Doctor Alien’s Five Empty Boxes

by Rajnar Vajra

You’re not the first person in town to ask me what kind of crazy contraption I’m driving these days. But in your case, Pastor, if you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to tell you the whole story. Never could be completely open about some of it, not even with Sunny; my wife’s been through enough. Can you spare the time? In that case, I suppose it never hurts to start off with a bang.

If you’d asked me that Wednesday afternoon, I wouldn’t have said that everyone in my neighborhood hated my clinic. Aside from you, Sunny merely felt “jittery” about it, or so she claimed; Mrs. Murphy, living directly across the street from the main building, had never uttered a complaint; and our son, Alex, even labeled it “groovy,” a word he’d hijacked from one of the more usual unusual visitors to the institution. Of course, Ember Murphy suffers from multi-infarct dementia, and Alex recently turned eight. And while I’m being candid, an unprofessional condition for someone in my profession, I’d grown a bit sour about the place myself.

Still, I was surprised that anyone felt so strongly about it that they would try to kill me.

I picked myself up off the parking lot pavement, stared at the smoldering remains of my almost brand-new car, and then turned toward Tad, the extraterrestrial still gripping my right arm with a hand longer than my torso. My shoulder hurt and I was breathing hard, but at least I was breathing.

My ET companion, a female1 Vapabond from what I’d come to think of as the wrong side of our galaxy, gazed down at me with her big brown eyes and a grimace that may or may not have been sympathetic. You’ve never seen a Vapabond? Think double-height gorilla with two appropriately hairy arms and legs but then add a torso covered in armadillo shell that expands and contracts hugely with every breath, plus a walrus head with three shrunk-down tusks. Throw in size 22 footwear with an improbable resemblance to huaraches as the only articles of clothing and a pungent odor only an elephant might find sexy. That puts you in the ballpark if not quite in the infield.

“How did you know, Tad?” I asked her. At that moment, I was only mildly perturbed. What had happened was too surreal to take seriously. Besides, maybe my first guess had been wrong and some fluke, rather than someone with a grudge, had ignited the car’s fuel cells.

“Scent. Explosive,” she said, finally releasing my arm.

Tadehtraulagong was a being of few words, or rather few words at a time. She was supposedly fluent in English and Spanish, but you’d never have guessed; perhaps her jaw structure and tusks made human languages uncomfortable to chew on. When in the mood, Tad acted as a nurse and was the clinic’s official security officer. Now she’d added something new to her resume: bodyguard.

Tiny rectangles of safety glass glittered across the parking lot like obese snowflakes. I shook my head, and a few pieces fell out of my hair.

Doors slammed. I looked around and watched neighbors rushing outside, undoubtedly hoping that the clinic had blown up rather than to enjoy the lovely fall afternoon. They must’ve been terribly disappointed judging by the glowers I was getting. Even sweet old Ember Murphy nearly frowned at me.

I felt a rush of blood to my head along with a rush of fear as the reality of what had just happened began to penetrate my brain fog. It also dawned on me that I was being an ingrate. “You saved my life, Tad. Thank you.”

“Welcome.”

If she hadn’t chosen to walk me to the parking lot today, which was hardly her usual practice, my neighbors would have had to find someone other than me to mutter about, and I definitely appreciated her effort. A nice change, since she’d given me three kinds of headaches ever since she joined my staff.

My shoes felt unaccountably warm so I lifted one and found the back heel half worn away. Evidently, friction was the culprit. Now that I knew what to look for, it was easy to spot the long, dual track of black rubber leading from what remained of my car to my present position. All this confirmed my vague impression of what had just happened. My least favorite employee had dragged me backward and twenty yards away from my Volvo Hydro even as I’d pressed the clicker to unlock it. I hadn’t even had time to wonder why I was suddenly zooming in reverse before the BOOM.

I waved apologetically at the neighbors, then used my DM to call Sunny and asked her to retrieve our Alex. Naturally, she reminded me that it was my turn to perform that crucial errand, but I explained that my car was out of commission while cleverly skirting the word “fireball.” She gave me her much-put-upon sigh but agreed to go. Incidentally, the first name on my wife’s driver’s license is “Sonja,” but don’t tell her I ratted her out.

When she logged off, the reaction finally hit me full force. If I’d been using an old-fashioned external sat-phone rather than my DM, I would’ve dropped it. My hands got busy shaking, my legs gave out, and only Tad’s renewed grip kept me from falling. That’s when I heard the approaching sirens and realized I’d better postpone doing a proper job of falling apart.

An impressive turnout: six police cars, two ambulances, an unmarked black sedan, a fire-truck, and a nanosecond late to the party, a large van containing the city bomb squad. Five uniforms cordoned off the parking lot with green Day-Glo cones and yellow tape. Festive. Another three either engaged in crowd control or took statements from the locals—hard to tell from where I stood. After a paramedic pronounced me unworthy to ride in an ambulance, two grim officials in dark suits interviewed me and tried, unsuccessfully, to interview Tad. One, a Detective Lenz, clearly believed the incident was my fault. Probably a neighbor. He oscillated between glaring at me and staring at the Vapabond as if about to challenge her to a bout of arm-wrestling.

Luckily, the other law minion, Detective Carl Beresch, did most of the questioning and stayed reasonably polite although from the lines on his face I guessed the man was allergic to joy. Our little chat started off awkwardly as we performed a conversational duet that’s become so familiar I could do it in my sleep, and probably have.

“Dr. Al Morganson?” he asked, pro forma.

“My friends call me ‘Al.’ Short for Alanso.”

He flicked his eyes toward Tad, then back to me. “No disrespect intended. But you are the man known as ‘Doctor Alien’?”

“‘Fraid so.” And how annoying is that, since I’m not exactly an alien here.

“You are the owner and operator of the—” He consulted an item practically considered incunabula since the DM revolution: an actual paper notepad. “—the Morganson Center for Distressed Beings?”

I hadn’t chosen that name, and it always made me wince. “Only the operator. A Trader Consortium owns it.”

He failed to jot down that vital, psychiatrist-exonerating fact. “We’ll want a list of all your current and past clients, human and… otherwise.”

I shrugged. “I’ve only had one ET client this last month, and she’s been here almost since we opened.” Baffling case. “And I’m positive that none of my human—”

“We need to rule out every possibility,” he said smoothly. “That’s the routine and it works. It’s in your interest to let us do our jobs.”

I gave that a quick chew. “Okay, my receptionist will DM you that list, but you know I can’t discuss my patients.”

His eyes, already chilly, went sub-zero. “I’m sure you won’t. But can you tell us anything that might point us in a specific direction? Any enemies? What about that one alien client?”

“Ignore that directions. She’s not… functional. As to enemies, I’m not Dr. Popularity around here, but I can’t believe anyone would actually try to murder me.” My voice rang with a lack of sincerity. “Right now, Detective, I’m mostly thinking about my family’s safety.”

He bared his teeth, possibly to simulate a smile. “Of course. We’ll make sure you and yours are protected until we find the doer.”

