She continued, “There is simply no way James would have forgotten to contact us this morning, and even if he was busy on deck, which I find hard to believe with twenty-five trained navy sailors on board, then Laurie would have had plenty of opportunity to call us instead.”

Neal decided to reiterate a possible option they had talked about when they had sat in her room earlier, “Let’s not forget that they may have simply suffered some mishap with the radio, maybe it malfunctioned, or the batteries went.”

“That is a possibility, but wouldn’t James have used some other method to let us know they were OK?” She looked at him for some kind of reassurance, but he was running low on it too.

“Neal, last night we found pretty good reason to suspect that something has … arrived here from somewhere else.” She still could not wrap her mind around it, but it was becoming steadily easier to say. “We all knew when we were talking about it that there was a pretty reasonable chance that whatever it is may not be friendly.”

She paused, and he saw the next thought coming, watching her steel herself.

“If ‘they’ were watching last night,” she continued, looking at her drink, “don’t you think they would have noticed a ship patrolling the waters where one of their own had landed? They must have gone to vast lengths to hide whatever they are doing here, what wouldn’t they do to keep it a secret?”

For the first time Neal felt what it was like to have someone jumping to conclusions faster than him, and felt some measure of the frustration that General Pickler and his colleagues must have felt when he ran off down theoretical roads in their meetings. He smiled ruefully, knowing he was about to deliberately be as pigheaded as they had always been to him.

“OK, let’s hold on. We are going to need a lot more information before we can jump to conclusions like that.”

She looked at him with the same frustration he must have shown a thousand professors. The difference was that all those teachers had all thought that he was being deliberately controversial, but Neal knew Madeline had no more desire to think these thoughts than he did.

As she went to speak again, they were interrupted by a commotion outside their boarding house down the street. Neal stood and peered down the crowded, dusty road to the small group gathering at its end. He saw the lady who had rented him and Madeline their rooms look down the street at him. He saw her say something to two officially dressed Indian military people standing next to her, and he saw her finger rise and point at Neal. The army men’s eyes followed her outstretched arm, coming to rest on the only white man in the town, and the two soldiers both promptly began to run toward Neal.