the voice to say something more. Or for something else to happen, but other than the continued ear-thumping noise of my own heartbeat, there was nothing. I leaned forward a bit, bringing one eye barely beyond the open front of the box so that I could see to the right. Nothing. To the left. Also nothing.
“Is this . . .” I cleared my throat and started over. “Is this a transporter?”
“Not the way you’re thinking,” said the voice. “It’s just really quick.”
“But I am on board the ship.”
“Yes.”
“The one over Milwaukee?”
“Is there another?”
“Not so far as I know,” I said.
“Trust me,” said the voice. “That’s the only one.”
I squinted hard at the darkness. It seemed to me that there was a shape out there, maybe even several, but it could have just been an illusion. The difference between the brightly lit circle in front of the box and the blackness beyond was severe. “This is contact,” I said. “Between humans and aliens.”
“Yes. That’s what this is.”
“Why did you . . . That is, why am I here? Why me?”
“We wanted to talk to you.” The voice didn’t seem quite so loud as it had at first. I