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and beat at the armrests with his fists, hissing and singsonging, eyes quivering
     
    “Warren,” I said at breakfast soon after that, as nonchalantly as I could, “why don’t we get the Fairlane tuned up, the battery’s getting old. Get it in shape in case I have to come after you in Atlanta, or something.”
    He looked up at me, his eyes red-veined, fork with egg on it in front of his unshaved chin. Quaaludes and speed—crank it up, crank it down. Quaalude-slow this morning, he stared at me blankly a long while. Finally he said, “Sure.”
    At the sink, the alien turned back to look at us. He came back to the table, glass of blood and oil in one hand, plate of our eggs in the other, and oo’ed slightly.
    “You’re using, Warren,” I said. He’d always dabbled, but he wasn’t stable enough to do a whole lot of speed. And here I was going to abandon him to the drug investors. I felt guilty, but God, I had to get out. Save Alpha. But seeing Warren using hurt—he was my brother.
    “Have a lot of work to finish,” Warren said. “Alien here doesn’t seem to mind the push, and I don’t force the load on you.”
    All I ran was one pilling machine, and I felt doubly guilty, to be making drugs, to leave so much work to them. Triply guilty, to be plotting to leave.
    “Sorry,” I said.
    “I’ll get you a new battery, tune that old Ford up. Must be boring all the time with some weird creature who can’t even say boo. ”
    Alpha had made himself a flat straw out of a Coke bottle he melted and fussed with over the gas stove, and now he had it stuck deep in his throat, pumping up the blood and oil mix, breathing in and out all the while.
    Hadn’t noticed he could breathe when he drank, before. Alien, very alien. Could he and I escape and leave Warren, who’d lose everything, maybe even sanity or life, to anonymous guys with dirt-masked faces?
    Or should I turn the alien over to the government? Sure, turn Alph over to the Air Force—him prisoner for life and the Atlanta investors still after Warren and me. The alien had already drawn up the best plan: kidnap some girl and leave the planet with the friendly aliens, if he hadn’t been lying with that old yellow #2 pencil.
    Flat lot of good #2 pencils had done me all my time on Earth. Me high-percentiling the achievement tests only made teachers think I was thief-stock cool.
    “Thanks,” I said to Warren, who didn’t seem to have noticed that my pause had been rather long.
     
    While Warren went out for groceries and a new car battery, Alpha and I worked in our respirators, both weird-looking beyond the ordinary with the breather snouts and shadowed faces under the harsh light of the bunker, working between earth walls shored up with chicken wire and two-by-fours.
    On a machine like in a factory—nothing romantic about drug-making. Damned machines whumped down the pill powder while I cleared the stupid little pistons and adjusted the powder flow. Stomp that pedal, old obsolete cranky machine.
    The alarm went off, then stopped. Warren.
    The alien watched from the porch as Warren drove up and parked. Smoke came off the engine block, so Warren said, “Think I’ll drive it about, see if it needs more work, or if the oil’s just got to burn off.”
    Alpha, up on the porch, fidgeted, almost dancing. Suddenly, I thought of how stupid, really, the escape plan was—where exactly were we going? I hopped up on the porch and caught him by a web, rudely, then shifted my hand to his elbow and led him inside.
    Alpha embraced me, so excited, and brought out the atlas again.
    How, I wondered, was I ever to understand them in space? I drew me speaking, using a little balloon for the words like a cartoon. Then the alien, with a balloon full of song notes. Then his question sign.
    He drew me and a balloon with an exact copy of the word “Executive” in it, copied from the top of the legal pad. Then he drew a box, “Executive,” going in, and scribbles, in his own writing,