The coffee splashed out over her platinum hair and powder-blue dress that looked white when the neon was azure, purple when it was amber. The coffee stained and soiled and ruined, and I was fiercely glad, unreasonably happy.
I tore the gun away from her by the short barrel, not letting my filthy hands touch her scrubbed pink ones.
I pointed the gun generally at her and backed around the thing on the floor to the cot. Doc had a pulse, but it was irregular. I checked for a fever and there wasn't one. After that, I didn't know what to do.
I looked up finally and saw a Martian in or about the doorway.
"Call me Andre," the Martian said. "A common name but foreign. It should serve as a point of reference."
I had always wondered how a thing like a Martian could talk. Sometimes I wondered if they really could.
"You won't need the gun," Andre said conversationally.
"I'll keep it, thanks. What do you want?"
"I'll begin as Miss Casey did—by telling you things. Hundreds of people disappeared from North America a few months ago."
"They always do," I told him.