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that there was something inside the pod—an actual presence, a being. It scared him, and yet there was a strange feeling he had not felt before—a feeling he could not put a name to. It wasn’t kinship, of course, it wasn’t compassion, but it was something like those feelings. Mutual loneliness, perhaps.
    He caught his breath. He and the pod were mutually alone. He sat down.
    “If you’re in there,” Mozie said, speaking in a low voice, “I’m just, you know, a kid that’s turning on the sprinkler system. Professor Orloff will be back soon. He’s supposed to already be back, though he paid me until next Saturday.
    “The professor’s the one who can help you. You just need to hang in there until next week.
    “I sort of know how you feel because my dad’s gone, and when someone goes out of your life—someone you really need—well, it does make you lonely. But the professor will be coming back, and my dad won’t. That’s the difference, so you don’t—”
    There was the distant sound of thunder, and Mozie lifted his head and looked up through the dusty panes of glass overhead.
    A broad line of thunderstorms had been stalled over the mountains for days, never coming closer, just gaining strength. Every afternoon the tops of the cumulonimbus clouds ballooned, and lightning could be seen in the rounded domes.
    At the sound of thunder, the pod seemed to quiver. It was such a quick movement—over almost as soon as it began—that Mozie wasn’t sure it had happened.
    “It’s just thunder,” he said.
    He looked up at the pod. The pod almost seemed to float above the rich soil, though the end of the pod was now pressed into the earth. It was like a prehistoric plant rising from mist, a low silhouette, green and ominous in its strangeness.
    Yet, there was a grace about the pod, a beauty that held Mozie in place, that kept him here, breathing this rich, perhaps unhealthy air until—
    A sound broke into Mozie’s world.
    Honk! HONK! HonkHonkHonk!
    “Valvoline,” he said. He lifted his head. “Valvoline!”
    And as if a spell had been broken, he got up and ran for the door.

911
    V ALVOLINE LEANED OUT OF the phone booth as Mozie ran around the corner of the gas station.
    “I was worried about you, Mozie. I was calling for help. I already dialed the nine.”
    “I—I—”
    He was too winded to speak.
    Valvoline hung up the phone and stepped outside of the booth.
    “What happened? I waited and waited, and ten minutes went by, and twenty, and finally I said, ‘Well, I have to call Mrs. Mozer,’ and I got in the phone booth and guess what? Somebody had torn the Mozer page right out of the phone book, and I don’t know your number. So then I just said, ‘Well, shoot, I’m calling 911,’ and I put in a dime and dialed a nine when you came running out of nowhere. You all right?”
    “Yes.”
    “That pod didn’t try to get you or anything?”
    “No.”
    “Because I remember a little plant I got for my seventh birthday and it opened and caught flies. You could see the fly’s little legs sticking out for the longest time.”
    “This isn’t that kind of pod.”
    “What kind is it?”
    “For one thing, it’s shut.”
    “That doesn’t mean it couldn’t open.”
    “True.”
    They started for the car. “Anyway, I’m glad I didn’t finish the 911 with you being all right. This friend of mine dialed 911 because her cat got his paws stuck in the VCR. And she called 911 and she didn’t say it was a cat. She just said, ‘It’s stuck in the VCR. I can’t get it out of the VCR!’ And when they came and saw Bosco—”
    Mozie stopped abruptly.
    “What’s wrong, Mozie?”
    “I forgot to turn on the sprinklers.”
    “You mean you got to go back?”
    “Yes.”
    “Well, I’m not going to sit out here in this deserted parking lot by myself. That’s dangerous too. All kinds of cars rode by with people looking funny at me. Get in the car. I’ll drive up there.”
    “You’re sure?”
    She threw the