"I was dead," he smiles, "and I can tell you - it ain't all it's cracked up to be. There's supposed to be a mighty 'DO NOT DISTURB' sign on the door," he illustrates with his hands, "and nothing at all bothers you." He caresses his words, as if savoring the feel of them. The smile is gregarious. He looks and behaves exactly like the videos I've seen.

"I was getting fairly comfortable with the fact of my death - takes forty or fifty years to get to that point, you know -" he jokes (or at least I think he's joking), "when I got 'disturbed'. They came and shined a little light in my eyes and dingled a little bell in my ears - metaphorically speaking - just wouldn't leave me alone, so here I am. How's your mother?"

"What? They? She's okay, she's remarried. Did they put you here?"

"Remarried? Well, I have been out of touch. Never mind who 'they' are, I'll tell you later. She was only two when I died, you know -"

"I don't understand. Where did you come from? Daddy - my father - died about five years ago. She married a man named Jonathan Lyle. Were you in suspended animation?"

"Is he good for her? Do you like him? And how is her mother, your grandmother, Lisa -"

We're trying to get simultaneous information dumps, but this last question slows me down. He knows the answer, he must - the sadness is already in his eyes. My grandmother was in her early thirties in 2000, at the beginning of the Interregnum. She suffered in the hands of the military dictatorship that followed, just for the fact of having been his daughter, but she was released after a few years and allowed to live almost a normal life. And she had a good life, my mother told me; a full, productive, long life. But "long" has limits - she died three years ago at the age of eighty-six.

This man - Gone for fifty-eight years, he looks like - well, not like death warmed over. He looks robust, like a youthful sixty-three - the age he died - not the hundred and twenty years he should be.

Noises in the bedroom passageway startle me. My crew-mates have come in a search party and found considerably more than expected. They huddle to provide mutual support, peering intently through the open port at Logan.

Andra's hair stands out in all directions like a fright wig; she didn't put a band around it. Confusion dominates her face. Charles looks angry. Or is it fear? Max is silent and attentive.

"Come in, come in," Logan gestures. "Welcome to the Twilight Zone."

"The what?" Max asks.

"An old joke, son."

"Who the hell are you?" my husband demands, bypassing the long social preamble that normally initiates new acquaintances, going to the heart of the matter.

"And why aren't we dead?" Andra whines. "And who fixed the powercan?"

"Who is this asshole?" Charles rasps again.

"Charles, shutup!" I snarl. "He's my grandfather. My great grandfather."

"Grandfather, great ... he's your ... yeah like he's my ... grandfather ... uh-oh." He sputters in the oral equivalent of a triple take, and the snappy comeback dies before it's launched. Andra has a serious case of slack jaw. Her wide-eyed-empty-headed-dumb-blonde look is appropriate to her chewing gum routine, but this time it's the real thing.

My grandfather is all gruff charm: "Let's get the priorities straight," he rumbles pleasantly. "I think this is the appropriate occasion for a little hard drinking to get acquainted with each other. I hope civilization has advanced to the point where they let you keep booze around here. The first thing on my mind right now is a martini. Do you keep any gin?"

"No gin." Max is soft spoken and controlled. "None of us likes it, so we didn't stock it."

"Jes-sus Christ, son," he jokes, laying on a thick southern accent, "how'd they expect you to start a grand new society without gin?"

Charles bridles. "Don't call him son. We're nobody's son."

Logan fixes him with a stare and pauses a beat. "Any man married to my great granddaughter, that makes him my great grandson-in-law. I'll call you that, Buster, unless you'd prefer great grandson-of-a-bitch." He laughs, but the eyes are deadly. My husband, unfortunately for his own ego, blinks.

Logan continues. "Why don't you break out what you do have. We got some serious talking to do, so we might as well be comfortable. As you might have noticed, I know who you are, but I can see you're still not comfortable about who I am."

An hour later, Logan stretches back from his seat at the dining platform and yawns. He's entertained us with small talk - jokes and stories - but now he pauses a long time, eyes half closed, apparently thinking about what to say or how to say it. No one interrupts. What conversational gambit do you use on someone who's been dead more than half a century? Do you ask his health? How was the weather when he died?

A nodding motion of his head holds the conversational place, telling us to wait a moment, wait, and shortly he will speak. He's on his second drink, sipping bourbon from a zero-g tumbler. None of us is much for drinking, but we've all had something to humor him.

He leans forward, forearms on the platform. "I'm not here by my own doing -" he intones slowly. The folksy speech is not evident.

"- although the alternative was to be nowhere. And I'd rather be anywhere than there."

I'm aware of our breathing, of air moving through the cabin from vent to vent. I hear the barely perceptible 'phutt' of an attitude thruster pulse.

He shakes his head and smiles almost bashfully. "I don't know how to say this," he speaks, with obvious discomfort. "What I have to tell you is incredible." He looks at each of us in turn. "No matter how I couch the language, it's going to come out as ominously as a dry stick snapping in the forest at midnight." He leans back. "Heh. That reminds me of a story."

"Grandfather," I admonish.

"Not gonna let me ease into it, hmm?" He acknowledges four pairs of silent eyes impatient for answers. He sighs, a long low rumble; then picks his words carefully: "I've been brought to you by an extra-terrestrial civilization."

There is a collective groan; involuntary, disbelieving, chagrined.

"Should've let me tell that story," he laughs for his own amusement. "It's absolutely true," he says, leaning towards each of us in turn, pushing sincerity into each consciousness. "You'd have a hell of a time explaining how I got here any other way."

"Does that - monstrosity in the storm cellar have anything to do with how you got here?" Max asks gently.

"Hmmm? Oh. Well, yes. But I'm not an alien, I'm human." He adds the last quickly enough to be obviously defensive, and it is the first chink in his armor that I've seen, and it indeed does make him appear human.

"I am who I am," he says, in control. "Logan Arron Styles. President of the United States. Deceased. In moderately good health at the moment. In that order."

We avoid his eyes and each other's. My emotions are incredibly mixed.