The seats were packed in the Great American Ball Park, home of the Cincinnati Reds. It was a close game—the Cardinals had battled back from a four-run deficit and were making things interesting. It was the seventh-inning stretch, and the crowd was just breaking out into the well-worn lyrics of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” when a shadow fell upon the field.

As heads turned upward, the raucous singing petered out. Directly above second base, a large, round object floated. A pedantic mathematician would have characterized it as an oblate spheroid. To the spectators, it was a disk. The object was about thirty feet in diameter, a striking emerald green, shading at top and bottom to the deep, rich blue of a cloudless early evening sky.

The organist, belatedly catching on to the drama, more or less crashed to a stop, the last few notes not even in the right key.

The object settled slightly toward the ground. Then, as forty-thousand-odd mouths simultaneously drew a breath, the object accelerated straight up. From a standing start, it split the clouds in less than two seconds, creating several vortices that would linger for up to a minute.

“Do you think they noticed?” I said, laughing. The Halo had gone invisible as soon as we’d broken through the clouds, and Sheldon was now hovering just outside the ballpark. In the image on the window, the crowds were surging, first one way, then the other. It wasn’t quite what you’d think of as panic—for one thing, there wasn’t any concerted rush for the exits. It seemed more like everyone was trying to get away from everyone else so they could use their phones without having someone else yelling in their ear. Which didn’t work well when everyone else was trying to do the same thing.

For the moment, anyway, the game seemed to be on hold.

“Should we do it again?” Nat asked.

I shook my head. “I don’t think we can take the chance. A second appearance might cause an actual panic. I don’t want to be responsible for any injuries from—”

Sheldon interrupted my commentary. “I’m going to have to maneuver. Two fighter jets are heading this way at high speed. Well, high speed for them, anyway.”

“They must have scrambled from Blue Ash Air National Guard Station,” Patrick said. “They may have already been in the air. Still, that’s pretty good reaction time, all things considered.”

“And it’s just going to add to the fun,” I commented.