Jemme freaked at family scenes and city crazies, so together we headed out as far from plastic fantastic valley suburbia as the highway could take us.  Walking out Jemme's parental door with backpacks wasn't a problem since nobody paid much attention to the kids in that house,  and the Ventura Freeway had a northbound on ramp close enough for easy hitching.  The first rides were good and we figured the road had called us with the challenge to find its end.

Then we got hung up along State Street in Santa Barbara with a hundred other people who had the same idea.

It's greed that designs freeways to funnel traffic down into stop and go lanes dragging for miles through small cities - forcing free flowing highway traffic to crawl down the main street of town.  Every block has a stoplight with a line of hopeful hitch hikers waiting.  No one'd dare open their car door for one in case they'd get mobbed by another dozen, desperate to get away from the beach bright heat and air thick with road stench.
After an afternoon of this, me and Jemme decided it was time to apply the other half of the phrase, so we picked up our packs and the guitar and used our feet.

There's a sign at the freeway entrance says no hitch hikers beyond this point.  No pedestrians.  But it was like Jemme said - we're going this direction, since we don't roll and we can't fly, we gotta walk - just stay well out of the traffic lanes.
The cops didn't think much of Jemme's logic when they pulled over to talk to us, it was kind of late by then and we weren't even to Golita, yet.  At least they weren't pigs about it when they drove us on to the next exit and left us there without a ticket.  Of course, first they searched us for pot, emptying pockets and backpacks, shaking the guitar, turning the case upside down, scattering stuff all over.
They didn't find any because they didn't look in the right places.  The beads around Jemme's neck were carved hash and my army boots were two sizes too big for me - I stuffed the toes with baggies of weed.

The freeway exit didn't have a light.  Didn't have a town or even a gas station anywhere near it, either.  When the CHP let us out, the older guy who was driving ran the standard lecture about the dangers of hitch hiking - horror stories of weirdos, rapists and naked, bloody bodies along back roads.  He was heavy around the middle and a bit gray at the temple, I imagined he might have some kids of his own out on the road these days.
"Then why leave us here?"  Jemme asked, looking at the foggy dark around us uncomfortably.  "We'd be safer if you took us on to the truck stop at Golita."
"Regulations."  The younger officer replied.  He was straight and stiff, the creases in his pants sharp as sheet metal.  "Specify that we can take you to the next exit to get you off the road.  We're bending the rules by not giving the two of you tickets or taking you in as the runaways you obviously are."
"But..."  Jemme started in again.
"Don't push it."  I muttered.  Jemme's mouth had gotten us in trouble before, was one of the reasons we were on the road in the first place.  Couldn't keep it shut in company, had to have the last word - know it all and make sure everyone else knew it, too.  Made a point of stating the obvious in the least tactful way, just to see folks twitch, I think.  We didn't need that sort of attention right then, being under age and holding, out without consent, you might say.  The younger cop would've dug an excuse to get tough, show off.
"We do appreciate the consideration, sir."  My midwestern upbringing differed from Jemme's unstructured childhood in the San Fernando Valley.  In Iowa, we learned the meaning of Hard Work and Good Manners while the kids in California learned to be rude and independent.  I envied them the freedom, but I used what I had to our best advantage by saying the polite thing, avoiding a showdown.  I handed a pack to Jemme and shouldered the other one.
"I just want..."  Jemme started in again.
"It's not what you WANT!"  I interrupted, "It's what you GET that you gotta deal with.  Want's just the illusion remember?  This is what we've got."
Jemme nodded, lips tight, pissed off or scared, then grabbed the guitar and stalked off east a ways.
"You got a guru or something?"  The older cop guessed.  "You meditate and stuff?"  Yeah, he had kids I decided, and maybe got high with them a time or two.  Certainly had access to a supply of free dope, searching hitch hikers along the road.
"Something like that."  I nodded and looked off at Jemme, sulking in the shadows.  I knew the man didn't want to hear Truth and Jemme'd get upset if I told him anything else.
"You take care of yourselves.  I don't want to hear something awful happened to you two."
"Neither do we, sir.  Thanks."  I grinned and tipped my chin at the skinny younger guy before I went over to Jemme.
Silver white headlights washed us blind and sent shadows dancing as the cops turned around and accelerated back onto the freeway.
Then it was dark.

