The doctor was merely irritated. “It’s been a while since the Fiihrer saw fit to interrupt me.”
Now the assistant sounded frightened. “Please, Doctor, we could all be in trouble if you were heard calling him that.”
But the doctor cut him off. “Don’t worry. There are no listening devices here. I made sure of that when I allowed the dog-headed simpleton to set me up in his ridiculous city. I also have the place swept regularly for bugs. And not only for ones installed by him. I also have to be watchful for those who would steal my research.” The doctor moved quickly to the computer and hit a key. His voice took on a jovial respect. “My Lord Anubis. How nice. It’s been a long time since we spoke.”
The voice of Anubis was both huge and unreal. It gave the claustrophobic impression that it was not only filling the entire room, but using up all the air. “Has the outlander been branded yet?”
Semple swallowed hard. Now Anubis himself was getting in on her humiliation. The doctor replied briskly, “Not yet, my Lord. We have had some trouble with the records office. I’ll be through very shortly.”
The voice of Anubis again boomed around the surgery. “Don’t do it.”
The doctor blinked. “Don’t do it?”
“That’s what I said. Do we have a bad connection? Am I failing to make myself clear?”
“No, my Lord. You are abundantly clear.”
Semple couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She was off the hook by a miracle. Never again would she ignore the eternally springing hope of the condemned.
“I want the outlander brought to me.”
The doctor sounded almost disappointed. “Unmarked?”
“Unmarked and unbranded.”
“I’ll have it done immediately.”
“Do that.”
“It’s been wonderful talking to you, my Lord. You must come here sometimes and inspect my work.”
But Anubis was already gone. Seemingly, Semple would soon be confronting him. Was this a rescue or merely a stay of execution reserving her for a worse horror in the future? She knew her wisest option would be to take refuge in the moment, and not even think about what the future might hold. Just rejoice that hot metal wasn’t at that moment searing her brow. Unfortunately, the dog god was all too central to the thematic operation of the city and she couldn’t help but speculate about him. Until now, she’d only seen pictures and statues of this figure who had taken the image and personality of the jackal-headed Egyptian god. Now she had heard his voice for the first time. Did the man always talk like that? Even when you were in the same room with him? Semple could only think that the voice was some kind of audio construct, like Tarzan’s bellow in the old Johnny Weissmuller movies. The Tarzan cry was reputed to have been a primitive overdubbing of an African bull elephant, a roaring lion, and a well-known yodeling cowboy. Working on the same principle, the voice of Anubis could have been digitally sampled from equal parts of Benito Mussolini, James Earl Jones, and late Elvis Presley at the full-stretch crescendo of “Bridge Over Troubled Water.”
The assistant was unstrapping Semple from the chair. After Anubis terminated the conversation, the doctor had stalked out of the room, plainly livid at the snub and miffed at the lost opportunity to inflict pain. As the assistant worked, he glanced around the room, as if unconvinced by the doctor’s assurances that no listening devices were planted in the surgery. He removed the gag and smiled a patently phony smile. “It’s a great honor to be summoned to Anubis.”
Semple massaged her jaw. She was in no mood for small talk. “Kissing up to the Big Boss, just to be on the safe side?”
The assistant looked at her plaintively. “Do be careful. They listen in much more than anyone thinks.”
Semple was in no mood for conversation. “Screw you, boy. You were just going to brand me.”
“I was only doing my job. It was nothing personal.”
“That’s what your kind all say. And don’t start telling me your fucking troubles, okay? Right now, I don’t give a fuck who’s listening. I was almost branded with a hot iron on my forehead. What the fuck else can they do to me?”
Despite her show of bravado, Semple was actually asking herself the same question. What the fuck else could they do to her? So far, this adventure had amounted to an unpalatable cocktail of Voltaire and De Sade. She knew what Anubis looked and sounded like, and she had seen some of the worst that the city he created had to offer. All inputs indicated that here was some mess of deep insecurities, overcompensating on a monumental scale. It did not bode well for their coming encounter.
As she finally stood up from the chair, Mengele returned to the surgery. He scowled at her. The doctor was also a bad loser. “So you’ve managed to elude my clutches?”
Semple flashed him a dazzling smile. “Better luck next time, Doc.”
The doctor didn’t smile back. His eyes hardened. It was as though a window had opened in some Arctic fortress of solitude. “Oh, there’ll be a next time. You can count on that.”
***
The lights dimmed to the blue glow, and Jim found himself surrounded by twelve or fifteen little gray aliens, two and a half feet tall, shorter than the doctor and the alien with the Bogart voice. They teemed around his legs like a bunch of eager, friendly children, as his mind was being inundated with cloyingly good vibes. Some were trying to take hold of his arms, others were feeling the rough texture of his cotton shirt, and running their little gray three-fingered hands over his leather jeans. Jim tried to move them back, shooing them away from him. “Hey, careful of the jeans, they’ve come so far with me they’re a symbol of my character.”
The little aliens refused to be shooed and didn’t appear to care about symbols of Jim’s character. They just twittered and chattered happily, making a sound between the wuffle of puppies and cheeping of baby birds, and the good vibes became even more saccharine. They treated everything he did as part of a marvelous children’s game. Jim found, however, that they were slowly and subtly propelling him in the direction that they wanted him to go. He was also aware that something else, something different, was in the room, along with him and the little aliens, something much bigger, cold, old, and malign, that observed without apparently wanting to be seen. Each time he tried to look directly at it, the little aliens ran interference, and the something-else moved out of sight, making use of the hallucinatory, inexact quality of the blue light to conceal itself. Jim’s only impression was of an elongated, equine, nonhuman head, long angular arms, and sinister arachnid motion. The word “mantis” came into his mind, but he didn’t know quite why, although the right side of his brain was definitely getting nervous. “Don’t trust these things. I’m telling you. You can’t trust them. Just think about it. If you were some ugly, unscrupulous space thing with tentacles and a see-through brain, and you wanted to create a false sense of security in another species, what would you do?”
The left brain considered this. “I’d disguise myself.”
“And how would you disguise yourself?”
Again the left brain considered. “I’d take on all the attributes of the young of the species I had targeted to screw over.”
The right brain was positively congratulatory. “Exactly, the big eyes, the frail bodies, the overlarge heads. They’re all calculated to make you feel protective and unthreatened. They’re all fetal decoys.”
The left brain had a question. “And what about the mantis thing?”
The right brain didn’t like the answer it was giving. “I fear that thing may be the real deal.”
The two halves of Jim’s brain reconnected, agreeing that he would no longer be buying the alien bullshit. Unfortunately, all the bicameral brainwork quickly proved wasted as Jim saw the table. It wasn’t like any operating table he’d ever seen, but there was no mistaking its purpose. The table was white and circular and had weird side trays holding laid-out instruments. Odd cantilevered devices were poised over it, ready to be swung into use like miniature cranes. The tools of the ET croakers were all fashioned from a highly polished, sapphire-blue metal, with odd, fluid configurations like some Henry Moore nightmare, but no mistake could be made about their function. Down to the smallest clamp, they were designed for probing, penetrating, and implanting-the whole abductee workup. He’d been taken for a sucker. He stopped in his tracks.