So did things he’d never imagined his brain retained: what he’d had for breakfast five years ago last Tuesday (two eggs over medium, wheat toast, grape jam, weak coffee); what his father had said when, sometime under the age of one, Mort spat up on the old man’s best suit (not to be repeated here, but prime, believe me). Amazing, he thought, and hoped he’d keep one percent of what the alien was getting.
Even more amazing, though, was the backwash he got, as if a few random little documents from the hard disk snuck onto the floppy while the floppy played out onto the hard disk. Some of them came from Katie: the smell of her corsage on prom night, a sixth-grade spelling test where she’d missed the word revolutionary, what cramps felt like, and a long-distance call to her sister in Baltimore the spring before.
And some of those little documents had to come from George the alien: using those peculiar private parts in the manner for which they were intended, what felt like a college course on how flying saucers or whatever they were worked (which would have been worth a mint, and not a chocolate one, if Mort had understood the concepts), the taste of fancy alien food (by comparison, that ever-so-ordinary breakfast seemed nectar and ambrosia).
Mort also picked up a few impressions about what George thought of mankind. In two words, not much. He went about his job with all the enthusiasm of an Animal Regulations officer counting stray dogs around the city dump, except an Animal Regulations officer might actually like dogs.
The alien didn’t like humans. Mort could think of a lot of reasons why benevolent aliens wouldn’t like humans: they were busy polluting their planet; they fought wars; they discriminated on the basis of color, gender, sexual preference, and the size of your bankroll. If any of that had been in the backwash from George, Mort would have been chastened but not surprised.
It wasn’t. George felt about humans much as a lot of nineteenth-century British imperialists had felt about the peoples they ruled: they were wogs. They were ugly, they smelled funny, they had revolting habits, and, most of all, they were stupid. George’s view of what humans had in the brains apartment was somewhere between a badly trained dog and what that badly trained dog was liable to leave on your front lawn when it went out for a walk.
Given that George was currently pumping him and Katie dry of everything they’d ever known, Mort had to admit that, from his point of view, he had a point. But if George was a benevolent alien, he devoutly hoped he’d never run into one in lousy mood.
All of a sudden, he was empty. The inside of his head seemed to be making the noise a soda straw does when you’re still sucking but the soda’s all gone.
A couple of more impressions backwashed into the sodaless expanse between his ears. One was a mental image of two scared-looking rubes in hunting gear getting the same treatment he as undergoing now. I’ll be damned, he thought. They weren’t making it up after all.
The second was a flash of alien mentation: As long as we have todo it, this is the perfect spot for the survey. They’d never- He never found out who they were or what they’d never. The document was incomplete.
George turned to his buddies by the door. He wiggled his ears. Mort didn’t know what that meant, but the rest of the green-and-glowing Fab Four did: job’s over for today. They went out the door. They didn’t bother opening it first.
The floating alien looked from Mort to Katie and back again. Mort got the idea that if it had been up to him, he’d have dropped them both on the floor, kersplat. But maybe he had a supervisor watching him or something, because he didn’t. He floated them down the same way they’d come up, only faster.
As they were descending, George went down the invisible stairs he’d gone up before. He left the Intelligencer office the same impossible way his colleagues had, except he left his nether cheeks on this side of the door for a couple of seconds while the rest of him was already on that side.
"Jesus," Mort said. "The moon from outer space."
Katie laughed-hysterically, sure, but can you blame her? Mort couldn’t see what anybody else was doing, because the room was dark again now that the nightlights that walked like men had gone.
Then the lights came back on. It was as if that broke a spell; for all Mort knew, maybe it did. People started jumping and hollering and running to the door (but not through it) to find out if the aliens were still in sight. Mort didn’t run to the door. Having seen the aliens more up close and personal than anybody but Katie Nelligan, he didn’t want to see them again.
Katie said, "Whoever was taking those pictures, get them developed this instant, do you hear me? This instant! Don’t leave the shop while they’re being processed, either-wait for them right there."
That got three people out of the office. Mort glanced down his watch, wondering how long he’d floated by the ceiling, hat he saw made him blink and exclaim, "Katie, what time do you have?"
She looked at her watch, too, then stared at him, bright blue eyes wide with surprise. "It felt like we were up there for an hour, not a couple of minutes." She pointed to the wall clock. "But that says the same thing. Weird." She was not the sort of person to let weirdness overwhelm her; that was one of the reasons she was editor and Mort, older and arguably more experienced, just a staff writer. "We’ll do drafts of the piece right now, while we still member everything. When we’re done, we’ll compare notes. This one has to be perfect."
"Right." Mort all but sprinted for his computer. He’d never imagined being in the middle of a story like this. Woodward and Bernstein, eat your hearts out, he thought as he hit the keyboard.
He plunged in so hard and deep that he started violently when Katie tapped him on the shoulder. "I just wanted to say thanks," she told him. "That was brave, what you did."
"Oh. That. Yeah. Sure," he said. "Listen, why aren’t you writing?" Katie laughed softly and went away.
The next thing mort remembered apart from words flowing from his mind to the computer was the pictures coming back. For that he was willing to get up from his desk. He’d expected something would go wrong-they’d be fogged, or black, or something. But they weren’t. There was the alien, doing the mind-probe on him and Katie while all three of them floated in midair. There were the other aliens by the door. Shot after perfect shot-it was just a matter of picking the best ones.
"We’ve got ‘em," Katie said. Everybody nodded.
Five o’clock came and went. Mort never noticed. Neither did Katie. Finally, at about half past six, she printed her story. Mort said, "I’ll be done in just a few minutes." He pulled his sheets out of the laser printer when he was through, then said, "We both must have run way long. Shall we"-he hesitated, then plunged-"compare and cut over dinner?"
She gave him not the wary, thoughtful look he’d expected, but a sidelong glance and half a smile, as if she knew something he didn’t. "All right," she said. "Let’s go to Napoli. It’s right down the street, and we have a lot of work to do to get this the way it has to be."
They went through each other’s stories alongside lasagna and Chianti. Time on real newspapers had made Mort sharp at writing lean and tight; he boiled away a quarter of Katie’s piece without touching the meaning at all.
She attacked his differently, looking more at what it said than how it did the saying. About halfway through, she looked up and said, "Backwash? That’s a good way to put it. I felt it, too. I wondered if you had. But somebody reading the piece is going to need more explanation than you’ve given it here." She scribbled a note in the margin.
Over spumoni ("To hell with the waistline; today I earned it," Katie said), each looked at what the other had done. Most of Katie’s comments asked for more detail here, less there, and made Mort’s story more tightly focused and coherent. He tipped the cap he wasn’t wearing. "Thanks. This’ll help."