A Matter for Men

TWO

I ENDED up in Dr. Obama's office. "Sit down, McCarthy."

"Yes, ma'am."

Her eyes were gentle, and I couldn't escape them. She reminded me of my grandmother; she had had that same trick of looking at you so sadly that you felt sorrier for her than for yourself. When she spoke, her voice was detached, almost deliberately flat. My grandmother had spoken like that too, when there was something on her mind and she had to work her way around to it.

"I hear you had a little trouble yesterday afternoon."

"Uh-yes, ma'am." I swallowed hard. "We-that is, Duke shot a little girl."

Dr. Obama said softly, "Yes, I read the report." She paused. "You didn't sign it with the others. Is there something you want to add?"

"Ma'am-" I said. "Didn't you hear me? We shot a little girl."

Her eyes narrowed thoughtfully. "I see. You're troubled by that."

"Troubled-? Yes, ma'am, I am."

Dr. Obama looked at her hands. They were folded politely on the desk in front of her, carefully manicured, and dark and wrinkled with age. "Nobody ever said it would be easy."

"You didn't say anything about shooting children either."

"I'd hoped we wouldn't have to."

"Dr. Obama, I don't know what the explanation is, but I can't condone-"

"It's not for you to condone!" Her face was suddenly hard. "Duke passed you the binoculars, didn't he?"

"Yes, ma'am. Several times."

"And what did you see?"

"The first time, I saw only the shelter and the enclosure. The second time I saw the little girl."

"And what did Duke do then?"

"Well, it looked like he was going to rescue her, but then he changed his mind and asked for the rifle instead."

"Do you know why he asked for the rifle?"

"Louis said he saw something."

"Mmm. Did you look through the binoculars again to check him?"

"Yes, ma'am-but I looked because I was curious. I'd never seen worms-"

She cut me off. "But when you looked, you saw them, didn't you?"

"I saw something . . ." I hesitated. "I couldn't be sure what it was."

"What did it look like?"

"It was big, and it was purple or red, it was hard to tell."

"The Chtorr have purple skin and varicolored fur. Depending on the light, it can look red, pink, magenta or orange. Was that what you saw?"

"I saw something purple. It was in the shadows, and it kept moving back and forth."

"Was it moving fast?"

I tried to remember. What was fast for a worm? "Kind of," I hedged.

"Then what you saw was a fully grown Chtorr in the active - and most dangerous-phase. Duke recognized it, so did Larry, Louis and Shorty. They signed the report."

"I wouldn't know-I've never seen a Chtorr before. That's why I'm here."

"If they said it was a Chtorr, you can be sure it was-but that's why they passed the binoculars, just to be sure; if Duke had been wrong, one of the others would have been sure to spot it."

"I'm not arguing about the identification-"

"Well, you should be," Dr. Obama said. "That's the only reason you could possibly have for not signing this report." She tapped the paper on her desk.

I eyed it warily. Dad had warned me about signing things I wasn't sure of-that's how he had married Mother. Or so he'd always claimed. I said, "It's that little girl we shot-I keep seeing her skipping around that pen. She wasn't in danger; there was no reason to shoot her-"

"Wrong," said Dr. Obama. "Wrong, twice over. You should know that."

"I shouldn't know anything!" I said, suddenly angry. "I've never been told anything. I was transferred up here from a reclamation unit because somebody found out I had two years of college-level biology. Somebody else gave me a uniform and a rule book-and that's the extent of my training."

Dr. Obama looked startled, resigned and frustrated, all at once. Almost to herself-but loud enough so I could hear it too-she said, "What the hell are they doing anyway? Sending me kids. . . ."

I was still burning. "Duke should have shot at the Chtorr!" I insisted.

"With what?" Dr. Obama snapped back. "Were you packing artillery?"

"We had a high-powered rifle-"

"And the range to the Chtorr was more than seven hundred meters on a windy day!"

I mumbled something about hydrostatic shock. "What was that?"

"Hydrostatic shock. It's what happens when a bullet hits flesh. It makes a shock wave. The cells are like little water balloons. They rupture. That's what kills you, not the hole."

