Dev struggled to hasten the donning of his pants. It wouldn’t do to return from an alien abduction in his underwear. He intended to prepare as best he could for a homecoming such as the world had never seen. Not to mention that he still had not decided how to respond to Gavin Reed’s daunting yet undeniably tempting proposition. If he chose to go along, he accepted that the Zimmers would not interfere but were prepared to judge him. He wasn’t sure that mattered.

It would matter if his parents knew, he had told himself repeatedly. But unless the Zimmers backtracked on their insistence that they would not give anything away, no one else would know if he decided to support the big man’s global-size bluff. Despite a week of near-constant mental struggle, he had yet to come to a decision.

That indecisiveness didn’t make him bad, he told himself. It only made him human.

Reed’s proposal had left him deeply conflicted. He knew he couldn’t keep postponing a determination. Soon they would be arriving in Earth’s orbit. The aliens would put them down right back near Houston, from whence they had been extracted, and proceed to wash their hands of them. Every government, every media outlet on the planet would want to talk to them. They would be whisked away to some secure CIA or NSA hideaway where they would be looked after and formally debriefed. Only at the conclusion of the official questioning would they be allowed back out in public, to appear on talk shows and do interviews and, with luck, perhaps be offered lucrative employment or endorsement contracts.

Of course, he told himself, if he chose to go along with Reed’s scheme, the latter would prove entirely unnecessary.

The Zimmers were the key to it all. They didn’t have to participate in the big man’s plan, only ignore it. If anyone queried them as to the truth of what Reed declaimed, they could simply reply that the authorities should talk to him about any arrangements that had been made with the aliens. They didn’t have to lie, only omit. Could they be counted on to do so? Dev didn’t know. Would it expedite his decision if he could be sure of their reaction? He didn’t know that, either. He told himself that he was a good person. A nine-to-five good person, to be sure, but still a good person. He was more enticed by Reed’s proposal than he cared to admit.

As it turned out, he was spared the need to choose between temptation and his conscience because the ship they were on never made it to Earth.