But when the smoke cleared, as it were, the only fact anyone could determine was that an “incendiary device” had been rigged to detonate when I unlocked my car. After a damn thorough check, the clinic and its surroundings were declared bomb-free. The news dot com crews appeared just as my ex-car was hauled away on a huge flatbed truck with its own crane, but the interviewing cops herded me away from the cameras, then drove me home. We waited in the cruiser until the bomb squad and a goofy-looking dog had gone through my entire house and its landscaping. I was certainly squeezing good use out of my tax dollars today. My wife and son showed up while we were waiting, and when Sunny heard the truth, she turned pale and kept a grip on both Alex and me that rivaled Tad’s.

Three of our new pals with badges kept us company in the house for the next four hours. We served them coffee and Sunny’s homemade pastries—not donuts.

The chocolate biskvi were getting scarce when four more armed personnel joined the festivities: two male FBI special agents, Dunn and Miller, who only accepted coffee; and two other officials, Smith and Jones—if I took their word for it—from another collection of three letters, one so esoteric that even God had probably never heard of it. These last two, Smith, a white female, and Jones, the opposite, said little to me at first, asked less, and refused refreshments. Soon, all four agents went into a huddle until Smith broke out to inform me that the quartet wished to interview me immediately. She grudgingly admitted that she was legally compelled to inform me that the upcoming session would be recorded not only by the agents’ DM systems, but also—because what government doesn’t love unneeded redundancy?—through speck-cams placed inconspicuously on their persons. All recording features of my own DM unit, she added, had already been temporarily disabled through the electronic power of government mandate. I tested this by sub-vocalizing a recording command and got rewarded with a link-failure message flashing across my vision. Smith nodded as though she’d also seen the message and expressed her hope that crippling my DM wouldn’t be too much of an inconvenience. I promised to withstand the grief of not having videos of the agents to remember them by.

Then Jones, a man who’d evidently botoxed his entire head, demanded I provide a space with privacy for their questioning, and the final four accompanied me to the dining room, where Dunn shut the French doors so that eavesdroppers would have to strain.

We all sat around the glass dining table. Jones handled the inquisition while the others watched me with the focused gaze of portrait painters. I didn’t understand the tension in the room, but it worried me.

“Fourteen months ago, Doctor,” Jones began, “NASA spent upwards of a million dollars to shuttle you to the Tsf Trader mother ship in circumlunar orbit at that time. Walk us through how this happened and your experience on the mother ship.”

Was this a test? “Parent Ship, not mother ship. When it comes to sexism, the Tsf don’t have any.” Maybe I’d run a test of my own. “Care to know why?”

I pretended his dismissive grunt meant yes. “They evolved as predators on a planet with food resources so scant they had to live in small, isolated groups until they developed enough social skills to raise food animals collectively.” I only knew this because after I’d started working for the Traders, they’d shared some family history. “The evolutionary result is that each Tsf, unless pregnant, changes sex every few of our months, a major survival trait for small groups whose sexual distribution might be so uneven that—”

“Perhaps,” Jones interrupted, “we might focus on relevant matters.”

“Sure. Sorry.” Which I wasn’t. Test results were in: The agents weren’t here on a general fishing expedition. “But why ask about my little adventure? By now, the story’s grown a beard, and God knows, there’s been enough info about it on the newswebs.”

Jones’s frown was a microscopic lip-tightening, but it was nice to see that his expression could change. “Some unreported fact pertinent to today’s incident might emerge. Doctor, this will proceed more rapidly if you simply answer our questions. How did you wind up on this Parent Ship?”

I shrugged. “Tsf explorers had rescued three, um, spaceship-wrecked sentients, all from different alien species that even Traders had never heard of. All seemingly insane. Since we humans have apparently developed a rep among Traders for being the galaxy’s worst neurotics, Tsf leaders figured that a terrestrial shrink might—”

“That wasn’t my focus, Doctor. Why you in particular? “

“Oh. I worked for NASA from 2020 to 2024, evaluating prospective astronauts. So when the UN passed the Tsf request to NASA, I’d already been vetted. Plus, not that many psychiatrists are fit enough to handle a space launch. Or survive the heavy gravity on a Tsf spaceship.” Or manage two push-ups.

“You had no prior relationship with Traders?”

“None. I had a lot to learn. But I figured from the start that the mission was absurd.”

Jones’s micro-frown had evaporated. “Then why did you accept it?”

“You don’t get such opportunities every lifetime.”

I’d fed him an answer with all complexities strained out. Aside from the unique opportunity and enough government pressure to squeeze carrot juice from apples, I’d taken the job for the glory of being the first human to visit a Parent Ship, and because I’d been afraid that some other shrink might actually dream they were qualified to evaluate aliens.

He nodded. “Now, on to your time on that Parent Ship.”

I walked them through at a gallop, briefly describing my three patients and confessing that I hadn’t had to flex any psychiatric muscles whatsoever to effect my three cures since none of the supposed psychotics, as far as I knew, had psychological issues. Their problems were more down to earth, so to speak. I also admitted that my unearned triple victory resulted from a glut of luck plus assistance from a military-spec “brain” hooked up to my Data Management implant.

“And the Traders paid you in technology,” Jones said, “with the promise of more to come?”

So he knew. That shouldn’t have surprised me although, during my debriefing, I’d asked NASA to withhold certain details because I’d had a hunch there is such a thing as too much publicity and that I’d be inundated just from having been in a Parent Ship.

I’ve never been more right. In fact, Pastor, if you want the remainder of my overextended minutes of fame, I’ll be delighted to hand them over. What technology? Sorry, I shouldn’t have brought that up. I’d prefer not to burden you with… irrelevant secrets.

Anyway, Jones’s face could’ve been carved in onyx as he waited for my response, but I sensed strain beneath the mask.

“They claimed the technology was a bonus for my success. But I suspect it was mostly to, um, lubricate my way to accepting my current job.”

“What did they propose, exactly?”

“To set up a clinic with various controllable environments near my home, staff it, and bring me the most interesting patients the Tsf found in their galactic travels. They said I’d be welcome to treat my human patients on site if I wished.”

“Any more specifics?”

I couldn’t help feeling defensive. “None. Honestly, the plan sounded wonderful at the time.”

“What did they hope to gain from this arrangement?”

“My invaluable services as a trading asset.”

“You said their offer sounded wonderful.”

I explained. Flushed with triumph, giddy from one of my best days ever, and blinded by opportunity, I’d accepted without pinning the Traders down as to details. I failed to ask what kind of “staff” they had in mind, just how close to my home the clinic would be located, how I’d pay my new employees or shelter them or feed them, and whether I’d be responsible for property taxes or rent on the new building. All of which proved that my three triumphs weren’t the result of my own brainpower.

“Tsf are honest,” I said with as little grump as I could manage, “but when you deal with them, it’s up to you to explore and fully understand all conditions of a trade. If you don’t, you’re stuck because they’d just as soon dismiss verbal contracts the way Crusaders would’ve thrown away the Holy Grail.”

“How did it play out?”

