He badly wanted a progress report, but there was no way to reach the predators until they succeeded, in which event, reaching them wouldn’t be necessary. Dink had assured him it wouldn’t take them long. Ridiculous, all this running about, unable to find a woman who should stick out like a sore thumb! It suggested ineptitude among people he had always valued for being good at their jobs!
Meantime, the select committee was still unable to talk to or communicate with or get at the envoys themselves, and the armies of ET hunters that were scouring the world for possible targets had as yet reported killing only a California condor, several wolverines and bear cubs, about fifty dogs, and a number of Ginko trees. The boosting of a surveillance satellite into a one-time moon loop, a little maneuver that cost too many millions, had allowed NASA to verify that predator ships were definitely on the back side of the moon. Morse had been cutting NASA’s budget relentlessly as long as he’d been in the Senate, so there was no way to get at the moon any time soon. It was like being in a wartime situation. You couldn’t attack the administration without seeming disloyal to the country, no matter how elusive or dangerous the president was. Maybe the thing to do was beef up NASA, fast, and see what the Russians had left over from their space program that might be useful. Though, come to think of it, the space station boosters had more or less picked over that trash heap.
Oh, hell, he told himself, pouring a scotch, let it go. Forget it for tonight. Raid the refrigerator, have a long hot shower, go to bed.
The food and the shower he managed. While luxuriating under the hot spray, however, he felt a sting on his shoulder, as though a wasp or bee was in the shower with him. Even as he slapped at the shoulder he felt overwhelmingly dizzy. The tile walls of the shower stall spun around him, he felt himself slipping, though he didn’t feel himself landing on the floor. Everything went gray and silent.
He was aware that time was passing, that things seemed to have duration. He came halfway to consciousness, finding himself on an examining table, just like . . . well, like all that stupidX-Files s tuff, and there was this . . . ET thing, not a little gray man, not an envoy, not one of those predators they had shown on that broadcast of theirs, something else. Like a huge wasp, only with a high cranium and a soft voice. This large creature, assisted by two smaller creatures, was very intent on doing something to him, though he felt no particular pain or apprehension. They were holding him and shifting him, quite gently, and then there was a sudden, horrible pain, terrible and piercing as the large creature stuck its … something or other, surely not what it looked like, no, that couldn’t be, he meant no, not that, he meant stuck its dagger-like thing into him, right into his middle, and squirted something through it, something quite large because the dagger-like thing bulged to let it through, and then the pain again, only worse, much worse, he couldn’t bear, couldn’t stand . . .
And then only peace and euphoria. Nice. Nice restful feeling, and he woke up momentarily. He was at home, in bed, quite naked.
Senator Byron Morse never slept naked. He staggered out of bed and found his pajamas hanging where he’d left them this morning, on the back of the bathroom door. It was while he was buttoning the pajama top before the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door that he noticed a strange discoloration on his stomach. Just to the right of the belly button and a little higher. A real doozy of a bruise, with a bloody spot in the middle. He touched it, and something bit him, like being hit with a cattle prod. A second attempt had the same result. He should have been worried about it, but he still felt very happy and contented. Euphoric. That was the word. He hummed it to himself.