Chapter One

On his last evening as an Earthman, Tom Collins sat in a gloomy pub in Bucharest, Romania, blissfully unaware that several million years in the past, an alien with hot pink hair was undoing the evolution of humankind so that a master race of reptiles could be born instead.

In truth, blissful was not an entirely accurate description of Tom's mood that evening, even if he didn't suspect the human race was in danger. He was actually feeling a bit grumpy. He was also staring at the bottom of his beer mug. He wasn't overly fond of the bottom of his beer mug, because the fact that he could see it meant that his beer was gone.

It hadn't been a particularly good beer, but he missed it just the same. He had considered the possibility of ordering another to help himself get over it, but worried a bit whether it would get along with the three pints already in his stomach, and he had to take the metro to a local hostel where he was meeting a nice English girl he had run into quite by accident the day before.

Being even slightly inebriated on the metro wasn't at all a pleasant state to be in. It was a bit like being an insect trapped inside a kaleidoscope in the hands of a gleefully sadistic child, and since Tom also had a tendency to forget he was in Romania when he overdrank and became paranoid he might have had a stroke and forgotten English, the whole experience was a complete downer.

He reflected that it probably wasn't a good thing that he knew this.

So he decided against a fourth pint of beer and opted instead to stare dejectedly into his empty glass. It was only 9 o'clock. He still had two hours before it was time to be at the hostel. He wondered how a nice crunchy handful of crickets would taste. Then he decided not to wonder why he had wondered that. He decided that leaving it alone would be the best thing to do.

Tom decided to stop staring at the bottom of his empty beer mug and instead glance furtively at the television screen overhead, on which two soccer teams went at it in the mud. Two old men sitting next to him talked alternately to the screen and to each other, in Romanian.

One of the old men gesticulated at the television and said something that Tom suspected he would not have repeated to his mother. Tom sighed and reflected how seriously some people took their sports.

He had gone to the pub partly to improve his mood in preparation for his date. Had he not been sitting in a pub in Bucharest, it would have been apparent to anyone looking that it had not worked. In fact, it was safe to say that Tom was in absolutely the worst mood of his entire life—at least the parts he could remember, as there was nothing before the age of eight that he could recall except for snippets of the most outlandish dreams. Like the one in which he was gazing languidly over a purple marsh or the one in which a strange, three-legged creature was apparently attacking a man with a series of violent, eardrum-shattering burps.

Since Tom was, in fact, sitting in a pub in Bucharest, people simply assumed he was busy wondering whether to have a late dinner of cabbage rolls. That is what was usually going on in the mind of a Romanian whose eyebrows appeared to be considering what life nearer his nose would be like. Tom was not, however, even entertaining the possibility of thinking about dinner or cabbage rolls. Aside from a sudden preoccupation with where he might find a nice little hole in which to sleep away the winter, safe from predators, he was simply bored.

Tom's boredom wasn't a normal sort of boredom. It was not the sort that visits on a lazy afternoon, and causes one to wonder what life would have been like had one become an entomologist. It was more the sort that moves in with all its luggage and its parakeet and changes the television channel just when you're interested. He'd felt that way since August, when he'd said goodbye to his family and the high school where he worked as a science teacher, and boarded an airplane for a year-long sabbatical in Europe. He had hoped he could rely on his ability to hide in pubs to get him through. As it turned out, his boredom had been to Europe and already knew where all the good pubs were, and the bad ones as well.

As a result, Tom made like a streak of lightning across the continent in an attempt to shake it, and ended up in Bucharest, where boredom had surprised him around a corner, clocked him on the head and sat on him.

Tom had boarded that airplane on his 39th birthday. The plan had been to find himself before his 40th birthday, to return home a changed man, a man with a purpose and a mission. A man who knew without a doubt what it was all for, and who could talk nonsense about European beer with some authority.

It would have cheered him up considerably to know that those strange dreams from his childhood weren't dreams after all, and that a man from the Galaxy of Andromeda was somehow involved.

It wasn't that he hadn't enjoyed his life in Georgia. His family had loved him, and he'd loved them, although they had a strange preoccupation with nailing the heads of animals to walls. He'd always had a difficult time sitting alone in his parents' living room, surrounded by the majestic antlered crowns of stags with eyes that seemed large enough to encompass the entire cosmos. Even though he'd never shot anything in his life, he'd almost been compelled to become a vegetarian on the spot. He was prevented, however, by his love of fried tripe which, he had long since suspected, wasn't genetic.

Even without being told, Tom had always known he'd been adopted. He would have been positively sure that even a Trafalgarian Megosaur would have been able to see he wasn't actually related to the people he called his family, had he ever actually seen a Trafalgarian Megosaur, or knew that they existed. They were short and heavy, with copious freckles and a predilection for spitting and using tobacco in any way it could be conceivably used, even as a salve for insect stings. In fact, they closely resembled the people Tom called his family. At the age of eleven, Tom had stood five and a half feet tall. Before he was through growing, he had gained another nine inches. He had always been thin—pleasantly so, he thought—with a mass of curls that could make a girl weep with envy.

It had made his father, Earl, weep on occasion. The English accent Tom seemed stuck with didn't do much for his dad's cheerfulness at those times either. Earl was a man who drove a pickup truck held together by duct tape and drank Budweiser, except when Tom's mother Laureen was going through a phase when she liked to watch Spiderman movies, put her hand over her heart and say, “Oh, that Toby Macguire.” At those times, Earl drank Bud Light.

Tom preferred to drive into town and drink at one of the downtown pubs with his buddies from the local college. If one of his strange moods hit him during a drink sessions, he would begin to babble about being destined for something more, and one of his buddies would tell him to quit the high school and put in an application at the college, since he'd had his doctorate since his thirtieth birthday anyway.

“That's not what I mean,” Tom would invariably say. Then his friend, whichever one had made the suggestion this time, would shrug and suggest they take a couple of canoes out on the canal that weekend, or have a cookout, or go to the local strip bar.

The local strip bar was called the Discotheque and featured a woman with a giant constrictor of some sort. She was, predictably, called The Snake Lady. Tom thought how nice it would be if she'd had a name like Serpentina, worn a veil and played exotic music. His friends thought that was a weird idea.

Tom had always felt a bit out of place, but had gone through life with a dull certainty that he'd find out what the heck he was supposed to be doing at some point before his 40th birthday. Forty had always seemed like a reasonable demarcation line. That certainty had always made him frighteningly cheerful, as though he were waiting for something simply wonderful to happen, except when strange periods of melancholy took him. During those times, he would climb on top of his trailer and look at the stars as though he was trying to see through something. At times he became preoccupied with the color pink and thoughts of David Bowie, and wondered if someone were whispering to him.

He decided not to mention that last part to anyone, being fairly certain it wasn't a good sign to think someone might be whispering to you, especially when you couldn't actually hear anything.

Sometimes his cousin Buddy would come over from his trailer and ask, “What'cha doin'?” It was a question Buddy had probably asked him dozens of times by now, to which he always replied, “Scanning for intelligent life. It seems the only direction left to look.”

“Huh?” Buddy would invariably say.

“My point exactly,” Tom would invariably answer.

Then Buddy would climb up and the two of them would lay on the roof and gaze at the stars, their reverie interrupted only by the random hooting of owls in the woods surrounding the family property and Buddy's occasional hawking into his spitcan.
If Tom had known that those dreams from his childhood were actually memories, he would have spent many happy hours searching for a way off the planet and into that glittering world of silver suits with ridiculously large, pointed shoulders.

As it was, he simply found it by accident one Friday night in Romania while walking off his beer.