Real dark.
Jemme stood near, a warm presence in the blackness, searching pockets, by the sound of it.  I figured it was all I'd hear for a while, since Jemme was good at long angry silences.
The darkness thinned a bit as my eyes adjusted and I could see the shape of Jemme's body like a blur against the surrounding shadows.
"Got any papers?"  My smile hid in the blackness - not anger, but fear was the motor driving Jemme just then.  Trapped in the darkness without streetlights and buildings, alone in the great wide nowhere, Jemme was on unfamiliar turf and looking for some security by getting a buzz on.
"In my sock."  I felt around before sitting down to unlace my boot.  The ground was fog damp, but otherwise dry, no obvious stickers or thistles, snakes.  I kicked a circle at the ground to make sure nothing would want to get out of the way later on, and discovered that the road makers had put a curb at the edge of the asphalt on ramp.  A convenient seat for stranded hitch hikers.  Jemme joined me.
"I don't know how you can rap with 'em like that.  I get so pissed at the System's stooges I just want to shout!"
"It's just a matter of saying what they want to hear.  They don't care about the Truth Internal, not even their own.  All they care about is that paycheck each week and the pension at retirement - or maybe that is their Truth.  Glad they didn't check out the ID's, though..."  Jemme'd borrowed a birth certificate from some older cousin, and I wasn't sure the cousin's mother knew about it.  My own Iowa drivers license had been scammed with a modified birth certificate, but it in was my own name.
"Yeah."
There wasn't much else to say.  Most things were just understood between us, like Truth Internal, so I found the papers, dug out the smoke and rolled a couple three numbers by braille.  I pulled another sock or something from my pack and stuffed it in my boot before lacing back into it.  The baggie I left in my pocket, it promised to be a long night.  Jemme'd groped some matches out of a pack and we blinked, startled at the light of the flame against the darkness as we fired that first joint.
The glowing ember lit our faces as we passed the roach back and forth, binding us together in the gloom.  A second joint followed the first, as much for the comforting light it provided as for the changes in perspective.
Jemme really needed the changes.  After a lifetime of fantasy trips presented as reality, the shifting of view points was necessary to maintain a sort of uneasy balance that passed for coping.  Not that Jemme actually coped with what went down around us.  Jemme reacted to stimulus and I got to cope.
Like with the cops.

"Bummer."  Jemme commented when the ember fell off the second roach, leaving a pinch of soggy brown paper in my hand.
"Could be worse."  I rolled the bit of paper into a ball between my fingers and flicked it out into the deeper darkness.  "Could be snowing."
Jemme didn't know about that, living a sun blessed life in the land of fresh oranges and eternal smog, but I bailed out last September because I couldn't go through the changes that icy weather forces on you.  Seemed easier to uproot and run than carry the weight of winter clothing and still be cold to the bone.  They tell you it's painless to freeze to death, but the only part about being frozen I can imagine painless is the dead part, with nothing left to hurt.

Funneling through the fog, southbound headlights lit the distant dark and rushed past us with a roar and a hiss.  The red lights receded behind and our post by the roadside was darker than before.
In the blackness, the mist brushed points of cool damp against my skin and moved softly on.  The city growl still rang in my ears so I wasn't certain that I heard the Pacific Ocean thundering beyond the rise of dunes across the freeway, but the damp air tasted like salt and the geography was right.  I knew Jemme'd never go for the suggestion that we check it out, walk on the beach.  We'd already done some walking today and city kids generally figure if you don't have wheels under you, you might as well stay where you are.
So I got out the guitar.
"It'll go flat out here in the damp."  I guess the change in Jemme's perspective didn't include enjoying what we did have.
"I can tune it."  There wasn't anything to fight about, but Jemme's family quarreled instead of conversing.
"Strings'll rust in the fog."  Jemme must've been feeling homesick, but I wasn't taking the bait.
"I don't think nylon strings can rust."
I kept it mild, this was an argument I wasn't going to have.  Instead, I strummed a chord, picked a short riff and hummed a few notes.  Something sounded wrong.  I checked the tuning, counting strings and frets by feel in the black - the B string was a bit flat, but correcting it made no difference.  It seemed like the whole guitar was out of tune with some tone or note that hung just beyond hearing in the fog.
Listening for that note was like trying to stop those colored patterns inside your closed eyes. There's no way to look at them closer, they just slide away.  Instead of being able to hear the note, I heard how very big the blackness was around us.  An echo, like, or that place in the middle of a reverberation.
Even the ocean was holding it's breath on the other side of the dunes.
Jemme shifted uncomfortably as the silence swelled.  "Got another doobie?"
I replaced the guitar and snapped the case shut before digging out that third joint.  Match flare left bright spots across our vision and made the dark around us even blacker.  Uncomfortable with that - note - hanging in the dark, I stood and rocked from foot to foot.  The ember on the joint glowed bright, lighting our faces in turn as we smoked it to a roach.

