“Albert, no!” Sikes cried out. He was terrified that the youthful Newcomer was going to rip his head off.
Albert snapped Sikes’s head around, quickly and efficiently and with a large measure of self-confidence. Sikes let out a compressed shriek of “Niiiiaaagh!”
He waited for pain to rip through every pore of his body. His skin would doubtless feel as if it were being flayed off. Every nerve ending was . . .
Was . . .
Nothing.
To Sikes’s astonishment, there was nothing. Well, not quite. There was something. But it was nowhere on a par with what he had been feeling before.
Albert took a step back. “How’s that?” he asked, his open hands still poised at either side of Sikes’s face. For a moment it seemed to Sikes as if Albert was preparing for the possibility that Sikes’s head might roll off its shoulders.
Slowly he brought his head in a circle. “Better,” he admitted, and then quickly amended, “It’s still sore, but I can move it.”
As if delivering a public service message, Albert said sagely, “Sexual ignorance is a very dangerous thing.”
“So is making comments like that around someone who’s armed,” said Sikes. “Remember, Albert, I do have a gun.”
“Yes, Matt, I think we all remember that,” George said pointedly.
Sikes glared at him.
May wisely took that moment to take the conversation in an entirely different direction. “George,” she said, “Albert and I want to have a child.”
George looked amazed. A grin split his face from ear to ear or, at least, what passed for ears on a Tenctonese head. “Really? That’s wonderful!”
Sikes was still rubbing his neck to work out the last of the kinks. “How?” he asked in a slightly distracted fashion. “You gonna adopt?”
May looked at Sikes as if he’d just dropped down from Mars . . . which was pretty ironic, considering who was looking at whom. “I’m going to conceive,” she said matter-of-factly. “Why?”
Now Sikes felt completely flustered. He had been so certain that adoption was a reasonable assumption, based on what he had learned about Tenctonese physiology. That was the problem with these damned people. Every time he thought he had a handle on them, they came up with some new philosophy or some new little biological trick that sent him off kilter once more. Sometimes he had the paranoid feeling that George and his friends were making this up as they went, just to keep the earth guy off balance.
May was still staring at him, clearly expecting an answer to her question of “Why?” And now Albert and George were also regarding him with open curiosity.
“Uh . . . well.” He scratched his chin and immediately winced, because he’d rubbed the sore spot. He tried to think of ways this day could possibly get worse, and nothing came to mind . . . which was a bad sign, since Sikes was a pessimist. Nevertheless, he pressed on gamely. “I mean, I know about Newcomers. It takes two men to get one woman pregnant.”
It wasn’t a statement so much as a question. He looked expectantly at the three of them, and almost as one, they nodded. He felt a slight measure of relief. It meant that they weren’t suddenly going to change the rules on him (“Two men? Matt, what an absurd notion! Where did you get that idea?” his paranoid fantasies had George saying.) Slightly buoyed, he continued, to make sure he understood things. “A Binnaum, the catalyst, right?”
Albert nodded.
“And a . . .” Here his command of Newcomer terminology wore out. “. . . a . . . whatchamacallit . . .”
“Gannaum,” George said helpfully. He beamed. “You’ve been paying attention, Matt. Very good.”
“Yeah, well, with everything that’s been going on the past year, it’d be hard not to learn something,” Sikes said. “But . . . okay, look. Albert’s a Binnaum. He’s supposed to go around, y’know, popping other guys’ wives.”
Albert and May winced slightly at the coarseness of the terminology, and now George was looking at Matt with an air of disapproval. “I mean,” Sikes said, “Gettin’ ’em ready so their husbands can make ’em pregnant.”
At that, May smiled. She patted Albert on the forearm. “Yes. I’m so proud of him.”
Sikes tried not to laugh. A job where you go around boffing other guys’ wives while everyone looks on and smiles, and your own wife looks at you like you’d just pulled three orphans out of a burning building. Sometimes he thought he’d been born into the wrong species. Just to make sure he fully understood, he said, “Albert can’t make anybody pregnant. He hasn’t got the right . . .” He sought a better word and couldn’t find it, and finished, “. . . juice.”
“True,” said George, not at all put off by Sikes’s phrasing. “That’s why Binnaums rarely marry. May would need to mate with a Gannaum after Albert had catalyzed her.”
May looked as if she was jumping out of her skin with excitement. She clearly had something else to say, and now she was coming out with it. “We want that Gannaum to be you, George.”
George looked stunned. “Me?”
And Sikes felt relief swim over him. Relief on a variety of levels. Not only was he relieved that his understanding of Newcomer biology was not deficient, but also relieved that they were now back on his turf . . . namely, predicting how females were going to react in certain situations.
Sure, he’d made mistakes every now and then, but he knew George’s wife, Susan, fairly well. Susan was not accustomed to being married to someone who went around having sex with other people’s wives. And Sikes knew, with as great certainty as if a huge hand had materialized and written it out in flaming letters on the wall, just precisely how Susan was going to behave when she heard about this “blessed event.”
“Ohhh boy,” said Sikes.
