Грегори Бенфорд - Not One of Us - Stories of Aliens on Earth

She waited to finish the last careful slice exposing the corpus minutalis —so she had named the organ, in honor of its resemblance to hamburger—before she buzzed George through the door of the autopsy room as well.

“Pee-yoo!” said George, and then, shambling closer to peer over her shoulder, “Holy shit, doc, that’s fresh kill.”

The sight of him kindled anticipatory warmth on Anna’s skin. Pavlovian conditioning. She firmly ignored it and turned away to pick up her digital camera. “Yes,” she said, snapping photographs of the minutalis, “and I want to keep working on it while it still is fresh. You know how fast they deteriorate. Now, what’s so important that it can’t wait until morning? Haven’t our Army friends instituted a curfew, and doesn’t it start in about five minutes?”

“I was kinda hoping I could stay here.” He grinned at her.

“You’ll be cold.”

“Not my idea of romance, either,” said George. “The drawers are a bit small for two people.”

He almost made her smile. At the same time—it must be fatigue that rendered her so vulnerable—his words caused her throat to constrict. Did he really think their trysts in empty hospital rooms, never the same one twice, deserved the term romance ?

The glass partition on the far side of the table reflected its own judgement: herself, brown-haired and petite, neat in her spotless lab coat and face mask; him in unkempt flannel shirt and baggy jeans, face unshaven, hair uncombed. At least today he wasn’t sporting his usual assortment of firearms.

They had nothing in common outside of bed. She still felt awkward saying his given name. Her sleeping pill, was how she thought of him. Since the starship had crashed on Cortez Mountain, it was either George, Ambien, or a long wakeful night in the morgue.

“Doc,” he said, staring down at her prize specimen. He rocked back and forth on his heels. “This isn’t the best time to have an eetee in your morgue.”

She picked up her scalpel again. “What, is the sheriff on the warpath?”

“Ben—fuck no, it’s the Army you should worry about.”

“They’ve been here already,” she said, beginning to sever the major nerves leading from the minutalis to the brain proper.

“ Here ? In the morgue ?”

“We gave them a tour of the hospital today. Don’t look so horrified. They didn’t unzip any body bags, and they were kind enough to give us diesel to run our generators. Is that all you came here about?”

George was still rocking on his toes. Usually he stayed relaxed, even irreverent, under the worst of circumstances. “Ben wants to know if we can have some kind of strong narcotic, like in a hypodermic or something.”

“What are you boys up to now?” she asked, but she didn’t expect an answer. She knew such little favors were the quid pro quo that enabled George to keep Ben from shutting down her research altogether. Still, she wondered if the timing of this particular request should give her cause for hesitation. Even she had noticed the discontent abroad in Lewisville.

“I can give you some Fentanyl. But I’ll have to get it from upstairs. Is tomorrow morning soon enough?”

“Sure,” said George. “I guess.”

But he showed no sign of leaving. She thought she had made it clear that she had no time for him tonight. Unfortunately, she could not rely on the eetee itself, sliced open from sagittal crest to cloacal canal, to drive him away. Such sights and smells did not disturb George.

Anna leaned over the table for better access to the left posterior pseudothalamic nerve. It required concentration to sever cleanly, running as it did through a layer of tough and slimy dura. Naturally George chose that moment to pick up one of her scalpels and prod at the section of skin and skull she had sawed out for access to the creature’s brain stem. The mucous that protected a live and healthy eetee’s skin had dried to a hard, yellowish crust. As George poked at it, a flake of the crust dropped onto the table.

“Get your hands away!” Anna said. “You aren’t even wearing gloves!”

He pressed on the flake with the scalpel, crumbling it, and frowned. “Doc, I’ve handled a lot of dead ones in the last year. I’ve been covered in splat. I’ve had ’em keel over on top of me and vomit in my face. If they were going to make me sick, wouldn’t it have happened already?”

They had discussed this topic before, but today there was a new, speculative tone in George’s voice. “You’re wondering about the Army’s quarantine regulations?” she asked. Again George did not answer. “Well, perhaps they’re justified—in principle. There are plenty of diseases with a long incubation period, and if you didn’t know what to look for, you couldn’t spot the infection.”

“As you’ve said. AIDS. And mad cow disease.”

“Creutzfeldt-Jakob,” she corrected.

“And kuru.”

Surprised he had heard of an obscure disease of New Guinea cannibals, Anna glanced up. George had been doing a little research on his own? She knew George wasn’t stupid, despite his unkempt, sometimes goofy persona. In his own way, he was one of the smartest people in Lewisville.

“But those are hard to catch,” George said. “A quarantine wouldn’t have much effect. And no one here has been eating any eetee brains.” Then he reverted to form. He poked at the minutalis, making it quiver like Jell-O, and grinned again. “Sure looks like it would cook up good on a grill, though.”

Anna had not eaten dinner. The image was unfortunate. Her mouth watered and her stomach grumbled. She sliced away the last of the dura, and at last was able to slip her gloved hand beneath the minutalis and lift it onto the scale.

One-point-five-four kilos. A middling weight. From the accounts of Ben’s deputies and her own labors here, she had become convinced that variation in the size of this particular organ correlated with social or military rank. The eetees with the very largest minutalis were always the ones carrying the fear guns and directing the others. Her first theory had been that the minutalis manufactured dominance pheromones, but then she had begun to wonder about the magnetic anomalies, and the odd rabbit-ear deposits of metallic compounds in the sagittal crest—

George tapped his scalpel on the metal table. “Doc, we haven’t talked about it in a long time—have you or Joe Hansen made any progress on how the eetees use the fear guns?”

“Oh, sure,” she said, removing the minutalis to a tray under the hood. She started to wash it down with ethanol. “Molecular microwave transmitters. Proteins with encapsulated crystalline segments, manufactured inside specialized neural tissue. That’s how the eetees communicate with each other, too.”

“What?” The stark astonishment in his voice made her turn. “Have you said anything about this to anyone else ?”

“I’m being sarcastic, George,” she said crossly.

“But you have a theory.”

“Guesses. Flights of fancy. I’m not a neurochemist or a molecular biologist, or, for that matter, a physicist, and I don’t have the resources—”

“But you have evidence—”

“Nothing worth the name.”

George gazed down at the eetee. “Too bad we couldn’t ever bring you a live one and do the CAT scan thing. See what lights up when they do different things.”