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short sentence that they spoke.
    “See,” Warren said to me, “they’re helping out.” His hand shaking, he signed a receipt for the machine.
    “Don’t sign anything, Warren.” I saw the curtains at the alien’s window flutter a bit, as though he’d been watching. Warren handed them the receipt and looked at me as though he was stoned, doomed, or both.
    The guys from Atlanta took the receipt and drove away. Next day, we unbuilt the machine and re-built it in the bunker.
    Alpha stopped the machines just as Warren started them, the powder mill and both pilling machines. The alien, one hand cupped over the powder mill switch, lips pulled back so the little teeth glittered, pointed from me to the respirator, and back.
    Warren sighed, went upstairs, and came back with a gas mask for me, which was hot and clammy, but it worked.
    I’d never before seen Warren take bossing from man or beast, but now he had a whole mess of bosses.
     
    At Thanksgiving, Warren went over to Galax to spend the holidays with a woman he knew. As soon as he was gone, the alien started drawing again, me with a human woman, among aliens. I wasn’t sure if they shook hands in space the way he was drawing them, or if he was using the Earth gestures to make me think I’d be at home in space.
    I stopped his hand and drew Warren getting shot by a black guy and a white guy.
    We sat there a long time, at the kitchen table, with cats mewing at our feet. He hummed low in his throat, first drew a black man and a white man shooting us all, then three skeletons, two not quite the same as the third, as though he guessed what our human bones were like under the different flesh.
    Yes, we could all get killed. I heard the road alarm finally go off, the clock buzz of it, and burned the drawings in the sink. Horrible drawings.
    The alien went “blam” with his lips, so real I jumped as though a shotgun had gone off, expecting to hear pellets rattling against the walls until I realized he’d spoken it.
    Then he stepped up behind me and rubbed the backs of his hands against my shoulder. I knocked his hands away and said, “Don’t tempt me.” He pushed his knuckles, hand curled slightly, against my chin, then walked away fast, as though very frustrated.
    The alarm stopped just as I got out the shotgun—Warren must have missed disconnecting the override, but he’d gotten back to it.
     
    The alien and I fixed the turkey, then Warren came out of his room, red-faced. His Galax woman wanted him to quit the drug business, now. “She doesn’t approve,” he said. “And she sure the hell doesn’t understand what they’d do to me.”
    All of us were bone-jerking tense. The alien began pacing, rocking his torso over his short bowed legs, spreading his arm webs, then pulling his arms around his body, the membranes stretched tight around himself. He spread his arms again, as if he turned hot and cold, or didn’t know which he was, cold or hot.
    Warren, his eyes on the turkey that he was slicing to bits, jerked his chin at Alpha, who stepped away from the table, hands hooked behind his neck, the long arms fitted up against his sides. “Gonna be weird,” Warren said, “when the Atlanta people get tired of me, and the law finds your alien here.” He started to laugh, then turned an angry red.
    “If you hadn’t expanded your damned operation on Alpha’s labor…”
    “Shut up, Tom,” Warren said. “It was way the hell over before that. And the guy in California dumped that damn locator in the ocean. He’s none too happy. He shot a man with thyroid eyes snooping around where he kept the egg. And he didn’t get it killed. Other people took it away. Aliens after us.” Warren grabbed a turkey leg, bit into it, and choked, coughing the meat out into his hand. I guessed he hadn’t stayed long enough to eat in Galax.
    After dinner, the alien watched Warren drive off, then turned to me and went “blam” again, just like a shotgun. Then he curled up on the sofa