It wouldn’t have happened had Wilshire’s solar roof been working. Or had his solar company, Yangguang Ltd., not been so limited as to go belly up at the first sign of recession. But no, when the southeast quarter of the roof stopped producing power, it dutifully sent a signal to the nonexistent company which, being nonexistent, failed to dispatch a tech to fix the dang thing. And now Wilshire was up on the ridgeline, prying off modules, inspecting connections, and getting nowhere. Because, although he’d been a solar engineer once upon a time, technology had moved on since his retirement eight years before.

 

Wilshire shouldn’t have been up there. At eighty-one, he’d become a tad rickety. Oh, he exercised and followed the dietary guidelines, but if he slid off the roof, his wife Maggie would never let him hear the end of it. So. Small steps. Slow movements. Arms out for balance. He probably looked like a novice acrobat attempting a tightrope for the first time. He popped off a module, slid off the access cover, peered into its innards, poked it with a tester. It seemed to be working. Then the next module, and the next, and the next. The system had “localized” the problem to a bank of sixty-four modules. He’d tested twelve. Fifty-two to go.

 

Nearing the end of the ridgeline, Wilshire felt his back muscles knot up. Straightening at glacial speed, he gave them a cautious stretch. Ah, that was better. He took a moment to look around. Not a bad day to be up on a roof. Warm, a light breeze playing in the trees, cumulus powder puffs dotting the sky. Down below his lawn, the rose beds, a pile of mulch waiting to be spread. Sunlight glaring off something in the deep end of his swimming pool.

 

Huh?

 

Wilshire squinted at the brilliant silver light emanating from the water. It was so bright he couldn’t look directly at it. What was down there? Grumbling to himself, he dismounted the roof, inched down the ladder, and shuffled to the diving board. Fists on hips, he scoured the pool bottom for the object, but from here it proved invisible. He peered up at the roof, at the point he’d been standing. Angle of incidence equals angle of reflection, he thought. Him there, sun there, object there. Yes, that was it. The sun would have been reflected almost right into his eyes.

 

Retrieving a net and a long pole from the shed where he kept his pool supplies, Wilshire began trolling the bottom. Behind him, he heard a window open, then Maggie called, “Willy, what are you doing?”

 

“Fixing the roof,” he snapped. “What do you think?”

 

“Last I looked, the roof wasn’t down there.”

 

“You never know,” he replied. Which could explain things. Maybe a component had blown off the roof and sunk itself.

 

Maggie closed the window with a sarcastic thud.

 

The net snagged something. He felt the drag as he lifted. In a moment, he’d landed the mystery object. Disentangling it from the net, he found a pale blue box no more than half a meter cubed, to which a parabolic mirror was attached on a gimbal. Which explained the glare. The mirror had reflected sunlight onto the roof. But why?

 

He scratched his head in befuddlement. And then he saw the other oddity: another cube, this one gray, hanging under the soffit at the corner of the house. He moved the ladder over, positioning it beside the mulch pile, and climbed up to inspect the intruder. The underside of this box proved to be a cover, which he removed. Within, a dense mass of tiny circuit boards huddled. Despite its technical sophistication, the box was mounted to the soffit by screws. Wilshire clambered down, retrieved a screwdriver from his garage, and soon had the device detached, except for one thing. A gray wire was hooked into the solar module just above it.

 

Ah-hah!

 

He yanked the box to rip out the wire, but it held fast. He yanked harder, harder still, and finally with all his strength, whereupon the wire popped out of the box, and he topped off the ladder onto the mulch pile.

 

* * *

 

“The power’s back,” Maggie told him. Sitting by Wilshire’s hospital bed while crocheting a red and orange afghan for one of their granddaughters, she shook her head in bemusement. “I still don’t see what the swimming pool had to do with it.”

 

Wilshire didn’t get it, either. Not that he’d had much time to think it over, between the concussion and the broken wrist and the pain meds.

 

She hummed a snippet of tune he didn’t recognize, then said, “Space Force agents showed up and took the boxes. Said you’d done the world a great service. Like falling off a ladder is great.”

 

“Space Force?” Wilshire croaked.

 

“Don’t ask me. They were tight-lipped. Wouldn’t tell me anything.”

 

No, they wouldn’t. But an idea crawled from the recesses of Wilshire’s addled brain. Focus sunlight on the panels. Boost the output. Steal the resulting power. It made sense.

 

No, it didn’t. Who would do that? China? They owned the solar market. Russia? Who knew? But if the culprits had installed these everywhere, it’d be all over the news. Conversely, how could anyone gain anything from a handful of power thefts? Or just one?

 

“Except that young guy,” Maggie continued, her tone suggesting it hardly mattered. “They had to keep telling him to shut up.”

 

“What did he say?”

 

“Nothing that made any sense.”

 

“Like what?”

 

She glanced up from her work. “Don’t get riled up. You need rest.”

 

“Come on, Maggie.”

 

Fingers flying, afghan materializing out of the aether, she shrugged. “Something about a crippled battleship.”

 

She was right. That made no sense. Wilshire closed his eyes, resigned to never knowing.

 

“And space aliens,” Maggie added. “How dumb is that?”