Bogart leaned into the exchange. “Listen, buster, that wasn’t our idea. All the lies and deception came strictly from your end. You think we wanted to be dismissed as marsh gas, flocks of birds, and weather balloons? We were quite ready to go live on Ed Sullivan or Face the Nation and reveal ourselves to the world. We even had a guy at William Morris, but Hoover had a shitfit and Truman vetoed it. It was those sons of bitches that wanted us to do the whole Area Fifty-one covert ops bit, in and out of the back doors of the Pentagon all the time, the interplanetary fifth column selling ray guns to the natives. They claimed that irrefutable proof of life elsewhere in the universe would freak the living shit out of the Arabs, the Bible Betters, and the Hasidic Jews; for all they knew, the Pope might resign unless he could come up with a good reason God had never warned him we were out there. Kennedy was okay with it, but look what happened to him. You know some of them even tried to blame us for that shit in Dealey Plaza?”
Jim held up a hand. “Hold it a minute. Are you seriously telling me that the William Morris Agency knew all about you?” Bogart nodded. “At least a month before the FBI.”
“You were going to go on Ed Sullivan?”
“It worked for Elvis and the Beatles.”
Jim shook his head ruefully. “It never worked for me.”
The doctor alien made a dismissive gesture. “That’s because you had to be the petulant rebel and keep in the drug reference. I mean, they warned you, didn’t they?”
Jim saw he was making no headway. “I’m not one of your abductees, you know?”
“We are well aware of that. You came aboard uninvited and of your own free will.”
“So just drop me off at the nearest accessible spot and we’ll forget the whole thing.”
The alien doctor shook his head. “I’m afraid it’s a little too late for that.”
“I could incapacitate your warp drive with ectoplasm.”
Although the doctor alien had no mouth, Jim could have sworn that he sneered. “We don’t have a warp drive. That’s also Star Trek. Now who’s conning whom?”
Because they had no iris or pupils, it was impossible for Jim to tell exactly where the big alien eyes were looking, but he had the distinct impression that they had left his face and were now staring past him into the darkness. A moment later, as if in confirmation, he heard the patter of tiny feet coming toward him, the patter of dozens of tiny feet.
***
Semple was more helpless than she could ever remember. The chair in which she sat could have been in any dentist’s office except for the padded restraints; no dentist would have secured her body with a tightly cinched belt around her waist and an equally tight crisscross of webbing across her chest that kept her from moving her shoulders and upper body. No dentist would have fastened her ankles to the footrest of the chair to prevent her from kicking out, or locked her skull in a steel clamp, or placed a rubber gag in her mouth so she was unable to utter a sound. Semple’s fear was off the scale. The outward trappings of this were definitely medical. The small lab was bright and scrupulously clear, all white surfaces, gleaming stainless steel, and glass cabinets. The individual in charge was even referred to as the doctor, though the intention of the operation that this so-called doctor was about to perform was nothing but gratuitous and agonizing torture.
Had Semple been a different person, had she retained some of Aimee’s guilt when the siblings split, she might have made use of the time while she waited for the worst to happen regretting all the pain that she had just as gratuitously inflicted on others. In some ways, her own torturings were less morally excusable than that which she was about to receive. At least Necropolis had a system, no matter how diseased; Fat Ari was just trying to make the equivalent of a buck. The suffering she had inflicted on the unfortunate angels, cherubs, and wandering spirits who had fallen into her clutches had been strictly for her own bored and private amusement. In that, she was equally as culpable as Mengele, maybe more so.
Semple, however, was made of sterner and much less repentant stuff. Even with no gag in her mouth, she would never have considered making any promises of atonement. Her only words would have been vitriolic, obscene, and abusive, directed at the doctor and his assistant, at Fat Ari, at the cops who had arrested her and all the others who had conspired to bring her to this place of degradation and promised pain. Helpless as she was, Semple still flexed her muscles against the restraints and bit down angrily into the hard rubber of the gag, determined that, when the awful moment came, she would give no one the satisfaction of seeing her cower.
The awful moment turned out to be a long time coming. Soon even the doctor began to grow impatient. He frowned vexedly at his assistant, who was bent over a wheezing computer that leaked wisps of vapor from bad seals in its microplumbing. “What the hell is the problem? This is a straightforward branding. It’s not supposed to take all day.”
“It’s the morons at Public Records. They’re making a whole performance about assigning me a number blank.”
“Fat Ari wants this unit back before his ridiculous show goes on the air.”
The assistant hit a sequence of keys. “Believe me, I’m well aware of that.”
“And we have a cheek-and-jowl job booked in twenty minutes.”
“I’m aware of that too, Doctor.”
“Then damn well get on with it.”
Semple swiveled her eyes and tried to turn her head to see exactly what was happening, but the steel plates clamping her skull made movement impossible. The eternally springing hope of the condemned suggested that maybe, if the delay was long enough, Fat Ari would give up on her and the branding would be canceled. She was enough of a realist, though, to know in her heart that this would never happen. If she missed the show, they’d brand her out of pure spite and hold her for the next one. On the way in, she had taken a good long look at this character everyone called the doctor and recognized on sight that his personal glacier of sadism ran cold and deep. He did even the most rudimentary things with a precise, perfectionist attention to detail, and Semple suspected that he had enjoyed maybe more than one lifetime honing his sinister act.
She had also observed that the doctor, like Fat Afi, was not required to dress up for a night on the Nile. His white lab coat covered and protected the neatly creased pants and fully buttoned vest of a trim, ultraconservative, 1930s-style three-piece pinstripe suit. His hair was pomaded and brushed straight back, his fingernails immaculately manicured, his black oxfords buffed to a mirrored sheen, and his wing collar rigidly starched. The doctor’s dapper and almost obsessive cleanliness made the horror of her situation somehow worse, even if Semple couldn’t pinpoint exactly why.
After a further five minutes, the assistant turned from the computer in discreetly weary triumph. “I have a number, Doctor.”
“And about time. Is the matrix heated?”
The assistant nodded. “It’s white-hot.”
“Then conform the bars and let’s get this nonsense over with.”
Semple could smell hot metal, and her stomach convulsed against the webbing. Despite her try for iron control, she was going to throw up.
“The brand is ready, Doctor. I’m removing it from the heater.”
The doctor entered Semple’s limited area of vision. He leaned over her, exuding a ghost-odor of cologne and breath mints. He lightly pinched the skin of Semple’s forehead between a pale, antiseptic thumb and index finger, and when he spoke, Semple knew he wasn’t talking to her. “It should take a good impression. I foresee no problems here.”
No sooner had he spoken than the computer on which the assistant had previously been laboring hissed, belched, then let out a mechanical Klaxon howl. Semple couldn’t see the assistant, but his voice sounded awed. “That’s the call of the Lord Anubis himself.”