"Huh-?"
'Too bad about Lieutenant Dannenfelser, tripping and falling into the wall like that."
"Valada? What are you talking about?" Siegel was staring at her.
"I know what I saw," she said firmly. She glanced around to the others. "Poor little Randy Dannenfelser was prancing around on the tarmac, celebrating our return, and he accidentally ran into a wall. Captain McCarthy hurt his knuckles when he went to help him. Right?"
"Thanks, Christine," I said. "But you can be court-martialed for perjury. Besides, this is one I'd prefer to brag about."
"Pardon me for disagreeing, Captain, but I don't think so."
"I insist. This is my battle, not yours."
Valada sniffed and shrugged. "Hold out your hands." She shook the can vigorously and then began spraying my knuckles. The cooling mist stopped both the bleeding and the pain almost immediately.
I looked past her shoulder. Dannenfelser, helped by his friends, was hobbling up to me. He looked like hell, puffy and red. Tomorrow he'd look even worse. Valada saw my look and tried to step between us. I said, "It's all right, I'm through." Even so, I could see Siegel and Lopez poised to separate us again.
Valada finished with me and turned to Dannenfelser to attend to his wounds. He waved her off and pointed one trembling finger at me. It took him a moment to summon the words, but finally he managed to croak out, "I know who picked you up. You haven't heard the last of this. I know who picked you up."
"Then you know more than I do." I started to turn away, then turned back. "Reilly and Willig and Locke are dead because of your petty little stunt. You're lucky I didn't kill you. I still ought to feed you to a worm-"
Abruptly, I stopped. Dannenfelser's expression never changed. Why was I wasting my breath? "Aw, the hell with it." I picked up the autolog cases, pushed past Valada and Siegel, and headed toward the distant terminal.
But the stingfly and its grubs are only supporting characters in this particular biological drama.
The insect's more important role is to provide an avenue of transportation-and communication-for the Chtorran bacteriological and viral communities.
Because of the creature's voracious appetite, it is continually injecting and sucking blood from the gastropede population of the mandala settlement. Ecological models demonstrate that this behavior will produce and maintain a uniformity of microorganism populations throughout the gastropede inhabitants of the camp. The complete range of microorganism varieties will be found in all gastropedes accessible to the stingfly swarm.
—The Red Book,
(Release 22.19A)
Chapter 29
The Bald Man
"Being dead means never having to say you're silly."
-SOLOMON SHORT
The first thing I wanted to do was climb into a hot shower, dial it up to something just short of scalding, and let the steam rise up around me forever; no, make that the second thing. The first thing I wanted to do was find Lizard and see if she was still talking to me; but when I got back to the apartment, she wasn't there.
But the bald man was.
What struck me first about him was how shiny his head was. He was totally hairless. Tall and thin, he had a big nose and bright blue eyes made larger by his glasses. He wore an Army uniform and a familiar smile. And he was sitting in my chair-my comfortable chair-nursing a soda. He switched off the TV and stood up when I entered.
The last time I'd seen him was at the meeting where the President had authorized the use of two nuclear devices against the Colorado infestation. He'd looked familiar then too.
I didn't ask, "How did you get in?" The answer was obvious. He had four stars on his shoulders and an Uncle Ira insignia. Instead, I asked, "Where's Lizard?"
"She asked me to talk to you first."
"I see. Who the hell are you?" I was certain I knew his voice; it gave me eerie shivers. The last time I'd spoken to this man it had been bad news too.
"You don't recognize me, do you, Jim?"
"If I had, would I have asked?" I dropped my cases on the floor and shrugged out of my jacket. "You know, there are rules about invading people's private quarters-even for generals."
He tossed me a key. "Here. You can give this back to General Tirelli. Or just leave it on the desk there."
I decided not to stand at attention. Whatever trouble I was in, I probably couldn't make it any worse by making myself at home in my-our-own apartment. I started to pull off my boots, hesitated out of misplaced courtesy, then decided what the heck, he was here by his own choice, and pulled them off anyway. The olfactory result of three days in the same pair of sweat socks was worse than I had anticipated. For a moment I thought a gorp had crawled in and died. I peeled off the grungy socks and threw them into the fireplace, then padded barefoot into the kitchen, hoping to escape-but my feet insisted on coming with me. I grabbed a Coke from the fridge. "You want a refill?" I asked with hostile courtesy.
"I'm fine, thanks." He'd followed me into the kitchen. He rinsed out his glass and put it in the sink. "Jim," he said. "Don't run an attitude on me. This is serious."
"You still haven't answered my question."
"I'm your fairy godmother," he said. He wasn't joking.
"I've had enough to do with fairies today, thanks-"
"I'm Uncle Ira. "
"Bullshit. Uncle Ira's dead-I was there." It seemed like ages ago, but the memory was still terrifyingly real. The worm had been on the stage. In a glass case. The glass had broken. The worm had surged out into the auditorium. Into the audience. I shot out its eyes, first one and then the other. It had nearly killed me. Uncle Ira had been in the front row. He had been one of the first to die. Or had he?
Uncle Ira had been tall and thin, with dark curly hair and round glasses and bright blue eyes and a big nose and
"Oh God." The chill came sleeting up my spine. "It is you." The hand grenade went off somewhere behind my heart, and my brain went into overload, and about two nanoseconds later I started shaking. I felt like I was fainting. I put both hands on the edge of the sink and held on hard, waiting for the feeling to pass-it just got worse. I stared at the empty glass. My reality had been fragile enough; now it was crumbling. My throat was so dry, camels would have died in it. "Who else is still alive?" I managed to ask.
He shook his head. "I'm the only one."
"And even if you weren't, you'd still say you were. Everybody lies about everything."
He put his hand on my shoulder. "Look at me, Jim."
I pulled away and kept staring into the sink. "This is another shell game, isn't it? A shell within a shell within a shell."
"Remember the political circumstances of that conference? Most of the Fourth World delegates didn't even believe there were such things as Chtorrans then. They weren't there to cooperate with the United States. They were there to loot us; each of those delegates had an agenda. You saw them. I know you remember-you lost your temper and stood up to argue with Dr. Kwong in front of three thousand people. They knew we had a secret operation. They knew I was connected to it. So we faked my death when we released the worm. It lent credibility to the whole operation, and it gave us a chance to bury the real Uncle Ira operation so deep it didn't exist anymore."
"You mean the Uncle Ira operation I've been a part of-" Abruptly, the meaning of his words sank in. I looked up from the sink and stared at him, aghast. His eyes were incongruously sad. "It's only a cover, isn't it?" I said. "There's a deeper level."
"Yes, there is." He said it without emotion.
"And you're here to enroll me, aren't you? That's the way these things usually work. Or kill me, right?"