“I never heard that,” says Zendahl.
“It’s not exactly priority knowledge. Until now. So if an alien shows up here at all, there’s one chance in seven it’ll be a headwalker.”
Zendahl doesn’t correct Louis’ arithmetic. “Only seven.”
“Well, there’s lots of variation within each basic type. Humans and Apkallu are both vertical four-limbed bilaterians—which is why the genetic engineering worked—and this critter and the Ancient Enemy are both…”
“…headwalkers. Okay.”
“Why haven’t the Chi-Po noticed this?” asks Jessica.
Zendahl looks at her. “Shy-po?”
“Chicago police. Why do they insist it’s a weather balloon?”
“We got better photo-analysis equipment?” Louis says.
The colonel shakes his head. “Not that much better. Silk purse and sow’s ears. You can only squeeze so much info from low-rezz security cameras. But the mind is a wonderful thing. We see what we’re mentally prepared to see. That’s why eyewitness accounts and satellite photo interpretations are so tricky.” He ponders the matter some and decides that someone—the “Chi-Po,” the FBI—will eventually take a closer look. “It’s harder to change a mind than to form it in the first place. New data gets filtered through that first impression, just like through a consensus scientific theory. Ninety percent of the time, that keeps you from going off the deep end. The rest of the time, it keeps you from seeing the bleeding obvious. Next question: What’s a headwalker doing on Earth?”
“Exploring?” suggests Jessica.
“Scouting for an invasion fleet?” Louis proposes. “Don’t headwalkers in general send out colony pods now and then? Geez, I haven’t thought about those old stories since I was a kid. I always thought they were folktales.”
“Colonizing?”
“There’s only one of them.”
“We’ve only seen one of them.”
Zendahl studies the video again while he finishes his chop. Guiscard is a superb chef, and the chop deserves more attention than he can give it. He promises himself a more leisurely meal on his return trip. Pointing to a corner of the screen, he tells Jessica, “Focus in on that. I want to see what the headwalker broke cover to chase.” He clears the plates and places them to the side of the table. Ancient Enemy or not, the creature’s presence on Earth is troubling and he wonders how he can bring it to the attention of Space Command without destroying his own credibility. Spring an alien invasion on NORAD without proper groundwork and they will decide it’s a hoax and Zendahl is either a hoaxer or a fool, neither of which would do his career much good, even if he were proven right in the end. Especially if he were proven right in the end.
Jessica zooms and cleans the image, heightens the contrast. “It’s an arm,” she decides, drawing Zendahl back to the screen. “There appears to be a body lying on the paving stones.”
“Dead?”
“Not moving. And, Bruno? It was there before the headwalker showed itself.”
“A drunk.”
“Maybe.”
“I been wondering why the alien popped up like that,” Louis says. “You’d think it’d want to keep things on the D/L.”
“I don’t know,” says Jessica. “The headwalkers in the old stories weren’t famous for being shrinking violets.”
“Check for other surveillance in the area,” Zendahl said. “Try the other warehouses. If there was a drunk, there’s probably a bar, too.”
“I thought of a reason it broke cover,” says Louis. “It was hungry.” Zendahl and Jessica look at him and he shrugs. “It’s a reason.”
They watch the video to its end, when the image begins to break up. When it settles down once more, the alien is gone, but the arm still lies there.
“Well,” says Louis with a certain amount of cheer, “that’s a relief.”
It takes a few hours to identify nearby establishments and requisition copies of their surveillance videos. The Chicago police have been doing the same thing, trying to pin down their fleeing suspect, and Zendahl senses a growing curiosity on their part regarding the apparent interest of the Air Force in a petty burglary. He sticks to the story about a missing NASA aerostat, but drops a hint that it might be a secret military operation and questions would be unwelcome.
“A deception within a deception,” says Louis. “I’m impressed.”
“Just hope I don’t trip over the tangle.” He calls Annie Troy at the Pentagon. She’s a civilian contractor in CYBERCOM and can set up a spoof in case anyone tries to check with Goddard. Everyone is home for the weekend, but he leaves a message on her phone. He also asks her to check for any unusual activity in orbit over the past several days.
“Headwalker had to come from somewhere,” he tells the others after he closes the call.
Or did it? When the additional surveillance videos finally download, Zendahl and his two partners split them up and comb through them. Nowhere do they find a record of the headwalker’s arrival at the warehouse. It might have been born there for all they can determine. And when it passes from the scene, it is not to any place covered by other cameras. The Land of the Free is still not entirely monitored. But Zendahl notices something curious on one of the files.
In the video from an after-hours bar diagonal from the warehouse, a small drama plays out in which a tall Chinese man takes on and defeats three gangbangers who are trying to steal his car. Zendahl finds this affair curiously refreshing, but the sequel is mystifying.
The man’s car is largely off-screen. Only a portion of what Zendahl takes to be its left front fender can be glimpsed. Once the man leaves the frame (and presumably hops in his car), the static commences—and the headwalker comes a-running. But the static seems to originate with the vehicle itself because there is a moment when only the fender is breaking up and the rest of the scene is still clear.
The static is a common cause affecting all the cameras in the area. It originated in the car, Zendahl thinks. That’s what the headwalker wanted. Either the driver or the car itself or some component of it. He shakes his head. Maybe the damn thing’s running a chop shop.
The Council will want further investigations. Zendahl can see this as clearly as a man falling from the penthouse can, during his plummet, see the sidewalk below. But for all that he might insist “so far, so good,” the prospect is not entirely encouraging. These inquiries can go south on him in so many ways, destroy his career, ruin his family. It may even unmask the League. Given the record of the aborigines regarding minorities in their midst, Col. Zendahl can imagine no happy outcome from that.
Consider now a headwalker, outnumbered at six billion to one and feeling in consequence more than a little insecure.
Alien life, we are told, would be so unlike human life as to defy understanding. Indeed, they may possess senses, organs, and appetites unknown to us. What lusts do bats endure that compel their squeals? Does it pleasure them to receive the echo? If human minds cannot grasp the hankerings of bats, what chance is there for a meeting of whatever serves for minds with headwalkers?
And yet, all things pursue the good insofar as they know the good, and that is whatever preserves and completes their nature. For inanimate bodies, this preservation is called “inertia”; for animate bodies, it is called “life.” The struggle to maintain existence that Darwin saw in living kinds is only a higher form of the struggle of a boulder to remain stubbornly in place.
Which is to say that while the finer points of headwalker philosophy may forever elude our ken, the basics can be grasped. The headwalker is desperately trying to repair a crippled scout ship with what amounts to wattles and twigs filched from unwary natives. We can understand if a certain anxiety grips him, no matter how outré his body and eccentric its appetites.