The spaceship sat in a pasture behind the carnival, where the radio said it had crashed during the night. The debris trailed off into a maple grove, like the scattering of yellows and reds that was beginning to show among the leaves. To Mike, the wreckage looked like a jumble of rounded metal shells and tubes, as if the Tilt-O-Whirl had been swept up from the midway and cast down from a divine height. The cold sheen of the metal seemed to chill straight through to his bones.

"Didn't we park in that field yesterday, Mommy?" said April, his eight-year-old daughter.

"I think so, honey," Ginny said.

"Wow! We should've stayed a couple of more hours, and maybe it would've crashed on our car!" April said. "Then maybe we could have gotten to ride home in the spaceship!" She bounced on the back seat several times, hard enough that Mike could feel the car rock. "Can we go take a look at it?"

Mike looked out past his wife at the spaceship, off to the right of the line of cars. He guessed that the carnival had its entire equipment crew guarding the spaceship, armed with everything from .22's to Uzis. "Sorry, kid. I don't think they want us getting any closer."

His gaze lingered on Ginny. After a summer of tanning, her blond hair was obscenely pale against skin the color of well-oiled teak; it made his pants bulge. She turned and saw his stare. "Down, Boy," she said, reaching across the car and patting his crotch. (Boy did not obey.)

April continued to rock the car with her bouncing. "I want to go look," she said. "Daddy, get me into the spaceship."

With Ginny's help he could do it, if she distracted the guards while he and April walked up to the wreckage. The idea of those carnival men staring at her, dressed in a white tube top and white shorts, made his pants bulge even more. "I don't think so, kid. Looks like they'd shoot the President if he got too close."

"Then we have to go see the alien," April said. "You promised."

"That's why we came back, kid." That's why they'd paid the parking fee again, even though it had shot up from three dollars to fifteen overnight. They'd be lucky if this trip cost less than seventy-five or eighty, money they couldn't afford. But the ad on the radio said they had a real alien!

Up ahead, the line of cars started to move. Mike looked again at the guns. Hell, those guys would shoot the Pope if he tried to take their spaceship away.

"I'm surprised the government hasn't tried to take this thing," Ginny said.

"They wouldn't dare." Mike shook his head. "Can't you see the headline now? 'Air Force steals spaceship from carnival. Hundreds die as aliens zap crowd!'"

Ginny laughed. "That wouldn't stop them. There isn't a legitimate paper in the country that would touch that line, and the Feds know it."

The car ahead moved, and Mike took his foot off the brake. "I don't know. I don't think they'd risk it."

An hour and three ten-dollar carnival tickets later (they had been five dollars the day before), they stood in line outside the tent where the alien was on display. "Man from Mars!" the sign said, green letters on fresh white paint. Mike could see the outline of the letters that used to read "World's Largest Horse!" They'd come through this tent the day before, too; April had wanted to see the horse, at two dollars per person.

"Bet the horse is enjoying his day off," Mike said. Ginny smiled and nodded.

"If they don't want the horse any more, can we keep him?" April said.

"Not this year, kiddo." Mike ran his hand through April's hair. "What do you think the alien looks like?"

"I bet he's ugly," April said. She made a face toward the tent.

The line moved faster than Mike expected, and the people leaving the tent each wore a face similar to the one April had just made, even before she had seen the alien. Soon Mike paid another ten dollars for each of them, and they stood inside the tent.

The alien was ugly. It lay on a sheet of scuffed plywood, which in turn stood on concrete blocks. It had a featureless gray head with a whitish lump on top, and a thin, limbless gray body that trailed down the board. But the strangest thing about it was its skin, which seemed sort of foggy, out-of-focus--as if there were no clear boundary between the alien and the air. The tent still smelled of horse manure.

April leaned over the fence that stood between her and the alien, then backed away from the alien and snuggled up to Ginny's side against the back of the tent. Her pale skin stood out like ash against Ginny's teak. "Yukko," she said, looking up at Ginny, who leaned down to her daughter's height. "It looks like a giant sperm!" April said in a loud whisper.

