The situation went from baffling to dead serious in a heartbeat. Jill called his name and went running toward them. The alien, ignoring her, disappeared behind a second door. She hesitated a moment, then went to the door Nate had gone through. She pounded on it, but nothing happened. Nate screamed again. He sounded terrified.
Jill pounded harder, yelling at the door to open, but it wouldn’t budge. She ran back to the door the alien had entered and this one opened immediately. Inside was an observation room, just like the one she’d been in. The alien was seated at the computer, his fingers dancing over the screen. He peered through the window into the next room. Jill stepped up to look.
Nate had stopped screaming. He was backed up against the doorway, a horrified look on his face. He was not alone. The bed-nest in this room was occupied by something the likes of which Jill had never seen. It was an alien, or so she thought, but its body was huge and grossly fat. It was naked, with a whole row of nipples and a pubis partially hidden by waving legs. Through its rolls of translucent skin Jill could make out bubbles or sacs.
As her eyes grazed over the corpulent mass, pulled by a sickened fascination, she saw that one of the sacs had something in it. She knew at once what it was and thus what the sacs were. They were eggs. Most of them were empty, but this one had a tiny embryo inside. As the mass on the bed shifted, the embryo’s face rolled lazily to face Jill. Its large head and eyes looked like any other embryo she had ever seen, but there was something wrong. The thing was frozen in a calcified position. It was dead.
“Oh my god,” Jill whispered.
The alien on the bed was a female, the first they’d seen on this planet. And she was horrid. The creature lay quivering, barely alive herself. She slowly turned her enormous filmy eyes to Nate. He pressed back harder against the door, shuddering.
“Nate, can you hear me?” Jill called. He gave no response. She knocked on the glass, but it was hard as a diamond and scarcely gave off a vibration, much less a noise.
Oh god, Jill thought. Tell me the females don’t eat the males on this planet. That would explain their reluctance to breed.
But the female didn’t lunge at Nate—far from it. She looked completely immobile. Next to Jill, the alien at the computer pressed something, sent his high chipmunky voice echoing into the next room.
“Do your duty, citizen! Do your duty!”
“You’ve got to let him out of there!” Jill demanded loudly. The alien ignored her.
“Hello!” She bent over, waving her hand in front of him to get his attention. But he was focused on the computer screen again.
“Bad!” the alien muttered. He turned those long fingers to a set of controls.
Jill, uncomprehendingly, watched the mechanical arm start to move. Nate backed away, sure it was coming for him, but the arm headed for the female. She made a high squealing cry of panic and protest as it approached. The needle-probe didn’t pause but embedded itself into her skin above the dead embryo and sucked it up, sac and all. Jill squeezed her eyes shut, felt her gorge rise. In the next room, Nate screamed and resumed his pounding on the door.
“Do your duty, citizen,” the alien said over the intercom, “or I shall report you. Do your duty!”
On the bed, the female weakly unfolded in invitation. Nate glanced over his shoulder, pounded on the door more fiercely. The look on his face—Jill couldn’t bear it.
And she did not like him being alone with that… that thing.
She ran back into the hall and pushed at the door to his room, pushed where it went into the wall, trying to get it to slide. Nothing.
“Nate, can you hear me?”
“Jill! Get me out of here!”
“I’m trying, but the door won’t budge!”
“Well… make it!”
Before she could figure out how to do that, the alien stomped into the hall from the observation room. Despite his inhuman features he had a distinctly petulant air. He would have walked right into Jill if she hadn’t backed up. He might be able to see Nate, but it appeared he still could not see her. The door opened at his touch.
A terrified Nate stood on the other side.
“Nate!”
“Bad! Move back!” the alien ordered.
Nate dodged around the alien into the hall. The alien, with a mutter, stomped into the room, heading for the nest.
“Are you all right?” Jill asked as Nate grabbed her hand.
“I will be. Let’s get out of here!”
Jill resisted his pull. “Wait!”
She couldn’t resist a final look into the room. The female was straining as if to get up. She appeared to be choking, her mouth gaping open, her face going from a gray to purple. The frail little alien paced helplessly beside her as if unsure what to do. He kept muttering but seemed unable or unwilling to actually touch her.
Nate tugged Jill again and this time they ran, down the hall, through the waiting room, out into the street, back outside, into the bright, hot sun.
They were quiet as they walked back to the apartment, quiet as they sat on the floor and ate food bars. Jill could tell Nate was feeling the lethargic effect of the planet—he looked tired. She was feeling it herself. And the clinic… the clinic had gotten to them both.
“Jill?” he said at last, clearing his throat.
“Yes?”
“I’ve been thinking about how far away from Earth we are.” Nate looked down at his bar, half-eaten. “And I was thinking that… You were right. We may never get home.”
Jill sighed. “This place has all the technology we could ever need for anything. Including getting home. It may take us a while to find it.”
He looked at her, his eyes savage with the purple stain of exhaustion under them. “A while.”
“Well. Quite a while, actually.” She smiled. “What are you worried about? You’re the one who said this place was lucky.”
“Not so lucky for the aliens,” he muttered, looking back down at his food.
Jill could feel that Nate was really in the thick of it. She tried her cheeriest voice. “Look at the bright side. We have water, food, and shelter, and all of those indefinitely, as far as we can tell. We can set up a more permanent place to live—a home base, if you will. And we could use an air car or two to save time. You’ll have fun with that. Perhaps in a few days you can see if you can find one.”
He didn’t answer.
“I know this is hard, Nate. But the important thing is the work. We should be able to take notes on the computer now. Remind me to try that tomorrow morning. Of course, the biggest priority is to learn how they’re using wave technology, particularly for things like space travel and energy—maybe even medicine or the production of goods. We really have to go see those antennae tomorrow.”
Nate clenched his jaw. She didn’t seem to be getting through to him. The clinic had been awful, so very alien and heartbreaking, too, in a way. But it wouldn’t do for them to brood. She decided to talk about something she’d been holding back, the way a mother might offer a pouting child a new toy.
“Listen, you’ve been so worried about the government getting the one-minus-one, about how it could be used as a weapon. Well, it’s true, there is the potential for a devastating weapon, if you pushed the negative one pulse. But what if you pushed the one pulse? You could create a climate of benevolence, couldn’t you? Imagine the possibilities! Everything you were saying about ‘there’s always a catch,’ well, that might have been true up until now. But if we could increase the crest of the one-minus-one with a one pulse, maybe for the whole world, that wouldn’t have to be the case any longer! Think about what that could mean for us, for our entire species. That’s why those antennae interest me. Tomorrow we can—”
“Jill, what is wrong with you? Are you crazy or just plain stupid?” Nate’s eyes were blazing from under a deeply furrowed brow.