Dominant Species Volume One -- Natural Selection (Dominant Species Series) (30 page)

He dropped his notes in a
pile on the table.

“All the goddamned hoaxes
make everything a hoax!” he fumed.

Linda leaned back in her
chair and cocked her head at George. She swallowed a mouthful of food then clamped
her hands with her legs and leaned forward with the most intense look George
Greenbaum had ever seen. Her spooky, multicolored eye blazed at him. Her voice
was perfectly modulated and the effect sent a brief chill up his spine.

“It’s not a hoax,” she
said. “I know it and you know it. And as long as we know it, there’s hope.”

George shuffled his papers
around without purpose. She was right, but she was also naive. It was her very
fire, her enthusiasm that would work against them. He shook his head quickly
and his confidence flew off like water from a dog’s coat. Here it was, finally,
in perfect form—but when you drew it out on paper, really looked at it hard, it
had all the best attributes of a real wing-dinger—a lollapalooza of a hoax.

It was so simple to him
now, so clear. The cries of
wolf
had
damned them all; the real wolf could never,
ever
be believed.

He wondered if some
strange, unknown dynamic—one that applies only to intergalactic conquest—had
worked its rare and nefarious purpose to set humankind up for an attack just
like this. Maybe that’s the way it worked with murder on the interplanetary
scale. The ones who got conquered by another race somehow fool themselves into
thinking it can’t happen. Unbeknownst to the victims, decades of dreams, tales,
imaginings, stories, movies and lies all worked to some horrible advantage
for the aggressor. It can’t happen because somehow imagining every possible way
it
could
happen makes it not possible. All that imagination, and playing it out, and
testing it, and nay-saying and scoffing makes the lame-minded victims perfectly
numb to the possibility and, thus, easier, perfectly stupid prey.
Maybe they picked us for destruction
just because we wouldn’t believe it, even when it was happening
, he thought.
How ironic. We’ve waddled along and quacked or gobbled or whatever it is dodos
do and thought everything was just fine. We’re so thick and pea-brained stupid
we don’t even know a club when we see it.

He shook
his head again and saw himself as if he was watching from across the table. He
just shook his head and shook it. He couldn’t have stopped himself if he’d
wanted to. It was instinctual. He’d seen albatrosses in the Philippines shake
their heads just like that, with the same back and forth, monotonous frequency.
The albatross was related to the dodo. That was the first thing you learned
when you arrived.

“You’ve
lost it,” Linda said. “You’ve really lost it.” She looked at him even harder
and got up from the table. “How dare you . . .”

He
stretched his mouth back over clenched teeth and the competent, eccentric
professor look gave way to one of total angst and weakness.

“There’s
nothing we can do,” he said to her back as she stomped off. “Not a goddamned
thing. We’re doomed. It was meant to be.”

“You’re
full of shit,” she said over her shoulder. What she thought, but did not say
was that George Greenbaum was a coward.

It just made sense.

*
 
*
 
*

Tom Moon
drifted toward the bright, clean light like a moth on a gentle breeze. When he
reached it, it vanished and revealed the alien world of the ship like some
sticky brown residue. When he saw where he was, he wanted to turn and fly back
to the safety of the dark nothingness on those petal-soft wings.

In his
mind, he whined the word
help
over and over and over.

He was
restrained but could see a good part of the laboratory by moving his eyes. He
couldn’t see his body but knew he was stretched and clamped and attached to the
inside of the strange cage just like the others. He looked over at the blank,
mindless face of the man in the cage next to him then turned his eyes away. The
horror of the place was there in that face, gathered up and reflected back.
When he closed his eyes to block it out, the ghostlike image was still there.

He could
feel the cruel presence of the cage all around him, like a living thing with
its talons, claws and tendrils piercing, pulling and tearing his body. When he
tried to move his legs, the talons dug deeper. There was pain where the claws
and tendrils held him, but not too much. He thought they must have given him a
big shot of something.

The
witches moved around him quickly and Tom Moon spun in his own fear like a
wounded animal.

There
were monsters and parts of monsters everywhere and the groaning and whining
sounds were louder and worse than the sound in the place where the aliens cut
out the worms. He wished he could block his ears.

He felt a
movement in his gut, a quick little squiggle, like a piece of wire being
twirled. It was followed by a feeling of fullness, like he’d just eaten two or
three cans of something. The cage shifted and he was suddenly looking down at
the filthy floor of the chamber through the weird parts of the cage-thing. He
felt a tickle in his throat, and he gagged, and retched up a potful of dark
liquid. He felt a buzzing chatter at the back of his head then saw stars and
bright shapes that moved back and forth like colored sheets in the wind and
filled him with unexplained terror. He cried out like a child and the sound
was new and foreign in its intensity, even for Tom Moon.

He faded
in and out of the dark universe of the chamber as if that ugly place was turned
on and off by the hand of some wizard. When he was aware enough to sense it, he
felt his skin being removed and another time he watched as his arms, held in
place by the strange grabbers of the cage, were cut off like unwanted branches
on a tree. Once, when he could still see, he saw a monster’s leg extending out
where his own arm used to be. It had three toes on it that looked like they’d
been carved out of potatoes with the skin left on. He wondered how they would
move, and like magic, they did.

He knew
then that the powerful leg was his own. He made it flex and felt the massive
strength in it as the muscles tightened like steel coils against the
restraints.

Now I
really am a galumpnuckler.