There was a gradual change of tone and the note became an audible whine from the foggy darkness north of us.  Jemme's head came around to face the source and noticed lightening of the gloom to the west.  Side by side we stood, watching the light grow and approach the line of the road that lead over the dunes.
"Think they'll be going north?"
"Headed south right now."  I had learned to respond to Jemme's flights of hope and expectation with basic, obvious facts.
"That's just to get to the road."  Jemme pointed out undaunted.  "Maybe they'll be turning north."
The whine grew more intense, picked up whistling overtones as the lights come over the rise.  Three headlights set in a row crossed the freeway to the northbound on ramp where we waited.

It was about the size of a school bus, but after that the comparison fails.  This thing was wider than a bus - too wide for the lane - and shaped sort of like a flying saucer, flat at the edges and domed you know, but not round, more like an oval or wedge shape.  Bright as day, the headlights were spaced along a curved front with orange and green lights flashing all round the sides like some psychedelic semi.  It was wild.
There were no wheels. This thing floated a couple feet off the pavement.  Hovered, like.  With a click and a whir, a door dropped down from the side - hinged at the bottom, I guess, and made a ramp to the ground.  We blinked at the blue light pouring out, pooling at our feet, splashing shadows around us, and were drawn to it, grateful.
Inside did not look like any van or bus conversion I've ever seen.  Two gray upholstered seats in the front, all tuck and roll, the driver's seat was turned toward us and between the seats looked like a coffee table.  The walls were lined with shelves and cabinets and panels with lights and buttons.  Facing the door was a longer matching seat, like a sofa, and I could see a hatch or door in the wall on my left.  Drifting out behind the light, I caught a smell like over ripe fruit with an overtone of musty basement and something acrid added for flavor.
I was still absorbing all this strangeness when Jemme the impatient pushed past me, pack in hand to ask.  "How far are you going?"
"North?"  Came the reply in a wheezy voice with a strong accent that I couldn't place.  "To San Francisco Love Street?"  The speaker was a shadow behind a glare that stung our eyes.
"Yeah!  Right on."  And Jemme climbed in, reached out for the guitar.
I followed the guitar uncertainly, blocking the door and blinking at the light while I tried to make sense of what I saw.  The driver leaned toward me, give us a hand in, I guess.
At first, I thought my eyes weren't focusing, 'cos with his face in the light I could see the expected arrangement of features, except that the nose was way flat, just a couple of crescent shaped holes, and his - or it's - mouth was a lipless slit.  It seemed to be set in a friendly expression, but his skin was the strangest yellowy green all over and smooth, even glossy.  His eyes were a solid pumpkin color with dark round irises but no whites, and when he blinked back at me, they closed from the center to the side, not top to bottom.  No eyebrows that I could see, but a ridge or crest of what looked like wet yellow gray feathers on long greenish quills ran back from the brow line to his shoulders.  His ears were tiny, round and set low, farther back than my own.
A bit freaky at first, but I could get used to it.
I was in the process of doing this when Jemme the impatient pushed me into the shotgun position beside the driver and flopped into seat across from the door.  From here the smell was a bit stronger, but nothing like the hogs back home - more like the compost pile, almost a clean smell.  Not really pleasant, but I knew from experience I'd stop noticing it in a while.  I wondered what we smelled like to him and smiled nervously in his direction as the door hissed shut.
Our driver ran his hands over the dashboard and I felt a brief vibration, then a bit of a body rush, you know, like coming over the top on a roller coaster and starting the drop.  Through the windshield in front of me I could see the freeway moving past and below us as we picked up speed and gained some altitude.  He wasn't steering - there wasn't anything like a steering wheel in sight - I decided not to think about it.  My seat swiveled so I turned it away from the windshield to watch Jemme settle in for the ride.
"Get high?"  The wheezy voice had cheerful overtones and what I assumed was a mouth formed a crescent that might have been a smile, it was hard to tell, given the differences.  "Want to warp out, mans?"
A green hand with too many, too long fingers was thrusting a container at me.  I counted four fingers and two opposing thumbs, all twig thin and apparently without fingernails, wrapped around an odd roundish hip flask.  Uncle Jake had one in his pocket much of the time, just about the same size as this one, but flatter, rectangular, made of silver.  He'd pull it out and pass it around back behind the woodshed when he drove over with Grandma on Sundays after church.  Passed it to me when I was about nine, and laughed while I choked on the raw fire it contained.
I took this flask with more caution than I had Uncle Jake's bottle that first time.  The surface was like hard plastic to the touch, and faceted like Grandma's cut crystal.
"What is it?"  Uncle Jake's hip flask taught me to be careful.
"Warp juice.  You like it, good trip."  The odd hand gestured unmistakably that I should drink the blue liquid in the flask.
"How much?"  Watching Jemme taught me to ask that question.
"All?"  Nods and another of those creepy lipless smiles.  "Little bit stop ral'lagch in warp."  The sound could not be misunderstood and I felt some satisfaction with the possibility that motion sickness was universal.  "Lot bit make warp inside head.  Very happy."
"Warp juice?"  Jemme grabbed the flask from me while I weighed the possibilities.  "I'm for it - Beam me up, Scotty!"
"Start with half, Jemme."  I suggested quickly.  "The stuff might not agree with us..."
Jemme sipped, grimaced and then drank down just under half of the blue stuff.  "Feels like gelatin going down, you know, half gelled, still warm.  Tastes like alcoholic bathwater, sweet, a bit flowery with soapy overtones.  You could dig it."
"Good!  Good!"  The 'drink up' gesture was used again.  Those hands were weird, too many joints per finger.
"Left you with blue teeth."  I grinned, taking the bottle in case Jemme decided to finish the dose before waiting for the effects of the first taste to show - like that time with a pint of tequila.
The results could be disastrous.
I pulled the baggie of weed out of my pocket and held it up.
"Do you smoke?"  It seemed the polite thing to do under the circumstances.
"Smoke?  Get High?  Weed, pot, maryjane, bush, boo, stash, marijuana, cannabis, hashish, kief, ganja, lid, joint, reefer, roach, doobie, splif, toke..."  The brush on his head rose and rattled a bit, there was no doubt that my suggestion was welcome.
