My mom had a thing about UFO's. Some kind of obsession, I guess, or maybe only a fatal attraction.

She was a great mom anyway, openminded about everything (I knew all about the birds and the bees doing it before I was toilet trained), always cooking and baking and helping with homework, always available for hugs or to answer questions, and she never snooped through your drawers. Most folks in town didn't realize what a terrific mom she was, though, because they mostly judged her by her thing for UFO's, which really was awful embarrassing at times. No joke.

Like once, for instance, at my sister's Little League championship game, Mom thought she saw a UFO hovering over the football field on the far side of the tennis courts, catty-corner to the ball diamond and she coldcocked Mrs. Panning, who was sitting next to her, with the binoculars whirling around to get a better look. The UFO turned out to be the Budweiser blimp and even though Mrs. Panning didn't sue us (she said Mom couldn't help being a bit demented, seeing as how she'd been a flower child back in the 60's), Dad paid for Mrs. P's new bridgework anyway and confiscated Mom's binoculars.

Or, take, for instance, our names.

All of us kids were named after a UFO crash-slash-retrieval site.

My name is Rendlesham Forest, which is someplace in England where a UFO that looked like a huge yellow aspirin tablet supposedly landed and the military set up all these perimeters and lights and shot videotape of it when they weren't puking from fear. (I've always thought the scene in Rendlesham Forest that night must have been a more chaotic version of the final scenes in Mom's favorite movie, Close Encounters.) Everyone just called me Ren, even Mom, except when she was mad at me (like if I tickled my sister 'til she puked) and then Mom would stomp around the neighborhood looking for me and hollering, "Rendlesham Forest Brown! Where are you, boy? You're as elusive as a UFO, I swear!" Now, that was embarrassing! I'd come out of hiding just to stop her hollering.

My sister's name is Roswell N.M. Brown, after the most famous UFO crash of all, but us kids used to call her Xenophobe because she always said if she saw some bulbous headed midget with gray skin and big, black, slanty eyes outside her bedroom window beckoning with a four-fingered hand in the moonlight, she'd blow a hole in it the size of Montana to let the moonlight shine through with Dad's .44 and then feed its remains to the pigs. Mom didn't like it when we called Roswell N.M. Xenophobe, but mostly what she didn't like was that Xenophobe was xenophobic.

She's say, "Roswell, honey, the extraterrestrial biological entities are our space brothers. We must welcome them, when they finally reveal themselves to the whole world, with our gratitude and love. When they finally reveal their presence unmistakenly and see that we accept and love them, they'll cure cancer, fix the ozone layer and end world hunger. Now, won't that be wonderful?"

"The EBE hasn't been born that's my brother," Roswell'd mutter, "unless it's you Ren."

"Yeah?" I'd shoot back. "Well, your eyes are kinda slanty, Roz."

"Shut up, Shorty," Roswell, N.M. would say in her `princess' voice.

And then our older brother, Tunguska (we called him Tung, as in `tongue' because his was always running), would break in with his stock speech. "Besides, Mom," Tung would lecture, "contact with a technologically advanced society has historically spelled doom for the culture of the less advanced society. These saviors from outer space you're envisioning are more likely to bring an alien version of the Pax Romana to earth than a friendly invitation to join the Federation of United Milky Way Planets."

"Go to your room," Mom would sigh.

Dad, usually from behind the Wall Street Journal or Scientific American, would just grunt.

Tung, of course, wasn't named for a real UFO event. Everyone (except my mom) knows that what impacted at Tunguska, Siberia in 1908 was just a comet, yet Tung, of all of us kids, is probably the only one who really did believe in Mom's UFOs.

He was afraid of them.

Tung thought in terms of invasion forces while Mom preached Utopia. To her, the aliens were Mother Theresa, Ghandi, Einstein and Martin Luther King, with a bit of JFK added for spice, all rolled up into bulbous headed, slanty eyed ETs whizzing around the universe in a saucer shaped, flying Mayo Clinic. To Tung, they were a terrifying combination of Vlad the Impaler, Hitler, the PLO and Satan. We were the Indians in an intergalactic game of cowboys and Indians, we were the Jews bound for galactic Treblinkas and Dachaus. A spaceship, even a teeny tiny one, landing in our back pasture, would signal humanity's Waterloo.

