Ten Sigmas & Other Unlikelihoods

by Paul Melko

  “I hope to direct their thoughts toward areas of fertile research.”

  “You’d rather have them studying ghosts than computers?”

  “We already have computers.”

  “What about medicine?”

  Bert looked away. “That has no impact on us.”

  “Then do your own research! Let us alone! Why use us for this crap? This won’t help us.”

  “We can’t do our research. We’re . . . sterile, while your planet is not bound by our culture, by our ritual. We have medical advances. We have nanotechnology. We have no disease or . . . retardation. And we pay for that in stagnation. You’re wild, alive. You have no bounds, no millennia of civilization to bind your minds.

  “When one of us wants something, we ask for it and it is given to us by machines that care for themselves and us. If you want something, you have to build it. You have drive, while we have stasis. You have —”

  Nick had stopped playing with his skipping stones. He moaned softly, peering out the door. A thorn had grazed his cheek as he’d lunged after me through the gateway.

  I saw a shape moving beyond the thorn bushes.

  “Cilly . . . I know you’re in there.”

  To Bert, I said, “Hide.” To Harry, I shouted, “Beat it, you sack of goat vomit!”

  “What’re you hiding in there?” he sing-songed.

  “Your penis, but it was so small I lost it in a thimble.”

  Egan and he were crawling on their bellies toward the fort. “We got you now, Cilly. You can’t hide your friend any longer.” His face was stretched up, grinning.

  “Back off, Hairy,” I said, glancing around. I couldn’t run without leaving Nick and Bert alone. Bert I didn’t care about anymore, but Nick was no match for cruelty. And there was no easy way through the thorn bushes, except for the way Harry was coming.

  “Leave us be, young men,” Bert said.

  “I told you to hide, you freak!” I said.

  “Is that the driver of the car?” Harry asked. “Why are you hiding him here?” He was almost to the point where he could stand up.

  “He’s an alien spiritualist,” I said.

  “Yeah, right. I don’t care what he is. Those guys said they’d give us a hundred bucks if we brought him to them.”

  “You can’t count to a hundred,” I said.

  “Keep talking, Cilly,” he said, standing, pulling a knife out of his belt.

  Behind me Nick, or maybe Bert, was keening.

  Something whizzed by my head, and Harry yelped. He dropped the knife and reached for his forehead where a red welt had appeared. Another rock flew at him, and he ducked.

  “Ouch!”

  I turned as Nick flung another skipping stone at Harry. The sharp edge caught his wrist and he shrieked like a kid. He turned and dived on Egan, trying to evade the rocks.

  Nick threw one at Egan and caught the corner of his eye. Egan buried his face in his hands and started scrambling back the way he’d come. The two of them disappeared into the brambles, then ran when they could stand.

  Nick threw rock after rock until I knocked the pile of stones away from him.

  I screamed at him, “Those are skipping stones, you retard!” And then I dove through the thorn bushes, ignoring the thorns and ran for the trailer.

  *

  Ernie and Mama shared a pull-out bed in the living room. Nick and I shared the bedroom in the back. Above the door in our room was a small storage alcove that you could reach from the top bunk. I threw the box of old games onto the floor and climbed into the space, hunching my shoulders.

  Screw Hairy, screw Bert, and screw Nick, I thought as I jammed my knees into my chin. Screw the goddamn Farmers. And screw me for believing in . . . what?

  Fairy godmothers. I was on my own. Just like the whole Earth was. We were some Amazon rain forest to be mined for valuable technology. An Amazon brain forest. And they wanted us to invest in studying ghosts.

  They lived where Nick could never happen, like gods. Then they came here to have us look for ghosts instead of doing medical research that could help our own.

  I wasn’t any happier in my hiding place. I was just angrier. I slid down, walked around back of the trailer to the train tracks. Every night at two in the morning, a freight train barrelled down the tracks, headed for Columbus. I could sleep right through it, without a twitch. They probably didn’t have loud trains on Bert’s planet.

  I followed the tracks, stepping from tie to tie until I reached the trestle. Graffiti stretched across the iron i-beams and concrete pylons to every spot reachable by a spray can and an outstretched arm. In the shade of the trestle down by the river, Harry and Egan lounged.