"Shhh," Ginny said. "Not so loud." She put her arm around her daughter's shoulders.

Mike looked back at them. "Where'd she learn what a sperm looks like?"

"They have sex education in school now," Ginny said. "She's been asking all sorts of questions."

Mike grunted. "They didn't teach me what sperm looked like, back when I was eight."

"It wasn't something you needed to know," Ginny said.

Most people were hanging back in the tent, edging toward the exit. Ginny and April clearly wanted to join them. Mike turned his attention back to the alien and reached his arm over the fence. The alien was too far away for him to touch, though; more than a foot separated his fingers from the outer fringes of its "skin."

"Keep your arms back, mister." A red-bearded carnie sat on a stool inside the fence, guarding the alien. He looked to be over six feet tall, and he cradled a shotgun in his heavily-muscled arms.

Snap. Mike heard and felt it as he pulled his arm back, and his fingers tingled a bit. He brushed his fingers across the fence to drive the tingling away. "I guess we've seen it," he said. "Let's go."

They walked down the midway on their way out. April wanted more cotton candy, and Mike wanted to see if the Tilt-O-Whirl was still there. It was, spinning its load of screaming children in wild circles. He stopped to watch, and April stood beside him, munching on a pink dust-bunny grown to cancerous proportions. Looking down for a second, Mike thought he saw an orange spider weaving more cotton candy. Just as quickly, the spider was gone.

When they got home, April bounded out of the car. "I'm going to tell Steve," she said. "He's going to hate me. He'll just die!"

Mike watched her lips blur as she talked. He had to run her words back four or five times before he understood, and by that time April was already at the Steve's house, five houses down and across the street.

As he and Ginny walked into the house, he nudged her back toward their bedroom. Boy was bulging again. Ginny tugged the other way, toward the back yard.

"We won't have nice weather much longer," she said. Mike understood; he'd built a privacy fence as his first big carpentry project, and Ginny liked to go naked in the yard whenever April wasn't home. Ginny had spent much of the summer sunbathing inside the fence, tanning every inch of her skin to a rich, deep brown.

Mike pulled back toward the bedroom again. "Inside," he said. "Satin sheets will feel perfect after a hot day." Ginny followed, pretending to pout. The sheets would only be cool. He needed cold, but cool would have to do.

He pulled her tube top off over her head, and paused to admire the smooth, dark grain as it accented the contour of her teak breasts. It was as if a cigar-store Indian--female--had come to life, ready to seduce him. He hoped that the Indian's Girl was as smoothly sanded and polished as its skin; he didn't want Boy to get splinters.

In bed, Mike found that a sea anemone had attached itself to the Indian's head. Many of its pale tentacles waved slowly in the still air, while others lay sprawled across a pillow. He ran his hand through the tentacles, which wrapped around his fingers and wrist, stinging fiercely. "Jesus," he said. "Son of a bitch." He got up and sat on the edge of the bed, holding his hand, watching it swell and redden. His breath grew deep and ragged, and he felt as if he had just been pulled out of the ocean after nearly drowning.

"Mike! What's wrong?" the Indian said, sitting up.

Mike's vision of the Indian and its anemone wavered and dissolved. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, and when he looked up, Ginny knelt beside him on the edge of the bed. She squeezed his hands, and the pain from the stings spread up his arm to his chest. He tried to control his breathing, with little success. His hand hurt like hell.

"Mike?" Ginny said.

"I don't know, honey. There was this Indian, a wooden Indian . . ." Mike stopped to fight for air; he felt like he was choking.

"Where?"

"In bed. I was lying next to--oh, shit." What was he saying?

The same image must have formed in Ginny's head at that instant. She stood, pulled a sheet off the bed, wrapped it around herself, and stomped off to the bathroom. "Thanks a lot!" she said, and slammed the door.