Mom and Tung were true believers. They inhabited opposite sides of the fence, it's true, but at least they weren't uncomfortably astraddle it like me and Roswell N.M. and our two younger siblings, the twins, Kingman Arizona and Tarija Boliva Brown. Of course, at six years old, the twins had a good reason not to have chosen sides of the fence yet. But Roz and me, we were just mostly confused. Like my hero, FBI Agent Fox Mulder, I wanted to believe.

And it wasn't hard to believe around Mom with her videotaped segments of Sightings, her subscriptions to MUFON and CUFOS and her kazillion books on the subject (including a copy of the Bible in Klingon). She even had me download from the local BBS a set of gifs of the President shaking hands with an alien ambassador (one of the Grays, natch) in the White House Rose Garden, then she pestered Dad until he figured out a way to transfer the gifs from the computer screen to the dining room wall. In art deco frames, no less. Anyway, it was hard not to believe when the first thing you laid eyes on each morning as you sat down to breakfast was ol' Billy Clinton shaking hands with a mushroom colored alien, the Secret Service guys all clustered around, the sun shining on the roses and everyone looking all cheery and normal.

But it was a lot harder to believe out in the real world of school and neighborhood where people like Mrs. Panning always referred to us as `those poor, poor, dear, sweet Brown children, afflicted with that lunatic of a mother' and Roswell N.M. and I were constantly getting into fistfights with other kids defending our mother's sanity and/or her choice of names for us.

So, how did Dad feel about Mom's UFO thing? He was embarrassed sometimes, I think, but he was mostly cool with it.

Sure, she was pretty much out of the box on the subject, he'd say, when Roz or I would complain to him about the latest embarrassing thing she'd done (like bringing an alien preserved in a jar that she'd ordered from some magazine to the PTA meeting), but she was a good wife and terrific mom to us five kids. Everyone's entitled to be a little off-center about something these days, he'd say. The stress of modern living practically demanded some type of emotional escapism, he'd say, and then he'd hide behind his Scientific American or Wall Street Journal again.

He was a propulsion engineer at NASA and the way Roz and I saw it in those days was that he kept a pretty open mind regarding possible life on other worlds because he worked for NASA and he liked Mom to be happy, so he put up with her obsession.

Summer before last, when I was 10 and Roswell just turned 11, Dad took us out to the back pasture and taught us to signal for UFOs using Morse Code with his big halogen flashlight. We figured Mom had asked him to do it, because right before that there was movie on HBO about a kid who gets a flying saucer to land by using a flashlight, so Roz and I went out two or three times a week after dinner, lugging the flashlight and six pack of Dr. Pepper. We hardly ever signalled though. Mostly we just sat in the high summer grass watching falling stars and orbiting satellites, smoking cigarettes cadged out of Mom's purse and talking about how when we grew up we'd like to live in a real city, like Miami or New York, or even St. Louis. Anywhere but Arkansas and our home town.

It was kinda nice, really, sitting out there with Roz, just talking and dreaming and listening to the night sounds. Once Tung tried to join us but we sent him out snipe hunting in the woods with Dad's flashlight and the bag we'd used to carry the Dr. Pepper and Doritos in. He seemed to get the message and never tried to come out with us again. So Roz and I, who were closest in age to each other, spent the summer in the back pasture. The high grass was full of grasshoppers and crickets and garden snakes and I'd catch one or other now and again, but Roz being a girl, wasn't very much interested in bugs and snakes. Still, even though Roz was a girl, and my sister, she was a better companion than Tung. At least Roz was smart enough to know there weren't any snipes in our woods.

That was a good summer. I'm glad Roz and I got to be friends during it, seeing's how she's the only family I've got left.

Anyway, last summer (I'm pretty sure it was last summer), Mom got it into her head that we needed to sell the house and go to Mexico because the space brothers were going to land at Chicken-Itza or somewhere like that, and take all the believers with them in their flying Mayo Clinics. Dad muttered something about this thing having gone too far and how something had to be done, and one night he brought home a big lantern-like object with little sliding glass windows of different colors and a megacandle watt halogen bulb inside.

"Gnarly," said my sister, who's always a year or two behind on the current slang.

"What is it?" Kingman Arizona asked.

"It's gnarly," Tarija Boliva giggled.

"Shut up!" Roswell snapped.

"It's a magic lantern," Dad said. "Guaranteed to bring a UFO right down in our back pasture." He winked at Roz and me.

"Cool!" Kingman and Tarija shouted together.

"That's stupid," Tung said. "And preposterous."

