Alien Nation

by Alan Dean Foster

  Just go with the flow, Sykes told himself, and keep an ear out for any obvious slip of the tongue. And watch his face, he reminded himself. The Newcomers were lousy poker players.

  How many hands were being played here?

  He tried to put it out of his mind. He was after Tug’s murderer. Concentrate on that. It was why he’d fought so hard to get this case, why he’d volunteered to work with a damn dumb Slag. Think about Tug. Let George worry about possibly dangerous Newcomer narcotics. Take him at his word that the junk is not dangerous to human beings.

  Until something else proves otherwise.

  They pulled into the parking lot outside the government building in West L.A. The night guard acknowledged their ID with a smile and a wave. Little traffic here this time of night.

  Sykes spoke briefly to the watchman stationed in the lobby, who directed them to the proper floor. The elevator dropped them off halfway up the tower. The corridor ahead was deserted, the lighting turned down but not off.

  “There’s gotta be some other connection,” he mumbled as they walked.

  Francisco looked down at him. “What?”

  “Nothin’, nothin’. Forget it, George. Sometimes I just like to talk out loud, okay? It helps me see things.”

  The Newcomer sighed. “Another astonishing human behavior.”

  Sykes eyed him irritably. “What is?”

  “Talking to oneself. A difficult concept to fathom.”

  “You think so? Fathom this.” Sykes flipped him the bird, a gesture Francisco was familiar with. He tried to connect it to what his partner had just said and failed. Let it slide, he told himself. You had to do that with humans a lot. Otherwise you put your sanity at risk.

  BUREAU OF NEWCOMER AFFAIRS

  Sykes eyed the lettering on the door, wondering if his partner had spent time here previously, but said nothing. The door was unlocked. No reason to secure it, he mused as he entered the room beyond. No one made it this far without passing lobby security.

  A maze of partitioned cubicles stretched out before them.

  Francisco’s gaze swept the room. “Nobody here.”

  “Got to be somebody,” Sykes argued. “The guard downstairs said the place was operational. Somebody’s got the lights on for a reason. Let’s have a look around.”

  They pushed into the maze. Each cubicle was decorated to individual taste, a warren of posters and family portraits and silk flowers. Each cubicle boasted a computer and printer.

  “Maybe we don’t need anybody. Can you run any of this stuff?”

  Francisco shook his head. “I can handle the basic machine, but I have no access to authorization codes.”

  “Who needs code authorization?”

  The voice stopped them at an intersection between cubicles. The woman standing there was young, black, and wary. “Who are you guys and what are you doin’ up here this time of night?”

  Sykes handled the intro. “Detectives Sykes and Francisco, ma’am. LAPD, homicide division.”

  She studied the badge Sykes proferred, looked satisfied. Her gaze kept returning to Francisco. It was possible she’d been the one to process him after the ship’s arrival.

  “We could use a little help,” Sykes told her.

  “Couldn’t we all. Why you think I’m working this late?” She sighed. “Homicide, huh? That’s more interesting than the stats I’m totaling. Come on. I was going to get some coffee, but it can wait.”

  “You give us a hand,” Sykes said encouragingly, “and I’ll buy the coffee.”

  She smiled. Had a pretty smile, Sykes thought, from somebody who spent all day in a six-by-six cubicle running records across a glass screen. Never define somebody by their job. Who the hell had told him that?

  Her cubicle was adomed with photo blowups of high white mountains and grassy valleys. One showed a castle in some unidentified European country. Travel agency stuff, She sat down in her chair and glanced up at them as she brought the screen in front of her to life.

  “What do you want to know?”

  “Recently deceased alien individual name of Warren Hubley,” Sykes told her. “We know a few things about him. Not enough.”

  She nodded and her fingers danced on the keyboard. “Let’s see what we can find.”

  Information scrolled past too fast for either detective to follow, braking automatically at the name HUBLEY, WARREN. She thumbed a switch and shifted the name to the top of the screen. Information in profusion appeared below. Too many abbreviations for Sykes’s taste.

