“Fifty-three percent Benton, Iowa; thirty-two percent Edison, New Jersey; eleven percent Las Piedras, Mexico; three percent Ankang, China. And trace quantities from, oh, a planet that’s about twenty-five thousand light years away from Earth.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Dana.

“That corn chip. This machine can pinpoint the origins of any sample you put inside it. In this case, a corn chip.”

“Your corn chip has extraterrestrial ingredients?” asked Dana, wrinkling her cute little nose.

“Well, it’s mostly from Iowa -probably the corn part,” said Joe.

“It’s no surprise, really,” I said. “The List tells us there are how many thousand aliens living here on Earth?”

“Probably one of them works at the snack factory and sneezed on the production line,” said Dana.

“Yeah,” said Emma, “or they’re trying to poison the population or something.”

“It’s possible,” said Joe, sticking another handful of chips in his mouth. “Aw I cun… sayfersher is… day… tayse… perrygood.”

“Think you can fit some caviar in there?” I asked, handing Joe a can from my backpack. It was the tin that mom had found in the mailbox.

He put the whole can inside and slammed the door shut. The machine hummed while Joe swallowed the last of the chips.

“Yeah, this one’s not going to earn ‘organic’ certification, either. The paper looks like it might have come from Oregon trees, but the metal and stuff inside is definitely from a galaxy far, far away.”

“Let me guess,” I said, “Number 5’s home planet.”

“On the button,” said Joe.

“Guys,” said Dana, hunkering over her console. “I’m seeing signs of alien activity a few hundred yards from here. And there’s some sort of freaky transmission coming from a TV relay station just up that hill over there.”

Against the starry sky, we could see a sinister red light blinking atop a steel-framed communications tower.

“Listen to this.”

The minivan’s speaker system began to play a decidedly unearthly series of clicks, moans, and static.