Dave Ladd, has-been country musician, didn’t mind much being abducted by aliens. More so as those aliens had plenty of cash to compensate him. More than he was making on the road! They could keep whatever secret they seemed to have learned about Earth.
He thought that was the end of it when he was returned to his home in rural Alabama. But he was already too involved in that secret—a secret that involved the survival of humanity—and soon was on the run with an alien girlfriend, both on Earth and ‘out there.’ Can the motley band of humans and aliens thrown together by chance and necessity find a solution?
an excerpt:
The saucer landed in some sort of hangar. I could see the the murky purplish-brown atmosphere all around us. How would we get indoors? A tube? Space suits? I’d seen too many ideas in sci-fi movies.
What they used was a bus, for want of a better word. It locked onto our door, we got in, it took us away. A simple and sensible way to do it. Maybe the quickest way too, but I wished it were quicker yet. Who knew what was happening on Paradise or on Earth? If the Larnagians wanted, they could make everyone blind to what was happening elsewhere. Everyone but Mickie and me.
There were those ‘new’ aliens I expected to see inside. I had too much on my mind to pay them close attention. A couple of them were humanoid. Or larnagoid, as our alien friends would put it. One looked like a rather large spider, but with more legs. Too many legs! We were hurried along, down a hall with crystalline-like walls, pale blue.
Our guide was a familiar squid-star. Yes, familiar and almost comforting by this point, amid the novelties and strangeness of this place. Perhaps that was intended. It led us to a translucent door. “Enter,” it requested. “I remain here.”
No, a figure, two figures, appeared at it. Another room, suited to the natives. Or maybe some other aliens with similar biology. I had no way of knowing.
“Wouldn’t a viewer have been more practical?” I whispered to Nok.
“Practicality is not a concern here,” he replied. “The symbolism of meeting face to face is more important to some races. Those are our hosts.” Nok would know these things. They were pretty much his specialty.
They looked like badly-made balloon animals, with a tangle of yarn glued on top. The other occupants of the room came to only three, one of them vaguely humanoid or perhaps more like a four-limbed stick insect. On one side of it sat something like a six-legged bear; on the other, crouched one of those multi-legged spider-things.
“I am Nac-nac-nac-nac,” insect-man announced, “head of this committee. We have been given complete emergency authority to deal with this situation,” it said. She said, I decided.
“And quite a situation it is,” I replied. “So what do we do?”