"Oh, but if it works ... " Mom whispered, raising her eyes to the kitchen ceiling and smiling so fiercely her whole body glowed.

"If it works, we won't have to go to Mexico," Dad said, winking at Roz and me again.

"If it works," Tung said, "it's dangerous. History has unequivocally demonstrated..."

"Oh, shut up, Tung," Roswell sighed. "When can we try it out, Dad?"

"How about after dinner?" Dad said.

"X-Files is on after dinner," I protested.

"Let's go now! Let's go now!" the twins started screeching, jumping up and down and tugging with six year old enthusiasm at Dad's clothes. "Why can't we go now? Huh? Huh, Daddy?"

"'Cause it's not dark out yet, stupids," Roz said. "It's a lantern. It has to be dark for it to work right."

"Is a lantern like a flashlight?" Kingman asked.

"That's right, Sweetie," Mom said. "We'll all go out after dinner and shine the lantern at the sky like Ren and Roswell N.M. did last summer with Daddy's flashlight."

"After X-Files," I insisted.

"OK, baby," Mom laughed, "I guess I can wait until after X-Files."

"I'm not going," Tung said. "It's stupid. It's not going to work and if it does work, then it's stupid and dangerous."

"Don't be a silly strudel," Mom said, ruffling his hair, which he hates because 14 1/2 is too old to have your hair ruffled, he says. Or used to say, rather. "If it's dangerous, you have to be there to protect your fat, old Mom, right?"

Tung just scowled.

Dinner was, as usual, great. Mom cooked everything from scratch, even our bread. Nothing was ever microwaved (except popcorn) or out of a can. No nutrition in canned and frozen foods, Mom said. Her children might all be short for their ages, but we sure were healthy, she'd say fondly to the other moms at the PTA meetings. I don't remember what we had to eat that night, but it was definitely tasty and I do miss Mom's cooking something terrible.

After dinner Tung stomped off and the rest of us watched X-Files which is my favorite show because it's so weird and Fox Mulder is my idol, like I said, and it's Roz's favorite show because she thinks Scully is a role-model for the modern girl approaching womanhood and all that crap. Come nine o'clock, we all, including Tung, tramped out to the back pasture, Dad and his magic lantern in the lead.

The twins were getting cranky, it being past their bedtime, and they were whining as we headed for the far side of the pasture where it borders our snipeless woods. Tung's always cranky, so nobody paid any attention to his carping as he marched stiffly beside Mom, taking seriously his designation as her miniature bodyguard. Mom was so ecstatic she looked like she might float right up into the sky to meet the UFO at some halfway point between our pasture and Lacaille 9352.

"You think this thing might really work?" I whispered to Roswell N.M. Like I also said earlier, I really did want to believe.

"Naw," Roz said. "Dad's just trying to make Mom happy. Or maybe bring her to her senses about this Mexico thing."

"I don't think it'll make her happy or change her mind about Mexico if it doesn't work," I said.

"Shush, Ren," Roz said, so I did, but this expedition to the back pasture was losing whatever logic I'd hoped that it'd had in the beginning.

We reached the edge of the woods and Dad set up his magic lantern.

"Eyes on the sky, everyone!" he shouted and switched on the contraption with a typical Dad flourish. (My dad, the NASA scientist, should have been a vaudeville magician. At least that's what Mom used to say.) "Eyes on the skies, now."

The magic lantern coughed, flickered a couple of times and went out. Roz rolled her eyes at me.

"Well, it's been a long time since I used it," Dad joked, giving the lantern a brisk whack on the side.

Colored beams of light shot out in all directions, none of them, however, up to the sky. Those little glass sliding windows clicked around and around, creating these really awesome patterns of color.

"Pretty cool," Roz observed and everyone agreed with varying degrees of enthusiasm but after thirty minutes of watching the lantern (and the sky), the twins were asleep on the ground, Tung was cheering up, Mom's enthusiasm was undimmed, I was bored and Roz whispered to me, "Not cool, Ren. Dull, dull, dull."

"Tung was right," I whispered back. "This is stupid."

"Yeah," Roz sighed. "But Mom's having fun."

"I guess that's the point," I said. "But we shoulda hocked some cigarettes out of Mom's purse. Then we could at least sneak into the woods for a smoke while Mom's so busy having fun."

"I've had piano lessons more exciting than this," Roz giggled. "Hell, Ren, even watching you catch grasshoppers is more exciting than this."