  Harry pressed a tissue to his forehead.

  I dropped down, hanging by my arms from the trestle, and landed between them.

  “What the hell do you want?”

  “Those guys give you their number?”

  He looked at me, then said, “Yeah. So?”

  “Give it to me.”

  “No.”

  I picked up a skipping stone, prepared to throw it. Nick had done this same thing — threatened someone with a rock — and I had yelled at him. I felt disgust. The stone slipped out of my hand, and I turned to go. It was time to find Nick, tell him I was sorry, and get him home for dinner.

  “Wait,” Harry said. “Why do you want it? He’s worth a hundred to us.”

  I said, “I’ll split it with you.”

  Harry looked at me a moment longer then nodded at Egan. He handed me a card with a handwritten number.

  We called from the bait shop.

  *

  Egan had to cut out for dinner, but Harry stayed with me until the two Farmers showed up. Their black Lincoln raised a white cloud of dust as they entered the trailer park.

  “You have information regarding the driver?” one asked Harry.

  “I do,” I said. “I can hand him over to you.”

  “Where is he, little boy?” he asked.

  “I’m a girl, you moron.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  “Come on,” I said, and we led the pair into the woods near the casting factory.

  They balked at crawling under the thorns, their bodies too stiff to bend, but finally they got on their bellies and shrugged their black suits through the dirt. Nick and Bert were standing at the front of the fort, both with the same blank expression.

  “The Farmers are here,” I said.

  Bert nodded.

  They stood without dusting themselves off, staring at Bert. One motioned at Bert. He stepped forward like a fish on a hook. They turned to crawl back out.

  “Hold on,” I said.

  “Yes?”

  “There was a reward,” I said.

  One of the Farmers pulled out a wallet and reached toward me with a smooth hundred dollar bill.

  “No. I want more.”

  The alien’s arm stopped, frozen. Bert looked at me.

  “Little girl, the agreed amount —s”

  “You made a deal with him,” I said nodding toward Harry. “And I know what you are.”

  They didn’t reply.

  “I know what he is. I know all about what you’re doing to us.”

  “Give her two hundred,” the other said.

  “No,” I said. “I know you’re Farmers. I know our world is fallow.”

  They just stared at me, but Bert’s face had the start of a smile.

  “I know your secret, and my silence is expensive. What do we get out of this arrangement? Short lives, poverty, mental retardation. Did we choose this? Don’t we deserve the same lives as you? Doesn’t Nick?”

  I pointed at my brother. He stood watching the aliens. Sometimes there was something behind his brown eyes. Sometimes he understood, and it all made sense to him. It was like looking into the center of the sun with the RayBans melting off your face, and then it was dark again. Empty, like there’d never even been a spark. But sometimes . . .

  The aliens�
� gazes touched him and turned away.

  “Nick wouldn’t exist in your world. There’s no broken things, and you take all our best ideas.” My throat was hoarse. “You don’t even pay the price!” I shouted. “We pay the price and we have all the costs! You owe us! You owe me!”

  I poked Bert in the chest. “You can’t use us for your own ends and not pay.”

  “We’re sorry,” Bert said.

  “Yes, aliens are very advanced in the field of apologies,” I replied.

  We stood for several minutes, silent, even Harry, until they nodded. “How much for your silence?” one said.

  “A million,” I whispered, so Harry couldn’t hear, snatching the two hundred dollar bills from his hand. I gave one to Harry.

  “Agreed.” I watched as they led Bert through the brush.

  Harry looked at me, then at the bill in his hands. “Those were aliens,” he said. He’d never understand, I thought, as I took Nick’s arm and dragged him home for dinner.

  *

  It’s hard for a fourteen-year-old to explain several hundred pounds of gold, so Nick and I slipped away after burying most of the thin sheets of metal under the fort.

  The aliens hadn’t bought my silence. They couldn’t take away the fact that I knew they were there. Nick didn’t care, or maybe he did. He got on well in the programs I could now afford. I let him be. I wanted to be his protector, but I knew he’d have to make his own way.