Like a good concerto on a bad piano, which I didn’t admit. “Could’ve been worse. My new employers assumed construction costs, taxes, wages, and my staff’s nutritional requirements, and put me on a nice monthly retainer. But they also used the Feds to do an end run around my community’s zoning and building laws, placing the clinic a mere four blocks away from Chez Morganson, and erecting it in two days with a really alien construction technique.”

Jones’s eyes flicked toward Smith, then back. “Describe this technique. We understand the clinic appeared to build itself.”

“Right. The Vapabondi, a species that trades with Traders, developed the technique. My security officer’s a Vapabond.”

A sore point. Given a chance to interview Tad first, I wouldn’t have hired her to walk my gerbil, but she came to me as part of a trade agreement, and that was that. I shouldn’t complain too loudly; my employers did better in choosing the rest of my staff, and they’d even followed my request to only sign up beings who could absorb human languages the way my fat cells absorb ice cream—didn’t want my new associates dependent on artificial translators.

“Go on,” Jones demanded.

“Vapabondi build things by using ‘macramites,’ a word coined by my receptionist combining ‘mites’ with ‘macramé.’“ Macramites are semi-organic crablike, flea-sized machines. They communicate with each other and with their programmers with microwaves and can reproduce faster than gossip. The weird part is that their main building material is themselves. My clinic, including floors, walls, ceilings, doors, plumbing, even the wiring is almost entirely interlocked macramites, self-assembled. Even what looks like glass is specially bred macramites. The whole thing went up in two days, and it’s not a small structure.”

I could almost hear a four-part AHA! echo in the room. “Could enough of these machines,” Jones asked in an elaborately casual voice, “detach from the building to carry an object of any substantial size?”

“Maybe. What do you mean by substantial?”

He ignored the question. “Could they… camouflage such an object while transporting it?”

I shook my head in bafflement. “Doubt it. I don’t think they can change color.”

I glanced over at Smith, who’d sighed almost loudly enough to hear with both ears, but she’d resumed playing portraitist. The excitement level sank, replaced by an equally palpable disappointment.

Jones’s non-expression didn’t budge. “Since your clinic is so close, why didn’t you walk to work today?”

“You’re thinking I’m lazy and anti-green? You’re only right about the lazy part. I had to go straight from the clinic to my son’s school to pick him up on time. Really. Once, I was five minutes late and his second-grade teacher gave me a look to make Hitler blush with shame.”

No one chuckled at my wit.

“I understand the clinic has generated some local resentment?”

“That’s beneath an understatement.”

He rubbed his botoxed chin, probably making sure it was still attached. “Tell us why.”

I studied his face for a moment, which wasted that moment. “Partly it’s because hundreds of curious souls drive s-l-o-w-l-y past the place daily, creating perpetual traffic snarls. Then there are the—pardon the unprofessional expression—crazies that show up. What I think clinches the deal, though, is that for some reason, folks dislike the idea of insane and potentially murderous aliens leaping or flying or burrowing… or oozing into their backyards.”

“Are you aware of any contact between your neighbors and extraterrestrials other than those on your staff?”

“Good heavens, no! And almost none with my staff. What are you getting at?”

Smith tapped lightly on the dining table. Jones didn’t look at her but sat a bit straighter.

“Does any ET at the clinic have access to any form of teleportation?”

“Not as far as I know. Your questions keep getting stranger.”

“Getting back to the patients you helped on the Parent Ship, tell us more about the first one.”

“As I said, it looked like a cross between—”

“Excuse me, Doctor. You mentioned that it could dematerialize enough to move through walls. Do you believe it was capable of manipulating solid objects in its dematerialized state?”

Stranger and stranger. “If by ‘manipulating’ you mean pick them up, I don’t see how.”

“Hmm. Then can you add anything concerning your third patient?” The three observing agents leaned forward a millimeter or so.

I let my puzzled expression speak for itself. “Not really. It was practically flat when I was trying to diagnose its problem, and I never saw it, um, reinflated.”

“Your report suggests that this patient may have come from another galaxy.” My therapist ear detected a new eagerness beneath the smooth surface of his voice.

“That’s what the Traders deduced. Since the creature’s recovery they’ve confirmed the theory, and also confirmed their suspicion that like themselves, that patient’s species engages in trading on a colossal scale.”

“Possible competition?”

I tilted a hand back and forth. “Also possible collaboration. I think the Tsf’s main purpose in bringing me to the Parent Ship was all about that patient. Last I heard, they’d made progress in communicating with it and had even gotten its name and the name of its species, the Hoouk. At least, that’s how I pronounce it. The Traders are hopping with excitement about—”

“Did you ever see any indications that this Hoouk, like your first patient, possessed… unusual abilities?”

A chill brushed my spine as my subconscious caught on ahead of me. “Remember, I never even saw it after—wait!” Funny, how one hint following an entire parade of them could transform confusion into clarity. “You think the Hoouk might be playing dirty to spoil Trader operations on Earth?”

Jones said nothing but didn’t deny it.

I shook my head. “Forget it. If the Hoouk operate on a scale only half as large as Traders, my little business would still be far beneath their notice. What would make you even look in that direction?”

Jones eyed Smith and got a distinct nod.

“Are you aware,” he asked, “that your clinic is under twenty-four hour government surveillance?”

I hadn’t been, but it made sense; the authorities would want to stay alert for unfortunate interspecies incidents. But the presence of a video feed offered me a blazing ray of hope. “So! You’ve got videos of the bomber?”

Jones made the quietest snort in the history of snorts. “That’s the problem. As far as our analysts can determine, no one approached your vehicle from the moment it was parked until you set off the explosive with your key-button. Therefore we must consider extraterrestrial activity.”

I stared at him. “Couldn’t the explosive have been planted earlier? Or maybe the key-signal wasn’t the trigger and someone detonated the bomb remotely.”

“Our colleagues,” he gave the two FBI agents a nod, “and the police are exploring those possibilities. However, investigators found metallic traces suggesting that your car’s locking mechanism was wired, yet no evidence a timer was involved to explain your earlier successful drive to the clinic. Also, we doubt the explosion’s location was random.”

Now I was the one frowning, nothing subtle about it.

The questioning resumed, but since the cat had already exited the bag and I had nothing useful to add, the interview soon fizzled out. The session ended on a sour note: Smith finally spoke, cautioning everyone to say nothing to the police about any possible ET involvement. She didn’t ask nicely.

We left to join the party in my living room, and Sunny displayed her usual elegance and courtesy though I could tell she was shaken. Suddenly, phone calls started flooding in, so many we had to let our DMs handle triage and only responded to the most pressing. My insurance agent wasn’t pleased.

A police cruiser crouched outside my house that night as my family tried to sleep. My mind refused to shut up, even for a second, and I knew that Sunny was also keeping vigil. When we got up in the morning, the cruiser had apparently reproduced because now there were three. One of them drove me to work, and its two taciturn inhabitants, Officers Phillips and Braun, accompanied me to the front door, where Bradley S. Pearson, my dear neighbor, was lurking with some papers under one arm and a tired-looking policewoman at his side. I could feel my blood pressure soar. Never met Brad? Count your blessings.

