“What spaceship?” asked Mrs. Hornby, and suddenly we remembered she and Miss Macy were standing right there, drinking coffee and listening in.

Mrs. Hornby was your typical tea-and-crumpet Englishwoman, the type who moves to Victoria from Britain and never gets rid of her tea cozies or her clipped accent. There are dozens of them. You’re always tripping over them downtown so that if you didn’t know, you would think this was some kind of colonial outpost instead of the Canadian provincial capital that it is. But Mrs. Hornby was better than most. She was kindly at least. She had the square body, square jaw, short hair, and sensible clothes of women of her ilk and looked as if there would be no nonsense about her. She’s the person you’d go to if you needed a sudden tourniquet or the proper rules for a croquet match. She could, you felt, dispatch advice and medical help with a cool head in an emergency situation. She was not the type to whom you’d relate adventures with Martians. I could see all this running through Sina’s head as she cocked it and looked into Mrs. Hornby’s kindly inquisitive eyes. But then Sina surprised me. She seemed to visibly pull herself together and screw her courage to the sticking point, something she hadn’t managed to do for the Space Institute man, so maybe she’d learned something that day. And almost defiantly she told the story of her spaceship.

I must admit, I was not so morally bold myself, and kind of hid behind Sina, peeking out now and then, unwilling to watch Mrs. Hornby’s face assume a look of disgust as she cottoned on to the fact that Sina, formerly thought of as an upstanding member of the community, was revealed to be not merely wanting like Miss Macy but quite, quite mad. However, I was much mistaken, for instead of the look of disgust, Mrs. Hornby’s eyes took on a troubled glazed expression as if she were puzzling something out and putting two and two together.

“I’ve never told another soul this,” she said quietly. Then she put a hand confidingly on Sina’s forearm, which startled us, it was so uncharacteristic; if there’s one thing you can say for the Brits it’s that they usually know how to keep their boundaries. “But something similar happened to me. About ten years ago. I was driving my granddaughter home from Brownies. And we were going down Lombard Road—you know that long avenue with all the poplars?”

We all nodded a bit frantically. We didn’t want to break the spell.

“When suddenly the road ahead was flooded with light, and looking up I saw hovering not twenty feet over the road a giant spacecraft. It was perfectly circular, and covered in lights.”

“Blue?” asked Sina sharply.

“I don’t remember if they were blue. May have been. I just remember all the lights. And it simply hovered there. It was saucer-shaped, just like in the movies. That’s when I knew I could never tell anyone. I couldn’t believe it myself. What would my family in England say if they knew? Elspeth Hornby was seeing flying saucers. I pulled the car over. I was terrified, but, well, I don’t know what else I was, enthralled, I guess, enchanted. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before. The world was suddenly as it was when I was a child and believed in fairies in the dell and such. What could it be doing here? In British Columbia? I said nothing about it to my granddaughter, who was in the backseat and didn’t seem to notice. I said, ‘Grandma just needs to get out and check the tires.’ I didn’t want to alarm her. And who knew if the aliens or whatever was in there were friendly. I got out and just stared up at it. I didn’t know what else to do. And then it sped away in the blink of an eye. I’ve never seen anything move so fast in my life.”