Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (29 page)

“No shit!” she said a little too
loud then whispered it again. “They were in the pack when I found it. Never
thought I’d have a use for them.”

Bailey
put them to her eyes and adjusted focus.

“Have a
ball,” he said. “I’m taking a nap.”

“Get me
out the notepad, first,” she said, keeping the binoculars trained on the scene
below. “Nobody’s smarter’n us.”

He pulled
out the note pad, handed it over to her, then scooted back down the tube a
short distance and stretched out. He looked at the black and ugly surface of
the narrow little tube in the alien spaceship and tried yet again, to imagine
all this was happening to someone else.

*
 
*
 
*

 
“There’s someone here who wants to ask you a
few questions, Phil,” Linda said into the speaker phone. “His name is George
Greenbaum.” She saw the look of restrained excitement on George’s face as he
leaned closer to the device. This was the ultimate for George. He would be
speaking to an honest-to-God alien abductee—not after the fact but while it was
happening.

The
egg-timer had been George’s idea, and Phil agreed immediately when Linda told
him about it. It was set for ten minutes. At the end of that time, they would
hang up and not communicate again until the need to relate critical news arose
or the time for the next scheduled call was reached in another twenty- four
hours. The next call, and each call thereafter, would have a maximum length of
five minutes. That would continue until Phil’s batteries were used up.

In
addition to the speaker phone, they’d also added a larger, professional tape
recorder that was turned on and running.

“I guess you’ve
had better weeks, Phil,” George started.

“You
bet.”

“The ship
is alive, but how alive?”

“I can’t
say for sure, but my gut tells me not very. There’s little activity visible. No
gross motor functions we can see.”

“An
automaton, some
dim
slave?”

“Slave.
Probably some cognition—at least, a controlling mechanism of some kind. The
smaller ships seem more ‘alert’.”

“Any
sense of the overall structure, physiology, architecture?”

“I don’t
have the right visibility. Mostly tubes and tunnel structures from our point of
view. Some big chambers. We’ve seen no mechanical or electronic mechanisms,
other than some components of the tools they use in surgery. Nothing but biotic
controls around here.”

“Any feel
for the size of the ship?”

“Huge. At
least a hundred yards in two dimensions. Maybe more.”

“The
goons you said are human.”

“Were
human.”

“Were.
Who gets to be one? How do they choose them?”

“Unknown.”

“Have you
tried to communicate with them?”

“Negative.”

“Why
not?”

“One:
they don’t seem human enough. You can’t imagine one until you’ve seen it. They
come pre-programmed. Two: they’re dangerous as hell.”

“Try it.”

“Why?”

“Do they
still walk upright?”

“Yes.”

“Then
there might be some humanity left.”

“I’ll
consider it.”

“The
aliens . . . describe them.”

“Witches.”

“Literally?
Like cartoon witches?”

“No. Just
disgusting. Very unclean.”

“They’re
females?”

“Unknown.
They just look like it.”

“Height?
Weight?”

“Five and
a half feet. Maybe a hundred pounds. Skinny. Hideous. Two hands, feet. Long fingers.
Agile. Skin moist, cool, texture of soft paper. Short downward spines cover the
entire body. Almost reptilian.
 
Nekked.”

“Naked?”

“Nekked.
There’s a difference.”

Linda and
George both had the urge to smile.

“Okay.
 
Nekked.”

“The
language, is it spoken?”

“Assumed,
but unknown.”

“You’ve
never heard them speak?”

“Never.”

“The
pupae. Can you get to them easily?”

“Yes. At
least the ones we know about.”

George
turned his eyes toward Linda.

“Can you
destroy them?” he asked.

There was a pause at the other
end.

“Why?”

George smiled ruefully.
“Please . . .”

“I don’t know,” Phil said.
“The containers are tough, and there are thousands of them.”

“Think it over.”

“It could be difficult.
Besides, my hunch is that they’d just start over.”

“Any ideas?”

“If I had a detonator I’d
set off a bomb, if I
had
a bomb,”
Phil said.

George smiled. “If I think
of anything that might help, I’ll . . . uh . . . I’ll let you know,” he said.
He knew it sounded silly before it was out, but it had an inertia all its own.
It was, after all, what people said to be helpful.

“Thanks. You do that,”
Phil said.

A little embarrassed,
George drew his mouth into a line for a second. “We’ll talk again tomorrow,” he
said.

“You bet . . . Linda?”

“I’m here.”

“Take us off the speaker.”

George took the hint and
left the room. Linda picked up the receiver just the same. “Hi,” she said.

“My will is in the gun
safe.”

“I know where.”

“There’ll be a snag
getting payment from the insurance companies. They’ll want a body and a death
certificate, but won’t have either. They’ll pay in seven years, at least a
partial if you stay on top of them.”

The egg timer went off
with a ding and intruded on the moment like the unthinking, unfeeling mechanoid
it was. “That’s it for now, then,” Phil said.

“I love you, Phil.”

Phil paused. He didn’t
mean to, it just happened. “I love you, Linda, more than anything,” he said.

She hung up and reached
slowly over and turned off the tape recorder.

All I
have is his voice, captured now on tape; that and some photographs are all I’ll
ever have again.

