“I’m not offended. What do you have to tell me?”

“What? Oh.”

Greg grinned and punched his friend’s arm again.

“You really are funny.”

“I wasn’t trying to be,” I said.

“I think that woman on television is talking about aliens,” said Greg.

“No,” said his friend.

“I don’t mean illegal aliens. I mean the kind from outer space. Wishu-Wishuu-ooooo.”

“That sounds like an Ivy League football cheer,” said Winn.

“Get out,” said Greg.

“Hit him and I walk,” I said.

Greg, fist cocked, looked hurt, but he didn’t deliver the punch. Instead, he said, “I did one of my blogs about so-called alien visitors. There aren’t any. Aliens with two eyes and two legs aren’t coming millions of miles to pluck people out of their beds to probe their rectums with metal rods.”

A woman who had been talking to a younger woman at the table next to us looked over at the last comment.

“No aliens,” I said.

“No, they’re humanoids from the future, maybe hundreds of thousands of years in the future. They’re archaeologists or anthropologists or whatever those sciences will be like. They appear and disappear so fast because they zip in and out of time. The shapes of the craft differ because they come from different times in the future.”

“Why didn’t the ones from farther in the future go back and visit the ones from more recently and coordinate?” I said.

Greg had finished something filled with caffeine over ice and topped with whipped cream. Just what he needed to calm him down. Winn had an iced tea. I played with my coffee and looked at the two extra cups of Colombia Supremo Deep Jungle Roast and the two biscotti to go.

I learned that Ronnie Gerall had come to Sarasota in his junior year, that he was a natural leader, passionate about protecting the school from politicians and social gadflies, particularly Philip Horvecki.