There was a white-enameled cooling case in the office, purring with a normality belied only by its present location. Condensate on the slanted glass-and-chrome top hid the contents until Doug threw a switch. Floodlights mounted on the ceiling illuminated the case starkly, and the odor which had been present even through the tobacco smoke in the orderly room became so overpowering now that its source could not be denied.
The creature under glass was the same as whatever Kelly had seen on tape, and it stank like the aftermath of an electrical fire in a spice warehouse. Neither the chemical nor the organic components of the odor were particularly unpleasant, and even the combination could have been accepted in another context. Somebody in the other room swore.
“Didn’t look this big,” said Kelly as he walked over to the case and the flaccid gray thing within. “This tall.”
Without clothes, the creature – or construct – but the men in the other room wouldn’t be playing games with a little scut like Tom Kelly – looked very frail; but the height should have been more than six feet. When the veteran bent over the case his shadow cut the direct reflection from the glass and gave him an even clearer vision of the creature. The arrangement of torso and appendages was that of a human being, but the limbs had the appearance of flat-wire antenna lead rather than the more nearly circular cross section of a man’s.
Of the limbs of an animal that belonged on Earth.
Elaine lifted the center section of glass; the cooler really was an ordinary grocery case. “It’s a refrigerator, not a freezer,” she said while Doug muttered something unintelligible in the background. “Freezing would have broken down the cell walls. Of course, it can’t be kept this way forever. When they’ve completed the autopsy, they’ll . . .”
The torso had been laid open in a long curving incision, but the flap of fine-scaled integument had been pinned back in place when the pathologists paused in their examination. Doctors tended to be self-ruled men in whom arrogance was a certain concomitant of ability if not proof of that ability. Kelly wondered who was handling the autopsy, whether the men in the other room had chosen to go with the best pathologists available or rather to use doctors whom they knew they could control.
They were trying to deal Tom Kelly in on this business. That gave him a notion of where their heads were.
Christ on a crutch. It really was what it seemed to be.
Kelly’s left hand reached into the case, his fingers tracing but not touching the surface of one of the arms. The hand had four fingers and no thumb, but it looked as though the two halves could be folded over one another along the central axis.
“There’re surgical gloves, if you want,” the woman said. She was looking at Kelly while she held the lid open. Only the flare of her nostrils implied that her eyes were on him to excuse them from having to view the alien. “It doesn’t have knee and elbow joints the way we do. Each arm is a double column of bones like paired spinal columns, and they’re connected only by muscle.”
“You can close it,” the veteran said, jerking his hand out of the cooler and flexing it repeatedly to work off the damp miasma that clung to the skin. The lid thumped behind him as he turned, and he thought he heard a grateful sigh. “How did it die?” he asked, facing Doug. “Did Mohammed kill it?”
Men waiting in the other room either glanced away when Kelly caught their eyes or matched his with stares of their own. Pierrard nodded coolly as he tamped a tiny meerschaum with a pipe tool shaped like a pistol cartridge.
Doug shrugged, his expression less nonchalant when it remained fixed even though the rest of his body moved.
“They were both killed by nine-millimeter bullets,” Elaine said as she walked into the veteran’s field of view again. “Turkish service ammunition lots, though of course that indicates nothing. We’d had reports that bullets didn’t – affect them, fired at very close range. Those reports appear to be in error.”