He would
have smiled but the apparatus that was his face could no longer shape a smile.
He felt another buzz and a familiar hiss at the back of his head, and the
universe exploded with black stars. He fell into that darkness as surely as if
he’d fallen from a high ledge. He fell and fell.

Except for his eyes, his
spinal column, most of his nervous system, and a few organs especially suited
for this particular design, Tom Moon was gone.

*
 
*
 
*

God will
give me the strength,
Gilbert thought.
God has brought me to this place for His purpose. These demons
shall be his allies and be bonded to me, the broker of His plan. I will say the
words and they will be heard. His will be done. The pain is nothing. Only the
words are important.

He
strained against the silence in his voice, pushing it aside slowly like a heavy
stone door. His lips squirmed and contorted with the effort.

His will
be done.

“Wea . .
. ther,” he croaked.

The witch
stopped cutting and looked at Gilbert’s head as if it was a troublesome piece
of equipment. It reached over and felt the head with its steely fingers and
turned it and probed at the voice box. This clearly should not be happening.

“I . . .
know . . . weather,” Gilbert barely said.

The witch
spoke out into the chamber and the sound came out like leaves shaken down a
wooden chute. Soon there were two others at its side poking and probing at
Gilbert’s head and throat, trying to find the source of the malfunction.

Once
Gilbert had made the alternate connection between brain and voice-box, he found
it somewhat easier to speak. Splayed open like a laboratory frog and with the
spiny fingers of aliens crawling over and probing his head and neck he said, “I
should speak to . . . the alpha.” The witches couldn’t understand English any
better than Gilbert could understand their odd language, but the speech sounds
came through loud and clear.

“I should
speak to the alpha,” he repeated mechanically.

The
witches conferred among themselves, and then the two newcomers left the first
with the job yet to complete, and the malfunctioning head making human noises.

“I have .
. . information . . . for the alpha,” Gilbert said.

The witch
put down the cutter with a show of alien impatience, picked up a syringe-like
device, clamped Gilbert’s wiggling lips together with thumb and forefinger and
glued them shut with one quick motion. That done, it went back to work, moving
somewhat faster as if all this bother had put it behind schedule.

Gilbert’s
rubbery lips struggled against the thick, elastic glue, still trying to form
words behind the closure.

His will
be done.

When the
last worm had been removed from Gilbert’s body, the witch glued the last
incision closed and hissed for a lab goon to carry the object away. The witch
halted the goon before it left by issuing another quick hiss, then it squirted
the seam holding Gilbert’s mouth shut with a thick, brown softening agent from
another syringe and rubbed it briefly with a spiny forefinger. By the time the
goon got to the chamber’s opening, Gilbert’s struggling lips had worked free of
the glue.

“I should
speak with the alpha,” he continued as if his speech had never been halted by
alien glue. “I have information for the alpha person.”

He still
couldn’t move his head well enough to aim his speech directly at the goon’s
face and so had to be content to let the words go at the goon’s huge breast.

The goon
ambled down the tunnel toward the alpha’s chamber while Gilbert prayed to the
glory of God and repeated his intonations like a limp doll whose pull-cord was
stuck.

“I should
speak to the alpha,” he said. “I have information about . . . the weather.”

*
 
*
 
*

Bailey was
beaming. She was studying Phil’s every reaction to the drawings and loving it.
She’d worked hard on them and now there might be a real use for them.

“These
are great,” he said. Mary craned her neck over his shoulder to get a look, too.

The
drawings were highly detailed. She’d identified each weird protuberance and
alien structure with arrows that terminated with neat block letters. She’d
given the devices names much like Mary would—it had become a common syndrome
where nothing in the environment had a true earthly analog.

Phil
turned a page and the neat table of the times of arrivals and departures might
have looked typewritten from a distance of a few feet.

“Amazing.
What’s the time frame? Overall?”

“We
stayed about twelve hours,” Bailey said leaning and reaching in to point to the
time column. “These are when they left, these times are when they arrived.
There’s exactly sixty-six minutes between each of these departure times. Count
‘em.”

“I
believe you,” Phil said. “Excellent.”

“Bailey
did it all. All’s I did was sleep,” Ned said with a plump chuckle.

“These
are just great.” He turned another page. On the next was an overall rendering
of the shuttle-bay from their perspective high in the chamber wall. The
shuttle-bugs
as Bailey called them could
be seen in a ring around the star-shaped seam on the far side of the divider.
Everything was neatly labeled. The perspective was torqued a little, but the
objects were tightly drawn. She’d even included a little scale with hash marks
at the bottom that tried to show the size of the chamber and the relative
distances between the things in it.

“How do
we know which one to get on?” Phil asked, winking at her. They hadn’t
discussed Bailey’s plan to stow away on one of the shuttles yet at all, but the
question filled in all the blanks.

Bailey,
all excited, poked Ned in the ribs and laughed. “See! I told ‘ya dough-boy!”
she giggled. “I told ‘ya it was a good idea!”

She
beamed broader and swung around so she could share the same view as Phil.

“They
always . . . always . . . take the one directly opposite the one that just came
back and one place clockwise,” she said pointing. “Turn the page—go, go.” Phil
did. The next page showed a direct overhead view of the ring of shuttle bugs
surrounding the star-like seam in the floor. Each of the shuttles occupied the
space at each point of the star. Each one had a perfect block lettered number
on it—one through six.