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was going to vanish into the night sky.
    “What’s that?” she asked, unable to restrain her curiosity. As usual, he ignored her question. Not that she expected an answer, but the sound of her own voice was better than complete silence.
    He was staring at it intently. It began to hum, a purely mechanical noise but not an unpleasant one. Like the one she’d seen him holding on the porch, it also started to glow, though not nearly as intensely. It did not rise out of his hands.
    Instead, it exploded.
    She threw up both hands in front of her face, trying to shield her eyes. There was no need. The explosion produced neither sound, heat, radiation, or damaging light. When she lowered her hands she found herself gaping at an image splashed across the inside of the windshield. It was so realistic she momentarily had to grab the wheel to steady herself. Then she realized they hadn’t been suddenly transported to a point in space hundreds of miles up.
    The windshield had been replaced by a holographic projection of startling depth and realism. She recognized the image instantly. It was the continent of North America, rendered in every perfect detail. It was not a map, but rather a reproduction of some kind of miraculous photograph.
    As she stared the image shrank until it encompassed only the continental United States, swerved and compressed still further until it showed the Southwest. She gulped and hung onto the wheel anyway. Watching the shifting image was like falling.
    Specific geographic features were brought into sharp relief with the aid of superimposed bright colors. There was an isolated, exceptionally high mountain, a series of descending plateaus, and in the center of the projection an odd circular canyon—no, a crater. She was sure it was some kind of crater.
    The image enlarged slightly but remained focused on the brightly outlined crater. She wished she’d studied her geography better in school.
    Her keeper reached up, into the projection itself. The outline of the crater pulsed when his finger touched it. “Here.”
    She gaped at him. “You wanna be driven to that place? Is that it?” And she’d been hoping he’d ask to be dropped off somewhere nearby.
    “Yes. That place.” He looked relieved at having made his point. “Wanna be driven that place. You know where that place is?”
    She forced herself to consider the projection. “Well, if that’s Baja California down there, and up there’s Salt Lake, then over here,” she reached up to touch the image and was inordinately pleased with herself for not twitching when her finger passed into and through the seemingly solid surface, “this has to be the Grand Canyon. The place you want to go is further east, but it’s still got to be in—it’s hard to tell without state lines on your map. I’m not real good at this.”
    “State lines?”
    “Never mind. What you’re pointing to is, like, Arizona maybe.”
    He nodded vigorously. “Yes, wanna be driven there. Arizona-maybe.”
    “Why Arizona?”
    “Driven there. Now.”
    She sighed tiredly. Some of the fear was beginning to give way to curiosity. You couldn’t stay terrified forever, after all. For one thing, it was too exhausting. And it seemed like as long as she did as he asked, he wasn’t going to hurt her. If his original motive had been robbery he already would have taken what he wanted, including the car, and left. If rape, there was no need to drive all the way to Arizona to perpetrate the act. That left only kidnapping, but that didn’t make much sense either. And why haul her all the way to Arizona, when she might have a dozen chances to escape during the long drive?
    And there was his manner. She didn’t know what else to call it. What at first she’d taken for brusqueness now seemed more like plain ignorance. Ignorance of the language, of local customs, of the simplest things. She decided he had to be a foreigner of some kind—but weird. And what about the glowing spheres, and this