"Yeah."  I put the flask down on the table in between us and started patting my pockets, looking for papers.
"This I do."  Those bony fingers latched onto the bag and snatched it away.  "Be'eahb'uba'h!  See?"  He turned to the shelf behind him and lifted a bright blue metal cylinder with an iridescent green tube snaking out of the side.  Placing the tube to the slit of his mouth, he sucked and I heard the bubbling of a water pipe.
He started loading my grass into a deep bowl set in the top of the pipe.
"Hey man!"  Jemme sounded drowsy, distant.  "Watch for the seeds, they burn rasty and pop, you know?"
"Seeds?"  He paused in the act of loading the pipe and his mouth puckered slightly.  "Show seeds."
"These."  Languidly, Jemme leaned across and pointed out hard brown ovoids in the stash.  "It helps if you remove the stems, too.  They don't burn so good, either."
"Seeds - like grow?"  The orange eyes glistened and the feathers on his head rose a bit.  "Make more plant to smoke?"
"With the right conditions..."  I was surprised to hear myself answer the question.  Life on the farm included learning a bit about those conditions and now I began to think about seeds in the pot.  Never gave farming much thought up to that point, spent most of my life trying to find a way to escape the patterns my folks were bound to, including the farm.
Especially the farm.  Now, unexpectedly, all I knew about growing things rolled to the surface of my mind, like rocks in a plowed field.
"Save seeds.  Grow later."  With a nod, our host acted on his decision, using those spidery fingers to tweezer seeds from the bowl and set them aside.  Satisfied with the seedlessness of the load, he dug in a pocket of his shiny silver jumpsuit and produced a short blue stick about as long as a kitchen match, tipped at one end with a tiny flat metal coil.  He tapped the plain end with a finger and when the coil glowed red a moment later, he used it to light the pipe.
He bubbled his own toke and passed it to Jemme who drew on the stem and handed the pipe to me.  One hit followed another around the circle.
"Hey man!"  Jemme looked around us curiously, finally registering the fact that this was no ordinary van.  "Is this thing a UFO?"
"What is UFO?"  Asked our host.
"Unidentified Flying Object."  Jemme and I said in unison like we did so often, evidence that we shared the Truth Internal.
"Un-identified?"  He looked from Jemme to me and blinked sideways.
"Means you don't know what it is."  I answered, less queasy than I'd have expected at the sight.
"Not un-identified."  He was decisive about this.  "I know what it is - my Hot Rod!  Rrruuummm  rrruuummmm!  She's my Little Deuce Coupe - you don't know what I got..."  He sang this last bit and made a honking noise I thought was laughter.
We laughed with him.  It surprised me how comfortable we were, given the circumstances.  I mean, this is beyond racial or even ethnic, we were talking to a whole nother SPECIES and not even from Earth.  You'd think we'd be scared shitless, but it was nothing like that.  He could have been some Mexican hippie headed up from the Strip to the Haight in a VW Microbus, except he looked so bizarre.
"What's your name, man?"  I realized we'd spaced out basic things like names.  Maybe they don't matter really, but it's easier than 'Hey you!' when you need someone's attention.
He honked again and smiled broadly - at least it looked like a smile.  Inside his mouth there were no teeth, just some kind of cartilage strips, like a comb, all blue like Jemme's teeth.  Warp juice, I thought.
"Not easy name."  He warned us, still smiling, lipless.  "But old and proud name."
"But what is it, man?"  Jemme was out to know everything there was to know again, and nothing would stop the quest but boredom.  Or finding an answer to too final for argument.
"First part is - F'fre'ahdifl'aqi'nol."  He recited slowly and looked expectantly at Jemme, there was something he wanted.
"Say that again."  Jemme demanded, hearing the request that I didn't.
He did.  Twice more.
"Fred."  Jemme was triumphant.  "We'll call you Fred."
"Fred?"  Repeated Fred.  "Is a short name.  Like - ieh, ieh..."  I got the sense he was searching for a word. "Mother name?"
"Baby name?"  I suggested at the same time.  My little sister Susan had been called Sukey until she was in kindergarten.  Sulky Sukey.
"Funny Fred?"  He turned to me and honked.  "Funny Fred.  Look funny to you, I bet."
I laughed, Jemme laughed, Fred honked.  We were grooving together, but I had a creepy feeling that my thoughts were not as private as they would have been if Fred had actually been a Microbus Mexican hippie.  Maybe it was more proof of the Truth Internal, but it made me itch, like - inside my head.
"You dig music?"  Fred changed the subject as he reached across me and opened a compartment like a glove box.  He pulled out a handful of plastic cases, fumbling some of them to the floor.  While I picked up the ones that fell, he slipped something into a player of some sort, because music filled the air around us.  Or it sounded like it might have been music to someone - maybe to Fred.  It was a disorganized assortment of rattles and clunks and whistles randomly drowned out by agonized shrieking, solo and in chorus.  It made things crawl under my skin, inside my skull.  I looked thoughtfully at the flask containing the warp juice and wondered how much I needed to drink to make sense of what I was hearing.
"!Yi'kza'raz'zle'fraz'eratz'ishi'taru..."  Fred punched at a button on the dashboard in front of him.  The howling stopped abruptly and a shiny silvery disk popped out of a slot beside the button.  "Wrong sid'dy in case.  You like this one."  He assured me as he slipped another disk into the slot.
"Hey wow, Freddy boy!"  Brown eyes dilated and glassy, Jemme sank farther into the long curved seat. "That was some weird shit - what was it?"
"Aph'labian peoples think that best music."  Fred flattened his crest and pulled his shoulders forward, it looked like an apologetic shrug.  "Friend make joke on me.  Not my thing, man."  He smiled at Jemme and pushed the button beside the slot, the first notes of "Eight Miles High" came into the air and filled it, the rest of the song following in sequence.
"This MY thing."  Fred honked and started singing along.  His singing voice was a wheezing warble that managed to meet the notes half way and in reasonable time.
"Get Down!"  Jemme's voice joined Fred's with more enthusiasm than accuracy, and between them it was hard to hear the music, loud as it was.  Didn't matter, I'd heard it before.
I checked out the cases in my hands.  They were like plastic tape cassette cases, except they were square, about two by two and under half an inch thick.  Each box had some script on it and a silvery plastic looking disk inside.  Putting them beside the flask, I reached for the water pipe and baggie when "Eight Miles High" became "Light My Fire".  It was going to be a long night.