Thanks mostly to this one man, I’ve suffered through four rough meetings with the town council and some exciting times at town meetings. I’ve a theory about what his “S” stands for, but wouldn’t feel comfortable sharing it with a man of the cloth.

“Good to see you, Al,” he trumpeted. “Glorious morning, isn’t it? This pretty lady with me is Cathy Bennett.” The policewoman gave me a wary nod, then winked at her fellow cops but said nothing. “Now I don’t want to make any trouble for you…”

Bradley always tried to radiate sincerity and likeability, and never succeeded. He was a beanpole with a pallid and slightly freckled complexion, an extra high forehead, thinning light-brown hair cut short, a sad mustache barely covering his philtrum, and an unfortunate combination of a long but very thin nose and large, watery blue eyes. He usually smelled of solvents and today was no exception; perhaps his hobby involved gluing together small model lawsuits in his basement.

“What kind of trouble don’t you want to make today, Brad?” I asked.

He waved a bony hand at me, brushing off any tendency I might have to take offense. “Really, Al, I must remind you, again, that this is nothing personal. It’s just that we all have to reevaluate the situation here. I’m sure you can see that.”

The cops bracketing me radiated impatience and did a splendid job of it.

“What are you talking about, Brad?”

“That blast yesterday. A child could’ve been injured, or even… killed! We can’t have any more of that sort of thing.”

“I agree. That’s why the authorities are investigating the explosion, and why police cars have been parked here since it happened, and why these two gentlemen are keeping me company this glorious morning. And also why Officer Bennett is keeping such a close watch on persons of interest.”

He ignored my dig and waved his hand again, a bit too close to my face. “That’s not enough! See here. A few of our good friends have come to me with this petition.” He pulled the document from under his arm with the kind of flourish you’d expect from a magician pulling a moose out of a hat. “Now, I didn’t want to bring this to you, but the entire community insisted and I couldn’t disappoint them. Just look this over.”

He handed me the papers. I glanced at the first page and knew that Bradley had written it himself. With about triple the necessary words, it essentially stated that neither my clinic nor anyone associated with it, particularly me, were welcome anywhere near this vicinity.

“Do you see how many signatures there are?” he demanded, oblivious to the significant glances the cops gave each other.

I’d already counted twenty-five names on the first page and wasn’t interested in following up on pages two, three, and four. I fought to keep my twinge of guilt from transmuting to rage.

“Brad, we’ve been over this a hundred times. I’ve always understood your concerns and share them more than you may know, but I didn’t choose to put the clinic here. When I learned that my employers did, I immediately asked them to locate it elsewhere, and they refused on the grounds that they’d already, um, purchased the grounds.”

“Then why not quit and make us all safer?”

We’d been over that ground as well. “Our government and most others around the world are pretty damn eager to keep me at this. The only reason the city council hasn’t shut me down already has been pressure from Washington. Have you any idea how important the Tsf are to us? How much a good relationship with them could help us? Or what a tragedy it would be if—”

“So you’ve claimed. All I know is what’s written on those papers, and you should look them over carefully. That’s your copy; I’ve got the original. And I hate to say this, but it can be used in a civil case that… I’ve heard may be pending, one that could have quite the impact on you.”

He lifted his weak chin to look down his nose at me or perhaps to mime nobility. “That’s all I have to say at this time.” Head held so far back that he risked tripping over small obstacles, Bradley S. strode past me and between my two flying buttresses and headed toward the sidewalk. Officer Bennett stayed with him until he’d crossed the street, and then she got into a parked unmarked car.

Officer Braun looked at me and held out a hand. I got the message and passed over the petition. “Nice of him to provide a list of suspects?” I said and got a hint of smile in response. I led the way through the door and into my troublesome sanctum.

I watched the cops take in everything: the absurdly large reception area, the huge and impossibly clear skylights, the 450-gallon saltwater aquarium, my multi-armed cleaning robot docked at its charging station, the full-sized olive tree, and the abstract sculptures. Then their eyes widened as they realized that the figure behind the coca-bola reception desk was no sculpture. Their hands moved closer to their guns. Understandable. My receptionist, L, takes some getting used to. No doubt he’s the main reason most of my human clients prefer to meet with me in the Cabin, my small separate office in back.

L isn’t quite as large as Tad or nearly as weird-looking as Gara olMara the Vithy, the third member of my staff, but is hands-down—not that he has permanent hands—the most intimidating of the three… to humans. Hard to pinpoint why. It’s not just the way his body parts practically radiate efficiency but are, excepting for his variable eyestalks, utterly unrecognizable—to humans, I should add again. And it’s not his aura of absolute confidence. Maybe it’s his… jaggedness. Where he isn’t downright serrated, his body is all zigzags and sharp, hard surfaces that gleam metallically in the dimmest light. And the oddest thing about him is that the total effect of all these angles and edges suggests something ferociously streamlined: a shark, perhaps. Or the first Disney version of Captain Nemo’s Nautilus. But you don’t need prior knowledge of a Great White to know in your gut that it’s not safe to pet.

After an admirably brief hesitation, Phillips forced himself to walk toward the desk. I imagine he planned to ask questions, but all he could do once he got close to L was stare. After a moment he wrinkled his nose. Under other circumstances, I would’ve found that comical because L uses something he calls “olfactory camouflage,” constantly matching his body odor exactly to his surroundings, which meant the cop probably smelled himself—from the outside, as it were.

“How may I improve your life?” L asked him, but Phillips just turned and headed back toward me.

Braun pulled his eyes off L to glower at me. “We’ll be waiting outside for the next four hours, then two other cops will take next shift. We got officers with your wife and kid. You good here?”

“Yes,” I said. “And thanks for everything.”

Just then, my cleaning robot decided it simply couldn’t eat another joule and it unplugged itself to scurry toward the flakes of dirt the cops and I had tracked in. The seven-foot-tall machine with its multitude of waving steel arms, designed by Tsf to resemble themselves, always made an impression on the uninitiated. So if the cops departed with a little extra haste, we must forgive them.

L extruded a limb and waved it to attract my attention. I walked over to his desk. “Such rude myrmidons.” His voice emerged from the device he wore as a pendant, a personal voice amplifier. Although he could duplicate virtually any kind of noise and had proved a supergenius at languages, he needed mechanical assistance to be loud enough for human ears. “Still, I ignore their slights for I have more interesting matters to discuss. But first I must ask, are you in need of therapy yourself from the recent trauma?”

“I remain sound in mind and habitually unsound in body.”

“Delightful news!”

“Some detectives asked me for a client list. Can you take care of that?”

“With ease. And since the subject of lists has arisen, have you scrutinized your revised schedule for today? I transmitted it an hour ago.”

“I’m sure my DM got it, but I haven’t looked it over.”

“Then I shall summarize. I canceled all your appointments for this week save for your usual daily failure with Cora.”

“You did? Why?”

You wouldn’t think anything that appeared so alien could look smug, but L managed it. “Being reduced to fragments might be less than therapeutic for your clients.”

