“You have a problem with that? Just as well I did. You seem to be in over your heads.”

“Wait, what makes you think that?” Patrick said.

“It’s a given.” Nat gestured at the corpse. “Now, getting back to the Wookiee in the room … ”

I grabbed my rolling office chair, plunked myself down, and gave her the whole story.

Nat stared at me for almost a minute after I was done. Then she slowly let out a breath and said, “Wow. When you screw up, you do it big. And you’re sure it’s intelligent?”

“It had a belt with some techy stuff.” I pointed to the items on the bench, and Natalie moved over to examine them.

“So what are you going to do with it?” she said, slowly turning one of the objects in her hand.

“Huh?”

“You’ve got a dead alien. In your barn. Can we agree this isn’t a normal thing? So what do we do? Give it to science? Call the cops? Email that Ancient Aliens guy with the hair, from the History Channel?”

“That would be the sensible thing to do.” I looked at Patrick, then Natalie, then the corpse. “Except for the Aliens guy, I mean. But no. None of the above.”

Patrick laughed. “That’s my boy.”

I pointed to the items on the workbench. “If this thing really is an E.T.—”

“Which seems the most likely hypothesis,” Natalie said. “Seriously, why haven’t you phoned the cops? Or the military? Or something?”

“I’m going to,” I said. “At least that’s what I keep telling myself. But once I do that, it’s over. It’s a given that I’m not going to be invited to be part of the task force or whatever they form to study it. It’s an E.T., Nat. We have this one chance to touch history. I guess I’m being a little selfish, but I don’t want to just hand it over before I learn something.”

Patrick made a head motion in my direction. “What he said.”

“Aaaaaanyway,” I continued, “if it’s an E.T., then it’s possible that it has a spaceship. Or a wormhole generator. Or a time machine. Or an interdimensional gate. Or something even more bizarre. And I betcha one of those devices will get us into it.”

“Assuming we can find it,” Patrick replied. “I mean, the alien was invisible. And no one has reported a flying saucer sitting in a field, as far as I know.”

“So we’re going to be searching the entire county for an invisible spaceship?” Natalie asked.

“We?” Patrick and I said in unison.

“What, you think I’m going to just shrug and go home, while you guys go find a flying saucer?” She glared at us. “Three Musketeers, assholes.”