Alien Nation

by Alan Dean Foster

  “Get the picture now? Or should we stop by a bookstore on the way out and buy you a manual?”

  Francisco frowned at the pale membrane. “And that fits?”

  It wasn’t exactly the response Sykes expected. “Well, yeah. It’s rubber. It stretches.”

  “And still it fits?”

  The detective stared hard at his partner for a long moment, but Francisco’s expression was utterly serious. Finally he tossed the condom and empty packet back on the counter and continued probing the dead Newcomer’s effects. Francisco returned to his examination of Hubley’s pile. The subject of birth control was not mentioned again.

  Sykes started in on Raincoat’s clothes. The heavy workboots the alien had been wearing came last and he handled them gingerly. They were still coated on the sides and sole with some thick, viscous black material. He took a tentative sniff of the stuff and was gratified it wasn’t what it might have been. Sticky, but not tar or asphalt. Either of those would have dried to rock hardness by now from their time in storage.

  The stuff was still malleable enough to come off on your fingers, though, as Sykes quickly discovered. Looking disgusted, he hunted for something to wipe his hand. Francisco looked over.

  “Problerns?”

  “There’s some kind of goo all over these boots.” He held out his sticky fingers for examination. “What is this stuff?”

  Francisco studied his partner’s outstretched hand. “If I am not mistaken, it is a resin.”

  Sykes stopped hunting for a loose rag or towel and looked up in surprise. “Oh. A resin. Well sure, I mean, that’s obvious, isn’t it?”

  Francisco wasn’t finished. “Newcomers working with methane at oil refineries must paint it on their boots to protect against sparks that could set off an explosion.”

  The detective’s jaw fell slightly. “How the hell do you know that?”

  As it turned out, there was a perfectly good reason. Francisco was knowledgeable, if no genius.

  “A large number of my people were hired by refineries in the Los Angeles-Long Beach area because the methane fumes that are produced as a byproduct of certain refining processes are not harmful to us. Our lungs can tolerate a number of different gases which humans would find harmful and sometimes even lethal. This fact is widely known.” Sykes bridled only slightly at the implied criticism. “My spouse’s brother is one such worker.”

  “I see. And you saw the stuff on his boots one day and asked him what it was.” Francisco nodded.

  “We frequently exchange information. It is the only way we can learn about the world in which we find ourselves.”

  Sykes’s thoughts were racing. “So the Slag they’re cutting into upstairs worked at a refinery. Just like Hubley worked at a refinery.” He glanced significantly up at his partner. “That suggest anything to you, George?”

  “I am not unaware of the line of thought you are following, Matt.”

  Sykes was nodding to himself, obviously pleased. “I’d say that ‘possible’ connection between the two cases just got a hell of a lot more possible. Okay, next step.” He was silent for a moment, gazing at the far wall. Then he blinked and turned back to the silently waiting Francisco. “I gotta go talk to the wife of the Slag storeowner who got blown away last night.”

  “I believe I should be the one to interview the widow.”

  “Yeah, sure, you can be there too. Probably need you, if her English ain’t too good. Might even be a question or two you’d think to ask that wouldn’t occur to me.”

  “You do not understand. I am saying that I think I should interview her alone. By myself, yes?”

  “Yes—I mean, no! Why the hell . . .”

  He stopped himself. Francisco wasn’t smiling knowingly, but he might as well have been. Sykes was among the first to recognize that his bedside manner at such times could be less than sympathetic to the victim of a recent tragedy. Interviewees tended to shrink from him when they ought to be spilling information. Relatives of homicide victims were the worst. It made no difference that the subject of their visit was going to be Newcomer. Where those kinds of emotions were concerned there was no difference between species.

  Sykes had his pride, but he wasn’t dumb. He wanted information, not ego boosting. “Great, fine,” he muttered. “You talk to the wife.”

  Francisco looked pleased, but had the courtesy not to comment.

