AT EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, Neil, Mavra, and the rest of the soldiers from the plane followed an armed escort to a temporary dorm.
“This doesn’t feel right,” Mavra said before they even went inside. The place they were led to didn’t appear to be a normal dormitory, long and skinny and several stories high. Instead, it sat squat and square, and very wide. It looked rather new.
As soon as they stepped inside, Neil said, “There’s a medical facility nearby or inside here somewhere.”
“You smell something?”
“Sure do.”
They followed Master Sgt. Clarke. At the entrance, a young woman in a lab coat checked names and pointed either to the left or the right. Mavra and Neil were escorted by a different young woman in a lab coat down the right hallway, which stretched away from the front and around a corner. Rooms lined the outside wall only. Mavra noticed the lack of windows as they walked down the hall. “We’re trapped,” she said. The one feeling she didn’t like was feeling trapped.
“You’ll be staying here,” the young woman said as she stopped next to their door. “Someone will come for you soon.”
Mavra nodded. Not ten feet down the hall a double door led into the large center area of the building. They were close to the operations room, or medical rooms, if Neil was right about the smell. “We’re not trapped yet,” he said after closing the door behind them. “We’ll have to wait and see whether we have any freedom. But now’s not the time to find out.”
“Okay, but I feel trapped already,” Mavra said. “Whether it’s true or not.”
“You’ve said it enough, sweetheart. Try to relax for now. By the way, quarantine is a form of surveillance. We’re not going to get around that.”
“I wish I had my cards.”
“And I wish I had my computer or my workbench…even my reader.”
She walked around the small room and touched the desk, the back of the chair, the single three-drawer dresser. She poked her head into the bathroom. There was a shower, sink, and toilet. Then she turned back to the room and stopped next to the bunk beds against the outside wall. “What do you think they mean by soon?”
“A couple hours. They’ll feed us lunch for sure,” Neil said. There was a knock at the door, and a woman’s voice asked permission to enter. “Maybe sooner than lunch.” He winked at Mavra and opened the door.
Mavra looked at the woman’s nametag first off. “Shall we call you Dr. Bursk?”
“Yes, please,” she said. Neil closed the door behind her as she sat a small medical bag on the desk and opened it. She looked at Mavra. “I understand you touched the…um…”
“We just call them aliens,” Mavra said. “No one has named them yet.” She saw Neil laugh silently behind the doctor.
“May I see your hands?” In a moment, Dr Bursk pulled on plastic gloves and reached for Mavra’s outstretched hands.
Noticing that Dr. Bursk wasn’t going to be swayed by humor, Mavra placed her right hand, the one that the female alien had held so tightly, into the doctor’s hand, palm up. “You going to take a skin graft or something?”
She held up a tool. “This is like a crumb remover, similar to what waiters use in fancy restaurants. I’m going to scrape it over your palm and collect any microscopic particles that may still be there.” She looked up at Mavra. “I know you’ve traveled and touched other things along the way, probably washed your hands, but anything that you picked up will most likely still be present…more than you can imagine.” She scraped Mavra’s palm, placed the tool into a plastic bag and zipped it shut before placing it back into her bag. She repeated the action with Mavra’s other hand.
Neil stepped around her. “I’m surprised no one did this earlier.”
“I’m going to take blood next, but I’d like for you to go into the bathroom and wash the area thoroughly first.”
Mavra walked into the bathroom. “With soap?”
“Everything you’ll need is under the sink on the first shelf,” Dr. Bursk yelled in.
Mavra listened as she cleaned up.
Neil said, “They’ve already checked out the aliens and found nothing important, so why do this now?”
“Dr. Altman, you must know that the research doesn’t end with your first findings. Especially since these aliens are maturing at such a fast pace. We don’t know what changes they might have gone through, what new chemicals are present in their bodies, on their skin. How their metabolism interacts with our environment.”
“She told you,” Mavra said as she walked past Neil.
“Has anything been found?” Neil said. “I noticed the aliens were pretty quiet in that plane. I suspect you tranquilized them and tested them right away before exposing the whole crew.”
Dr. Bursk smiled at him as she got Mavra ready for her blood work—her first show of emotion. “You are very astute. To answer your question, no. We haven’t found anything different. But as you know, that doesn’t mean we won’t.”
