“Get your hands away!” Anna said. “You aren’t even wearing gloves!”
He pressed on the flake with the scalpel, crumbling it, and frowned. “Doc, I’ve handled a lot of dead ones in the last year. I’ve been covered in splat. I’ve had ’em keel over on top of me and vomit in my face. If they were going to make me sick, wouldn’t it have happened already?”
They had discussed this topic before, but today there was a new, speculative tone in George’s voice. “You’re wondering about the Army’s quarantine regulations?” she asked. Again George did not answer. “Well, perhaps they’re justified—in principle. There are plenty of diseases with a long incubation period, and if you didn’t know what to look for, you couldn’t spot the infection.”
“As you’ve said. AIDS. And mad cow disease.”
“Creutzfeldt-Jakob,” she corrected.
“And kuru.”
Surprised he had heard of an obscure disease of New Guinea cannibals, Anna glanced up. George had been doing a little research on his own? She knew George wasn’t stupid, despite his unkempt, sometimes goofy persona. In his own way, he was one of the smartest people in Lewisville.
“But those are hard to catch,” George said. “A quarantine wouldn’t have much effect. And no one here has been eating any eetee brains.” Then he reverted to form. He poked at the minutalis, making it quiver like Jell-O, and grinned again. “Sure looks like it would cook up good on a grill, though.”
Anna had not eaten dinner. The image was unfortunate. Her mouth watered and her stomach grumbled. She sliced away the last of the dura, and at last was able to slip her gloved hand beneath the minutalis and lift it onto the scale.
One-point-five-four kilos. A middling weight. From the accounts of Ben’s deputies and her own labors here, she had become convinced that variation in the size of this particular organ correlated with social or military rank. The eetees with the very largest minutalis were always the ones carrying the fear guns and directing the others. Her first theory had been that the minutalis manufactured dominance pheromones, but then she had begun to wonder about the magnetic anomalies, and the odd rabbit-ear deposits of metallic compounds in the sagittal crest—
George tapped his scalpel on the metal table. “Doc, we haven’t talked about it in a long time—have you or Joe Hansen made any progress on how the eetees use the fear guns?”
“Oh, sure,” she said, removing the minutalis to a tray under the hood. She started to wash it down with ethanol. “Molecular microwave transmitters. Proteins with encapsulated crystalline segments, manufactured inside specialized neural tissue. That’s how the eetees communicate with each other, too.”
“What?” The stark astonishment in his voice made her turn. “Have you said anything about this to anyone else?”
“I’m being sarcastic, George,” she said crossly.
“But you have a theory.”
“Guesses. Flights of fancy. I’m not a neurochemist or a molecular biologist, or, for that matter, a physicist, and I don’t have the resources—”
“But you have evidence—”
“Nothing worth the name.”
George gazed down at the eetee. “Too bad we couldn’t ever bring you a live one and do the CAT scan thing. See what lights up when they do different things.”
“No, on that particular idea I’m in complete agreement with the sheriff.”
The last thing in the world Anna wanted was a live eetee to experiment on. She did not even like George in her morgue. She wanted it cold, silent, and stark, filled only with her well-tended garden of the dead. She wanted to keep dissecting her specimen, taking it apart organ by organ, slice by tiny slice, protein by protein. Over the dead she had total control.
But she also wanted George to stay. She wanted to touch his warm flesh and feel his hands on her own skin. It was the only thing these days that made her feel like a human being.
“What’s really on your mind, George?” she asked.
“Doc,” he said, “I know you aren’t going to like this. You need to clean out your lab. Tonight. Get rid of your friend here. Destroy all your samples and slides. Remove all your files. Hide them—incinerate them.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Anna said.
“It’s not Ben you’re dealing with anymore. The Army is confiscating everything that came out of that ship—”
“So I’ve heard. They want the goodies for themselves.”
“They are also quarantining anyone who’s worked with eetee goodies, and anyone who’s had contact with eetees dead or alive.”
“Not to mention anyone who protests the policy,” Anna said. “It’s not a real quarantine, George. If the Army was serious about an outbreak, the first people they would isolate would be those with the greatest exposure. And that’s you deputies.”
“I disagree that they’re not serious,” George said. “They are extremely serious. And very soon someone will tell them about Dr. Anna King and how she trades pharmaceuticals for eetee corpses in good condition. How you have a whole fucking eetee research project down here.”
“I keep a very clean lab,” Anna said. “They can check it if they want. I can’t believe the Army could be less sensible than the sheriff on the subject of basic research.”
“Oh, yes, they could be,” said George. “You know, don’t you, that Joe and all of his files have disappeared?”
Anna had heard, but she’d dismissed it as a wild rumor. The thought of ignorant soldiers ransacking her lab, her refuge, her life—destroying a year of work—terrified and enraged her. She tried to push the thought away. “I’m happy to share everything I’ve learned, though I’m sure people elsewhere with better equipment have found out a whole lot more than I have.”
“Suppose,” George said, “sharing is not the goal. Suppose they want to know everything you’ve learned, and then make sure no one else ever sees that information.”
“But what could they possibly want to conceal? It’s not as if the eetees are a secret!”
“Look,” said George, “the Army comes here, to an enemy crash site, but instead of going after the eetees, they devote all their manpower and attention to this—whatever it is. It’s important, a real disease, a—a real something. Maybe they don’t know exactly. Maybe they know the symptoms but not the cause—maybe they don’t know whether it’s a disease or an effect of eetee technology. But whatever this quarantine is about, for them it is taking precedence over everything else. They are serious about it.”
Anna tried once more to dismiss George’s arguments. She found she could not. She gazed wistfully at the minutalis and her waiting culture plates. “Well, then,” she said, at last, “I suppose I should take a look at Harvey Gundersen’s dog.”
“His dog?!”
“Harvey claims the dog has an eetee disease.” Anna grimaced. “That the coyotes have it, too, and they have developed not just dementia but telepathic powers. Yes, I know what it sounds like—but today he brought in the dog, and it does have some odd lumps. I said I’d do biopsies and what blood work I have the facilities for.”
“You have it here? Jesus, Anna, get rid of the dog, get rid of the eetee. Now! I’ll help you. They will come here. Your only hope is to make sure they aren’t ever able to pin this on you. Trading drugs is only a nasty rumor. You have never dissected an eetee.”
“No, George. If the dog really has an eetee disease, it needs studying and I need to tell the colonel whatever I can find out. If people are in danger from it, I’d be criminally irresponsible not to!”