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The Siege - Two how they made me go.” “What happened after you went riding on the rocket?” “T don’t remember,” Heidi shrugged. Ted turned to Susie. “Exactly when was it that Heidi told you about this?” he asked. “Can you remember?” “Yeah,” she nodded. “It was back in the spring, early April, I think.” “And that’s when you had your dream,” Bud commented. “What dream?” Susie asked. After hearing Heidi’s story, Ted felt compelled to tell her parents about his UFO dream, and they weren’t happy to hear it. “We just thought Heidi had been dreaming, too,” Susie said, shaking her head, “but now I don’t know what to think. Can things like that really happen?” Before Ted could reply, Susie continued. “Oh, I just remembered something else,” she said excitedly. “My eighteen-year-old cousin was in town visiting us during that weekend. He was sleeping on the sofa in the living room. And when we got up the next morning, he told us that he had seen some strange children in the living room during the night.” “Could there really have been kids in the house?” Ted asked, but Susie shook her head. “No,” she answered, “and we didn’t know what he was talking about. He said he woke up and saw a soft, pale bluish light everywhere, and there were some kids running around in the room. He even said he sat up on the couch and talked to them, but he couldn’t remember what anyone said.” It wasn’t enough for Susie to tell him these things. Ted wanted to hear it directly from her cousin, so a phone call was made, and for the second time that evening Ted heard confirmation of at least part of his dream. Only now, he real- ized, he couldn’t call it a dream any longer. Three Write the vision, and make it plain upon tables, that he may run that readeth it. Habakkuk With this new confirmation, Ted reluctantly accepted the possibility that his disturbing “dream” reflected a real event. And his instinctive response to that was not a happy one. Since it seemed to involve UFOs and their little gray occu- pants, he decided to tell his friends at the bookstore about the experience. His opportunity came the next Saturday when he was there waiting in his small office for the next client to arrive and listening to a conversation among several of his friends in an adjacent room. “Did you see the TV special the other night about cattle mutilations up in Arkansas?” one woman asked. “It showed all these dead cows with missing parts. Some had their tails cored out and parts of the jaw cut away. And there was one with the uterus removed by some type of unknown surgical procedure, maybe a laser, that literally cut between the cell layers.” Intrigued, Ted stepped out of his office. “Did they say anything about why these cattle were being mutilated?” he asked. “No,” the woman replied. “They didn’t say it was defi- nitely aliens, they gave several possibilities. But we know the ETs are responsible.” “Why would aliens be interested in cows?” Ted asked. “T’d say they’re studying the different species on our planet,” a second woman said. “Probably they’re looking for ways to improve the nutrition we get from beef. They Masquerade of Angels 16