By the time she got to the
living room, her eyes were wet with tears. She sat down, plucked a tissue out
of the box on the coffee table and dabbed her eyes with it. God, she was tired
of crying. George sat cross-legged, his head propped sideways on his hand. He
reminded Linda of every long-haired college eccentric she’d ever seen.

“Now what?” she asked with
resignation.

George lifted his head up
and took a deep breath and held it. Linda wished that when he spoke he would
have the answer and would speak it gently and with confidence like a trusted
friend; and one who
knew
the answer.

“Nothing very inspired at
this point,” he said evenly.

It wasn’t a surprise, but
it stung anyway.

“Yeah . . .” Linda said.
“Me, neither.”

They sat looking in
opposite directions with nothing to say. Linda knew that if you didn’t have a
fixed and clear direction, any direction would do. She blew her nose, got up
and went outside.

Linda walked out into the
center of the little front lawn; and shielding her eyes with her hand, tried to
look up at the sun. The star obliterated her vision, washed it away with light.

Phil is
up there. He’s right there in that bright light and I can’t see him.

She tried and tried, bringing
her sun-blinded eyes back to the white hole time and again, and time and again
the light rebuffed her without pity, slapping her away with its fierce energy.

“That’s not a good idea.
It’s not a good way to do it,” George said, standing next to her. He glanced up
at the sun and squinted painfully as if to test the forgone conclusion.

“Clever sons of bitches.
The energy from the sun makes one hell of a defensive cover. And if the ship is
organic or mostly organic, it probably wouldn’t show up very well on radar, if
at all.”

Linda only half heard him.
“Phil is up there,” she said.

*
 
*
 
*

She made
sandwiches later while George talked to his buddies at the USC labs. They’d
been promised the results of the tests on the fluid and tissue scrap that afternoon.
When Linda looked over at George, he was sitting on the edge of the sofa, furiously
taking notes with the phone clamped between shoulder and cheek.

He came
into the dining room with a stack of loose notes. He was so pre-occupied,
reading and thinking, he nearly missed the chair when he sat down.

“Well?”

“It’s
interesting,” he said absently, fingering his notes.

The
absent-minded tone of voice and the word interesting made her anger flare.

“It would
be
interesting
if it was on TV, George! It’s damned horrible is what it is. Why don’t you just
say it’s horrible?”

George
looked down over the rim of his glasses, adding to the eccentric professor
look.

“Okay . .
. it’s horrible,” he said.

Linda
could have slapped him. She tossed her fork down on the plate with a
clank
and got up from
the table. When she made it as far as the sink, she stopped and leaned against
it.

“Linda,
I’m sorry. It’s been tough, I know,” he said.

George
waited patiently. Linda stared out the window for a full minute before she
turned around and sat back down.

“Sorry,”
she said into her plate.

“It
is
horrible and I don’t have any
answers,” he said. “I feel like a dodo bird waiting for the club to fall. I’m
afraid and confused, too.”

Head down,
Linda chewed her tasteless food. She was ashamed of the outburst. It wasn’t his
fault he was a dweeb.

“You said
it was interesting,” she said finally, still staring at her plate. “What did
they find out?”

Her voice
was so low that he could barely hear it. He cleared his throat and began slowly
shifting his notes around, not really looking for anything. “Well . . . the DNA
was very interesting. It’s mostly human. That’s not comforting, but it fits. If
the aliens are as adept at biological manipulation as Phil says . . . I don’t
know . . . I have no idea how they’d do that . . .” His voice trailed off and
he shuffled aimlessly through his notes some more.

“The DNA
in the tissue sample,” he continued, “does have an amphibian-like profile, just
like the guy in Kernville suggested. I’m sure he’ll be glad to hear that.”

Linda
looked up and grinned at the thought. It was probably the last thing that
chicken-shit wanted to hear.

“I doubt
that,” she said.

“Right .
. . the fluid looks much like blood with very few red blood cells. Massive
amounts of what look like white cells and protein plasmids that could be
anything. It doesn’t have the physical characteristics of any blood they’d ever
seen . . . how did he put it . . .” he shuffled papers for the exact words and
found them. “‘It’s a composite of blood-like elements’, is how he put it.
Overall, both the tissue and the blood confused the hell out them. I guess you
might expect that, too. They wanted to know if asking them to analyze the
samples was a test of some kind. They asked me if I made the blood stuff in the
kitchen. I think they were serious about that.”

Linda
smiled and the smile chased away the last of her funk. “Right. We made in the
blender—a little frog juice, a piece of meat, a cup of water,” she laughed.

“Right. I
almost wish we had. The good news is that the DNA in the tissue sample is
clearly both human and amphibian. And you can’t fake that like you might mix up
a fake solution. We have the physical sample, its color, texture and the chemical
DNA locked in the cells that are locked in the sample. Jeff thought it was
quite interesting.” When he said
interesting,
he smiled a little.

“So now
what?”

“We get
pictures of the ship through a telescope. If we can find it, and photograph
it—and I mean good, really good photos—and with the taped phone calls and
physical evidence— blood stuff, tissues, the lab report . . .”

He
stopped himself in mid-sentence as if he’d just
remembered
something more important he had to do. “. . . and we get shut down anyway,” he
said. “It sounds just like a damned hoax.”