Dreamcatcher(110)

Owen shrugged.

'The story,' Kurtz resumed, 'will be that the detainees are being flown to a top-secret medical installation, a kind of Area 51, where they will undergo further examination, and, if necessary, long - term treatment. There will never be another official statement concerning them  -  not if all goes according to plan  -  but there will be time-release leaks over the next two years: encroaching infection despite best medical efforts to stop it . . . madness . . . grotesque physical changes better left undescribed . . . and finally, death comes as a mercy. Far from being outraged, the public will be relieved.'

'While in reality . . . ?'

He wanted to hear Kurtz say it, but he should have known better. There were no bugs here (except, maybe, for the ones hiding between Kurtz's ears), but the boss's caution was ingrained. He raised one hand, made a gun of his thumb and forefinger, and dropped his thumb three times. His eyes never left Owen's as he did this. Crocodile's eyes, Owen thought.

'All of them?' Owen asked. 'The ones who aren't showing Ripley-Positive as well as those who are? And where does that leave us? The soldiers who also show Negative?'

'The laddies who are okay now are going to stay okay,' Kurtz said. 'Those showing Ripley were all careless. One of them . . . well, there's a little girl out there, about four years old, cute as the devil. You almost expect her to start tap-dancing across the barn floor and singing "On the Good Ship Lollipop."' 

Kurtz obviously thought he was being witty, and Owen sup?posed that in a way he was, but Owen himself was overcome by a wave of intense horror. There's a four-year-old out there, he thought. Just four years old, how about that.  

'She's cute, and she's hot,' Kurtz was saying. 'Visible Ripley on the inside of one wrist, growing at her hairline, growing in the corner of one eye. Classic spots. Anyway, this soldier gave her a candybar, just like she was some starving Kosovar rug-muncher, and she gave him a kiss. Sweet as pie, a real Kodak moment, only now he's got a lipstick print that ain't lipstick growing on his cheek.' Kurtz grimaced. 'He had himself a little tiny shaving cut, barely visible, but there goes your ballgame. Similar stuff with the others. The rules don't change, Owen; carelessness gets you killed. You may go along lucky for awhile, but in the end it never fails. Carelessness gets you killed. Most of our guys, I'm delighted to say, will walk away from this. We're going to face scheduled medical exams for the rest of our lives, not to mention the occasional surprise exam, but look at the upside  -  they're gonna catch your ass-cancer wicked early.'

'The civilians who appear clean? What about them?'

Kurtz leaned forward, now at his most charming, his most persuasively sane. You were supposed to be flattered by this, to feel yourself one of the fortunate few to see Kurtz with his mask ('two parts Patton, one part Rasputin, add water, stir and serve') laid aside. It had worked on Owen before, but not now. Rasputin wasn't the mask; this was the mask.

Yet even now  -  here was the hell of it  -  he wasn't completely sure.

'Owen, Owen, Owen! Use your brain  -  that good brain God gave you! We can monitor our own without raising suspicions or opening the door to a worldwide panic  -  and there's going to be enough panic anyway, after our narrowly elected President slays the phooka horse. We couldn't do that with three hundred civilians. And if we really flew them out to New Mexico, put them up in some model village for fifty or seventy years at the taxpayers' expense? What if one or more of them escaped? Or what if  -  and I think this is what the smart boys are really afraid of  -  given time, the Ripley mutates? That instead of dying off, it turns into something a lot more infectious and a lot less vulnerable to the environmental factors that are killing it here in Maine? If the Ripley's intelligent, it's dangerous. Even if it isn't, what if it serves the grayboys as a kind of beacon, an interstellar road-flare marking our world out  -  yum-yum, come and get it, these guys are tasty . . . and there's plenty of them?'

'You're saying better safe than sorry.'

Kurtz leaned back in his chair and beamed. 'That's it. That's it in a nutshell.'

Well, Owen thought, it might be the nut, but the shell is something we're not talking about. We watch out for our own. We're merciless if we have to be, but even Kurtz watches out for his laddie-bucks. Civilians, on the other hand, are just civilians. If you need to burn em, they go up pretty easy.

'If you doubt there's a God and that He spends at least some of His time looking out for good old Homo sap, you might look at the way we re coming out of this,' Kurtz said. 'The flashlights arrived early and were reported  -  one of the reports came from the store owner, Reginald Gosselin, himself Then the grayboys arrive at the only time of year when there are actually people in these godforsaken Woods, and two of them saw the ship go down.'

'That was lucky.'

'God's grace is what it was. Their ship crashes, their presence is known, the cold kills both them and the galactic dandruff they brought along.' He ticked the points off rapidly on his long fingers, his white eyelashes blinking. 'But that's not all. They do some implants and the goddam things don't work  -  far from establishing a harmonious relationship with their hosts, they turn cannibal and kill them.