  I wrote letters of my own, to all the people Bert had sent them to, and others, undoing the damage. Maybe they thought I was a crackpot too, but I think I changed some course of thought. Somewhere.

  And if not someone else’s mind, my own was changed. It was our field to plant, ours to harvest, no matter who was looking over our shoulders.

  DEATH OF THE EGG KING

  Dr. Rocque was dead — shot in the forehead with a small caliber handgun — and my first concern was whether he had signed my thesis.

  The manuscript, in loose leaf form, lay open on his desk to the middle of Chapter 5. Rocque sat in his chair, head back, seemingly taking a moment to rest before continuing on with my masterpiece. That image was fine, if you ignored the dot in the middle of his brow.

  I carefully flipped to the cover page. Empty, the slot for his signature in the lower left hand corner was empty. All the other signatures were there: mine at the top, then Dr. Forest’s and Dr. Olivia-Yordan’s and Dr. Khomeli’s. But not Rocque’s, and I had been sure the bastard was going to sign. Just to be rid of me after six years.

  I heard the heavy drip-drop of blood and looked behind his chair at the pool of red. It was obvious what had happened; he’d been popped before he could sign. The row of eggs that usually lined his shelf were gone.

  I grabbed his fountain pen, a gift from a Duchess during his Nobel Prize trip, and, after a quick glance at his signature on a student petition on his desk, signed his name for him. I’d done it before on a grant proposal.

  The thesis was thick and heavy, and I was quite proud of the amount of material I had managed to regurgitate concerning my last six years in the Department of Aromatic Chemistry. Rocque had been less thrilled, but the bastard survived by keeping dumb graduate researchers like me in indentured servitude. The last time Rocque had been in a lab was when he was a graduate assistant. I thumped the thesis against his desk, squaring the pages.

  With a look into the outer office, I exited and shut the door. I dropped the signed thesis in Thelma’s in-box and departed for a well-deserved beer.

  *

  The Man Hole was empty, except for some rough boys in the back playing pool. Fernando was tending the bar and gave me a toothless grin.

  “Hey, Stot. What’ll it be, man?”

  “Hey, Fernando. How much does it cost to get in here?”

  He grinned again. “You know there ain’t never any cover at the Man Hole.”

  “You never get tired of that joke, do you? Corona.”

  He handed me my beer and I handed him a twenty.

  “How long have I been here?”

  “An hour, Stot, at least. We been talking about your Grammy and the good cookies she used to bake for you.”

  “I’ve been here at least two. Remember? The bells of Saint Clemens rang five times when I entered.”

  Fernando bounced his palm off his forehead. “How could I forget, Stot? Oranges and lemons.”

  I grinned, then took a sip from my beer. I liked to avoid the Man Hole in daylight hours. At least at night the grunge sort of blended in. The wooden floor was pitted and warped. The odor of the place was this year’s sweat mixed with last year’s beer. The moulded metal on the ceiling made the acoustics shitty. Don’t ask me why I spent so much time there.

  I did notice the placement of Fernando’s egg at the end of the bar, close to the door where everyone who entered would pass it. I’d told Fernando he could have put it under the bar and it would have done him just as well. The aromatics filled the whole room pretty much equally. Instead he’d put it out there in the open, and worse, under a ceiling fan. Any decent defense attorney would add a time variable of plus or minus one hour for data taken out of that egg.

  It was a Singaporean rip-off of one of Rocque’s first models. With a mass spectrometer and a neutron activation system, a good aromatic chemist could determine to the hour who was in the bar for the last twenty-four hours. I, with university equipment and newly decreed Ph.D., could figure it for the last forty-eight hours. Cheaper than a security system and more verifiable than video, the egg was a perfect crime deterrent. Unless the thief or murderer took the egg with him.

  The egg had won Rocque his Nobel Prize and now it had won me my Ph.D. I downed my beer, and said, “You can call me Dr. Aristotle, now.”

  Fernando laughed, and brought me another beer. “This one’s on the house, Doc.”

  I took it and went off to flirt with the rough boys in the back.