  “Here’s Hubley,” she informed them.

  “I can’t read it.” Sykes peered over her left shoulder. “Bureaucratese. How about interpreting?”

  “Too much information too spread out,” the operator explained. She translated from the screen. “Warren Hubley. Left quarantine on November thirtieth, relocated first to Riverside, then moved to Los Angeles early in February the following year. Field of expertise: chemical manufacturing. Did work with the alien ship when it was being prepared for departure, helped with the awakening from deepsleep on arrival. Was one of the first Newcomers out of suspension, according to his preprogramming. So he could help with the setup for the others, I guess.”

  Francisco’s eyes were glued to the screen. “Makes sense.”

  She went on. “Was officially debriefed by US Army Chemical Engineering. Looking for information on ship’s functions. Apparently he couldn’t help them there. All he’d been trained in was maintenance and closedown of the ship’s sleep facilities. His other education was to be utilized on arrival. He didn’t know anything about the operation of the ship itself.”

  “None of us did,” Francisco murmured. “We were not even passengers. We were cargo.”

  Sykes didn’t comment. “What happened to him after he was let out of quarantine?”

  The operator enlarged the print slightly. Working at night was a strain. “He was a lot better off than many Newcomers. Apparently he didn’t have too much trouble adapting his specialized knowledge to useful jobs here on Earth. He must’ve known he’d do okay here, too.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  She tapped the screen with a fingernail. “Says here that he passed up several other better-paying jobs waiting for one at a particular refinery in Torrance. Not many Newcomers could afford to pick and choose like that. I guess it was just the kind of work he wanted to do.”

  Sykes and Francisco exchanged a look. Squinting at the screen, the senior detective tried to separate any useful information from the lines of statistics and history. It all looked like personal stuff: known addresses, physical characteristics, relationships, and movements. That wasn’t what they were after.

  “That’s enough Hubley. Try a Joshua Strader, will ya, darlin’.”

  “For you, anything.” She gave him a lewd wink. “Is that Strader with an ‘a’ or an ‘ay’?”

  “S-t-r-a-d-e-r,” Francisco spelled helpfully.

  She nodded and punched in the request. Information filled the screen almost immediately. Sykes didn’t know much about computers, but he knew that when a query was answered that fast there was some awesome CD RAM behind it.

  The operator leaned slightly forward. “Released on November twenty-ninth. Came right to L.A. Specialist in interpersonal analysis and personnel management.”

  “That figures,” Sykes muttered.

  “Ten weeks after arriving,” she went on, “he took over an abandoned nightclub on the edge of the Los Angeles Newcomer District, oversaw its renovation and refurbishment thanks to a substantial loan from the Federal Newcomer Small Business Bureau, and renamed the place ‘Encounters.’

  “That’s all?” Francisco asked.

  “It’s followed by the same standard personal information and vital stars. Apparently he was doing well financially, paying back his loan on time and taking out a decent profit besides.”

  Sykes found himself digressing. “I didn’t think the government would loan money for a project like that. A nightclub.
I thought the idea was to help ‘elevate’ the Newcomers’ status. You get elevated in that joint, but it ain’t your status that goes up.”

  The operator was grinning. “The government loaned money to any Newcomer they thought could learn to support himself and create jobs for others. The only kind of elevation the Bureau is after involves full employment and getting everybody off welfare.”

  The detective shrugged. “Hey, somebody’s showing some sense, anyway.”

  Francisco gestured to the screen. “Enough about Mr. Strader. Now I think we should inquire about the gentleman who first provoked our curiosity. Could you please research a store owner named Cecil Porter, please.”

  She entered the name and once more the information materialized almost instantly.

  “Released December first,” she drawled. “Married, unlike your first two. Took a more roundabout route finding his way to L.A., too. He and his wife first went to Modesto, but they got themselves caught up in the Hmong race riots there and had to get out. Went to Coalinga next, wherever the hell that is.”

