Most of the country spent that week thinking someone dressed like Michael Rennie in The Day the Earth Stood Still was going to come walking up Lubbock's main drag with his pet robot Gort clanking along beside him, demanding to be taken to our leader. And they were moths. Do you like it? Don't you have to like it?

This voice was so clear it was amusing – it was that of Dr Klingerman, who had taught the seminar. It lectured her with good old Klingy's unfailing – if rather shrill enthusiasm. Anderson smiled and lit a cigarette. Smoking a little too much tonight, but the damned things were going stale, anyway.

In 1947 an Air Force captain named Mantell flew too high while he was chasing a flying saucer – what he thought was a flying saucer. He blacked out.

His plane crashed. Mantell was killed. He died chasing a reflection of Venus on a high scud of clouds – a sun-dog, in other words. So there are reflections of moths, reflections of Venus, and probably reflections in a golden eye as well, Bobbi, but there are no flying saucers.

Then what is that in the ground?

The voice of the lecturer fell still. It didn't know. So in its place came Anne's voice, saying the same thing for the third time, telling her she was getting funny in the head, getting weird like Uncle Frank, telling her they would be measuring her for one of those canvas coats you wear backwards soon enough; they would cart her up to the asylum in Bangor or the one in Juniper Hill, and she could rave about flying saucers buried in the woods while she wove baskets. It was Sissy's voice, all right; she could call her on the phone right now, tell her what had happened, and get that scripture by chapter and by verse. She knew it.