“Shit,” he said softly.
“All right,” Francine said, putting down her own book and rolling to lay her head on his shoulder. He closed the notebook and stroked her forehead. She wound her fingers through the thick salt-and-pepper patch of hair on his chest. “Are you going to tell me? Or is it more security stuff?”
“Not security,” he said. He ached to tell her about that. Perhaps in a few weeks he could. News was leaking rapidly; he suspected that soon even the Death Valley find would be public knowledge. Everybody was too excited.
“What, then?”
“Harry.”
“Well, what about him?”
The tears started to come.
“What’s wrong with Harry?” Francine asked.
“He has cancer. Leukemia. He’s working with me on…this project, but he might not see it through to the end.”
“Jesus,” Francine said, laying her palm flat on his chest. “Isn’t he getting treatment?”
“Of course. He just doesn’t think it will save him.”
“Five more years. We keep on hearing five more years, and it won’t be a killer anymore.”
“He doesn’t have five years. He may not have one.”
Francine hugged him closer and they lay together in silence for a moment. “How do you feel?” she finally asked.
“About Harry? It makes me feel…”He thought for a moment, frowning. “I don’t know.”
“Betrayed?” she asked softly.
“No. We’ve always been very independent friends. Harry doesn’t owe me anything, and I don’t owe him anything. Except the friendship, and…”
“Being there.”
“Yeah. Now he’s not going to be there.”
“You don’t know that.”
“He does. You should have seen him.”
“He looks bad?”
“No. He looks pretty good, actually.” Arthur tried to imagine one’s entire body a battleground, with cancer spreading from point to point, or through the blood, unchecked, a kind of biological madness, a genetic suicide aided by mindless, lifeless clumps of protein and nucleic acid. He hated all errant microscopic things with a sudden passion. Why could not God have designed human bodies with seamless efficiency, that they might face the challenge of everyday life feeling at the very least internally secure?
“How was the visit?” Francine asked.
“We had a good couple of days. We’ll see each other tomorrow, too, and that’s all I can tell you.”
“A week, two weeks?”
“I’ll call if it’s longer than a week.”
“Sounds like something big.”
“I’ll tell you just one more thing,” he said, aching with greater intensity to reveal it all, to share this incredible news with the person he loved most on Earth. (Or did he love Francine less than Harry? Different love. Different niches.)
“Don’t spill the beans,” she warned him, smiling slightly.
“No beans, no cats, just this. If it wasn’t for Harry, right now I’d be the happiest man on Earth.”
“Jesus,” she said again. “Must be something.”
He wiped his eyes with a corner of the flannel bed sheet. “Yup.”
Edward Shaw swirled the spoon in the cup of coffee and stared at the glass port mounted at head level in the sealed chamber door. He had slept soundly during the night. The chamber was as quiet as the desert. The clean white walls and hotel-style furniture made it reasonably comfortable. He could request books and watch anything he wished on the TV in one corner: two hundred channels, the chamber supervisor informed him.
By intercom, he could speak with Reslaw or Minelli or Stella Morgan, the black-haired woman who had given him permission to call from the grocery store in Shoshone, seven days before. In other rooms, Minelli had told him, were the four Air Force enlisted men who had investigated his call and seen the creature. All of them were undergoing long-term observation. They might be “in stir” for a year or more, depending on…Depending on what, Edward was not sure. But he should have known the creature would mean enormous trouble for all of them.
The threat of extraterrestrial diseases was sufficiently convincing that they had submitted to the rigorous two-day round of medical tests with few complaints. The days since had been spent in comparative boredom. Apparently, nobody was quite sure what their status was, how they should be treated or what they should be told. Nobody had answered Edward’s most urgent question: What had happened to the creature?
Four days ago, as they were being led to the sealed chambers by men in white isolation suits, Stella Morgan had turned to Edward and asked, conspiratorially, “Do you know Morse code? We can tap out messages. We’re going to be here for a long time.”
“I don’t know any code,” Edward had answered.
“It’s okay,” an attendant had said from behind his transparent visor. “You’ll have commlink.”
“Can I call my lawyer?” Stella had asked.
No answer. A shrug of heavily protected shoulders.
“We’re pariahs,” Morgan had concluded.
Breakfast was served at nine o’clock. The food was selected and bland. Edward ate all of it, at the recommendation of the duty officer, an attractive woman in a dark blue uniform with short, bobbed hair. “Any drugs in it?” He had asked the question before; he was becoming boring, even to himself.
“Please don’t be paranoid,” she said.
“Do you people really know what you’re doing?” Edward asked. “Or what’s going to happen to us?”
She smiled vaguely, glanced to one side, then shook her head no. “But nobody’s in any danger.”
“What if I start growing fungus up my arm?”
“I saw that one,” the duty officer said. “The astronaut turns into a blob. What was its name?”
“The Creeping Unknown, I think,” Edward said.
“Yeah. ‘Creeping’ or ‘Crawling.’”
“Goddammit, what will you do if we actually get sick?” Edward asked.
“Take care of you. That’s why you’re here.” She didn’t sound convinced. Edward’s intercom panel buzzed and he pushed the tiny red button below a blinking light. There were eight lights and eight buttons in two corresponding rows on the panel, three of them live.
“Yeah?”
“This is Minelli. You owe us another apology. The food here is terrible. Why did you have to call the Air Force?”
“I thought they’d know what to do.”
“Do they?”
“Apparently.”
“They going to shoot us up on a shuttle?”
“I doubt it,” Edward said.
“I wish I’d majored in biology or medicine or something. Then I might have some idea what they’re planning.”
Edward wondered aloud whether they had isolated all of Shoshone, blocking off the highway and the desert around the cinder cone.
“Maybe they’ve put a fence around California,” Minelli suggested. “And maybe that’s not enough. All of the West Coast. They’re building a wall across the plains, not letting fruits and vegetables through.”
The intercom system was wired so they could all talk at once or privately. They could not exclude the watch or the chamber duty officers. Reslaw joined them. “There’s only four of us, plus the four investigators — they didn’t isolate that clerk, what’s her name.”
“Esther,” Edward said. “Or the kid at the service station.”
“That must mean they’re holding only those people who might have touched it, or came close enough to breathe microbes in the air.”
Morgan joined in. “So what are we going to do?” she asked.
Nobody answered.
“I’ll bet my mother is frantic.”
None of them had been allowed to make calls out.
“You own the store?” Edward asked. “I’ve been wanting to thank you …”