Figure we were maybe six hours from San Francisco by road.
Looking out the window, what I saw didn't look much like US101 - the fog was below us, far enough below that I could see the fuzzy edge of the atmosphere curve away into stars and night.
It wasn't a reality I was ready to deal with, so I packed the bowl and smoked.  When Fred and Jemme stopped singing long enough to take a hit, I passed it to them, then loaded the bowl again.  Fred's little lighter thingy worked just fine for me.  Couldn't figure it out, no moving parts, no flame - just touch the cold end and the coil would glow on the hot end until you let go.  Then it was cold, just like that.  It wouldn't work if you touched both ends at once or if you didn't actually touch the end of it with a finger, just rested it on skin.
Like some kind of cosmic dj, Fred played hits and albums while he and Jemme chorused along.  When Jemme's voice started to give out, Fred got up and started dancing and playing air guitar.  Jemme joined him.
There wasn't all that much room to dance in, and Fred had more than the expected number of elbows and knees.  These moved at strange angles and Jemme, who tended to dance in expansive spirals, was backed into a corner by the rhythmic thrashing that passed for dancing in Fred's experience.  At some point the munchies set in and Fred went through the hatch into the back, reappearing minutes later with hot pizzas and six-packs of cold sodas.  Later we found Fred's little Deuce Coupe came equipped with a tiny commode, functional but unfamiliar.

