Starman by Alan Dean Foster

said quietly, “Kidnapped?”
    “What?” She turned to him as he removed a folded paper towel from his pocket and pointed to her desperate inscription.
    “What is ‘kidnapped?’ ”
    That was it. She just couldn’t take this anymore. She’d handled it well up to now—hadn’t she handled it well up to now? But everyone has their breaking point and she’d finally reached hers. Mentally and emotionally she was completely drained. She had no more reserves and in any event, she was just plain tired.
    She crushed the brakes and brought the car to a skidding halt on the shoulder. More than anything else, she was surprised by the intensity of her voice.
    “You wanna know what kidnapped is? All right, I’ll tell you. It’s being dragged out of your house in the middle of the night and being scared and dirty and hungry and going to the john in cruddy gas stations so if you’re going to shoot me go right ahead because I’d rather be shot than scared to death every minute of the day and I can’t take it anymore.” She turned away from him, dropped her head.
    “Go on.” She swallowed. “Get it over with.”
    She found that she was trembling. She was too exhausted to scream.
    Nothing happened.
    When she finally spoke again, her tone was much subdued. “Come on, what are you waiting for? Do it.”
    There was a snicking sound. Something landed gently in her lap. Opening her eyes, she looked down to find herself staring at the clip from the automatic.
    “I mean you no harm, Jennyhayden,” he told her softly. “I do not want to hurt you.”
    “You . . .” Suddenly she was crying. It was positively the last thing she wanted to do, the last thing she expected to do. She couldn’t help it, couldn’t stop the tears from flowing no matter how hard she tried. She didn’t try very hard.
    A hand reached over to gently squeeze her arm. Somehow that made it worse than ever.

Four
    No one gave the green Mustang a second look as it cruised smoothly down the highway. There was nothing unusual about it, except perhaps its speed. It was traveling sixty miles an hour. That in itself was not extraordinary. What was remarkable was the precision with which it maintained that speed. It didn’t matter whether it was going uphill, or down, or around the occasional curve. The speedometer needle clung to the small space between the six and the zero as if it had been glued there. No cruise control could have maintained that speed with such precision, and in any case, the Mustang was not so equipped.
    But then, the mind that was monitoring the flow of fuel to the engine was far more accurate than anything electronic.
    The radio had been bopping away until a series of particularly uninformative and annoying commercials replaced the music. The starman took one hand off the wheel and killed the radio.
    New music replaced the commercial pitches. It emanated not from the radio but from the driver, from somewhere deep inside. It didn’t sound quite like it was supposed to because the body that was producing the music wasn’t designed to generate such sounds, but it was a reasonable approximation. The music was soft, atonal but without being harsh. Not twelve-tone fragments and not Cageish raucousness but something very different. Harmonious and yet constantly changing.
    Jenny blinked and looked up. She was curled up in the passenger’s seat and she’d been sound asleep. It took her a moment to realize that the music had to be coming from the starman.
    It produced a gentle warming inside her, a feeling of peace and vast relaxation. Whether the sensation was the product of the music or of something else he was putting out she didn’t know. There was a sweetness to it, an innocence that was utterly different from the sounds he made when he spoke to her. Probably he found human speech harsh and rough, she thought. What must his own language sound like? His own voice?
    He sensed the attention and stopped.
    “I am sorry. I did not mean to