  V

  The last time they’d seen the minimart it had been aflame with police lights and noise and activity. Now it was silent, the shattered windows boarded over with three-quarter-inch plywood. After several rings the door was opened with obvious reluctance by an elderly Newcomer woman taller than Sykes. He stood behind Francisco, letting his partner do all the talking in the softly hissing Newcomer language.

  My day to play chauffeur, he mused as he strolled through the empty store. The shelves were empty now, the stock having been sold or given away. A For Rent sign was already stapled to one of the plywood panels out front. Empty and deserted, the minimart didn’t look like much.

  There were a few isolated goods left on the back shelves. Some he recognized, others he didn’t. American manufacturers were still trying to adapt, some with far more success than others, to an entirely new group of consumers unexpectedly dumped in their midst. In their place alien entrepreneurs had stepped in, repackaging old goods to appeal to their own kind, creating new products out of what was available. The Newcomers often acted silly and slow, and deserved many of the jokes told about them, but they weren’t all shambling stupes. They had their share of brains, even if it seemed much of the time that they weren’t evenly distributed.

  Take Francisco, now. Like all his people he was almost too quiet, too precise in his speech for Sykes’s liking. The detective smiled to himself. If they had to be together as long as six months, Sykes would have ol’ George spewing every cuss word known to the L.A. Police Department, which because of the city’s polyglot population included most swear words known to modern man. Given some time he might be able to make the Newcomer into something resembling a real detective.

  The less time they spent together the better, of course. Molding George wasn’t his job. His task right now, his only task, the only thing that interested him at all and made him get up in the morning was the burning need to track down Bill Tuggle’s other murderer. For that he needed Francisco, in spite of all the frustrations that came with working with a Newcomer. For that he could endure any number of snide remarks from Fedorchuk and Alterez and the rest of the bozos at the station.

  For that he could handle anything the world chose to throw at him.

  The proprietor’s widow was speaking calmly to Francisco. There were few gestures. As Sykes looked on, the alien detective extracted a picture from his pocket and showed it to the woman. She studied it intently, nodding and talking fast. Sykes could hear it all clearly without being able to understand a word of it.

  “Turn in here.”

  “I saw the sign, damnit.” Sykes had to hit the brakes hard because he actually hadn’t seen the sign, but he was damned if he was going to let Francisco know that.

  Steam and scrubbed smoke rose from the enormous complex of pipes and conduits and buildings that comprised the refinery. There was just enough of a breeze blowing in off the South Bay to keep the air over the hellish installation clear. You could feel the presence of exotic chemicals in the atmosphere as you drove through the lot, or so Sykes imagined. Men and a few women scurried busily through the maze, ants tending to their hill. Everyone wore a hard hat.

  They located the Visitor’s Office and Sykes received the sort of welcome commonly reserved for inquiring police: reserved and correct. The Methane Section manager who was summoned from his regular duties to escort them was a little more friendly. His name was O’Neal. Unlike the majority of the workers they’d encountered, he wore a tie and shirtsleeves.

  Companies were strange in their habits, Sykes mused. A guy working this place needed a tie about as muc
h as a longshoreman did. It was more a badge of rank than anything else, a long straight chevron that differentiated O’Neal from the peons who slaved over the pipes and wheels and gauges.

  He was amiable enough, though, as he led them deeper into the complex. More important, he was talkative. Sykes soaked up everything he was saying. Never knew when you might find some gold shining among the shit. Around them dozens of workers went about their assigned tasks, none of which Sykes could make sense of. A few O’Neal acknowledged, others he ignored. The work crew appeared about evenly divided between humans and Newcomers.

  The Section Manager had to shout to make himself understood above the clank and roar of the machinery around them.

  “Mr. Hubley was an all right guy, and a damn good manager. The men liked him. Even the Newcomers liked him. Hell, I got his job, but I’d give it back in a minute if it would do him any good. I’m really gonna have to scramble to fill his shoes. I wasn’t expecting to be in this position for a couple of years, at least. Now I’m gonna have to work tough to keep it.”

  “Maybe what you say is largely true,” Sykes told him, watching his steps as they advanced up a catwalk, “but one of his men didn’t like him so much.”