I rubbed my tired eyes. “You’re borrowing trouble. The bomb squad checked out this building from the roof down and the police have been watching the place nonstop since yesterday.” I didn’t mention the government surveillance or the invisible bomber on yesterday’s videos.

“Are you familiar with the English phrase ‘better safe than sorry’?”

“Oh. Point taken.”

“Your gift of free time is adorned with lagniappe!” L shifted position to jut over the desk as if he were about to launch himself into space. “You now have the leisure to hear about my latest discovery. Doctor, are you familiar with the term ‘acronym’?”

I stifled a groan. “Sure.”

“Ah! Then did you know that acronyms were once referred to as ‘cable codes?’ “ L used the temporary limb to point at an open book in front of him, one of many on his desktop including both volumes of the compact OED. L had become a serious—make that an obsessed—student of human cultures and languages, which in turn had become a damn nuisance.

“That I didn’t know,” I stated with an abundant lack of enthusiasm.

“If you wish to remember it, you only need memorize AWORTACC, which itself is an acronym standing for—”

“Acronyms Were Once, etcetera. L, I’m starting to understand the way you think.”

“Ah! Ah! But AWORTACC is not only an acronym. In this context it is also a pneumonic! A pneumonic is—”

“Hate to interrupt,” I lied, “but what came in those crates over there in the corner?” The five large boxes in question were shiny and tan-colored, certainly not cardboard or wood. They all lay side-by-side, which made me suspect they were heavy.

“A new patient. He, she, it, or something else, no judgment implied, arrived early this morning.”

I glared at him. “Why can’t you get it through your… look, you’re supposed to call me the minute—oh hell, never mind.” I’d been down this road too many times before, and it always terminated in a dead end. Despite all my pleas, requests, and orders to inform me the instant a new alien patient arrived, L would never call me at home. He always had some rationale; perhaps the real reason involved religion.

I’m probably handing you the wrong impression. I thought highly of L, and in most areas he was great at his job. True, his constant verbal games had gotten old enough for their beards to grow mustaches, but I loved to hear him talk about exotic beings he’d met and his own species, the Pokaroll. His take on psychological matters was always fascinating. An example? Well, he told me once that the most surprising thing that ever happens in a person’s life is getting born, or in his case hatched, and that all artistic expression amounts to an attempt to handle the shock. Could be true—for Pokarolls, anyway. Back to my story!

“How,” I asked through teeth trying to unclench, “did the boxes get here?”

“A Tsf Trader brought them,” L said.

I went from glaring to staring. “Just how long ago?”

L didn’t need to consult a timepiece any more than I did, but unlike me his internal chronometer was natural. “Three hours, no minutes, and twelve seconds.”

“What did this Tsf say, exactly?”

The translator emitted a rapid series of clicks—Tsf speech.

Patience, Al, I told myself. “In English, please.”

“Get on the horn, pal, and tell the Doc he’s got ‘splainin’ to do.” Yep, sounded like a Tsf. Whoever had programmed their translation devices had squeezed in every cliché, slang term, tagline, and snowclone inflicted on the human race during the last century. As I’d once suspected but now knew, they’d been acting in strict accordance with the ET Operating Manual and had been monitoring our entertainment transmissions for decades.

I glanced at the boxes again wondering which one, if any, had contained my new patient; they all appeared identical.

“Did the Trader vouchsafe his or her name?” I asked, hoping that “vouchsafe” would keep L from his daily ritual of pestering me for a new word to play with.

He generated a thin finger, used it to flip open the OED’s P to Z volume, turned a few pages, extended an eye-stalk to study the practically microscopic letters, and made a little squeal of joy. “Yes! The Tsf vouchsafed the name Deal-of-ten-lifetimes.”

“Deal! Haven’t seen him since—”

“Him is currently a her, Doctor, judging by the green cilia coloration.”

“Got it. So what information did she leave me concerning the patient?”

“She vouchsafed none.”

I was already regretting forking over that particular word. But that wasn’t my main problem. “Hang on. I’m supposed to be treating an alien I know nothing about? Again?” I’d also been vouchsafed no clues about Cora, my long-term patient who’d come with Tad, but the Tsf had only been indirectly involved with that fiasco.

“Perhaps you could discuss it with the Tsf herself?”

I blinked a few times. “You mean Deal is stillhere? For God’s sake, why didn’t you say so right away?”

“Why rush? Life is brief and the one thing we lack time for is excess haste.”

I took a slow breath. “Where is she?”

“Gara’s demesne.”

Well, I thought, at least Deal won’t be the weirdest thing in that room.

At the polished door to Gara’s office, I faced my reflection and a decision. Should I follow shop practice and knock before entering, or obey Tsf protocol and walk in cold? Among Traders, only those who questioned their welcome would knock. So after glancing at the environment readout to make sure the office’s present atmosphere wouldn’t poison me, I touched the open-sesame plate and the door slid aside.

This room, like every room in the building, was expansive with a sky-high ceiling; after all, some clients might be gigantic. Alien equipment edged the space with oddly curved surfaces in unexpected hues, all gleaming in the morning light through the tall windows that Gara needed, but not for seeing. Her spooky computer must’ve been put away in whatever en-suite pocket dimension Gara used for storage.

It seemed Deal was the weirdest personage in the room, although I suppose Deal might’ve said the same about me. He was—she was—average size for a Tsf, a bit shorter than me while hogging more floor space, and that hadn’t changed. Yet she looked so different just from the altered sexual coloration that without L’s heads-up I might not have recognized him—damn it!—her. I gazed around more carefully and still couldn’t spot my physical therapist, which didn’t prove Gara was absent. The room had shadows and she could be doing her version of fly-on-the-wall.

Deal stood in place, spinning fast enough to let most of her limbs extend straight out through centrifugal force. This gave me a splendid and unwanted peek at her gondola.

What’s a gondola? Sorry, of course you wouldn’t know. It’s this massive, corrugated structure where Tsf keep their brains, digestive organs, and a heap of fangs. No, you don’t see them on DM-TV, or on the newswebs because Traders don’t care to reveal that much of themselves, and the World Media Administration plays along. That’s why the only parts of Tsf anatomy shown in broadcasts are the ten outer limbs with those seaweedlike fronds halfway down the curves. Just between us, the fronds are bundles of cilia; the longest cilia act as fingers, the medium-size ones are sensory organs, and the short hairs flip like switches, making the clickety-clicks of Tsf speech. Traders also have three thick central legs to protect and support their gondolas.

If you ever actually met any Tsf, Pastor, I bet two things would surprise you: they smell just like curry, and their tiny clicking hairs can make one hell of a racket. I imagine the noise could bring a twinge of nostalgia to any retiree who’d once worked in a typist pool back in the days of manual typewriters.

Deal stopped spinning and a few dozen of her optical cilia pointed at me. Wide bands of some elastic material encircled four of her limbs: Trader pockets. One pocket held a Tsf translator device. Deal started clicking and the translator spoke up.

“Doc Morganson? That you?” The English came out in a parody of a western drawl, a new variation on a consistently bizarre theme.

I smiled. “Tricky to tell humans apart, Deal-of-ten-lifetimes?”

“No way. But I reckon your mug don’t look the same.”