“So, how long do you keep us here? How long do you continue to test the aliens? What are you going to do with them?” He took a step toward her. “You can’t kill them.”
Mavra perked up. “No. You wouldn’t do that, would you?”
“Now, now, no one said anything about destroying the aliens in order to test them,” Dr. Bursk said as she slipped a third test tube over the back of the needle to be filled. “There. Hold this over your arm and bend it for a few minutes.” She placed the blood samples into a plastic bag and put that into her medical bag. She pulled out a flashlight and with her thumb lifted Mavra’s eyelid. “Look up.”
Neil stepped away and lowered his chin as though thinking deeply.
Mavra let the doctor go through the rest of the brief physical.
“All finished with you,” she said.
“I’m next?” Neil said.
Mavra got up and let the doctor go through her process with Neil. At the end, the doctor thanked them and left.
“You got pretty quiet,” Mavra said.
“Routine stuff. I feel bad for the aliens.”
“What can we do?” Mavra tapped the desk as Neil paced the rest of the room. She knew to stay out of his way. “I don’t like how she said destroy instead of kill,” she finally said.
“You know, it’s one thing if there’s a crashed spaceship—and I’m not saying there is or that I know anything like that—but if the aliens had been dead already, that would be one thing. But these two are alive.” He wrinkled his cheeks, questioning his own words. “I don’t know what it is, but for some reason…” he shook his head from side to side and closed his eyes for a moment. “I don’t see any reason to harm them. They’re here. It’s not their fault their race left them behind.”
Mavra didn’t know how to respond. It wasn’t like Neil to allow his feelings to outweigh his scientific curiosity. She stared at him while he talked about what little they might learn about the aliens if they were destroyed.
“Destroyed,” he said.
“It’s such a cold word. But we don’t know for sure what they’re going to do? I don’t sense anything in particular except that we can’t leave and I don’t like that.”
“Clouding your reception,” Neil said. “We’ll give this some time. I have to think about this too.”
“Now, that’s my Neil,” she said. Mavra lay on the bottom bunk and closed her eyes, but not for long. She heard him walking in circles like a caged cat. He tapped the desk, scratched his head. He was a noisy pacer. She sat back up. “This really bothers you,” she said.
Neil pulled out the desk chair and sat down, placed one elbow on the desk and rested his chin on his fist. He stared at the wall, not at Mavra. “They’re innocent,” he said.
“You were innocent, too.”
“Maybe it’s that. Maybe it’s because I know how it feels to be an experiment, tested to see what might happen, how I’d react.” He swiveled in his seat toward his wife, but still didn’t look into her eyes. “My whole childhood I was different, and I knew it. My mom played out her theories on me. Do you have any idea how often I was connected to all kinds of electronics? Wires everywhere to test my brain, my heart…my reactions.” With his elbows on his knees, Neil lowered his face into his hands. “They shouldn’t have to go through that. I don’t care where they’re from. What’s worse is that they’re orphans. They have no parents.”
She got up from the bed and placed a hand on his back. “I know, honey. I agree.” She took a deep breath. “They wouldn’t destroy the aliens with her being pregnant would they? I mean, if she is pregnant.”
“Maybe procreation is their second mission. You know, if the first one, signaling their own species, doesn’t pan out.” He shrugged. “It’s not going to pan out. We know that.” He patted her leg and sat upright. “We’re the only ones who seem to care about them as living beings. We’re all they have.”
Mavra let Neil’s head push against her stomach. She bent over him as though protecting him. She seldom saw him in a vulnerable state, and something about it both worried her and made her love him even more. She reached for his hand and looked at his watch. “Let’s rest for a half hour or so. They’ll be coming for us at lunchtime, like you said. Maybe we can get some information then.”
“Sure,” he said.
She pulled him toward the bunk and let him lie down against the wall and lay on her side next to him, her arm over his chest, her head resting on his bicep. She listened to his heartbeat and wondered what went on inside his head, both sides. How did he keep them separate, yet allow them to communicate with one another? She didn’t fully understand how it all worked. There must have been some synapses shared between both sides, but which ones? How?