George, utterly oblivious to his partner’s reaction, found himself at a loss for words. But it wasn’t out of any sense of concern over what Susan would say. In fact, he was so overwhelmed by sentiment that Susan hadn’t even entered the equation for him yet. “I . . . don’t know what to say . . .”
“I was Binnaum for your children,” said Albert enthusiastically, which was no surprise to Sikes, because Albert said everything enthusiastically. “You’ll be Gannaum for ours. It’s so beautiful!”
George looked with fondness, and even humility, at the excited young couple before him. It brought back to him so much of what he was feeling the first time that he and Susan had decided to create a child, the young male who would grow up to be Buck Francisco. Emotion swelled through him, almost more than he could contain. Certainly the middle of the squad room was not the appropriate place for such displays, so he internalized as much as he could. With effort, he managed to say, “Albert . . . May . . . it will be a great honor. Thank you.”
Warmly, the three of them touched temples in the traditional Tenctonese method of close exchanges.
Sikes stared at them in the way that one sees a four-car pile-up about to occur and knows that he is helpless to stave it off. “Ohhhhhhh boy,” he said again.
He might as well have said nothing because they weren’t paying attention to him at all, since they were so enraptured in the sentiment of the moment. They broke from their intimate interaction, and then May cleared her throat and said, “We better get back to work.”
Albert was grinning widely, taking joy not only in the anticipation of being a father, but also in the genuine joy that he had evoked in George. George, for his part, nodded in agreement with what May had said, and the two young Newcomers moved off. As George sat back down behind his desk, he realized his face was wet. He pulled out his handkerchief and dabbed at the tears, knowing that it was important to maintain decorum in the squad room. Earth males were not particularly comfortable with sentiment so openly displayed. Just another one of those little emotional oddities that he’d learned to live with, if not actually understand.
He noticed that Matt was staring at him with a most peculiar expression. He lowered the handkerchief and looked back at his partner questioning
ly.
“Hey, uh . . . Studley,” began Sikes. “Don’t you think you ought to run this by the missus?”
It took George a moment to translate for himself just what in the world Matt was saying. English was, after all, a learned language. With two odd terms of address, (Studley, the missus) and the slang verb (run this by), it took him a moment to grasp Matt’s question.
Then he understood. But he still did not comprehend.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Most wives . . . my ex, for example,” he said, remembering with more than a touch of dread what had happened after his rather inappropriate behavior at a police convention in Chicago, “aren’t particularly thrilled when their husbands have sex with other women.” He had picked up a pencil as he spoke, and now, as a minor visual aid, he made a circle with his thumb and forefinger and was casually sliding the pencil back and forth through the space as he spoke.
Now George comprehended. But he didn’t believe it, and he gave Sikes a look that could best be described as faintly patronizing.
“Matt, Susan does not have your human propensity toward jealousy.”
Matt’s pencil drooped.
“Don’t give me that, George,” Matt said, and then added, “She’s a woman,” in the same tone of voice he would have used to announce that the pin of a hand grenade had just been pulled.
George sat back, thinking for a moment. His partner was generally a good judge of human psychology. Now he was rendering judgments on Tenctonese psychology, and for that, of course, he was ill-equipped. Still, George owed him the courtesy of trying to give as much weight to his words as possible. He tried to view the subject from all sides, looking for an analogy from his previous experience. “I admit,” he said slowly, “I don’t know any Tenctonese wives who have faced this situation . . .”
Matt slapped his desk and then extended his hand, palm up. “There you go.” He lowered his voice to a tone that was both confidential and filled with dread. “She’s not gonna like it,” he warned.
George was still having trouble accepting that something as eminently human as jealousy could possibly factor into this. Then he realized something that might give a small degree of merit—not much, but a small degree—to Sikes’s warnings. “The only thing Susan might object to . . .”
Matt waited.
“I have to maintain a high level of bahna fluid,” said George.
It was a statement that had no meaning to Sikes at all. He stared at George questioningly, uncertain of what the ramifications of this “high level” stuff were.
Realizing that Sikes hadn’t grasped the significance of it, George added, “We won’t be able to have sex for a month.”
Matt’s face fell. “She’s really not going to like it. I mean . . . she has to be celibate for a month, so that you can store up enough joy juice to erupt like Vesuvius after thirty days? With another woman? There’s not exactly an up side for Susan in all this, George. Do you see that?”
George waved dismissively. “Albert is practically family. He helped father our children. Susan couldn’t possibly object!”
At this point, Sikes gave up. He knew he was right. The only thing to do now was to sit back and let George walk straight into the lion’s den. And Sikes knew, beyond any doubt, that poor Francisco was going to get chewed up and spit out.
At that moment, Captain Bryon Grazer approached them.
Sikes had never been that wild about Grazer. Oh, once upon a time, Grazer had been a good cop. Okay, hell, a great cop. But since rising to the captaincy, Grazer had seemed far more occupied with the notion of furthering his own advancement than actually tending to the mundane, unglamorous job of catching bad guys. A cop liked knowing that his captain was going to be there to back him up, come hell or high water. But Sikes had the distinct feeling that if the water were getting high, Grazer would let any cop under his command go to hell. It seemed very likely that Grazer would cut any of his people loose if it became politically inexpedient to support them.
