Down, down, down. There was nothing else to do, so Alex soon began talking again. “I wonder if Liz and Maria will miss me.” (Liz Parker and Maria DeLuca had been his best friends since grade school.) “I hope they do. I can’t believe Liz didn’t tell me what was going on for so many months. And then when she told me, it was such a farfetched story. But I don’t believe in aliens.” Soon Alex began to get rather sleepy, and went on saying to himself, in a dreamy sort of way, “Do aliens eat humans? Do aliens eat humans?” and sometimes, “Do humans eat aliens?” for, you see, as he couldn’t answer either question, it didn’t much matter which way he put it. He felt that he was dozing off, and had just begun to dream that he was walking hand in hand with Liz and Maria in the elementary school playground, and saying to them earnestly, “Now, tell me the truth: did you ever eat an alien?” when suddenly, thump, thump! down he came upon a heap of dry leaves, and the fall was over.

Alex was not a bit hurt, and he jumped to his feet in a moment: he looked up, but it was all dark overhead; before him was another long passage, and the White Rabbit that he had followed down the rabbit-hole was still in sight, hurrying down the passage.

“Liz!” Alex called. There was not a moment to be lost: away went Alex like the wind. He was close behind the White Rabbit when he turned the corner, but the pretty little Rabbit was no longer to be seen.

Alex walked sadly in the direction the Rabbit had gone, wondering how he was ever to get any answers. By and by, Alex again heard a little pattering of footsteps in the distance, and he looked up eagerly.

“Liz!” pleaded poor Alex. “Where are you going in such a hurry? I don’t understand what you told me. I need to know more—“

The pretty White Rabbit did not notice Alex; instead she scurried on down a winding path past a manor house and into a wood. As Alex followed, he began thinking over other students he knew, who might very well be aliens, and was just saying to himself, “If one only knew the right way to figure it out—“ when he was a little startled by seeing the Cheshire Cat sitting on a bough of a tree a few yards off.

“Maria,” Alex began, rather timidly, as he did not at all know whether the Cat would like the name. “Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here? I need to find out the answers, and I think I should probably find the White Rabbit.”

“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to and what you need to know,” said the Maria Cat.

“I don’t care where—“ said Alex.

“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Maria Cat.

“—so long as I get SOMEWHERE and understand MORE than I do now,” Alex added as an explanation.

“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Maria Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

Alex felt that this could not be denied, so he tried another question: “What sort of people live about here?”

“In THAT direction,” the Maria Cat said, waving her right paw round, “lives the Max Hatter: and in THAT direction,” waving her other paw, “lives the Michael Hare. Visit either you like: they’re both not from around here.”

“But I don’t want to go among aliens,” Alex remarked.

“Oh, you can’t help that,” said the Cat: “we’re all aliens here. I’m an alien. You’re an alien.”

“How do you know I’m an alien?” said Alex.

“You must be,” said the Maria Cat, “or you wouldn’t have come here. You wouldn’t have followed the White Rabbit.”

Alex didn’t think that proved it at all; however, he went on, “And how do you know that you’re an alien?”

“If you have to ask,” said the Maria Cat, “then you should keep looking for the White Rabbit.” And with that, she vanished.

“Maria!” Alex called after her. “Come back!” He waited a little, half expecting to see her again, but she did not reappear, and after a minute or two he walked on in the direction in which the Maria Cat had told him the Michael Hare lived.

He had not gone much farther before he came upon the house of the Michael Hare: he thought it must be the right house, because the chimneys were shaped like rocket boosters and the roof was thatched with silvery metal. It was so large and so strange a house (being shaped like a flying saucer crossed with a house trailer) that he walked up to it rather timidly, saying to himself, “Suppose the Michael Hare should be raving mad after all! I almost wish I’d gone to see the Max Hatter instead! Or I should have continued to search for the White Rabbit. Liz could have answered my questions.”

There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the Michael Hare and the Max Hatter were having tea at it: a Dormouse named Isabel was sitting between them, fast asleep, and the other two were resting their elbows on her, and talking over her head.