Before long, the awaited knock came to the door and a young man’s voice announced that it was lunchtime. Mavra rolled out of bed and Neil rose behind her. When she opened the door, she found a soldier standing outside. He held no weapon.
“This way.” He turned and walked past the double doors to the far end of the hall and made a quick left. Two more doors opened to the left and he led them through those doors into a cafeteria style eating area. “Bland,” Neil said. “You can hardly smell the food.”
The soldier stepped aside and let them get into line with other familiar faces.
Mavra scanned the room and decided to sit next to a few of the women and men wearing lab coats. Neil was right, the potatoes had the most flavor, even though there was chicken on her plate. She wondered how they could eat that way day after day. Perhaps the main chow hall on the base was better. She poked at her broccoli, ate a few pieces of the cardboard chicken just for the protein, and tried to shovel a third forkful of mashed potatoes into her mouth before giving up completely.
Neil had practically finished his plateful of food, leaving some potatoes and a little broccoli, but none of the chicken.
“You want mine?” she said, pointing at her plate.
He stood. “I’ll get more.”
While he was gone, Mavra asked one of the lab technicians how the day was going. A young girl in her mid-twenties answered. “Pretty well. It’s amazing that we get to be involved in something so, so…” She let the sentence stand unfinished.
“So alien,” Mavra said.
The girl smiled. “Yeah.”
“Did they come out of their deep sleep easily enough? I mean, after they were tranquilized.” She took her cue from Neil’s observation.
“One of them did,” she said.
“What do you mean?”
“The female took a little longer to wake up. And the fetus—”
A young man sitting beside her placed a hand on her arm to stop her.
“Fetus?” Mavra pressed.
“I’m sorry,” she looked at her partner, “we’re not supposed to talk about it.”
Mavra turned to the young man. “Well, that’s just not true. We were specially called in to work on this case and we’ve been security cleared for access to everything.”
“Then why aren’t they letting you into the lab?” the man said.
From behind her, Neil said, “Because Mavra was in direct contact with the alien in an open environment and needed to have blood samples taken first. Her welfare was on the line.” He spoke to Mavra. “You didn’t tell him that we have full clearance from General Harkins?” He looked at the young tech. “I’m sure you know him?” Neil remained standing until the young man answered him.
“Yes, sir. I didn’t know.”
“It’s all right,” Neil said as he sat down. “Back to the question. You indicated that the female was, in fact, pregnant, and that it took her longer to come out of her tranquilized state. What about the fetus?”
“It appears to have minimal movement,” the girl said. “But we don’t know what’s natural for them.” She said it in a hurry, as though covering her steps.
Mavra reached to touch the girl’s hand. “You don’t mean minimal. There’s no heartbeat either, is there?”
“How would you know that?” the girl said. She looked as though she was going to cry. “Who told you?”
Mavra said, “What other tests are they going to do? Is there any plan to try to talk with them?”
The young man scoffed. “They’re animals. They’re not intelligent.”
“Then how did they put that equipment together?” Neil said.
“We found some sort of programming chip at the base of the skull of the male. The female has one, too, but we didn’t remove it yet. We were…”
“Afraid after how long it took for her to respond from the tranquilizer,” the young girl finished his sentence.
“That’ll be next.” Neil shoveled food into his mouth as though he was trying not to speak.
Mavra easily recognized when he was angry. This was one of those times. He wiped his mouth with his napkin and took a long drink. She stood, then reached down and pulled him up. “We’d better go,” she said, knowing that she didn’t need Neil yelling at the lab techs. The situation had nothing to do with them.
He glanced at the lab techs. “We’ll see you soon,” he said to the two techs.
The young girl held a napkin over her mouth, and looking distraught.
Mavra led Neil away from the table and out the door. As they turned down their hall, they saw a guard at the far end, near the entrance. “Do you really think they’re going to allow us in to see them?”
“No,” Neil said.
***
“The baby,” Kek-ta said while holding her hands over her stomach.
Chit-Chit-ta sat a few inches from her, his hand over the bandage on the back of his neck. He looked up as she spoke, then inched his way toward her. “I’m here.” He slipped his arm over her shoulder.