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

Then a chopper came out of the murk. It hovered over him like an angel with spotlights and an unfurling ladder. Men in wet suits dropped onto the deck. They harnessed him up and he spun away into the black sky. On the hard floor of the chopper a woman stood over him with a big needle of epinephrine, her face lined with concern. He could not get his thick tongue to tell her that this case was something else. She shot him full of it and his heart pounded. That did clear his sluggish mind but it did not stop the shooting jolts that would come up suddenly in his leg and chest and in other places he had no memory of the pink rope being at all.

She gave him other injections though and those made the whole clattering chopper back away. It was like a scene on late night television, mildly interesting and a plot you could vaguely remember seeing somewhere. She barked into her helmet mike and asked him questions but it was all theory now, not really his concern.

The next few hours went by like a movie you can’t recall the next day. A cascading warm shower lined in gray hospital tile, McKenna lying on the tiles. A doctor in white explaining how they had to denature something, going on and on, just about as interesting as high school chemistry. They said they needed his consent for some procedure and he was happy to give it so long as they agreed to leave him alone.

He slowly realized the ER whitecoats were not giving him painkillers because of the War on Drugs and its procedural requirements. A distant part of him considered how it would be for a lawman to die of an excess of law. Doctors X and then Y and finally Z had to sign off. Time equaled pain and dragged on tick by tick.

Then there was Demerol, which settled the arguments nicely.

The next day he found a striping of tiny holes along his leg. More across his chest. He guessed the corpses had sealed up most of these when they swelled, so they showed only a few tiny holes.

The ME came by and talked to McKenna as though he were an unusually fascinating museum exhibit. At least he brought some cortisone cream to see if it would help and it did. He recalled distantly that the ME was actually a doctor of some sort. Somehow he had always thought of the ME as a cop.

Two days later a team of Fed guys led him out of the hospital and into a big black van. They had preempted local law, of course, so McKenna barely got to see his supervisor or the Mobile Chief of Police, who was there mostly for a photo op anyway.

In the van a figure in front turned and gave him a smile without an ounce of friendliness in it. Mr. Marine.

“Where’s Dark Glasses?” McKenna asked but Mr. Marine looked puzzled and then turned away and watched the road. Nobody said anything until they got to Dauphin Island.

They took him up a ramp and down a corridor and then through some sloping walkways and odd globular rooms and finally to a little cell with pale glow coming from the walls. It smelled dank and salty and they left him there.

A door he hadn’t known was there slid open in the far wall. A man all in white stepped in carrying a big, awkward laptop and behind him shuffled a Centauri.

McKenna didn’t know how he knew it, but this was the same Centauri he had seen getting onto the Busted Flush. It looked at him with the famous slitted eyes and he caught a strange scent that wrinkled his nose.

The man in white sat down in one of two folding chairs he had brought and gestured for McKenna to sit in the other. The Centauri did not sit. It carefully put a small device on the floor, a bulb and nozzle. Then it stood beside the man and put its flipper-hands on the large keyboard of the laptop. McKenna had heard about these devices shaped to the Centauri movements.

“It will reply to questions,” the man in white said. “Then it types a reply. This computer will translate on-screen.”

“It can’t pronounce our words, right?” McKenna had read that.

“It has audio pickups that transduce our speech into its own sounds. But it can’t speak our words, no. This is the best we’ve been able to get so far.” The man seemed nervous.

The Centauri held up one flipper-hand and with the device sprayed itself, carefully covering its entire skin. Or at least it seemed more like skin now, and not the reptile armor McKenna had first thought it might be.

“It’s getting itself wetted down,” the man said. “This is a dry room, easier for us to take.”

“The wet rooms have—”

“Ceiling sprays, yeah. They gotta stay moist ’cause they’re amphibians. That’s why they didn’t like California. It’s too dry, even at the beach.”

The Centauri was finished with its spraying. McKenna thought furiously and began. “So, uh, why were you going out on the shrimp boat?” Its jointed flippers were covered in a mesh hide. They moved in circular passes over pads on the keyboard. The man had to lift the awkward computer a bit to the alien, who was shorter than an average man. On the screen appeared:

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“Is that what attacked me?”

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“Your young are feeding?”

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“Why don’t we know of this?”

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He could not look away from those eyes. The scaly skin covered its entire head. The crusty deep green did not stop at the big spherical eyes, but enclosed nearly all of it, leaving only the pupil open in a clamshell slit. He gazed into the unreadable glittering black depths of it. The eyes swiveled to follow him as he fidgeted. McKenna couldn’t think of anything to say.

“I, I can’t read your expression. Like Star Trek and that stuff, we expect aliens to be like humans, really.”

The alien wrote:

<Trek drama we studied. To discern how you would think of us.>>

“You don’t have our facial expressions.”

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“Of course. So I can’t tell if you care whether your young killed two men on fishing boats.”

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“We don’t know! Our government has not told us. Why?”

The man holding the computer opened his mouth to say something and thought better of it. The alien wrote:

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“People are okay with your visit. They might not like your seeding our oceans and moving in. Plus killing us.”

This time it took a while to answer:

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McKenna blinked. “Is that a religious idea?”

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“Uh, sky?…”

The computer guy said, “Mistranslation. I saw that one with the astro guys last week. The software combines two concepts, see. Sky—means astronomy, ’cause their world is always cloudy, so the night sky is above that—and history. Closest word is cosmology, astronomy of the past.”

McKenna looked at the alien’s flat, unreadable gaze. “So it’s… science.”

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McKenna could not see where this was going. He had read some pop science about something called dark energy, sure. It supposedly was making the whole universe expand faster and faster. “So what’s it… this dark heaven… do?”

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McKenna blinked. “You mean we… our minds… send out their…”

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“This sounds like religion.”

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McKenna was getting in over his head. He felt light-headed, taking shallow breaths, clenching his hands. “You don’t regret that those men died?”

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“Around here murder is a crime.”

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“Look, even if spirits or whatever go someplace else, that doesn’t excuse murder.”

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“Being dead matters to us.”

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