"Look!" Mom whooped suddenly, waking the twins and scaring me silly. "Look! They're coming!"

We all looked up at the tiny dot of light moving across the sky at the tip of Mom's pointing finger.

"It's just a satellite," Tung said, like he was trying to convince himself.

"I don't think so, son," Dad said, not sounding very convinced either.

The dot became a dime of light, then a nickle, then a quarter. It was definitely heading for us.

"Isn't this miraculous, Harold?" Mom squealed, hugging Dad.

"Oh, yes," Dad said absently, watching the quarter become a sun sized blare of light. "Oh, indeed."

"Oh, shit," Tung said.

I'd never heard Tung speak a two syllable sentence (family legend has it that his first word was a compound sentence with semicolons properly placed) and I took my eyes off the now snowball sized light to stare at him. That was when I started to get seriously scared. Tung's face scared me. It had hardened into an alarmingly adult expression of fear and hopeless courage.

"It's not really a UFO," I said to Roz. "Right?"

"ETV," she hissed. "It's an extraterrestrial vehicle, not a UFO."

"Oh, that's real comforting," I said and punched her arm. Usually she'd punch me back. This time she didn't. That scared me, too.

"Wasn't meant to be comforting," she mumbled, staring at the snowball which had become in those short seconds a moon.

"The truth rarely is," Tung said in an odd, empty voice.

It was suddenly dark again and when I looked up this time, I saw the light had become a massively huge disk hanging silently at the edge of the woods. Small lights, the color of the beams shooting from the lantern began to sprinkle and sparkle all around its rim.

"Will it land?" I asked.

"Doesn't need to land, Ren," Dad said. He turned off his magic lantern.

"Doesn't need to land to do what?" I asked.

"Exactly," Tung said.

A cone of light, so brilliant and white it seemed clear, speared out from the bottom of the ship and immediately disappeared. Where it had rested for a moment on our pasture, two Grays now stood, dressed in silvery aluminum foil suits and holding out their four-fingered hands in the universal gesture of friendship.

"Oh, my," said Mom.

"This is just some elaborate NASA joke, right, Dad?" Tung asked hopelessly. "That thing's just some secret prototype, right?"

"Wrong," Roswell said. "Unfortunately."

"What now?" I asked, edging closer to Roz.

"Well," Dad said brightly, "now I have a wonderful surprise for everyone. We're all going to go aboard the ship. Isn't that cool, kids?"

"Uh, right, Dad," I said.

"Gnarly," Roswell N.M. agreed weakly.

"Oh, Harold!" Mom cried.

"I have to pee," Kingman Arizona whined.

"I wanna go to bed," Tarija whined, too. "I asleepy."

Tung didn't say anything. Like a soldier, he was waiting to see if combat was really imminent or if this was just a drill.

"And I've got another surprise," Dad said. "We've always talked about visiting my parents, your grandparents, kids, one day, and today is that day." He gestured for the Grays to come on over, which they promptly did, nodding their bulbous heads at us in a friendly way. "I'd like to introduce my parents, George and Sowela Brown."

"You mean they're not aliens?" Mom asked. "Oh, damn it, Harold."

"I knew that," Tung said. "Evolutionarily speaking, a species without an opposable thumb couldn't make a spearhead, much less an intergalactic vehicle."

"And they're wearing masks," Roswell pointed out.

"What a rotten joke," Mom said. She was really miffed. Her face was all red, like her blood pressure was way, way up.

"Those aren't masks," Dad said. "They're disguises."

"So, what's the difference?" Roz said.

"I've gotta pee!" Kingman screamed.

"What's an opposable thumb got to do with anything?" I asked Tung.

"Has to do with the ability to grasp firmly," Roz answered.

"Can we go home now?" Tarija whined.

"Quiet!" Dad roared.

We all shut up.

"These are my parents and one of them is an alien," Dad said.

"I don't believe you," Mom said, her face redder than ever and kinda blotchy looking, too.

That huge flying saucer twinkling and sparkling over our heads and she didn't believe him?

I sure as shit believed, I realized. "Oh, boy," I said.

"Take off the helmets, folks," Dad said wearily to the Grays, who carefully lifted off their `disguises'.

Underneath one mask was a short, blond man who looked just like my dad, but a lot younger. Under the other mask was something else. Something kind of like an insect. A pretty insect.

That's when things went, literally, ballistic.