But Sikes kept his opinions to himself and tried not to let it affect too much the way that he dealt with the man. Especially since Grazer could make his life miserable if he wanted to.
Grazer was rapping a file folder against his leg as he walked, and when he got to their desks, he said a curt, “Francisco, Sikes,” by way of greeting, and then handed the file to George. Grazer was not one for cheerful morning amenities. He wasn’t even inclined to give Sikes a pat on the back about the good work they had done on their previous collar. That was old business, and it was time to move on to the new. “You got a homicide in Little Tencton.”
George flipped open the file, skimming it with his usual speed. “The victim, William Perkins, was human . . .”
“Killed by a Newcomer,” said Grazer.
Already Matt’s antenna were up. Whenever you had a human slain by a Newcomer, you had potential for an explosive situation because of the racial aspect. It meant that whoever had done it was going to have to be nailed fast. And that wasn’t likely. In Little Tencton, finding a Newcomer to rat on a Newcomer was always difficult. And finding a human who could accurately pick out one Newcomer from another was virtually impossible. If Sikes had a nickel for every description he had that went, “He was bald and had spots on his head,” as if that was going to be of any use whatsoever, he could have retired ages ago.
So it was with nothing short of amazement that he reacted to the captain’s next words when Grazer said, “According to witnesses—a plumbing salesman, in particular—the perpetrator was a giant.”
It was a godsend. They were going after a Newcomer with a major distinguishing feature.
George, naturally, could not refrain from looking a gift horse in the mouth. He frowned and said, “That’s odd. I’ve never heard of giantism among Tenctonese.”
It was just like George, Sikes thought, to try and wreck a perfectly decent lead just because it was something outside of his own experience.
Meantime, George continued to read the file. “Perkins worked security for Dual Pharmaceuticals. We can start there.” Then something else in the file caught his eye. “I didn’t know that.” He looked up at Sikes and Grazer and said, “Dual is owned by Hadrian Tivoli.”
This was an earth-shattering revelation, the importance of which went right by the two human officers. They looked at each other, as if trying to get silent verification from the other that he wasn’t the only one to whom this meant absolutely nothing.
Amazed that they could be unaware, George added the customary title in front of the name. “Doctor Hadrian Tivoli.”
Matt tried to look as if this jogged his memory. Encouraged, George further prompted by saying, “He patented a genetic cure for diabetes back in ’94.”
“Right!” said Matt triumphantly. “That Hadrian Tivoli.”
George looked to Grazer to see whether the captain now remembered. Grazer, for his part, was staring at Sikes, and Sikes made a face that indicated very clearly that he still had never heard of this Tivoli guy. But in matters like this, it was best to convince George that everyone was playing on the same field so that they could move on.
Grazer took the opportunity to move on as well. “An infant was found at the scene of the crime. Before you go to Dual, take a look at her.”
There was something in his tone that prompted inquiring looks from Sikes and Francisco. And all that Grazer could say by way of explanation was, “She’s . . . different.”
He actually seemed shaken by it.
Moments later, Matt and George understood why.
The police station had set up a nursery, a small facility to be used for those situations where small children were brought if they’d been lost. It seemed more humane than making a child stew for hours in the squad room, in the midst of the flow of human sewage that cops were constantly bringing into the station house on their way to booking and processing.
There were two cribs, a TV and video player, a few games and old toys that had
been donated by a local parish. And there was a changing table which, at that moment, was occupied.
Sikes and Francisco entered quietly, uncertain of whether the baby they were supposed to see was sleeping or not. Then they spotted a woman attendant by the changing table, finishing the diapering of someone. Sikes could see the hint of little legs kicking around.
“That her?” asked Sikes.
The attendant turned. She had on a police ID that identified her as Willis.
She had a look of quiet amazement in her eyes. Instead of saying anything, she simply nodded and then indicated with a tilt of her head that they should come over there.
They did so, but stopped about a foot away. Their expressions shifted into flat-out astonishment when they saw what was on the changing table.
The child was not a child, at least nothing in the traditional sense. She wasn’t human. But she didn’t look quite Tenctonese. Her head was abnormally large in proportion to her body, and it was perfectly hairless. But there were no signs of spots either. Her large eyes seemed to be many colors at once, and they studied the two detectives with open curiosity that was tempered with what seemed an overwhelming intelligence. Her gaze seemed to drill into the backs of the detectives’ skulls, penetrate into their private thoughts and examine them, turning them over and over the way that a child would find endless fascination in the most mundane of objects.
Her arms lay quietly at her sides. Even the mild movement of her legs had ceased. She was perfectly still, and it seemed to Matt, in his imaginings, that he was looking at something not only not from this world, but not from this dimension.
It almost seemed that the child was glowing. But that was certainly a mere trick of the lighting in the nursery. There was more to it than that, though. It was as if the infant was illuminated from inside by some sort of spiritual light of inner peace. Peace, contentment, knowledge . . . it was . . .
“Unreal,” breathed Sikes.
George was no less captivated than Matt, but he made a conscious effort to remain businesslike. He turned to Willis and said matter-of-factly, “Has a doctor examined the baby?”