Flying high above me, buoyed on a cloud of alcoholic blue bathwater, Jemme and Fred were still tripping.  Jemme had finished the flask before I got around to drinking any.  Not that I minded, I wasn't up for a trip - things were strange enough already.
The bag of weed was empty, nothing left but seeds and stems - a fat lid smoked up in a single night.  If a single night it was, since I had no way to tell the time.  We were above the clouds and I could see stars spread through the darkness, but no sun.  Spaced out - quite literally if the view through the window was for real - I watched the globe rotate below, saw distant lights wink into existence as they came over the horizon, slide across the arc of darkness below me, and wink away in the east and the edge of a dawn I couldn't see.
The process took all night.
By this time Fred and Jemme had collapsed on the long gray sofa seat opposite the door, stirring shared hallucinations with their fingers, playing catch with shimmering balls of thought light.  They were listening to what Fred claimed was his own rock and roll band.  It was all the thing back home, he insisted, so he brought a demo with him to play for record company executives, convinced it would be a hit.
Jemme loved it.
Not being as high as they were, I wasn't so sure - this whole trip was beginning to bring me down.  I looked at the planet below me and felt an unexpected rush of homesickness, like what I wanted was a place to put down roots, maybe try making some seeds grow.  Guess I'd had enough high times and rock and roll.

There was blue light on the dash that flashed for a while before it started to buzz with each blink.  Fred didn't notice it, being lost with Jemme in a haze of psychedelic hilarity.
"Hey, Fred!"  I called him a couple of times before he stopped honking and shook himself clear of the fog.  "Check out that blue light, man.  Does it mean anything?"
"Mean what?"  Fred's eyes didn't quite focus and half his attention was on Jemme giggling in the background.
"It was flashing, now it buzzes, too.  Is it important?"
There was a pause while Fred descended into reality.  His smile faded, his crest drooped, and his skin tone faded from green to yellow as he sank into the driver's seat.  I knew something was up.
"!Sha'zhaf'ritz!"
The music was suddenly, mercifully absent.  Fred seemed to be searching the dash board for something, turning a knob here, pushing a button there and wagging his head, crest rattling slightly with the movement.
"What's happening Freddie boy?"  Jemme pulled together some, forced back into Now from the Truth Internal when the stimulus of loud music stopped.
"Bummer man."
The Deuce Coupe shifted to one side and the landscape below got a lot closer before we leveled out, hauling ass toward the sunrise.  "We are... ieh... uncovered...Not hiding, but found."  Fred's hands danced over the dashboard of buttons and lights, there were miniature television screens with shifting views on them.
"Who's seen us?"  Jemme got up and looked over Fred's shoulder.  I suddenly flashed on thermonuclear weapons aimed in our direction.
"No danger."  Fred didn't look up.  "Not your people who saw."
Once again I had the feeling my thoughts were not quite private.  Once again Fred diverted the conversation before I had a chance to ask about it.
"I get lost.  Watch!"  He shined me a broad blue grin as we dived across the path of a jet and slowed abruptly.
For a flicker of a moment, I could see the pilot through cockpit windows and his face was one of astonishment.
No wonder - he'd just been cut off at 35,000 feet by a screaming hot rod U.F.O. that vanished, or seemed to.  I knew he'd have a hard time explaining it to the folks at air traffic control.
Fred had parked us under the jet, matching velocity and using the plane to mask the various kinds of radiation the Deuce Coupe put out.  His crest was bristling again as he told us how he'd done this, and his skin color was back to normal, so I guess he felt pretty good about the maneuver. The sound of jet engines were loud above and you could see jet wings sticking out on either side.
"So who spotted us, Freddie?"  Jemme was peering up through the windshield, checking out the baggage doors on the bottom of the plane.
"Signal was message from my... ieh... ieh... family."  Fred's crest sagged a bit with this.  "They want back Little Deuce Coupe."
"What'd you do, Fred?"  Asked Jemme less than tactfully.  "Borrow the family wheels and go out joy riding?"
"Right on."  Fred's shoulders hunched forward in his version of a shrug before he quivered a lipless grin.  "But no wheels."
"You mean you're just a kid like us?"  Jemme had finally reached the point of disbelief.
I'd reached it a long time before.  Figured that any time now I'd wake up beside the road just south of Golita, cops shaking my shoulder, ready to run me in.  Or maybe Big Sur.  Heard it was nice there, but I'd always wanted to see the giant sequoias north of San Francisco and, if I had to wake up beside the road, a place like that would be my choice.  Really big trees don't happen in Iowa.
I wasn't waking up though.
Fred's crest had fallen again and he looked sheepish, if an alien that looked like an over grown feathered frog could be described that way.  The jet engines screamed above us as we broke into the sunrise and lost some altitude.  Fred studied the dashboard dials and gauges with his head down.
"Was going back."  He said at last.  "Play demo for record company first, maybe go to Avalon or Fillmore - hear some sounds, then go home."  His head came up and he looked at Jemme's scorn.  "Thought no one to miss me.  Working all time, always busy."
The scorn melted from Jemme's face, this was a familiar story, touched close to home.  "What do your folks do?"
"Watch worlds.  Your world, now."  His crest relaxed a bit.  "I study, too.  Learn TV and music.  Got samples of food..."  He looked at empty soda cans and greasy pizza cartons scattered around, shrugged his shoulders forward. "Were samples of food. Good food, pizza!"
"Are you in trouble?"
"Not big - go back to ...ieh ...school."  His blue grin was infectious.  "Maybe a while until we go cruising again."
"So what now, Fred?"  I was wondering what his idea of pulling over at the next corner was.
"Take you somewhere home."  He tipped his head to one side and blinked his pumpkin eyes at me.  This time I could actually feel Fred in my mind sorting images of fields and barely undulating flatlands from mountain dreams and memories of moving water.  When he found what he was looking for, he withdrew and turned to the dashboard in front of him with a nod of his crest and a blue grin.
"Good place, we go there."  His hands danced over buttons and keys. It seemed he had pulled some undefined location from things in my head, and I wondered if this went beyond the Truth Internal.
The fog bank grew alarmingly as we approached it, spreading toward us, reaching out to engulf us.  With a hiss, we broke away and shot off to the left as the jet and Deuce Coupe entered the clouds, maintaining the same altitude while the jet dropped away and vanished.  We were alone in the silent fog.