Mom looked at the insect, I mean Grandma, squeaked and fell right over. Ka-plop. The twins started wailing. I thought Mom had just fainted. After all, even a pretty insect, like a ladybug or a butterfly, is still an insect and Grandma looked more like a grasshopper than either of those, so naturally it must have been a shock to Mom to realize that her husband was half-grasshopper and her own offspring a nest of part-insects, too, but then Dad said something about a heart attack and Tung screamed that Mom was dead, the twins started to shriek even louder and then Tung, in slow motion, was pulling Dad's .44 magnum out of his T-shirt, caterwauling like an Indian in a John Wayne movie.

"Run for the ship!" Dad yelled at his parents. He grabbed me and Roz, one under each arm, and ran for the ship himself. I saw the twins bolt for the woods. They were clinging to each other as they ran, squalling all the way. That beam of clear light came down from the ship at the same moment Tung started shooting. Slow motion gave way to high speed.

Roz was fighting Dad, hollering she didn't want to go, put me down! Tung blasted Grandma, blowing up her pretty insect head, not two inches from my nose, and then Dad was hit, falling over on top of Roz and me. Bullets were zinging everywhere. I figured it was probably safest to stay under Dad until Tung ran out of speedloaders, but Roz was fighting to disengage herself, still hollering that she wasn't going anywhere with a bunch of bugs, even if they were, quite literally and inarguably, her space brothers and help me, Ren! so I tried to help her but Dad was awful heavy for someone so short and we were all slippery with his blood. It was Grandpa who pulled us out, tossing us into the light beam just as Tung, with a wild Apache yell, shot him down, too, and jet fighter planes came roaring out of the western night sky headed for our pasture.

Well, the light, of course, sucked me and Roz right up into the ship where we've been ever since, which is about a year, I think, in Earth time. I have no idea what time even is out here. Einstein was right about the space-time continuum and how it bends and warps and slows and plays magic tricks, but wrong about physical objects with mass being unable to travel faster than the speed of light.

I don't understand how all this stuff works yet, despite the IQ supplements that come with every meal, but my cosmosciences tutor tells me not to push it, that one day I'll know more than Tung ever would have learned about the mysteries of the universe even with his higher native intelligence quotient.

Poor Tung. I don't know what happened to him and the twins. The military moved in and covered up everything that happened that night in our back pasture. My tutor says that's SOP for the United States government and not to worry about it. Tutor is way cool, actually. I taught him the shell game and he's teaching me Bundago, the Rigelian version of softball.

This ship is a kind of Mayo Clinic, just like Mom always believed UFOs were, but its mission isn't to cure cancer or patch the ozone layers of a thousand worlds. We're strictly a genetic enhancement team.

Yeah. We. I'm part of the team, being a hybrid, and I'm expected, after I reach puberty, to return to Earth, mate and continue the experimental intelligence enhancement program of cross-breeding that began in my family with my great-great-great grandmother. Roz, too. Ol' Roz, she's still a xenophobe. We must have visited a hundred species in this sector of the galaxy so far and she's hated every one of them. She has to accept the grasshoppers, but she's never letting any other lifeform into her definition of spacefamily. Not Roz. Nope, no and never, she says.

Roz, in fact, is having a great time picking out her potential mate from among the one night stand abductees we snatch from Earth on our frequent stops there. These abductees are brought aboard, tested for genetic suitability as mates and then returned, usually that same night and usually with screen memories in place. Roz and I always go to the testing labs to check them out as potential spouses. Right now, she's wavering between a Russian picked up on our last visit to Earth and a French kid from the time before that. Dorks, both of them, in my opinion.

I have the feeling, watching Roz, who'd just started her period a couple of months before that night in our pasture, that as soon as she gets clearance to breed, she's going to go at it with real gusto. Not a male on Earth is going to be safe from her. Roz says she doesn't believe in monogamous relationships and did I ever see an insect that had only one mate? She acts like she's half-rabbit, instead of hybrid alien.

As for me, I'm fighting this biological duty and being part of the team crap. I'm 12 years old now, or at least, I think I am because my voice is starting to change. That means puberty. After puberty comes manhood and as a man, I'll have the right to choose my own mate, just like Roz, as a woman, has that right. Unlike Roz, I already know who I want to breed with, and monogamously, too.

Grasshoppers, of all the insects back on Earth, have the most human of faces and Tutor's sister is the prettiest insect I've ever seen. Her name's Mirado and I'm almost certain she thinks I'm pretty hot, too.