The table was a large one, but the three were all crowded together at one corner of it. Alex sat down in a large armchair at one end of the table.

“Have some wine,” the Michael Hare said in an encouraging tone.

Alex looked around the table, but there was nothing on it but tea. “I don’t see any wine,” he remarked.

“There isn’t any,” said the Michael Hare.

“Then it wasn’t very civil of you to offer it,” said Alex angrily.

“It wasn’t very civil of you to sit down without being invited,” said the Michael Hare.

“I didn’t know it was YOUR table,” said Alex; “it’s laid for a great many more than three.”

“You look confused,” said the Max Hatter. He had been looking at Alex for some time with great curiosity, and this was his first speech.

“You shouldn’t make personal remarks,” Alex said with some severity; “it’s very rude.”

The Max Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he SAID was, “Why is an alien like a writing desk?”

“Great. A riddle,” thought Alex. “As if I weren’t confused enough. –I believe I can guess that,” he added aloud to be polite.

“Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?” said the Michael Hare.

“Exactly,” said Alex.

“Then you should say what you mean,” the Michael Hare went on.

“I do,” Alex hastily replied; “at least I mean what I say—that’s the same thing, you know.”

“Not the same thing a bit!” said the Max Hatter. “You might just as well say that ‘I see what I am’ is the same thing as ‘I am what I see’!”

“You might just as well say,” added the Michael Hare, “that ‘I look like what I am’ is the same thing as ‘I am what I look like’!”

“Well, aren’t you?” asked Alex, feeling quite puzzled by this conversation. “Don’t they mean the same thing?”

“It IS the same thing with you,” said the Max Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alex thought over all he could remember about aliens and writing-desks, which wasn’t much. “Which is just the problem,” continued the Max Hatter.

Alex felt dreadfully puzzled. The Max Hatter’s remark seemed to have no meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English. “I don’t quite understand,” he said, as politely as he could.

“Have you guessed the riddle yet?” the Max Hatter said, turning to Alex again.

“No, I give it up,” Alex replied: “what’s the answer?”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said the Max Hatter.

“Nor I,” said the Michael Hare. The Dormouse named Isabel murmured her agreement in her sleep.

Alex sighed wearily. “I think you might do something better with the time,” he said, “than waste it asking riddles with no answers.”

Suddenly the table seemed to shift off the ground, and the wood spun away into a blur of green and brown and gray. Alex was buffeted by a strong wind. Then he noticed a blonde girl in red silk pajamas leaning against the Michael Hare’s house. The real Isabel cocked an elegant eyebrow at Alex and said casually, “Curiouser and curiouser.” Her lips curved into a secretive smile….

* * * *

“And that’s when I woke up,” Alex concluded. “God, am I glad that I didn’t end up having to play croquet with flamingoes or argue with a caterpillar or the queen or something.” He frowned at Liz and Maria, who had blackmailed him into telling them about his dream. “But why did Isabel appear in my dream in her – forgive the expression – human form? She looked different from the rest of the dream, which I admit was probably just a weird anxiety dream.”

Alex was sitting outside in the school quad eating lunch with Liz and Maria. It had been a couple of weeks since the party at the old soap factory, and the night when Liz had told Alex the truth about Max, Michael, and Isabel. It felt good to be friends with Liz and Maria again. His Isabel question had broken their listening silence, and they were both doubled over in laughter.

Alex stood his ground. “So what do you think of my crazy dream?”

“It was probably just an anxiety dream,” Liz said reasonably once she had caught her breath. “Alex, why didn’t you tell us about it when you had it, though? I mean, it’s been a couple of weeks.”

Alex shrugged. “I don’t know. It was just too crazy. I didn’t know what to think about things as they were. I didn’t want to make them even more complicated.” He stared at Maria who was still bent over with laughter. “What is up with you, DeLuca?”

Straightening, Maria wiped her eyes and tried to compose herself. “Crazy is not the word for your dream, Alex. Michael in rabbit ears is a mental image I’m not going to forget anytime soon, and it wasn’t even my dream.” She cracked up again.