Mike examined at his hand. It looked and felt normal. He stared at the bathroom door, reflected in the vanity mirror, and watched the light streaming through the crack along the floor. "I'm sorry, Ginnemone," he said. The bathroom door remained silent and closed.

Mike put on his clothes and started toward the kitchen. At the door, he stopped beside the dresser, which was half-buried in jars of tanning lotion, skin cream, special vitamins ("guaranteed to reduce the risk of skin cancer"), and other assorted bottles. They reminded him of the arguments over her tanning, and over the money she'd spent, not only on these lotions but on clothes to show her tan, on special foods, on skin treatments--the list went on and on. Mike could have bought a lathe with all that money--a selfish thought, he knew, and that had made him resent it all the more.

He'd stopped fighting it when he realized that Boy had its own opinion of her tan. Although he still saved money for his lathe, it didn't mean as much to him as Ginny, assuming she ever spoke to him again. But he still worried about what the sun was doing to her health. He picked up a bottle of her vitamins and opened it. Inside, the pills glowed with warm, liquid light that hurt his eyes.

On his third try, he got the lid back on the bottle. He managed to set it on the dresser without knocking anything else over.

He wanted to tell Ginny that he loved her, and that she wasn't a wooden Indian. He wanted to tell her that he would still love her even if her skin were the color and consistency of mayonnaise.

Mike walked to the kitchen, opened the refrigerator, and pulled out a jar of Hellmann's. He opened the jar and scooped out a handful, which he rubbed between his palms. The numbing cold and the oily smoothness brought an exquisite peace, a feeling of safety and protection. As the chill faded, he stared at the pale greens and deep blues that rippled through the mayonnaise, and watched as the underlying whiteness turned purple and then black.

It took another two minutes to get the lid back on, and to put the jar back in the refrigerator. Washing his hands was torture; he couldn't get the water to run cold enough. Even the coldest water from the tap burned and sizzled across his skin.

Snap. Something tugged at his mind; the kitchen wavered and held, as if it were frozen in ice.

Mike walked out of the house and sat on the front step, examining his hands. They were tanned and smooth, except for a few calluses. He looked up and watched as his driveway began to ooze into the street, where the pavement churned and rippled toward the highway that lead back to the carnival. Snap. Once again, his hands tingled, and he wiped them on his jeans.

April came skipping up the walk, stepping from the crest of one wave to another. "Steve hates me!" She sat beside Mike, giggling. "His father won't let him go see the spaceship. Says it's nothing but old junk. Steve went spastic!"

Spaceship. Carnival. Snap. This time he knew the jolt was coming; watching his hands, he saw sparks jump out from his fingertips and over the horizon towards the carnival. "April, want to see if we can get inside the spaceship?"

"Yeah!"

The road flowed swiftly beneath them, and the current tugged at his wheels, making it hard to steer. The car enclosed him like a steel fish, promising to swallow him. Other fish swam past, fighting the torrent of gray froth. All the colors on stoplights glowed at once and reflected everywhere on oily ripples.

Mike survived the drive to the carnival by making a game of it. He would only go when April told him to go, and turn when she told him to turn. Thank God she wanted to get to the spaceship as much as he did; she was bouncing on the seat again, and the car bobbed up and down in the stream.

From time to time, he felt another snap, and his fingers tingled again. As he neared the carnival, traffic slowed and Mike had to maneuver between bloated, fat-finned fish, each one dancing gracefully on black flippers above a cold and soothing balm.

He passed the spaceship again, looking for a place to rest his fish. The carnival crew no longer guarded the wreckage; instead, several gangly four-tailed aliens lay sprawled on the ground around the ship, some twitching, others still, all connected to the ship by pale, translucent green tethers. The ship itself had changed; the scattered debris was gone, and the various shells had assembled into a flattened sphere. Its tubes now resembled many sperm-tails dangling and twisting from the bottom of the sphere. The sphere no longer sat on the ground, but hung in the air, resting on the tails that danced beneath it. Mike tried to tell himself that the change was in his mind; somehow that seemed less frightening than the possibility that the ship was already repaired.

