From a Buick 8(59)

'I've got a good tight shot,' Sandy told him. 'The smell may be bad, but the light's heavenly.' The time-code at the bottom of the little interior TV screen read 7:49:01P.

'Cutting now,' Curt said, and slid his larger scalpel into the pinned creature's midsection. His hands didn't tremble; any stage-fright accompanying the arrival of the big moment must have come and gone quickly. There was a wet popping sound, like a bubble of some thick liquid breaking, and all at once drops of black goo began to patter into the trough under the easel.

'Oh man,' Sandy said. 'Oh, that really stinks.'

'Fucking foul,' Tony added. His voice was thin and dismayed.

Curt took no notice. He opened the thing's abdomen and made the standard branching incisions up to the pinned wingpits, creating the Y-cut used in any human postmortem. He then used his pincers to pull back the hide over the thoracic area, more clearly revealing a spongy dark green mass beneath a narrow arch of bone. Sandy had never seen anything like it.

'Jesus God, where's its lungs?' Tony asked. Sandy could hear him breathing in harsh little sips.

'This green thing could be a lung,' Curt said.

'Looks more like a ? '

'Like a brain, yeah, I know it does. A green brain. Let's take a look.'

Curt turned his scalpel and used the blunt side to tap the white arch above the crenellated green organ. 'If the green thing's a brain, then its particular evolution gave it a chastity belt for protection instead of a safety deposit box. Give me the shears, Sandy. The smaller pair.'

Sandy handed them over, then bent back to the video camera's viewfinder. He was zoomed to the max, as per instructions, and had a nice clear picture.

'Cutting . . . now.'

Curt slipped the lower blade of the shears under the arch of bone and snipped it as neatly as the cord on a package. It sprang back on both sides like a rib, and the moment it did the surface of the green sponge in the thing's chest turned white and began to hiss like a radiator. A strong aroma of peppermint and clove filled the air. A thick bubbling sound joined the hissing. It was like the sound of a straw prospecting the bottom of a nearly empty milkshake glass.

'Think we should get out of here?' Tony asked.

'Too late.' Curt was bent over the opened chest, where the spongy thing had now begun to sweat droplets and runnels of whitish-green liquid. He was more than interested; he was rapt. Looking at him, Sandy could understand about the fellow who deliberately infected himself with yellow fever or the Curie woman, who gave herself cancer fiddling around with radiation. 'I am made the destroyer of worlds,' Robert Oppenheimer muttered during the first successful detonation of an atomic bomb in the New Mexico desert, and then went on to start work on the H-bomb with hardly a pause for tea and scones. Because stuff gets you, Sandy thought. And because, while curiosity is a provable fact, satisfaction is more like a rumor. Or maybe an out-and-out myth.

'What's it doing?' Tony asked. Sandy thought that from what he could see above the pink mask, the Sarge already had a pretty good idea.

'Decomposing,' Curt replied. 'Getting a good picture, Sandy? My head not in your way?'

'It's fine, five-by,' Sandy replied in a slightly strangled voice. At first the peppermint-clove variation had seemed almost refreshing, but now it sat in the back of his throat like the taste of machine-oil. And the cabbagey reek was creeping back. Sandy's head was swimming more strenuously than ever, and his guts had begun to slosh. 'I wouldn't take too long about this, though, or we're going to choke in here.'

'Open the door at the end of the hall,' Curt said.

'You told me ? '

'Go on, do what he says,' Tony told him, and so Sandy did. When he came back, Tony was asking Curt if Curt thought snipping the bone arch had sped up the decomposition process.

'No,' Curt said. 'I think touching the spongy stuff with the tip of the shears is what did it. The things that come out of that car don't seem to get along with us very well, do they?'

Neither Tony nor Sandy had any wish to argue that. The green sponge didn't look like a brain or a lung or anything else recognizable by then; it was just a pustulant, decomposing sac in the corpse's open chest.

Curt glanced toward Sandy. 'If that green thing was its brain, what do you suppose is in its head? Inquiring minds want to know.' And before either of them completely realized what he was doing, Curt reached out with the smaller of his scalpels and poked the blade into the thing's glazed eye.

There was a sound like a man popping his finger in his cheek. The eye collapsed and slid out of its socket whole, like a hideous shed tear. Tony gave an involuntary shout of horror. Sandy uttered a low scream. The collapsed eye struck the thing's furry shoulder and then plopped into the drip-gutter. A moment later it began to hiss and turn white.

'Stop it,' Sandy heard himself saying. 'This is pointless. We're not going to learn anything from it, Curtis. There's nothing to learn.'

Curtis, so far as Sandy could tell, didn't even hear him. 'Holy shit,' he was whispering. 'Holy f**king shit.'

Fibrous pink stuff began to bulge from the vacant eyesocket. It looked like cotton candy, or the insulation people use in their attics. It came out, formed an amorphous node, then turned white and began to liquefy, like the green thing.

'Was that shit alive?' Tony asked. 'Was that shit alive when it ? '