  “Up on the west side of the Central Valley,” Francisco informed her softly, “near nothing else.”

  She grunted a response. “Settled in L.A. in April. Field of expertise is organic chemical engineering. Looks like he first tried to hook up with one of the big agribiz outfits in Modesto, same thing in Coalinga, and finally gave up and moved down here to Newcomer country. Took out a loan to buy the store. He and his wife have one son.” She smiled back at Francisco. But then, Sykes reminded himself, she has to work with Newcomers and their problems every day.

  “You folks tend to have children later in life.”

  The Newcomer didn’t bat an eye. “Our women reach the equivalent of menopause at a later stage in their physical development.”

  “I don’t know whether to envy them or feel sorry for them.” She chuckled, turned her attention back to the computer. “You want details on the boy?”

  “Naw, we already met him,” Sykes said conversationally. “Wonderful kid. Close personal friend of George’s here.”

  “Hey, I know it’s none of my business, but why the interest in these three?” She swiveled in her chair. “I can’t imagine three more different personalities. Are they supposed to have something in common that involves homicide? They in some kind of trouble?”

  “Yeah, you could say that.” Sykes was looking past her, past the giant wall photo of the fairy-tale castle that dominated the back wall of her cubicle. An idea was forming, slow as the first life to emerge on land, crawling painfully up from the oleaginous depths of his brain. It was what he was best at, why Warner overlooked his many other faults. Somehow Sykes had the ability to pull seemingly unrelated bits of matter together from the vast reservoir of garbage that drifted loosely in his skull, to turn nonsense into logic and nothingness into reality.

  It wasn’t much of an idea. Not something any of his colleagues would have considered. He stood there silently mulling it over, his expression that of a man who’d just swallowed something sour. It took another minute to assimilate it all.

  If he hadn’t been working with George it might never have occurred to him, but he was doing a lot of thinking about Newcomers lately, learning a great deal about them. Things you didn’t get in the supplementary alien classes everyone was required to take.

  Or as the Porter kid had said to him, “Didn’t they teach you anything about us?” They did, but some stuff you didn’t pick up in class, and a lot of what went through your mind at the time never crossed it again. Well, Sykes found himself wondering about some of that now, thinking long and hard.

  His eyes widened suddenly. “Holy shit.” He looked sharply at Francisco. “Look what we’re staring at. No wonder we’re not getting anywhere. Three Newcomers with nothing in common, right? Or so it appears. What if it’s just one other guy who’s killed these three?” He was so excited he didn’t realize that for the first time since they’d taken on the case he wasn’t thinking about Bill Tuggle.

  Francisco eyed him uncomprehendingly. “I do not see where you are going with this line of thought, Matthew.”

  “Gimme a minute. You will. Think about it, George. Three dead. Three and one make four. Four Newcomers, three dead, one still alive somewhere who’s responsible for the deaths of the other three. All four from ‘totally different’ backgrounds.”

  His partner shook his head doubtfully. “I still fail to recognize a useful connection.”

  Sykes was so excited now he was all but hopping up and down. “C’mon, man! You’re the one who gave me the glue to put it all together.”

  “Me?” Francisco looked honestly surprised.

  “Yeah, you. What you told me earlier. You and the store owner’s son, that damn punker.”

  “But we had already decided he had nothing to do with these murders.”

  “He doesn’t, damnit! You and him, two Newcomers also of utterly different backgrounds, but you still had something in common. One thing. Remember what it was?”

  “No, there was nothing, besides the fact that we are both of the same . . .” The detective straightened. “Quarantine.”

  Sykes nodded vigorously, turned back to the operator. “Can you dig up quarantine records on this thing?”

  “For the three guys we just reviewed?” Sykes nodded again. “Sure, just a minute.” She turned back to her console. “I’ll have to run a cross-reference layout so you can see all three sets of records simultaneously. What were those first two names again?”

  “Warren Hubley. Joshua Strader,” Sykes reminded her impatiently.

