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to put his borrowed library articles in it, and ran out the door. The ice on his windshield was thick. After turning the defrost on, he chipped frantically with a plastic ice scraper, a cheap giveaway from the insurance company. It was slow going, so he retreated to the house and emerged with a bowl of hot water, which he poured over the glass, hoping it wouldn’t crack. The ice fell away, and the windshield escaped unscathed. He discarded the bowl in his backseat and revved the engine. It clanked mysteriously. As always, Mike became flush with nervousness, but he pulled into the university parking lot on time, ran frantically to the Smith Building, and seated himself in his desk with two minutes to spare.
    It was the professor’s first lecture. The man had seemed amiable enough on the first day of class, going over the syllabus and sending the class down to the resource center to begin the first exploratory stage in the papers that would become their final exam, but as Mike had been drawn away then by Robbie’s call, he hadn’t the chance to see the man in professorial action. He was a whirlwind of information. He was going on and on about the evolution of morality from culture to culture, spanning continents and centuries, summoning an electric winsomeness as if from the ether. He used no notes. He made none on the whiteboard. Nobody dared interrupt him with a question.
    â€œWhat we are seeking—and by ‘we’ I mean you—is gnosis. Special knowledge from the heavens. And by the heavens, I mean the nether regions of the universe, that point of original origination. The celestial crater that marks the big bang. Whatever constellation is made up by the stardust in your bones, people, whatever your DNA is silently summoning you to recognize, is the secret world unlocking all the secret worlds. If you want to know where mankind is going, you’ve got to trace it back, all the way back-back-back, to where it’s been.”
    Mike was sure as anything that nobody, including himself, had the slightest clue what the man was talking about, but he was just as sure they were all enjoying it. One young lady surreptitiously pulled out her phone and snapped a photo of the prof mid-gesticulation, undoubtedly destined for some quippy Instagram post.
    At the end of the class, Mike jotted down the homework reading assignment in a little notepad. He also scribbled the title of the textbook he had yet to purchase. He set out for the library.
    The Landon Library and Research Center was bustling with activity. At each photocopy machine, long lines formed and were continuously dissected by students frantically darting here and there. Semester’s first research paper , he assumed. He hoped he could find an open table. He did not look forward to sharing space with giggling, note-passing, gum-smacking college students. He discovered a table with a lone occupant. A young man in a high school letter jacket pored over a sports magazine. His lips mouthed the text as he read. Mike lay his computer bag down to secure his seat and went to return the articles he had borrowed the day before. On his way back, he hunted through the catalogs and found some more. At the table, he finished entire volumes of Science Fact or Fiction? , UFO Hunter , Roswell Scrapbook , and Space Digest before his companion at the table had finished an article on arena football.
    Mike began to notice something. The more he read, the more it all sounded the same. There was nothing new. In a matter of two days, he had really completed his fast-track education on the subject of UFOs. Sure, there were new stories to hear with new eyewitnesses and new twists, but generally they were the same stories, only with different people and different places. They usually concluded with harassment by government agents. These stories eventually led to the UFO folklore of mysterious men in black who arrive unannounced and pressure witnesses into silence. Mike