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in an interview with Elderwild Barnes of Spacetime
U.S. Department liaison staffer

The fervent emphasis that the government placed on traditional Christian values and on getting-back-to-one’s-Vacation-Bible-School-roots (never mind that it put a steady drag on American culture, like hanging lead weights on one side of a wheel, pulling all of life at a crazy angle back toward the twentieth century) was a big help to Brooks Showard in his cursing. He didn’t have to be inventive about it and use the resources of his Ph.D. to dredge, up exotic oaths. The sturdy fundamental godams and hells that had served his forefathers, glazed now with time like candied fruits studding an otherwise plain loaf of bread, served him perfectly well.

“God damn it to hell and back,” he said, therefore. “Oh god damn it all the way to hell and back, with side trips for the eager! Oh, shit!”

The other technicians had pulled back from the Interface, the oh so perfect and according to specs Interface, where Brooks stood holding the infant. They had formed themselves into a little group, that could behave as if it had nothing to do with whatever this regrettable latest development turned out to be. Who, them? They were just passing by. Just happened to be in the neighborhood, don’t you know…

“You get on over here!” he bellowed at them, shoving the baby under one armpit and shaking his free fist at them like the maniac, raving ranting maniac gone clear outaspace, that he considered himself to be at this moment. “You get on over here and look at this mess, you shits, you’re as guilty as I am in this! Get your asses on over here and see this!”

They moved an inch, maybe. And Showard began a steady dull cursing, bringing Job’s beard into it along with the private parts of the Twelve Disciples and a variety of forbidden practices and principles. They weren’t going to come over there to him. They weren’t going to participate in this, share the guilt, spread the horror around, not willingly. He was going to have to take it to them, the cowards! And it might be that next time he wouldn’t have the guts to go inside the Interface after what was squirming there either, and then they could all be cowards together in Christian fellowship, couldn’t they?

Behind him, safe in its special environment, the Alien-In-Residence existed, so far as anyone could tell. If it had died, presumably the various indicators on the walls would have told him that — that was the theory, anyhow. You couldn’t say that the AIRY sat, precisely, or that it stood, or that it did anything, or was in any particular state. It was, and that was all it was. If what had happened to the human infant was of any concern to it, there was no way to know that, and might never be any way to know that. Sometimes Showard wasn’t sure he saw the AIRY, really; the way it flickered (??), and never any pattern to the flickering (??), it drove the Terran eye to a constant search for order until there were great flat spots of color floating in the air between you and the source of the sensory stimulation. And then there were the other times, when you profoundly wished that you couldn’t see it.

The linguists called theirs Aliens-in-Residence, too, called them AIRY’s for short like the technicians did; but theirs were different. It was possible to look at one of theirs and at least assign labels roughly to its parts. That thing was a limb, say. That little lump there might well be a nose. There was its rosy butt, you see. Like that. It was possible to imagine that the creature had obligingly taken up “residence” in the simulated and sealed-off environment you had built for it within your house, and that it was delighted to visit for a while and share its language with your offspring. God knew the Lines had offspring to spare; the Lingoes bred like rats. But Brooks couldn’t imagine the thing inside this Interface being allowed to take up “residence” in a human dwelling. Did it even have “parts”? Who could tell?

And now, there was this baby.

“Gentlemen,” said Government Work Technician Brooks Everest Showard, holder of a secret rank of Colonel in the United States Air Force Space Command, Division of Extraterrestrial Intelligence: “I am sick unto death of killing innocent babies.”

They all were. This would be, they thought queasily, the forty-third human infant to be “volunteered” by its parents for Government Work. The ones that had lived had been far worse off than those that had died; it had not been possible to allow them to go on living. The thing that the Colonel carried under his arm like a package of meat must already be dead… it was something to be grateful for.

There were plenty of bleeding-hearts who called them, the G.W. staff, “mercenaries.” And so they were. You might do what they did for money; you surely would not do it for love. They liked to think they did it for honor and glory, sometimes, but that was wearing a little thin. And the parents? You couldn’t help wondering sometimes whether the parents, if they’d been allowed to see what went on here, would have considered the generous fee they had been paid to be an adequate compensation. You wondered if those who had volunteered baby boys would be interested in keeping the posthumous Infant Hero Medal in its black velvet box with the solid silver lock… if they’d had a little more information. The obligatory top secret classification on the procedure, the signed-for-in-advance permission to cremate — can’t chance Alien bacteria or viruses getting into the environment, you understand that, of course, Mr. and Mrs. X — they helped. But you wondered.

“Well, Brooks,” one of them said finally. “Happened again, I guess.”

“Oh! You can talk, can you?”

“Now, Brooks — ”

“Well this kid can’t talk! It can’t talk English, it can’t talk Beta-2, it can’t talk anything and it never is going to talk anything!” An obscene jingle ran crazily through his head, turning him sick… ALPHA-ONE, BETA-TWO, SEE ME MAKE A BABY STEW… sweet god in heaven, make it stop… “You know what it has done, thanks to our expert intervention in its exceedingly brief life?”

“Brooks, we don’t want to know.”

“Yeah! I expect you don’t!”

He advanced on them, inexorably, shaking the dead baby the way he had shaken his fist, shaking it in front of him like a limp folded stuff, and they saw the impossible condition that it had somehow come to be in. He made certain they saw it. He turned it all around for them so that they could get a clear view from all sides.

None of them threw up this time, although an infant that had literally turned itself inside out by the violence of its convulsions, so that its skin was mostly inside and its organs and its… what?… mostly outside, was something new. They didn’t throw up, because they had seen things just as bad before, if you were interested in trying to rank abominations on a scale of awfulness, and they weren’t.

“Get rid of it, Showard,” said one of the men. Lanky Pugh was his unfortunate name. Doubly unfortunate because he was shaped like a beer keg and not much taller. Doubly unfortunate because when he told you his name you might be inclined to grin a little, and to forget the respect that was due a man who could play a computer the way Liszt might have played a metasynthesizer. “Vaporizer time, Showard,” said Lanky Pugh. “Right now!”