Paul almost gave in to the temptation to grab the doctor and shake him, hard. “Doctor, people are dying out there,” he snapped, as they reached the bottom of the stairs. “It’s not fucking funny!”
“No, of course not,” Jones agreed. He paused for a moment in the corridors. “What would you like to see first? The craft — or at least the images of it — or the prisoners?”
“The craft,” Paul said, forgetting his anger. The craft might be able to help them actually win the war. “What have the engineers found out about it so far?”
Jones led him into a small briefing room, turned out the lights and activated a PowerPoint presentation. “The craft appears — I’m no engineer and we couldn’t spare one to brief you, although they did write the notes — to be a fairly basic SSTO design,” he began. “We actually worked on trying to build one, but we never got the concept quite right and… well, NASA wasn’t too keen on it for some reason. The alien craft looks crude” — he clicked through a series of images of the conical shuttle craft — “but it is, in fact, very sophisticated. One of the engineers even called it sheer genius.”
The image changed again, this time to show the dissembled pieces of the craft. “The craft was designed on a principle that seems to allow them to take the entire thing to pieces very easily,” Jones added. “The field engineers who reached the crash-site were able to figure out how to take it apart, after which the separate pieces, all seven hundred of them, were transported to a secure complex somewhere else. A lot of the electronics were fried by the EMP — that’s probably why the craft got so far off course anyway — but the mechanical aspects were easy to understand. Hell, sir, we could duplicate it, given a few months.”
“Better get working on it,” Paul said. He’d have to recommend that to the President, if the President survived the threat of impeachment. Apparently, these days, not nuking America was considered a crime. The Russians were probably laughing over a glass of vodka. “Can we actually fly them ourselves?”
“The fuel mix is a little unusual and the electronics will have to be replaced carefully, but if we can meet those issues, we could even fly the craft we have now,” Jones said. “Building our own shouldn’t take that long; according to the engineers, it’s one hell of a lot less sophisticated than an F-22 or even the space shuttle.”
“The President will be pleased to hear that,” Paul said, relieved. It was something, perhaps, that they could use in the future. The aliens might be advanced, but they weren’t all-powerful. “And the aliens themselves?”
Jones turned the lights back on and started to fiddle with a computer, playing with it until it showed an image of the aliens, each one in a separate cell. “We think that they’re reasonably unhurt, although it’s hard to tell for certain,” he said. “We’ve kept them separate, but six of them don’t seem to speak English and don’t even seem interested in anything else. They don’t respond to our questions, not even in their own language.”
“So they could be faking it,” Paul said. “They might understand English and are just pretended not to speak it.”
“They might,” Jones agreed. “Some of my… fellow researchers have advocated a more rigorous program of questioning, but if they genuinely can’t speak English, there’s little point in trying to hurt them. We could try to get them to speak in their own language, but they could be saying anything, although samples would be useful to the linguistics people.”
Paul studied the aliens for a long moment. “What are they doing?”
Jones followed his gaze. “We think the males are at prayer,” he said. “The females… they talk to us, or they read the books that we give them, but little else.”
“I see,” Paul said. He peered towards the male aliens. “And that’s the male Redskins?”
Jones winced. “I wish that you wouldn’t use that word,” he said, tightly. “It has too many… issues with Americans. Call them Redshirts, if you must insult them.”
Paul ignored him. Naked, the aliens seemed somehow unhealthy, even though the doctors believed that they were in good — alien — health. They did have reddish-purple skin, their eyes dark pools of shadow… and, despite himself, his gaze slipped to the alien genitals. The alien penis — if penis it was — was a long thin sausage; it seemed to hang down further than…
“I can’t believe I’m thinking this,” he admitted. “How do they have sex?”
Jones gave him a reproving look. “As far as we can tell — and so far we haven’t seen them engaged in sexual congress — the male’s penis is inserted into the female’s vagina. I guess God wasn’t feeling too imaginative when he created these aliens.”
He pulled up the results of an x-ray. “Internally, on the other hand, they’re very different from us,” he said, changing the subject firmly. “Their biology is nothing like ours, so there’s no chance of a War of the Worlds outcome, in either direction.”
Paul scowled. “Could we come up with a biological weapon that might attack them?”
“I would prefer not to speculate,” Jones said. “They have a brain set-up that is comparable to our own, but they also have four hearts, which suggests that a heart attack isn’t going to be anything like as dangerous to them. Two of the males, in fact, have only three working hearts… and it doesn’t seem to have slowed them down any. Their legs have very little in the way of bone structure — much of their strength is concentrated in their upper bodies — and they are, in fact, very much like a human penis.”
Paul stared at him. “Now this I have to hear,” he said. “How are they the same?”
“We think that the… rigidity of the legs depends largely on an act of will,” Jones said. “When tired, their legs get more… bendy and they tend to try to sleep. It could be a matter of endurance; the males here seem to keep their legs usable longer than the females, or… really, sir, this is pretty much a new field of science. It could be that half of what I have told you is completely wrong.”
Paul looked up at the alien female, sitting in a position that would have broken the legs of a Yoga master. “I see your point,” he said. “What have you been able to discover from talking to the females?”
“They generally agree with the documents that the ambassadors brought home,” Jones assured him. “Subject Female One is seemingly completely broken. She answers all of our questions and, otherwise, just sits there. I think she’s in shock, but without a baseline for what represents normal among them, it’s impossible to know for sure. The interesting part is what she thinks of Subject Female Two.”
Paul blinked. “What does she think of the other female?”
“That she’s worthless,” Jones said. A slight hint of disgust echoed through his words. “She is, apparently, sterile and therefore worthless. The female, according to her… friend, should have been thrown into space once it became clear that she wouldn’t be having any children. That’s… odd, because as far as we can tell, the sterile female is the brightest one of the pair.”
“Odd,” Paul agreed. “I suppose I’d better talk to them, right?”
“You should talk to her,” Jones agreed. He sounded tired, pushed beyond endurance. “If nothing else, you might realise just what sort of beings they are.”
“They’re tearing up Texas and killing thousands of humans,” Paul snapped. “I think I know exactly what kind of beings they are!”