“Probably all the new worry lines.” L, I thought, would love this conversation. How long has it been since “mug” was slang for face?

Deal’s optics stretched out a bit further and a score of additional eyes joined in to peer at me. “Matter o’ fact, you appear more buoyant than I recall. Of course, back at the corral, mostly I saw you lyin’ down on the job.”

I nodded with sudden understanding. “Right. On your Parent Ship you mostly saw me on my self-propelled couch and in much heavier gravity.” Tsf evolved on a world with almost five times Earth’s gravity and kept some of the extra squeeze on in their space station fulltime. “I must’ve looked more… saggy then. If you don’t mind interrupting our reunion, where’s the new patient?”

After months of experiences with various Traders, I’d come to interpret Deal’s minimalist twitch either as a sign of surprise or a gesture indicating contempt for my stupidity.

“In the reception area,” Deal said. “You didn’t notice them there crates?”

I stared at her and not because of the fake-cowboy dialect. “You mean my patient is still packed in one of those boxes?”

“In every dang one, you’d best believe.”

Time out, I told myself.

Ever run your Data Manager’s CPU non-stop for a year or so? The whole system gets logy and little errors start popping up. In this case, my brain was the device needing a reboot. I’d forgotten my own number one rule for dealing with ETs: never make assumptions. That explosion hadn’t taken me out, but apparently it had shorted my circuits.

Maybe I swayed a little. The Trader placed limbs gently on both sides of my shoulders to add support. “What’s the dealio, partner? You ain’t ridin’ so steady in the saddle.”

Distracted and irked with my own foolishness, I blurted out the question I hadn’t dared ask for over a year. “Why the hell are Tsf translators programmed to make you Traders sound so hokey? It’s annoying, not to mention frustrating. Do you know that some of the slang you throw around is so obsolete that I’d need my great-grandfather to tell me what it means?” Of course, I was instantly ashamed of myself, and I hadn’t even been honest. Usually, I enjoy the varied quirkiness of Trader speech.

Deal stopped clicking. When she resumed, the voice from the translator sounded entirely different. “My dear Doctor, the programming is precisely calibrated, I assure you. We are Traders and our goal is profit, mutual profit whenever possible. We calculated that by configuring our speech patterns to make us sound colorful we would ease human reactions to our obvious physical, mental, and technological superiorities.”

“I see. Smart.” And how very cynical.

“We have learned that ease between species lubricates the friction of trade. With particularly frail species, we do our utmost to project harmlessness.”

I tried to keep my face from expressing disappointment that Trader zaniness was all for show. Perhaps Deal couldn’t read human non-verbal cues, but considering what I’d just learned about Trader shrewdness, I wasn’t betting on it. “As to the patient, shouldn’t we do some, um, unpacking?”

“Indeed, but first I suggest you examine this item.”

She pulled what appeared to be a small cylinder from one of her elastic bands and gave it a tap. The cylinder unfolded and unrolled into a wide, stiff sheet of thin plastic. Deal passed the sheet over to me. It weighed almost nothing and for a moment was entirely blank. Then embossed patterns developed on its surface and the patterns darkened into elaborate illustrations that resembled, more than anything, those horrid pictorial assembly instructions included in kits from, say, Ikea.

“Touch an illustration,” Deal suggested.

“Okay.” It was distinctly warmer than the surrounding plastic, and the embossing felt taller than it looked. Also, it vibrated slightly under my finger. “Interesting. So this is a… one-size-fits-all-senses instruction sheet?”

“Our conclusion exactly, Doctor. The beings who sent us this document were clearly unsure about the nature of our sensory organs so they allowed for an assortment of possibilities. Even the color contains self-illuminated wavelengths well beyond my perceptions.”

“Huh. I just see an intense brown.” I squinted at the drawings. “When this machine is put together, is it supposed to be a life-support unit for my patient?”

“We believe the machine is your patient although it appears to be what you refer to as a ‘robot.’ If we obey these diagrams, you will learn why I have brought this problem to you.”

I studied the illustrations more carefully. They were laid out in a spiral pattern, but the assembly order was obvious from the way the robot—assuming that’s what it was—became progressively more elaborate. The reverse side of the sheet had a lengthy parts list. Even with twelve arms including my two, putting this thing together wouldn’t be a quick job. I checked the time.

Not wanting any virtual buzzers, gongs, or even a quiet internal word to further abrade my nerves, I had my DM place a countdown stopwatch at one edge of my vision, where I couldn’t forget it, yet it wouldn’t block my view. I set this timer for an hour and twelve minutes and started it running, further validating my self-diagnosis of a mild case of OCD since I had no good reason to meet with Cora at that specific time every workday. But that was my schedule, and I was sticking to it.

“How heavy are those boxes?” I asked.

“When full, some outweigh us both while others are less massive. In either case, they are easy to transport due to the adaptable material coating the bottom surfaces. Apply steady pressure to any side, and those surfaces become frictionless.”

“Slippery when pushed?”

“So I said. I assume from your query concerning weight that you wish to open these containers in another location?”

“I do. If this robot really needs my… services, I’d like to build it in one of the rooms dedicated to extraterrestrial patients.”

“That is sensible since the automaton, once complete, will be far more challenging to transport. This will require several trips if we work alone.”

Tad could help, theoretically, but the fastest road to chaos I’d ever found was to have her help; her grasp of any job tended to be more miss than hit. L knew to distract Tad if she showed up, so I wanted him at his desk. And Gara was nowhere in sight.

“Let’s do it ourselves.”

“Then we shall begin.”

Deal was right about the boxes sliding along easily, although it took a while to get them moving, and the heavier ones adored sliding straight when you wanted them to turn. Still, five minutes later they were all sitting pretty in one of my controlled-environment rooms.

We got to work and by “we,” I mean mostly Deal, who was either very familiar with the procedure or incredibly adept at following pictorial instructions. And of course, with all those optical cilia, manipulative cilia, and arms, her motor skills made the operation dazzling to behold.

Three boxes were crammed with smallish pieces, the other two had very few, but much larger ones. Looking at the sheet, I counted fifty-seven assembly steps ending with a completed robot standing next to the presumably empty boxes, all neatly stacked. Now and then, Deal asked me to hand over “the tetrahedron with an octagonal protruded helix” or some such, but I think she was just trying to involve me in the process as an act of pity. The gizmo kept getting more impressive and once its head—at least it looked headlike—was on, I estimated the finished project would be nearly ten feet tall and as broad as three of me. Most of its surface had a dusty, bluish gleam.

My countdown timer had reached five minutes when Deal installed the final component: a shiny, twisted strip of translucent material that went around the thing’s waist like a frou-frou cummerbund.

“What do you think of it?” she asked. “Can you account for its surprising variety of waveguides?”

“No, but it looks like a robot all right. Sort of manlike, if I squint hard enough… except for the three legs.”

“Personally, I would assess it as an uncanny likeness, and see little difference between two and three legs, save for stability.”

L’s voice came from behind us. “The spitting image, as the locals say, of a human being.” L could sidle quieter than a cat by extruding a plethora of soft little tentacles.

