Joseph Delaney - Partners

There was a worried look on Mel’s face even though he reported that everything else seemed to be OK. The chickens weren’t making any noise and the door and windows on the hen house were intact. He joined Alice inside the house, where she sat drinking coffee and scratching the two dissimilar heads of her animal companions.

“George seems to be all right, Mel, except for a cut on the inside of his right wing, which seems to have stopped bleeding. I know he’ll make a mess but I think he’s earned a night in and I’d worry about him if he was outside. I guess we can let the vet sleep. I wish I could. I know I’m going to be awake all night.”

“Maybe we can find something to do to keep busy,” Mel replied, with a wink.

“Maybe we can,” She answered, and shooed the two animals away while gulping the last of her coffee.

The harried couple had gotten little sleep, nevertheless they met the Sun at rising, anxious to study the remains of the devastated creature. They found only its head and a maze of strange tracks, one of which was clearly the mark of the rest of the body being dragged off.

Mel and Alice, still armed to the teeth and accompanied by Brutus, followed the trail as far as it went, which left them even more perplexed than before.

“It—it just ends, Mel. There re no tracks away from it, except for those we followed here. Do you realize what that means? It means they’re still around.” Terror washed over Alice’s face. “Mel, we can’t handle this, we—”

“I know, I know. You’re right. I always intended to call Eddie back, but I wanted to check things out myself first. Alice, I don’t think they’re still here. I think something, their owner, maybe, picked them up.”

“Their what?”

“I didn’t tell you this last night, Alice. I didn’t want to worry you, and frankly, in the excitement I wasn’t really sure I’d seen it. Now that all the tracks lead to the same place I guess it was real after all. I…

“What, Mel? What was real?”

Mel cringed. “Just—just a light, Alice. A kind of dim one at that. It was a long way off from where I was. I thought maybe I just imagined it…”

“You said, ‘their owner.’ Mel, what else did you see?”

“Nothing, Alice. Nobody. I didn’t see anything but this faint light.”

Alice had been around a bit herself, and knew a little something about tracking. She took another look at the jumble of tracks on the ground. Nothing she could see suggested a vehicle had been here. Even a helicopter, had it landed, would have left some sign. She finished her examination and gazed up at Mel. “Mel, either there’s some other explanation or these things took off and flew away. And I don’t remember seeing any wings on the one that attacked George.”

“I don’t know what to tell you, Alice. I don’t know what I’m going to tell Eddie, and the rest of them, either.”

“We tell them these things are dangerous, Mel,” Alice answered. “We do the neighborly thing and warn our friends so they don’t get hurt.”

Mel glanced back, contritely, and answered, “Yeh, Alice, I guess we do. Come on, let’s break the news.” He took her arm and walked her back to the house.

“Well,” Sheriff George Shuler sighed, “The head’ll be enough to convince any sober person I know that you’re serious. And, then there’s the tracks, and these’ll probably tell us a whole lot more even than the head will. I’ve sent for Aberg.”

“Who’s he?”

“The world’s leading expert on fossil footprints, according to the people at the university. He’s been studying a place over in the west end of the county where a volcano erupted way back when, and wiped out a whole bunch of dinosaurs. I never met him but he’s supposed to be the last word on tracks. He ought to be here about lunch time.”

“OK,” Eddie added, gathering Mel and Alice around him in a huddle. “Uh, there’s something I think I ought to tell you.”

“Yeah. You know something new, Eddie?”

“I was going to call yesterday about it, Mel. Something came up, and I didn’t get around to it. But, the tissue samples we took? Mel, the tests results came back and they’re weird. These creatures—they don’t seem to be related to anything else on Earth. I mean they’re just—”

“Just What, Eddie? Are you holding out on us?”

“No, no Mel. This gets complicated, but if I had to oversimplify I’d say that none of the animals we’ve seen could have evolved on Earth. If they had there d be signs in the fossil record, and there aren’t. The chemistry’s basically the same but everything else is different.”

“Are you trying to tell me these things came from another planet?”

“I’m trying to tell you I don’t know, Mel. That had occurred to me, of course, but the theory has its own set of problems, not the least of which is that the aminos are exactly the same ones terrestrial life uses, down to the very last one.”

“I don’t follow.”

“Amino acids, Mel. Aminos are the basic stuff of proteins. There’re lots of them, but terrestrial life only uses a small number. You’d expect a few to overlap but chance can’t account for what we found. The odds of that happening are—well, astronomical.

“And that means that the simplest explanation is the most plausible—that somehow they’re related to everything that evolved here on Earth, that they’ve been here all the time but somehow we missed them.”

Eddie paused and his face started to flush, as though he was embarrassed by his next remark. “Sherlock Holmes, Mel.”

“What?”

“Holmes—the detective who always had the answer. He said, ‘Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’ That is pretty much how orthodox scientific logic works.”

Mel stared at Whitman, waiting for an explanation. None came, so he asked, “What is all that supposed to mean?”

“I—I’m not really sure I have an answer, Mel. If this had happened a hundred years ago, or even fifty I might have bought it, because even that late in history there were still places on this planet that were complete mysteries to science.

“What if they haven’t been here all along, Mel? What if somebody brought them, just now, millions of years after the animals we’re used to evolved here on Earth? What if in the beginning all life had a common origin?

“There’s an old theory, called panspermia, which assumes that life originated in space, even before any planetary bodies were formed, that there are primitive organisms that drift around, dormant, until natural processes move them into environments where they can evolve into more complicated forms.

“The trouble with panspermia is it could only explain the chemical similarity, not the physical similarities—and there are some of these that chance can’t account for. There is another possibility that could account for this—that Earth was visited by aliens, who brought these creatures along and left them here. In that scenario the most troubling mystery would be, why?”

Mel’s face was sober, but he said nothing, he just stared at Eddie.

Whitman felt very awkward, caught as he was without a pat answer. His tone became more aggressive. “Look, Mel, it’s not as farfetched as it seems, considering the alternative. I mean, this is the twenty-first century. Except for new insect varieties and an occasional marine species modern science is pretty well out of surprises. We know so much about land animals, even jungle animals, that nobody expects to see anything new.

“But now, suddenly, three totally new creatures pop up in the space of one summer, in a temperate climate that’s been crawling with people for the last ten last millennia. The theory is not only tempting, Mel, it’s the only one that fits the facts.”