  She ran the crossref and scrolled old man Porter to the top of the screen. “Your market owner was in Lodge Seven Seven Two. I’ll make a run with that.”

  It took a little longer for the computer to process the request. Quarantine information was sensitive and access to it restricted. A moment later the info flashed on the screen.

  OCCUPANTS, QUARANTINE LODGE 772: HUBLEY, WARREN—STRADER, JOSHUA—Sykes and Francisco looked anxiously at the screen—PORTER, CECIL . . .

  The fourth name now. The answer to all their questions, asked and not yet thought of—if Sykes was right, and the names appearing on the screen offered incontrovertible proof of that.

  It took forever for the machine to print it out.

  —HARCOURT, WILLIAM—

  Man and Newcomer exchanged a last look. Words were unnecessary.

  XI

  Nobody had a chance to open the door for Harcourt this time. He was in a hurry as he stepped out of the limo.

  The Encounters sign illuminated the entrance to the club, but the rest of the garish exterior lighting was turned off. The place was closed tonight, the parking lot out front was deserted, the driveway empty except for the limo and the van parked in front of it. The rear bumper of the van was badly scratched and rife with small dents as if metal had been pulled violently and repeatedly across its otherwise shiny surface.

  Harcourt took a moment to study the entrance to the club. Then the noise of the van doors opening turned him in that direction. Kipling was just exiting the passenger side and Quint the driver’s seat.

  His assistant slid open the van’s side door. Reaching inside, he extracted a large black suitcase, then turned to confront his boss. Harcourt nodded once. Together they strolled into the club. Quint trailed a respectful distance behind, hands jammed in his pockets. He would have whistled except that he’d learned early on many Newcomer’s didn’t like that. Something to do with the frequencies humans sometimes hit. Personally he didn’t see how it could bother them since they didn’t have any ears anyway. Just those dumb openings in the sides of their heads.

  Not that it was any of his business, he reflected.

  The chairs had been stacked neatly atop the tables. The lights in the booths were dark. Feeble illumination turned the bottles of liquor ranked behind the bar to crystalline teeth, imparting to the labels and shapes a magical softness they didn’t deserve. Harcourt led his men
toward the back, then up the stairs to the second floor.

  Cassandra was waiting for them. She produced a weak, strained smile by way of greeting. Her eyes never left Harcourt. The dress she wore was too modest for a performance, too extreme for a church. She was doing her best to be friendly, but it wasn’t easy. Harcourt made her very uncomfortable.

  Kipling and Quint walked right past her, heading for the door to the main office and conference room. Harcourt slowed, stopped to smile back at the female. One hand rose and the fingers drifted easily over the neckline of her dress, slid possessively down into the depths of the cleavage displayed there. Cassandra shivered but didn’t pull away. She’d already learned that much about Harcourt.

  “Quite lovely,” he whispered. “What was your name again?”

  She fought to keep from flinching. “Cassandra.”

  Harcourt smiled, and it was neither the smile he reserved for his adoring public nor the one he’d bestowed on the absent Watson. In its fashion it was more chilling than either.

  “I am sorry not to have remembered that. I will not forget again.”

  Withdrawing his hand, he continued on to the office. Cassandra watched him go. She was shaking and angry at herself for doing so.

  The refinery functioned around the clock, but with a reduced crew at night. Computers made that possible even as they kept the highly volatile products of the plant from igniting to destroy half of Torrance.

  The slugmobile skidded to a stop outside the loading dock. Sykes and Francisco checked the ID numbers above the platform to assure themselves they were at the right spot, then climbed out and started up the stairs. The interior of the building beyond the dock was brightly lit.

  The few nightworkers didn’t even took in their direction as the two detectives strode purposefully toward the back. Francisco was moving fast, but Sykes was so up he had no trouble keeping pace.

  The Newcomer detective was talking almost as fast as he was walking. “It all seems so obvious now.”

  “Easy once you make the connection,” his partner agreed tersely.