“Need me for something?” I asked him.

“Not presently, but I thought it prudent to remind you of your upcoming appointment. And I must confess to a whim of curiosity concerning just what those boxes contained.” That must’ve been some whim since L had extruded a record number of eyestalks.

I opened my mouth to point out that I hadn’t forgotten an appointment yet, but the robot interrupted me.

“Doctor Alanso Jose Morganson,” it said very clearly, but in a voice like a squeaky hinge.

“Um. That’s me.”

“Doctor Alanso Jose Morganson,” it repeated.

I turned toward Deal. “What’s is this?”

“A pity. We’d hoped for a different response than we’d gotten after prior assemblies. Now you know why we brought the robot to you; no matter what we tried, the completed machine would only stand in one place and say your name three times.”

“Doctor Alanso Jose Morganson.”

“Just so,” Deal continued. “If it follows precedent, it will now remain silent indefinitely until it is disassembled and reassembled.”

I stared at my latest patient. “Where did this thing come from, anyway?”

Deal stopped clicking but to my surprise, her translator said, “Thinking.” The translator’s current mode evidently included a verbal “busy” signal.

My timer flashed discreetly and vanished just as the clicking resumed. “The issue you raise, Doctor, has convolutions. I gather you are presently under a time constraint, and suggest we return to this topic later.”

“Good idea. There’s a client I have to see now, but I’ll be back shortly. If you’d like to be more comfortable in here while you wait, my receptionist can boost the gravity while I’m gone.”

“If you have no objections, I would prefer to accompany you since I have my own whim of curiosity to satisfy.”

L backed out of the doorway as smoothly as warm butter gliding over an oil slick, but slowly and with his eyestalks all aimed at the robot. That gave me time to weigh the ethics of Deal’s request before giving her an answer. Normally, I wouldn’t consider bringing an observer to a private session, but in this case, I couldn’t imagine what difference it would make.

“What are you so curious about?” I asked.

“I’ve been informed that this patient is a Vapabond, reputedly a most interesting species. I have seen images but have never met one before.”

I looked at her in surprise as a baker’s dozen eye-cilia gazed back at me. “We’ve got two Vapabondi here. Thought you knew.”

“Yes, the other is your security officer.”

“Supposedly. And a nurse, also supposedly. Her name is Tadehtraulagong, but I just call her ‘Tad.’ You haven’t bumped into her yet?”

“I haven’t encountered her if that was your question.”

“Come to think of it, I hadn’t seen her today either.” This was odd since she was always underfoot—if “underfoot” can apply to someone nearly twice my height.

Vapabondi are comfortable in Earth’s gravity and can breathe our air as if they’d evolved here, so it hadn’t been necessary to customize conditions in my patient’s room. That is, it hadn’t been necessary for her. I’d arranged for odor filtering to make the space more pleasant for me; that elephantine smell tended to build up. A Tsf translating device, programmed appropriately, sat near the vast bed in which my patient, Coratennulagond, lay supine, staring at the ceiling. If she’d been human, I would’ve judged her condition a twelve on the Glasgow Coma Scale—more stupor than coma.

As a female2, Cora was visibly different from Tad: shorter but wider, and her torso-shell had fancier articulation. I’d never been able to mine much information from Tad, but a helpful Tsf visitor had explained that in Vapabondi, the female1 generates an equivalent to a human ovum and retains it until impregnated by a male1. After fertilization, the egg is transferred to a womblike organ in a female2 who, if all follows nature’s blueprint, is protected by a male2 until the little one is born, or more precisely, ejected.

“This is your patient?” Deal asked and I wondered why the translation came out sounding surprised.

“She is. Hello, Cora,” I said as always, the translator honked and growled as always, and I received the usual response. Cora’s walrusoid head gradually turned toward me, and the wrinkled eyelids quivered for a moment but remained at half-mast. “I’ve brought a friend, the Trader Deal-of-ten-lifetimes.”

Deal clicked and the translator did some honking and growling, then said in English, “I am pleased to greet you.”

The massive head slowed aimed itself toward the Tsf. Cora eyes opened fully, then blinked in slow motion. Surprise and excitement set my heart racing. The tip of a blue tongue appeared between her two lower tusks, licked across six inches of black, rubbery lip, and then withdrew.

As I gawked at her unprecedented responsiveness, Deal placed a few finger-cilia on my arm. “What is wrong with her?” she asked, clicking more quietly than I’d thought she could, and the translation came out as a whisper.

To my disappointment, Cora’s eyelids drifted halfway down and she resumed her standard torpor. “Let’s talk outside,” I suggested.

Deal led the way to the hallway and after I’d closed the door asked, “What is wrong with her mind?”

“Wish I knew.” I puffed out my cheeks and let the air out in a rush, a way of expressing frustration that always bugs my wife. “Deal, you’ve gotten more out of Cora in a minute than I have in the last six months. Maybe it’s me, but everything about her case is… off somehow, even the way she arrived. I assume you know about that?”

“I do not, and evidently what little information I did receive is incorrect. Soon-to-be-wealthy, a Trader in another division who is still a novice at dealing with extrinsic species, made the arrangements. I understand that your notoriety had been attracting deranged humans to this location and Soon-to-be-wealthy’s solution involved a barter in which you were to be loaned a Vapabondi security specialist in exchange for your aid in treating a mentally ill Vapabond. What did you find unsettling about her arrival?”

The idea that Tad was any kind of specialist gave me an instant hit of what we shrinks call “cognitive dissonance.” “You Traders brought me all the other ET patients I’ve had. Not Cora. She and Tad just showed up one day in a van driven by federal agents. It seems Tad had flown a shuttle down from whatever spaceship had brought them to Earth and landed it in a field fifty miles from the clinic.”

Deal wriggled four limbs like pythons doing tricks, a Tsf gesture I hadn’t seen enough times to make a stab at interpreting. “Vapabondi are clever but cautious beings, Doctor. They insist on autonomy in all things, so they would inevitably wish to affect the delivery. I cannot explain why the shuttle landed so far away, but I am no authority on Vapabondi behavior. Did the unexpected arrival create a problem for you?”

“I wouldn’t say unexpected. Your people told me the pair was coming, just not when. They even gave me a micro-briefing about Vapabondi.” Thank God. “But they knew nothing about Cora’s condition. My problem was that she showed up with no documentation, patient history, or previous diagnosis—not so much as a Post-It—and the only thing I could get out of Tad concerning Cora was that Tad herself would be her nurse because only a fellow Vapabond could be qualified. In terms of evaluation, let alone therapy, I’ve been flying blind… without a paddle.”

“Your metaphor mystifies me, but surely this Tad has oriented you by now?”

I snorted. “Anything but. One theory I have is that Tad was ordered to tell me nothing so that I could assess Cora without preconceptions.” I had another theory less based on the intrinsic benevolence of all beings, namely that Tad was a jerk.

“Shall we return to your patient?”