  O’Neal frowned, stopped when Sykes handed him the Polaroid of the alien who’d recently taken up residence in the County Morgue. They were approaching a massive sealed door leading to the Methane Section. As O’Neal examined and his two guests waited patiently for him to comment, the door groaned open. A trio of workers emerged, chatting softly among themselves. They were all Newcomers.

  The Section Manager tapped the photograph. “You think this is the guy who did it?”

  Sykes wore his air of professional nonchalance. “We think he coulda been involved, yeah. You know him?”

  O’Neal examined the picture one last time. “I’d like to help you fellows out, but to be honest it’s hard to say. I might, and I might not.”

  “That’s what I like about this job,” Sykes muttered. “You keep finding one indisputable piece of evidence after another.”

  “Hey, I’m sorry. I hate to admit it,” and he glanced furtively in Francisco’s direction, “but they all still kinda look alike to me.”

  “Try to learn to recognize the cranial coloration patterns,” Francisco told him. “They are quite distinctive. We often recognize others that way ourselves. It is no good for long-term police work, however, because they tend to change with age.”

  “Who else can I ask around here?” Sykes inquired impatiently.

  O’Neal still held the photo, trying to make a connection for them. “I’m not sure that—wait. You know who it looks like?” He nodded to himself. “Yeah. Anderson. Uh, James Anderson. He isn’t in today. If I’m remembering the shift roster right he was scheduled to take the afternoon off.”

  Sykes grunted. “I think you’re gonna find he’s taken the rest of his life off.” Ignoring O’Neal’s reaction, the detective nodded toward the heavy door. “That where Anderson worked?”

  “Yes, it is.” O’Neal turned as two more Newcomer workers emerged from inside. “Thirty-five percent methane in there. I don’t know how these fellas do it. They breathe oxy-nitro just like you and me, but that stuff doesn’t start to faze them until the concentration hits fifty percent.”

  Francisco spoke again. “Our lungs can carry out a kind of selective filtration which yours cannot. Greater capacity has something to do with it, as I understand the difference, and there are significant differences in the structure of the alveoli.”

  “Uh, yeah,” said O’Neal. Sykes simply gave his partner a look before turning one final time to the Section Manager.

  “If you see a Newcomer who does look like the guy in the photo, give us a call.” He handed O’Neal one of his cards. “If neither one of us is there, leave a message. We’ll get back to you fast. We’ll get back a lot faster if this Anderson character shows, though I’d bet my pension you’ll never see him within a mile of this plant again. Never know, though. Even Newcomers can do dumb things. Right, George?”

  “That’s right, Matt.

  “Ain’t he a card?” Sykes left O’Neal gaping as he and Francisco departed.

  The Section Manager continued to follow them with his eyes until they reached the gate. As soon as the slugmobile had pulled out into traffic he retraced his steps, heading for the section control room. The one monitor on duty ignored him as he went to the rear wall phone and dialed rapidly.

  It was dusk by the time Sykes pulled up in front of the modest three-bedroom home located on the outskirts of Slagtown. From an architectural standpoint it wasn’t much to look at: composition roof, stucco walls, lawn and bushes, two-car garage at the end of a narrow concrete driveway, and a solitary but sturdy maple dropping leaves out front. One thing even Sykes noticed right away was how clean the place was. Not a weed poking its rough-maned head through the perfect lawn, not a candy wrapper or bit of tin foil on the sidewalk, not a mark on the house. The windows looked new but were probably only well maintained.

  An attractive and conservatively dressed alien woman was watering the lawn with a garden hose. In her huge but still feminine hands it looked like a flex-straw. A six-year-old alien boy rode a specially modified bicycle along the sidewalk.

  Everyone had expected alien children to have even more trouble integrating into human society than the adults, but the opposite turned out to be the case, especially once they advanced past puberty. Sykes had heard that the girls still had a difficult time, but even the scrawniest alien boys were welcomed with open arms to local high school football teams by their coaches and fellow players. The Newcomer boys ran a minimum of fifty pounds above the average for children their age, and they never demanded to play quarterback. If they ever developed real quickness they’d revolutionize pro sports.