Dr. Obama stopped, took a breath. I could see she was forcing herself to be patient. "I know about hydrostatic shock. It doesn't apply here. You're making the assumption that Chtorran flesh is like human flesh. It isn't. Even if Duke had been firing point blank, it wouldn't have done any good unless he was lucky enough to hit one of their eyes-or unless he had an exploding cartiidge, which he didn't. So he had no choice; he had to shoot what he could." Dr. Obama stopped. She lowered her voice. "Look, son, I'm sorry that you had to come up against the harsh realities of this war so quickly, but-" She raised her hands in an apologetic half-shrug, half-sigh, then dropped them again. "-Well, I'm sorry, that's all."

She continued softly, "We don't know what the Chtorr are like inside-that's why we want you here. You're supposed to be a scientist. We're hoping you'll tell us. The Chtorr seem to be pretty well armored or segmented or something. Bullets don't have much effect on them-and a lot of good men died finding that out. Either they don't penetrate the same way, or the Chtorrans don't have vital organs that a bullet can disrupt-and don't ask me to explain how that one's possible, because I don't know either. I'm just quoting from the reports.

"We do know, though-from unfortunate experience-that to shoot at a Chtorran is to commit suicide. Whether they're intelligent or not-as some people think-makes no difference. They're very deadly. Even without weapons. They move fast and they kill furiously. The smartest thing to do is not to shoot at them at all.

"Duke wanted to rescue that child-probably more than you realize-because he knew what the alternative to rescue was. But when Louis saw Chtorr in the woods, Duke had no choice-he didn't dare go after her then. They'd have read him halfway down the hill. He'd have been dead before he moved ten meters. Probably the rest of you too. I don't like it either, but what he did was a mercy.

"That's why he passed the binoculars; he wanted to be sure he wasn't making a mistake-he wanted you and Shorty and Larry to double-check him. If there was the slightest bit of doubt in any of your minds, he wouldn't have done what he did; he wouldn't have had to-and if I thought Duke had killed that child unnecessarily, I'd have him in front of a firing squad so fast he wouldn't have time to change his underwear."

I thought about that. For a long moment.

Dr. Obama waited expectantly. Her eyes were patient. I said, suddenly, "But Shorty never looked at all."

She was surprised. "He didn't?"

"Only the first time," I replied. "He didn't look when we saw the child and he didn't look to confirm it was Chtorr."

Dr. Obama grunted. She was writing something on a note pad. I was relieved to have her eyes off me even for a moment. "Well, that's Shorty's prerogative. He's seen too many of these-" She finished the note and looked at me again. "It was enough that he saw the enclosure. But it's you we're concerned with at the moment. You have no doubt, do you, that what you saw was Chtorr?"

"I've never seen a Chtorran, ma'am. But I don't think this could have been anything else."

"Good. Then let's have no more of this nonsense." She pushed the report across the desk. "I'll take your signature on the bottom line."

"Dr. Obama, if you please-I'd like to know why it was necessary to kill that little girl."

Dr. Obama looked startled again, the second time since the interview began. "I thought you knew."

I shook my head. "That's what this whole thing is about. I don't. "

She stopped. "I'm sorry ... I really am sorry. I didn't realize - No wonder I couldn't sandbag you. . . ." She got up from her desk and crossed to a filing cabinet. She unlocked it and pulled out a thin folder-it was lettered SECRET in bright red-then returned to her seat. She held the folder thoughtfully in her hands. "Sometimes I forget that most of what we know about the Chtorr is restricted information." She eyed me carefully. "But you're a scientist-"

She was flattering me, and we both knew it. Nobody was anything anymore. To be accurate, I was a student on leave, temporarily contracted to the United States Armed Services, Special Forces Operation, as a full-time exobiologist.

"-so you should be entitled to see these things." But she still didn't pass them over. "Where are you from?" she asked abruptly.

"Santa Cruz, California."

Dr. Obama nodded. "Nice town. I used to have some friends just north of there-but that was a long time ago. Any of your family still alive?"

"Mom is. Dad was in San Francisco when it-when it-"

"I'm sorry. A lot of good people were lost when San Francisco went under. Your mother still in Santa Cruz?"