"So, are we lost now, Freddie?"  Jemme was looking out at the deep bright fog around us.  "Looks like nowhere out there."
"We look like nowhere to nosey peoples try seeing us."  Fred kept on playing with his knobs and buttons.  "Use water in  ...ieh ...atmosphere can shake  ...ieh  ...vibrate with sound and be like nowhere fog."  No doubt about it, the dude was smug about being able to pull this off.  It took a lot of work to do it though - his fingers were moving and the little tv screens were changing so fast they seemed to flicker.
"What about radar?"  Jemme always had to know.  "It's supposed to see through weather and stuff."
"Radar doesn't work right now." Fred replied, distracted. "It turned off a while, but will work right - too soon."  His crest was flat but he seemed more uptight than abject - very focused on his dashboard, stirring up a fog blind while looking through it for a parking place.

It was late morning where we dropped through the clouds to make a vertical landing in a clearing on a ridge top.  Around us in the mist, massive trees loomed.  Somehow almost familiar, I knew I'd never been there before.
"Wow."  Was the first thing I said, then, "Beautiful. Where are we?"
"Big trees.. ieh - redwoods north from San Francisco Love Street."  Fred was pushing buttons and making some adjustments that seemed to absorb his attention.  "We - my peoples - land here sometimes, collecting."  The door opened behind me with a small pop and a hiss.
"Need to leave very soon."  Fred still worked the buttons and watched the screens.  "Or be seen."
"Could be a bummer." Jemme commented.
"Major bummer."  Corrected Fred.  "Your peoples might see."
"Fireworks, eh?"  Jemme's tone was conversational.
I didn't bother to hang out, just grabbed my pack and headed for the door.  Fred gave up his buttons and followed, taking the guitar case for me - my folks would've approved of his manners.
"Come on, Jemme." I stood on the ramp, holding out my hand.  The sun was burning through Fred's generated fog and it wouldn't give him much cover on the way out if he stayed here much longer.
"No.  This is where you were going.  I'm headed somewhere else."
"No time for two stops, Jemme..."
Jemme ignored Fred's protests, and cut across mine before I got them out.
"Maybe this is home for your Truth Internal, friend, but my Truth tells me to stick with Freddie, here."
"No way, Jemme - I be deep hot shit stuff to bring you home..."  Fred was shifting from leg to leg, looking anxiously over his shoulder at the receding fog outside.
"Call me a stowaway that got in when you stopped for the pizzas."  Jemme dropped into the seat I had recently vacated.  "Or take credit for bringing in one really good sample, a genuine California hippie for examination."  Jemme lifted bare feet to rest on the table between the seats and the water pipe rocked dangerously.
"!Shi'tzaf'razal'rez'afri'tz!"  Fred slapped his head and rattled his crest in apparent frustration.  Putting the guitar on the ramp, he looked from Jemme to me and back before opening a compartment near the door.  He removed a lumpy bag and a rounded box, offering them to me.
"Your peoples value this ...ieh ...gold highly?"  Shaking the bag open was enough to show a gleam inside, a promise of value.
He caught my thoughts before I had a chance to be polite and smiled that lipless grin at me.
"It will ..ieh ...purchase your need?  Take."  Closing it, he tossed it in my direction, and I scrambled to catch the bag before it fell and spilled.  The weight of it surprised me.  The box thing followed - looked like some sort of paperweight and didn't have an obvious top or bottom.
"Keep it and I visit you - we get high again."  Smiling for me once more and ruffling his crest, I realized I had gotten used to him.  Hadn't taken long at all.
"Jemme?"  I asked once again, knowing that we had more than gray city concrete lives to celebrate at last.
"Not me, man - I'm not in it for the money."  Jemme leaned back, settled deeper in the seat with a smile, "I'm in it for the ride."
Fred's crest rose and settled as he shrugged his shoulders forward.  "They won't let you stay."
"How they gonna make me leave?"  Jemme's arms crossed in a defiant posture I suspected Fred and his folks would soon know as well as Jemme's family and I did.  I interrupted before the argument started.
"Thanks for the lift, man.  And a wider future."  I'd hoped that Jemme would hear this through the Truth Internal, but I got no answer for my effort.
"You have seeds?"  Fred asked looking around for the baggie. "You need seeds to make grow..."
"You make those grow, Fred"  I was thinking about the other lid in my boot.  "I can get more to plant."
Fred honked and hooted at this and turned back to his drivers seat.
"Jemme!  Take it easy!"  I couldn't think of much else to say.  Sharing the Truth Internal means that some things don't need to be said - then I remembered the beads.  "Hey, Fred! Check out Jemme's beads!"