He guided his fish past the spaceship, toward the carnival gate.

"You said we'd go to the spaceship," April said. "I don't want to see the alien again."

"Shhh," Mike said. "We'll get there." He took April's hand, and snap, whatever held his mind spread to hers. Nothing told him that, nothing had to tell him: he could see the large, squat fish dancing past their own, through her eyes as well as his. She twisted violently in her seat, and the shift in her perspective almost caused him to slip into the throat of his fish.

"Daddy?" April's voice said. "Daddy, where are you?" Mike turned to look at April, but an alien had taken her place. It bobbed and spun in the air, with four tentacles writhing. "Daddy?" It was April's voice, but in his head, not in his ears--or so it seemed. As he looked through her at himself, the steering wheel twisted in his hands, and his car--for a moment it was no longer a fish--lurched into a ditch and stopped.

"April, are you still in the car?" From his own eyes, he looked at the thing that he hoped was really April. A thin blue tether floated in the air above them, translucent, wavering, anchored to each of their heads. Through her eyes, he could see another tether, yellowish-gray, that wandered out through the car window, away from the ship and toward the midway. He saw, too, that he looked more like an alien than the image he remembered of himself. No wonder April was frightened.

"Daddy? What's going on?" April's voice seemed softer, but no less frightened.

"I don't know, kid," Mike said. "I truly don't know." He slid a tentacle from the wheel to a lever that protruded from the wall beside him; he tugged on it, and part of the fish swung open. At least some things still worked as he expected.

The April-thing swam out beside him and grasped one of his tentacles in two of hers. "Daddy, can we go home now? I'm scared."

Mike looked back at his fish, which now looked much the same as the others, except that his crouched against the ground, its side and front split open, gasping into the air. "Kid, I don't think I know how to go anywhere. You remember the way home?" He turned to look at the yellowish-gray tether, which now waved gently through the air. Its other end had disappeared into the carnival tents and buildings. Snap. He could now see inside the horse tent, where a red-furred, four-tentacled alien sat in a corner, playing with a shotgun. As he looked around, he saw that the tent was empty; none of the four-tentacled creatures gathered around the outside of the fence. Mike's yellowish-gray tether snaked out through the front of the tent.

"No, Daddy, I don't want to see that thing again."

Had she seen the same thing that he had? Mike wasn't about to call that impossible, or even unlikely; neither did he want to ask, for fear of what April might answer. "I think we have to, kid. I don't think we have a choice." He turned to look at her, and watched the tether between them grow thicker and deeper blue in color.

They walked toward the carnival, tentacle in tentacle. The tether between Mike and the alien grew thicker with each step, and undulated with slow and stately grace.

They saw many other four-tentacled aliens like themselves, mostly sprawled on the ground, few of them moving. Occasionally a pair or small group were connected by stringy, sickly-green tethers, but their tethers hung still in the air, or lay limp on the ground. No one tried to stop them as they walked in the carnival gate, and on to the horse tent where the alien still lay on a sheet of plywood and the red-furred thing lay on the ground, stroking the barrel of its shotgun.

"Oh, yuk! Daddy, it's still so ugly!" April hung back by the door.

Just inside, Mike found a gate to the inner part of the tent. As he stepped through, his tether suddenly thickened and enveloped both Mike and alien. The feeling was wonderful, calming and cold beyond anything he'd ever known. He knelt beside the alien and slipped his hands through the fog around the alien's body; the fog had a thick, oily feel, like mayonnaise. Inside the layer of fog, which was thinner than he expected, he found the alien's body, cold and slippery-soft. He reached one arm around it and tried to pick it up, but its body slipped through his fingers, as if he were trying to pick up a huge pile of cottage cheese. Unlike cottage cheese, though, the alien's body held together, so that Mike was able to lift it off the plywood and hold it in his arms.