"I think so. Last I heard, she was helping with the refugees."

"Any other relatives?"

"I have a sister near L.A."

"Married?"

"Yes. She's got a daughter, five." I grinned at the thought of my niece. The last time I had seen her, she had been barely beyond the lap-wetting stage. I went sad then, remembering. "She used to have three. The other two were boys. They would have been six and seven."

Dr. Obama nodded. "Even so, she's very lucky. So are you. Not many people had that many members of their family survive the plagues." I had to agree with her.

Her face went grim now. "Have you ever heard of a town called Show Low?"

"I don't think so."

"It's in Arizona-it was in Arizona. There's not much left of it now. It was a nice place; it was named after a poker game-" Dr. Obama cut herself short; she laid the folder on the desk in front of her and opened it. "These pictures-these are just a few of the frames. There's a lot more-half a disk of high-grain video-but these are the best. These pictures were taken in Show Low last year by a Mr. Kato Nokuri. Mr. Nokuri apparently was a video hobbyist. One afternoon he looked out his window-he probably heard the noise from the street-and he saw this. " Dr. Obama passed the photographs across.

I took them gingerly. They were color eight-by-tens. They showed a small-town street-a shopping center-as seen from a third-story window. I flipped through the pictures slowly; the first showed a wormlike Chtorran reared up and peering into an automobile; it was large and red with orange markings on its sides. The next had the dark shape of another climbing through a drugstore window; the glass was just shattering around it. In the third, the largest Chtorran of all was doing something to a-it looked like a body-

"It's the last picture in the bunch I want you to see," said Dr. Obama. I flipped to it. "The boy there is only thirteen."

I looked. I almost dropped the picture in horror. I looked at Dr. Obama, aghast, then at the photograph again. I couldn't help myself; my stomach churned with sudden nausea.

"The quality of the photography is pretty good," she remarked. "Especially when you consider the subject matter. How that man retained the presence of mind to take these pictures I'll never know, but that telephoto shot is the best one we have of a Chtorran feeding."

Feeding! It was rending the child limb from limb! Its gaping mouth was frozen in the act of slashing and tearing at his struggling body. The Chtorran's arms were long and double-jointed. Bristly black and insectlike, they held the boy in a metal grip and pushed him toward that hideous gnashing hole. The camera caught the spurt of blood from his chest frozen in midair like a crimson splash.

I barely managed to gasp, "They eat their-their prey alive?"

Dr. Obama nodded. "Now, I want you to imagine that's your mother. Or your sister. Or your niece."

Oh, you monster- I tried not to, but the images flashed across my mind. Mom. Maggie. Annie-and Tim and Mark too, even though they were seven months dead. I could still see the boy's paralyzed expression, the mouth a silent shriek of why me? startlement. I could see that expression superimposed on my sister's face and I shuddered.

I looked up at Dr. Obama. It hurt my throat to swallow. "I-I didn't know."

"Few people do," she said.

I was shaking and upset-I must have been white as a scream. I pushed the pictures away. Dr. Obama slid them back into the folder without looking at them; her eyes were studying me. She leaned forward across her desk and said, "Now, about that little girl--do you have to ask why Duke did what he did?"

I shook my head.

"Pray that you never find yourself in the same situation-but if you do, will you hesitate to do the same thing? If you think you will, take another look at the pictures. Don't be afraid to ask; any time you need to remember, come to my office and look."

"Yes, ma'am." I hoped I wouldn't need to. I rubbed my nose. "Uh, ma'am-what happened to Mr. Nokuri, the photographer?"

"The same thing that happened to the boy in the picture-we think. All we found was the camera-"

"You were there-?"

"-the rest of the place was a mess." Dr. Obama focused on something else for a moment, something very far away. ". . . There was a lot of blood. All over everything. A lot of blood. ... " She shook her head sadly. "These pictures-" She straightened the folder on her desk meaningfully. "-an incredible legacy. This was our first real proof. The man was a hero." Dr. Obama looked at me again and suddenly snapped back to the present. "Now you'd better get out of here. I have work to do-oh, the report. Take it with you and read it again. Bring it back when you've signed it."

I left. Gratefully.