The door hissed closed on Jemme's startled scowl and I backed away toward the trees as the Little Deuce Coupe rose through the mist and sped away with a ringing humm.
Around me the trees breathed and the mist vanished in the sunlight.  A jay screeched nearby and another bird offered a tentative song, while small noises and rustlings emerged from a silence free of city growl.  Bag and box were stashed at the bottom of my pack until I could answer questions about them without having to describe the weird ride I'd just had.

I did see Jemme again.

Years after - in the late Seventies - towards the end of September, another ship arrived one foggy morning just before dawn.  The chickens were going crazy and I figured it was that coon come back again, so I took my rifle out to solve the problem.  Except there wasn't a coon, just chickens freaking out.
I turned back to my bed, hoping it hadn't cooled off much yet, when I heard that humming note, the tone that wasn't quite there.
Coming down the hill on the track that dead ends at the spring above my water tanks, it pulled up to a stop right by the house.  It hovered a foot or so over the driveway for a minute before a door on the side hissed open and a ramp tongued out.
It wasn't Fred's Little Deuce Coupe, the body shape was more pointed, like an arrowhead and there were more lights, all going off and on like a psychotic semi at Christmas.  Reminded me of that opera music Fred had played.
Someone who looked like Fred but wasn't got out and asked if I'd had any luck making the seeds grow.
"Scuse me?"  I was standing there with next to nothing on and a rifle in my hand, at something before six in the morning.  Things can take a while to register unless they're habit, under these circumstances.  Fred and the joyride we took was a memory faded to a dream and I wasn't up for a repeat.  My mind was on a bit more sleep, not another nightmare.
"You remember Fred?"  This guy looked over his shoulder back into the ship a moment before he went on.  Something moved inside. "Fred told me he got his seeds from you and that you were growing them, too."  His crest rippled in a friendly manner.  "Just call me Bob."  He stretched a lipless smile and I saw that his tooth ridge wasn't stained blue.  Guess he didn't have a taste for warp juice.
Jemme appeared in the ship's door and tossed out a duffle bag, saying, "He's Fred's brother, it's cool, man." Then emerged a moment later with a backpack and an attitude.
"Jemme!"  Bob's crest flattened a bit.  "What is this?"
"I'm going home. It's been a trip but I've got somewhere else be."
"I thought we were going back to my place after we made this stop."
"That's what you were thinking, Bob.  I've got other plans."  Jemme walked to my front porch and dropped the luggage with a decisive thump.
"But, we've been traveling together so long!"  Bob's voice was taking on a whine and I could see why Jemme would want to be clear of him.
"!Rha'tle'spvi'ropud'ave'frizi'tlatz'azale'frat'z!" Is how it started.  From the tone, I guessed that Jemme was swearing and had learned quite a number of effective words.
Bob's crest rose and rattled, then flattened against his shoulders as Jemme finished.
"I had no idea you felt that way."  Was all he had to say.

Before Bob left, we made a good trade.  He got the end of last year's crop, some of it seedy, and a few flowers fresh from the plant in exchange for a significant amount of gold in easy to use non-denominational nuggets.

Jemme didn't seem to have much to say, but went into town with me that afternoon, caught the Greyhound to SanFrancisco.  Mentioned something about wanting to catch up with the world.

No great surprise.