"Oh, Daddy, how can you stand to touch it? It feels gross." April backed away from him, and the tether between them grew thin and pale.

"Stay close, kid," Mike said. "We just have to get her back to her ship, and this will all be over." Her? Yes, something about the alien seemed protective, feminine. It was right that a female should feel this way, cold, oily, soft. The tethers, too, were a female thing, but Mike sensed that the alien saw all humans as females. He knew that the alien was wrong about this, but that knowledge turned soft in his mind, soft and painfully warm, and it oozed away.

Mike stood up, and found that he could hold the alien in one tentacle. He reached toward April with another. "Come on, April, take Daddy's tentacle. We're going back to the ship."

April edged around him and took his free hand, keeping Mike between the alien and herself. For an instant Mike felt the heat of her touch, a warm, solid, human hand. Then a wave of revulsion rolled through him, and April's touch turned cold and viscous. April's hand squirmed and tried to pull away, but Mike held on; he knew that it was a warm, dry, human hand, his daughter's hand, and that he needed to hold on to her for his own protection as much as for hers.

They stepped out of the tent into late afternoon sunlight, and a flash of white forced Mike to shut his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, he saw that a new tether, huge and glowing white, now connected the three of them with the alien's ship. It pulled hard on Mike, so hard that his feet could barely keep up as he ran toward the pasture where the ship waited. April stumbled at his side and said, "Daddy, slow down!" But Mike held on to her; she was his link to his family, his life, his world.

He looked down at April and saw her as he remembered her, human, pale-skinned and dark-haired, running beside him. Tears ran down her face, and his tentacle was wrapped around her wrist.

Around them, nothing moved; through the midway and on into the pasture around the spaceship, no other creature stood or even crawled on the ground. As they approached the ship, a pair of tails whipped out from its belly. They grabbed the alien and tore her away from Mike. Mike stumbled and fell, and April with him, still hand in tentacle. The ground felt good, safe and comforting. April clung to him, shaking.

They watched as the ship began to rise, two tails still holding the alien and pulling her inside, the other tails dancing fiendishly. The ship continued its slow, unhurried ascent, and turned to move beyond the maple grove, where it disappeared from sight.

Mike watched the yellowish-gray tether that still floated up from where they lay, up and over the trees. It faded a little, and its slow undulations diminished, but waves of cold still poured into his mind. The ground beneath him answered with a cold comfort of its own. There is no reason to move, Mike thought, no reason to move ever again.

"Daddy," April said, "is it gone? Can we go home now?"

Mike shut his eyes. Yes, the tethers were still with him, even then. One to the ship, yellow-gray, and the blue one that now enveloped him and April. He felt a pair of new ones, pale and slender and creamy, that snaked away over the horizon. One touched his own head; the other joined to April. Mike followed his own, and saw that it linked him to Ginny in her back yard, one of many tendrils extending from the gelatinous mass of her anemone. Ginny held a human shape for a second, then wavered, became the anemone's body, then became human again.

"Daddy? Isn't it over? Can't we go home, please?"

Mike opened his eyes, and through the bluish fog of his and April's tether, he looked up at the sky. He shut his eyes again and tried to sense the tethers by feel alone. Yes, they were still there; yes, he did not need to look for them; yes, they would remain without any effort from him. He checked again; the only tentacles were to April and to Ginny; none remained to the alien.

"Daddy?" April said, raising her voice. "Daddy?"

"Soon, April," he said. The peace was broken; where was it? Yes, it was in the cold of the ground, the soft, cool ooze of his daughter at his side. He wrapped his tentacles around April and hugged her, felt his tentacles squeeze through to a body that seemed too solid, felt the cold of her body seep from her to him, from him back to her.

"Daddy?" she whispered. "Can we go now?"

"Soon," he said.

He felt his way along the tentacle that led to Ginny. He could feel the warmth of the sun on her skin. It seemed odd that such intense warmth could bring comfort to him.