  Sykes studied the bucolic scene and rolled his eyes. “Geez. Welcome back, Ozzie and Harriet.”

  He leaned on the hom. Francisco looked up from where he’d been waiting for his son, then while Sykes waited he went to kiss his wife goodbye. Lastly a kiss for the boy, atop the naked skull. Oh well, Sykes mused. Every race to its peculiarities. At least they kissed.

  As he looked on, the derisive expression he’d worn when he’d parked by the curb began to soften. It was too corny to be fake, too genuine to be ignored. Sure they were aliens, out of place and time and society, but the innocence of it cut across interspecies lines. Even interstellar ones.

  He turned forward as Francisco opened the door on the passenger side and climbed in. Only one thing mattered anymore, he reminded himself, and that was finding Tug’s killer.

  Which probably meant finding this Slag named Anderson.

  The Biltmore was still the grand dame of downtown L.A. hotels. Completely renovated in the eighties, it clung to its glory like a wealthy dowager in her prime. Cars pulled out in front of the main entrance and slickly dressed men and women emerged. Not all were human. Not every Newcomer still lived in Slagtown. Some had come a long ways in a short time.

  There was muzak in the air and the cheesy aroma of canapés on trays. Waiters moved obsequiously through the crowd, dispensing Perrier and champagne and soaking up a month’s worth of gossip which the more astute among them would peddle a little at a time and for high fees to the city’s more prominent columnists. Not all the waiters were human, either. Newcomer integration had reached every level of society, though it remained concentrated near the bottom.

  At the moment the hall men’s room held but a single occupant. His custom tuxedo had been tailored to fit his massive frame. He checked the stalls, then the doorway, before removing the small, thick plastic object from his inside suit pocket. It resembled a flattened toothpaste tube with a tab dispenser near the top. As he lifted it to his lips a faint but distinctive clinking sound echoed through the bathroom. It was made by the links of the exotic silvery bracelet he wore around his left wrist.

  Placing the dispenser to his lips, he extended his tongue and thumbed
the stud near the tip. Like the dispenser itself, the tab control was designed to accommodate an alien-sized thumb.

  The tube released a small dab of bright blue gel. He pulled it in with his tongue, inhaling wetly through thick lips, and let it rest near the back of his mouth for a long moment as he savored the sting. It dissolved slowly in his saliva. When it was nearly gone, he swallowed.

  Almost immediately, his pupils dilated and his eyes widened. As the rush overcame him he sucked air.

  And whirled as the door to the men’s room banged open. He calmed himself as he saw that the intruder was only a balding, middle-aged human whose sole interest was the nearest urinal. The man was half drunk and didn’t so much as glance in the gel-sucker’s direction.

  The name of the owner of the seemingly innocuous dispenser of blue gel was Kipling. He hurriedly pocketed his little dispenser and strode toward the exit, taking care to keep his face turned away from the peeing human. His caution was excessive. The man was having enough trouble focusing on his business. He didn’t notice Kipling depart.

  If you squeezed your eyes shut until they hurt, the lights of L.A.’s army of autos changed from blinding blobs to heart-breakingly beautiful streaks of color. Sykes never did it intentionally, but sometimes he got so tired he experienced the same hallucinatory effect from sheer exhaustion.

  They’d been driving awhile in silence, each sunk in his own thoughts. The radio crackled and complained, dense with high-caloric crime. Just an average L.A. night, no more than the usual number of muggings, purse snatchings, domestic disputes and DWI’s. No murders yet. No rape. No arson. One major burglary, safely out of their vicinity.

  When Francisco eventually spoke up he did so without looking at his partner. “Mrs. Porter is not taking her husband’s death well.”

  Sykes tried to sound sympathetic and discovered he could not. He’d had to take statements from too many widows. The underside of Los Angeles had kicked most of the sympathy out of him years ago. Not that he wanted to be that way, but it was a matter of self-defense for a lot of cops.