“So is there anything else?” he asked.

“Should there be?” countered Sina.

“Excuse me,” said Winifred, breaking the spell in the little dance of that-of-which-we-do-not-speak. “But what exactly were you measuring?”

“Angles,” he said smiling at her. “Always … the angles.”

He hissed this last, causing Winifred and me to back up several paces and nod frantically as if we hoped by doing so we could fend off any attacks when he finally went completely off his nut.

“Angles, yes, angles,” we parroted. Even though this really didn’t elucidate anything, we thought it best to agree enthusiastically.

Why, I wondered, was nothing that was being thought being said? Why was Sina, so insistent with her family that she’d seen a UFO, refusing to divulge it to the one person prepared to believe her? Mr. Hastings seemed to be wondering the same thing as he stayed kneeling, leaning closer and closer to her as she stood at the edge of the bed unmoving, as if mesmerized by his professional Space Institute hypnotic gaze. He stared more and more deeply into her eyes. Who would blink first? Well, Mr. Hastings, it turned out because in the silence he leaned forward bit by bit until the mattress, which had been doing its sorry saggy best to support him, gave up and collapsed to one side and he fell off the bed with a crash. I had to hand it to him because he got up unapologetically, looking none the worse for wear, just brushing off his pants a bit, as if falling off beds were standard operating procedure for they of the Space Institute. Now that the spell of trying to draw from Sina that-of-which-she-would-not-speak was broken, he became all cheerful and normal, just your run-of-the-mill, dull fuddy-duddy scientist and said, “Well, we appreciate you calling. If you think of anything else to tell us will you call again?”

“Yes, of course,” said Sina as, with some relief, we vacated her room and she closed the door.

“What time did you say this was?” Mr. Hastings asked casually, as if it were an afterthought, which it clearly wasn’t, while we trotted downstairs again. “That you saw it?”

“Oh, I don’t know, around nine-thirty, wouldn’t you say, Franny?” asked Sina, who had likewise gotten all normal and businesslike again. You’d think her world couldn’t possibly contain things as mysterious and magical as UFOs and strange knowing men from the Space Institute.

“Yes, around that,” I said.

We escorted Mr. Hastings to the front porch, where he put his shoes back on without any of the ceremony he had used to take them off. I wondered whether, had Sina told him the real story of the UFO, he would have returned his shoes to his Space Institute feet with an evidence-finding ceremony all its own. It was very sad that we would never know.

Because we could think of nothing more to say, a kind of pregnant pause ensued. I’d never experienced a pregnant pause before—that is, a silence so full of something about to happen that it’s as if there is an invisible living thing, the embryo of an event, within it. It was an interesting experience.