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DR. DELAWARE APPROACHED me with his hands behind his back. An air of arrogance enveloped him everywhere he went.
“The five-year-olds are screaming again,” he informed me.
I sighed and went to the five-year-old storage. I peeked through the window. Sure enough, all of them were screaming.
I turned to Dr. Delaware. “What did you do?” I asked him.
He smiled, displaying a row of yellow teeth. “I only tapped on the glass,” he said.
I pulled him away from the door by his upper arm. He looked at me, shocked at my action.
“They have very sensitive hearing,” I whispered. “Tapping on the glass for them is like firing a shotgun to us.”
“Well, I had no idea,” Dr. Delaware said. His wicked smile told me differently, however.
There were twelve of them. All five years old, all transferred from the four-year-old storage room just days ago. I didn’t like that their rooms were referred to as storage. They were living creatures, not surplus objects to get out of sight.
It was about thirteen years ago when the first of them arrived. They came down with the annual rain showers as seeds. Vines grew from the seeds at rapid paces. Flowers appeared on the vines, similar to melons. The flowers grew into pods that looked like a cross between a cantaloupe and a watermelon. The color and texture of the first, the size of the latter.
When the pods split open, tiny babies squirmed inside. They looked like human babies, but instead of having the pinky peach flesh tones, they had cool flesh tones; greens, blues, purples. Occasionally one showed up with yellow skin, but it died hours after hatching.
We opened a research lab to keep the infants under control and out of the cruel eyes of the media and anyone who might object to our research. Since they only landed in one location, we built the lab close to that spot and began harvesting them annually.
As they aged, we built different rooms according to the years since they hatched. It was easier to keep them organized this way as we found, over the years, as they aged, they required different attention, environment, food, etc.
We only have one in the thirteen-year-old room and have found that ages seven and eight are the most difficult. They begin to change. It is rapid, and they require constant monitoring. At age seven, they can no longer walk as their legs fuse together. At age eight, they cannot breathe air. They are placed into a tank of water and monitored closer still. As the eight-year-olds develop into nine-year-olds, they are back to normal. Their legs un-fuse, they can breathe air again, and they are moved into the nine-year-old room for further observation.
We believe that these changes are hereditary and evolutionary. Perhaps on their home planet, before they began to rain down upon us, these changes are necessary for their survival. They only “talk” from ages one to six, and it comes out in the form of shrill screams. After age six they become mute. We are hoping that at some point they will begin to speak so we may learn more about them.
I donned my earplugs and went into the five-year-old room and looked around at the purple, green, and blue children inside. All of them had their heads thrown back, faces white with anger or some other emotion, all screaming. I touched each of them on the head. I found this technique worked only long enough to get to the last one, then the first one would start to scream. As I reached baby number twelve I started to hum. I didn’t have to hum anything particular, just the humming sound was enough to soothe them. Sometimes they would hum, too, either mimicking, as children often do, or to join in.
When they all fell asleep, I crept from the storage room and back into the hall. I closed the door and peered through the window at the slumbering children.
Dr. Delaware was behind me looking over my shoulder at them.
“Disgusting creatures,” he hissed. “Why are we even continuing this stupid research?”
I turned around and looked him in the eye. “They are not disgusting.” I said through gritted teeth. “And we are doing this research because this is the first good bit of evidence we have that there is life somewhere else in this universe.”
Dr. Delaware leaned closer, leered at me and said, “Who cares?” He backed away abruptly. “Who cares if there is life elsewhere? We obviously cannot communicate with them!” He threw something against the five-year-old’s door, and they all began to scream again.
“Go check on the thirteen-year-old,” I said.
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DR. DELAWARE LAUGHED as the assistant disappeared into the five-year-old room. He sauntered down the hall toward the room with the thirteen-year-old. It was obviously a female specimen. She had long dark-blue hair that she enjoyed brushing as she sat in her storage room.
Dr. Delaware entered her room and looked at her. He rubbed his hands together and gave her a wicked grin. The thirteen-year-old turned toward him and her mouth twitched. Dr. Delaware took a step forward.
“Useless creatures, can’t even talk,” he said out loud. The thirteen-year-old smiled at him. As he neared her, she opened her mouth. “What are you doing?” Dr. Delaware asked her.
Her mouth opened further, as if she was going to answer him, but instead, a serpent shot out, grabbed Dr. Delaware around the middle, bent him in two, swallowed him whole and disappeared back into her mouth. All the while, she combed her long hair. She began to hum.
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WHEN I ENTERED THE thirteen-year-old’s room, she was humming and combing her hair.
“Did you have a good lunch?” I asked her. She looked at me and nodded emphatically.
