Only Human (Themis Files #3)(46)

—I didn’t come here to fight with you, Alyssa. I just want to find a way to stop this.

—Stop what?

—All of it. Lapetus. The camps. Everyone hating everyone. How did it come to this?

—Dr. Franklin, the free world was destroyed when the aliens came. All these ideas, democracy, the will of the people, everyone being equal, it’s based on the belief that, in the end, good will always t … tr … triumph over evil.

—It did. Didn’t it?

—Tell that to the tens of millions that died. They all died in the world’s biggest cities, where the power is. P … people were scared, and scared people defer to authority. The world also lost Themis. You may have d … disabled one of their robots, but it’s Themis that gave people hope. Then she was gone. But there it was, lying in the middle of Central Park. Lapetus was inevitable, Dr. Franklin. No one could have stopped it.

—You didn’t try.

—Me? No. Why would I? Why would I want Earth to be defen … defenseless? Why would anyone want that? Do you know why no one, why none of these countries fight back against the Americans?

—Because they can’t, Alyssa. They don’t fight back because they have nothing to fight with.

—No! They don’t fight back because they need Lapetus. They sleep better at night knowing it’s there even if it is their enemy that controls it, even if they have to give up some freedom for it. And the camps? The camps are nothing new.

—What are you talking about? Rounding up innocent people, citizens, born and raised in this country because they happen to have had their father’s genes expressed instead of their mother’s, or because they call their god by a different name? What are they doing to them, Alyssa? Are they killing them?

—Not many of them. Not for now. But it might happen. People have a very short memory, or a very selective one, I d … don’t know. You had over one hundred thousand people in camps during the Second World War, so did Canada. They were citizens too. That wasn’t in the Middle Ages. Our parents were there.

—I’m not defending what happened during the war, but we were fighting Japan. We’re not at war with those people. They haven’t done anything!

—Does it matter? We have to blame sssomeone. A hundred mmmillion people don’t die because … these things happen! The human mind doesn’t work that way.

—Sure! How about we blame the people that did it?

—Not good enough. That won’t make anyone feel better. There’s n … nothing you can do about them. They’re too powerful, and they’re not here. It has to be someone weaker, here. Then you can remove those people and feel safer. People need to feel safer.

—You’re crazy, Alyssa. Do you know that?

—I’m not saying this is a good thing. I’m saying it’s always been this way. We need scapegoats when bad things happen. The Jews poisoned the well.

—What?

—The Black D … Death. It killed almost half the world in the fourteenth century. Maybe the Jews were less affected, maybe it was a myth, but people in Europe blamed them for the disease, accused them of poisoning the water. So they threw them out of the cities, or they killed them. They murdered them inside their homes. They burned them alive. In Strasbourg, they brought hundreds of them inside a wooden house and set it on fire. They did this in France, in Germany, in Spain, in Switzerland. This was Europe, the p … p … pinnacle of civilization. It happened before, and it will happen again. You think the world ch … changed while you were gone? It hasn’t. This is who we are.

—I’m sorry, Alyssa, but I refuse to believe that.

—Good for you. I choose to be a realist.

—And so you helped with all of it.

—About as much as you did, yes.

—Don’t do that, Alyssa. I’m not like you.

—You complained about Lapetus and about the camps. You gave them Lapetus. There’s no d … denying that. It makes no difference whether you intended to or not. I made a genetic test so they could find pilots. They found pilots. Only they didn’t stop there, and they started screening everyone. There were aliens among us. People wanted them found.

—We’re all aliens, Alyssa. All of us are.

—I know. That was the problem. How do you find them if they’re everywhere? Imagine if tall people were to blame. Are you tall? Am I? They made the c … camps until they could decide who we’re supposed to be scared of. And yes, they used my test to do it. So blame me if you want, I don’t care.

—I think there’s enough of that going around. I came here to talk about Lapetus.

—Beautiful, isn’t he?

—How did you make that test of yours? We couldn’t find anyone else who could activate the helmets in Themis.

—Your sample size was too small. I had already made a series of t … tests based on the samples I had from your pilots, but it was too precise, too specific. I couldn’t find anyone with that much in common with them, but I now had a much larger sample of the po … population to look at.

—Who?

—The dead, of course! All one hundred million of them. The aliens made that test for us. They designed that gas to target their own kind. Some people died within seconds of being ex … posed to the alien gas. Some spent entire minutes breathing it before they died. If I could figure out who went first, I could narrow it down to a handful of genetic traits. I d … did.