  About an hour later, Russell walked in and we hissed at each other.

  “There aren’t enough gay bars in this town,” I said.

  “Well,” he said in his ultra-lispy voice that he used in public, “when you’ve had as many boys as I’ve had, there could never be enough bars in this podunk town where I wouldn’t run into somebody I’d done. And believe me, Aristotle, you’re one of many.” He looked me up and down and then shook his head.

  Russell was my first lover when I came to graduate school, but not my first lover ever, even though I had let him think that for a few weeks. We’d parted in what I thought was an amicable way about a year earlier. Russell had seen it differently, and been a public nuisance to me since.

  I was feeling nostalgic however, and said, “Let me buy you a drink, Russell.”

  “I thought you’d never ask,” replied Russell. “Oh, Bar Wench! Bar Wench! A strawberry daiquiri, please.” I passed the pool cue to one of the rough boys.

  Fernando rolled his eyes at me as he turned on the blender. I flashed him a smile and took the stool next to Russell’s.

  “I got my doctorate. Handed in my thesis yesterday.”

  “It’s about damn time, Aristotle. I figured you to be turning gray before you got that shingle. In celebration, if you buy me two more rounds, I’ll buy you one.”

  “You are truly a gentleman.”

  “Stop flirting with me.” Russell took the drink from Fernando. “I heard Adrian dumped you. How’s it feel to be on the other end for a change?” I sensed a real anger behind Russell’s mocking venom. Adrian had been my lover after Russell and until a week ago.

  “He knew I was leaving. He knew we couldn’t stay together.”

  “So you still fantasize about leaving our little community? We’re spoiled here, you know? This little college town is the most liberal place in the world. Thirty-two percent of all students and faculty are gay in our little politically correct haven.” He began to play with his umbrella. “Where do you think Fernando lost all his teeth? In the real world, out there among the straights.” He paused
to finish his drink. “Weren’t you and Adrian a registered couple?”

  I shrugged. Russell was beginning to piss me off. He knew me too well, knew what screws hurt when turned. I had yet to go down to the courthouse and un-register Adrian and me. I decided to do that before I left the next day.

  “Well, speak of the devil,” Russell said.

  I turned and saw Adrian enter with a leather stud. He was dressed in tight jeans and a denim jacket. He’d added dark rouge to his eye to enhance the shiner he had. We had played rough before, but he had obviously decided to embrace the SM life-style fully. He saw me and gripped his stud tighter.

  “Oh, ouch. Such immature displays of spite. I’m glad you never did that to me when you dumped me. He’s such a bitch, Stot.” Russell edged closer to me. “Why don’t you come on home with me and forget about Adrian? I’ll even be your punching bag, if you want.”

  I stood up suddenly, shaking loose Russell’s hands. “No thanks, Russell. I’ve gotta pack. I’m leaving tomorrow.”

  “Well, okay,” said Russell, already eyeing one of the rough boy pool sharks. “See you later, Doctor. Then again maybe not.”

  I slipped past Adrian and out the door.

  *

  The pounding of Police Sergeant Claudia Clarke’s fist on my door woke me the next morning. I saw it was her through the front window, so I answered the door naked.

  “I just love a woman in uniform.”

  “I’m gay because of you, Aristotle.”

  “Are you sure you’re not het? That crew cut makes you look scrumptious.”

  “Open the screen door and get some clothes on, Stot. This is serious.”

  I pulled on a robe and we sat at the kitchen table. She kicked at a pile of boxes. “Going somewhere?”

  “Yeah. I got my doctorate. I’m outta here.” I put a cup of coffee in front of her. “What’s the deal, Claudia? Last minute police work you need us for?” The university aromatic chemistry equipment was a leap better than the city’s and on a number of occasions, I’d helped out deciphering an egg that had come from a particularly tough scene.

  “Dr. Rocque is dead.”

  I frowned, tried my best to look shocked. Unfortunately my cynicism is my only defense mechanism. “He ate far too much butter. Success did him in; the Nobel Prize gave him too much spending money, raised his standard of living too high. You have to be born to upper class or the food will kill you.”