Betty Fernandez was tough; she was also intelligent, and though she had been a housewife for a dozen years, she had not forgotten her training as an electronics serviceperson. This was just another of the medium's countless miracles of simulation; she would accept it now, and worry about the details later.

'Dave,' she answered. 'Dave – is that really you?'

'I am not sure,' replied the image on the screen, in a curiously toneless voice. 'But I remember Dave Bowman, and everything about him.'

'Is he dead?'

Now that was another difficult question.

'His body – yes. But that is no longer important. All that Dave Bowman really was, is still part of me.'

Betty crossed herself – that was a gesture she had learned from José – and whispered:

'You mean – you're a spirit?'

'I do not know a better word.'

'Why have you returned?'

'Ah! Betty – why indeed! I wish you could tell me.'

Yet he knew one answer, for it was appearing on the TV screen. The divorce between body and mind was still far from complete, and not even the most complaisant of the cable networks would have transmitted the blatantly sexual images that were forming there now.

Betty watched for a little while, sometimes smiling, sometimes shocked. Then she turned away, not through shame but sadness – regret for lost delights.

'So it's not true,' she said, 'what they always told us about angels.'

Am I an angel? he wondered. But at least he understood what he was doing there, swept back by the tides of sorrow and desire to a rendezvous with his past. The most powerful emotion he had ever known had been his passion for Betty; the elements of grief and guilt it contained only made it stronger.

She had never told him if he was a better lover than Bobby; that was one question he had never asked, for that would have broken the spell. They had clung to the same illusion, sought in each other's arms (and how young he had been – still only seventeen when it had started, barely two years after the funeral!) a balm for the same wound.

Of course, it could not last, but the experience had left him irrevocably changed. For more than a decade, all his autoerotic fantasies had centred upon Betty; he had never found another woman to compare with her, and long ago had realized that he never would. No one else was haunted by the same beloved ghost.

The images of desire faded from the screen; for a moment, the regular programme broke through, with an incongruous shot of Leonov hanging above Io. Then Dave Bowman's face reappeared. He seemed to be losing control, for its lineaments were wildly unstable. Sometimes he would seem only ten years old – then twenty or thirty -then, incredibly, a wizened mummy whose wrinkled features were a parody of the man she had once known.

'I have one more question before I go. Carlos – you always said he was Jose's son, and I always wondered. What was the truth?'

Betty Fernandez stared for one long, last time into the eyes of the boy she had once loved (he was eighteen again, and for a moment she wished she could see his entire body, not merely his face).

'He was your son, David,' she whispered.

The image faded; the normal service resumed. When, almost an hour later, José Fernandez came quietly into the room, Betty was still staring at the screen.

She did not turn around as he kissed her on the back of the neck.

'You'll never believe this, José.'

'Try me.'

'I've just lied to a ghost.'

34 – Valediction

When the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics published its controversial summary Fifty Years of UFOs in 1997, many critics pointed out that unidentified flying objects had been observed for centuries, and that Kenneth Arnold's 'Flying Saucer' sighting of 1947 had countless precedents. People had been seeing strange things in the sky since the dawn of history; but until the mid-twentieth century, UFOs were a random phenomenon of no general interest. After that date, they became a matter of public and scientific concern, and the basis for what could only be called religious beliefs.

The reason was not far to seek; the arrival of the giant rocket and the dawn of the Space Age had turned men's minds to other worlds. Realization that the human race would soon be able to leave the planet of its birth prompted the inevitable questions: Where's everyone, and when may we expect visitors? There was also the hope, though it was seldom spelled out in as many words, that benevolent creatures from the stars might help mankind heal its numerous self-inflicted wounds and save it from future disasters.

Any student of psychology could have predicted that so profound a need would be swiftly satisfied. During the last half of the twentieth century, there were literally thousands of reports of spacecraft sightings from every part of the globe. More than that, there were hundreds of reports of 'close encounters' – actual meetings with extraterrestrial visitors, frequently embellished by tales of celestial joyrides, abductions, and even honeymoons in space. The fact that, over and over again, these were demonstrated to be lies or hallucinations did nothing to deter the faithful. Men who had been shown cities on the far side of the Moon lost little credibility even when Orbiter surveys and Apollo revealed no artifacts of any kind; ladies who married Venusians were still believed when that planet, sadly, turned out to be hotter than molten lead.

By the time the ALAA published its report no reputable scientist – even among those few who had once espoused the idea– believed that UFOs had any connection with extraterrestrial life or intelligence. Of course, it would never be possible to prove that; any one of those myriad sightings, over the last thousand years, might have been the real thing. But as time went by, and satellite cameras and radars scanning the entire heavens produced no concrete evidence, the general public lost interest in the idea. The cultists, of course, were not discouraged, but kept the faith with their newsletters and books, most of them regurgitating and embellishing old reports long after they had been discredited or exposed.

When the discovery of the Tycho monolith – TMA-I – was finally announced, there was a chorus of 'I told you so's!' It could no longer be denied that there had been visitors to the Moon – and presumably to the Earth as well – a little matter of three million years ago. At once, UFOs infested the heavens again; though it was odd that the three independent national tracking systems, which could locate anything in space larger than a ballpoint pen, were still unable to find them.

Rather quickly, the number of reports dropped down to the 'noise level' once more – the figure that would be expected, merely as a result of the many astronomical, meteorological, and aeronautical phenomena constantly occurring in the skies.

But now it had started all over again. This time, there was no mistake; it was official. A genuine UFO was on its way to Earth.

Sightings were reported within minutes of the warning from Leonov; the first close encounters were only a few hours later. A retired stockbroker, walking his bulldog on the Yorkshire Moors, was astonished when a disk-shaped craft landed beside him and the occupant – quite human, except for the pointed ears – asked the way to Downing Street. The contactee was so surprised that he was only able to wave his stick in the general direction of Whitehall; conclusive proof of the meeting was provided by the fact that the bulldog now refused to take his food.

Although the stockbroker had no previous history of mental illness, even those who believed him had some difficulty in accepting the next report. This time it was a Basque shepherd on a traditional mission; he was greatly relieved when what he had feared to be border guards turned out to be a couple of cloaked men with piercing eyes, who wanted to know the way to the United Nations Headquarters.