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The aliens were dead by morning.
When Hubcap heard the news, he set out to find Owen and yell at him, but he found the human in a state of dismayed guilt.
“It’s our fault,” Owen told him in the hallway. “I don’t know how, or what we did, but this has to be our fault. There’s nothing visibly wrong with them, and we had them under watch all night; there were no frenzies. They must have been allergic to the food we offered them, or to some chemical or germ here — or to us!” He looked heartsick. “What if the aliens are allergic to us?”
Hubcap didn’t have anything good to say to that, so he said nothing. Other people hurried past, all of them looking studiously away from the head biologist’s distress. Even Elliot and the camera crew weren’t around yet.
“I was so careful not to let anything dangerous into the room with them,” Owen went on, hanging his head. “It’s like their hearts just gave out, or their lungs, or they weren’t getting enough oxygen to their brains. What could I have missed? It’s impossible to know!”
Hubcap looked at the human askance. This level of emotion seemed out of character.
Owen broke down. “It’s not fair!” he wailed.
Hubcap frowned and got out his SedEgg. Owen didn’t even see the smack on the arm, and moments later Hubcap was heading for the hospital wing with the unconscious biologist slung over his shoulder. He hissed to himself about being robbed of his opportunity to tear the man a new one — he could hardly take him to task when Owen was unconscious. Oh well. It could wait until he was awake. Maybe by then he’d have words to relay from Vic about just how much Owen’s people had let down the show, and humanity in general. Not to mention Hubcap himself. Scenes of frolicking aliens replayed in his vision centers as he walked.
Hubcap reached the medcenter without so much as a twitch from Owen. As he entered, he was surprised to see a large number of frenzy victims laid out in the recovery room.
“Where did this happen?” he asked the attendant, nodding toward the rows of beds as he set Owen down on an empty one. He expected to hear of some distant expedition to an unexplored location, but he was surprised to learn that they had all happened around the base recently.
“It’s getting worse,” the attendant said tersely. “Keep an eye out, will you?”
Hubcap nodded and promised that he would, knowing full well that this request was more than the casual warning that the attendant gave everyone else.
Not for the first time, he missed being around other robots. If the laws had changed sooner, he thought as he left, Or if this place had enough money for them to have bought a robot worker back when we were property, then I wouldn’t be the only one here immune to the frenzy. With this piled onto the other bad news, he felt unusually world-weary. I’m used to being more durable than the fleshies, but this is a bit much.
In a mood, he walked into the cafeteria to hear a healthy dose of paranoia served with breakfast.
“It’s an alien epidemic,” a heavy-set blonde man was saying. “And it’s only a matter of time before it spreads to us!”
“But an alien disease shouldn’t affect humans,” said his over-muscled neighbor.
“What do you think the frenzy is?” Blondie retorted.
“It’s not a disease; there aren’t any germs involved,” reasoned Muscles. “It’s been tested many times over.”
“So it’s an alien kind of disease, with germ-things we can’t detect!” Blondie exclaimed, spreading his arms.
“Or it’s environmental, some kind of allergy that we can’t detect,” put in a small Asian woman at the same table.
“But that should show up on allergy tests,” argued Muscles.
“I said, something alien that we can’t detect.”
“That’s just a cop-out,” Muscles said.
“I heard that there was evidence that the whole thing is psychological,” a sunburned woman put in.
“What, you mean like mass hysteria?” Tiny asked, leaning on her elbow. “That’s bull.”
“No it’s not; there have been tests—”
“Complete bull,” she said. “I refuse to entertain the notion that we’re all just freaking out because we think we should.”
“It’s more complicated than that—”
“No. I’ve had frenzy, and it came on with no reason.” The dinky woman pointed with a scowl. “Nobody else was freaking out about anything, but suddenly I was worrying about a tool I’d just dropped. It wasn’t even broken! But I was mortified that I’d damaged the freakin’ solid steel torque wrench! I’ve never had a panic attack in my life, but there it was! I’m telling you, there’s something going on here, and it’s not some stupid sheep-mentality group panic.”
“Yes, well—” Sunburn tried.
“You shut up; you’ve never had frenzy,” said a curly-haired man who had been silent until now.
“Neither have you!” she replied.
“Yes I have,” he said. “I just don’t like to talk about it, because it was horrible.”
“Frenzy is always horrible.”
“Well some times are worse than others,” Curly insisted.
“Okay, now we have to hear it,” said Blondie. “Spill.”
“...I don’t want to, all right? Just drop it.”
“No way, we have to hear this,” Blondie insisted.
“No, you don’t,” Curly said.
“Oh, come on; I told my story!” Tiny chimed in.
“I said no!” the man shouted, flinging his coffee cup at her. Hubcap saw coffee fly, one human go down, and others leap to their feet to pile on the one who was now raging about privacy and respect for other people’s feelings.
There were plenty of SedEggs in evidence. Hubcap didn’t step further into the room. Instead he spun on his heel, face blank, and walked back down the hallway toward the dormitories. Surely he could be useful there. Maybe something mechanical needed fixing.