We did, but this time Cora just lay there like a very large lump. Deal and I took turns talking at her, both of us failing to elicit any reaction. As always, I sensed that she heard but couldn’t or wouldn’t respond. Seeing that we were on a roll of non-accomplishment, I suggested we return to the room with the robot and continue wasting our time in a fresh venue. Deal agreed.

The machine, to no one’s surprise, stood exactly where we’d left it.

“We have time now,” I said. “Getting back to my question, where did this thing come from?”

The Trader aimed a few optical cilia at me, but kept most of them facing the subject of my question. “No doubt you recall the unfortunate Hoouk you correctly diagnosed on the Parent Ship.”

I managed to mate a chuckle with a snort. “Even if I habitually forgot my patients, I’d make an exception for the only one from another galaxy.”

“That is why I said ‘no doubt.’ After you returned to Earth, this individual recovered fully and was soon able, with our aid, to converse with its fellows.”

My eyebrows decided to levitate. “They must have one hell of a communication system.”

Several of Deal’s limbs rippled.

“Now what,” I asked, “is so funny?”

She twitched, just once but all over, and more eye-cilia swung around toward me. “Your perceptiveness alarms me, Doctor, although by now I should have learned to expect it. How did you become so expert on Tsf body language?”

“I’m no expert. But I’ve been around you Traders enough to pick up a hint or two. The source of your amusement?”

“I will tell you, if you will remember that I mean no offense.”

“Okay. Consider my skin properly thickened.”

“At last, an intelligible metaphor!” It made sense to her, Pastor, because Tsf can thicken and harden the outer cells in their limbs into swordlike weapons.

Then she let me in on the joke. “I was—” The translation device paused for an instant. “—tickled by something I’ve often observed. The manner in which a species survives long enough to become technological usually limits that technology.”

“For instance?”

“Humans. Despite your many physical limitations, humans possess adequate grasping powers combined with a shape that allows fair leverage. Therefore, your earliest foreparents depended on hurling objects both to hunt and to defend themselves against predators. Aids such as bows and guns flow from the basic idea of throwing, which has become so embedded in human perspective that in English, ‘weapons’ and ‘limbs’ are synonyms.”

“I think you mean arms.”

“I see no distinction.”

“Right. What does this have to do with long-distance communication?”

“All your devices for this purpose are tools for throwing such things as microwaves, light, or radio waves. The Hoouk are more advanced than we Tsf in transportation, but we use identical communication tools. Distance is irrelevant when nothing has to travel.”

I studied Deal for a long moment. “That’s interesting. How do you communicate without moving anything?”

Deal raised a limb and waved it chidingly; I wasn’t the only one who’d learned something about alien body languages. “This information could be the basis of a future trade. It would be irresponsible of me to supply it gratis. Perhaps we should now turn all curiosity toward disassembling and reassembling the robot. We must be certain that no mistake has been made.”

My curiosity wasn’t in the mood to turn, but I saw no point in arguing. “I’m game.”

“You might be distressed by how your last statement was translated, but I take it you are willing so we will proceed. Observe the process with critical eyes, if you will, for the smallest blunder could result in cumulative error.”

I pored over the assembly sheet while Deal followed the instructions in reverse but so slowly that I could follow the procedure and sign off on each step. From the start, though, I had a nagging feeling we’d missed something obvious. If so, we both missed it all the way to the end, where nothing but machine parts and us littered the floor.

“You agree,” Deal asked, “that I made no mistakes?”

“Seems that way.”

“Then I shall construct it again under your few but watchful eyes.”

I sighed. “One downside to having a mere pair is that they get tired, but go ahead.”

“Since I have memorized this process and wish to avoid automatically repeating any errors, I suggest you provide all assembly information as we proceed, and I will obey your directions.”

“I like it.” And that way I’d set the pace. I lifted the assembly sheet and tried to look at it as if for first time. “Step one. Push the three long, gray rods into the holes in the smallest cylinder…”

With me calling the shots, the job took over two hours. I wouldn’t say we completely wasted our time because when we were finished, I had the fun of hearing my name repeated three times.

After that third repetition, I noticed that my shadow was darker than it should’ve been considering the room lighting. I wondered how long Gara had been with us, but if she wanted to go incognito, who was I to out her?

That night, Sunny and I took turns reading bedtime books to our son. He finally drifted off and we dared tiptoe to our bedroom. The weather had made a surprise U-turn to unseasonably muggy, but my weather widget claimed cooler air would return after midnight, so I left a window and its curtains open. We put our DM CPUs on their chargers and lay in bed with the lights off, chatting a little and watching a broad patch of moonlight on the ceiling that had snuck into our room by bouncing off the small pond in our backyard. Whenever even the mildest wind arose outside, the light above us would fill with moving ripples.

All this seemed incredibly peaceful, but I was too aware of the patrol car parked out front and too full of questions to relax. And when I closed my eyes, I kept seeing that damn assembly sheet. So I swallowed my pride and had my DM send a gentle 3-Hz pulse though my nervous system, knowing that within eight minutes my brainwaves would automatically sync to the pulse and I’d fall into a deep, delta-level sleep.

Why the pride-swallowing act? Because I usually advise against direct DM brain stimulus as a soporific. It’s too easy to become dependent on it and the process, continued over months, can scramble a person’s natural sleep cycle. Yes, acoustic entrainment is supposedly safe, but that night I wanted the biggest guns. I’d been awake most of the previous night and didn’t want to spend another day in a fog.

So I was gently settling into a dream when a nasty thought that must’ve been circling my mind for hours finally landed. If the government could shut off my DM’s recording function, what else could they legally make my DM do? Was I now bugged… from the inside? I paused the delta signal and called up a virtual screen, grateful that modern technology made it possible to do online research without getting out of bed and thus waking my wife.

Having spent most of my life in the dark ages before nanobiotechnology and computer science got married, before data management systems were partially implanted, I still feel most comfortable controlling my DM with a keyboard. Oh, I can use subvocals just fine to input simple instructions, but strange things happen when I try the non-simple kind, and Sunny tells me that such attempts remind her of watching a bad ventriloquist. So I only used sub-V to summon what I wanted: a virtual keyboard facing me, floating in midair below an impalpable screen.

I called up a meta-search engine, raised my hands to type, and then hesitated. If my DM system was bugged, did I want the, um, buggers plotting the exact vector of my suspicions? I needed to take a more tangential approach. Considering how Smith et al had prevented me from recording our session, wouldn’t it be reasonable for me to research the legalities involved with that, and if the information I really wanted happened to hang out nearby…?

Figuring my best bet would be the kind of omnibus document reserved for law libraries, I forked over the twenty-five bucks for a single LexNex session and lo, the veils parted as the blindfolded lady with the scales appeared. Thanks to DM nerve pulses, I felt the projected keys under my fingers as I typed in my search parameters.

Over a million hits, but LexNex sorted them so brilliantly that my answer waited in the very first document. What I’d feared was called a “mind-tap,” and it was out-and-out prohibited except when specifically authorized by an act of Congress.

So I was semireassured. I dispelled my toys, closed my eyes, and of course the damn assembly sheet that I’d been staring at all day floated up again. An impressively clear image considering that my visual memory isn’t normally terrific. I could practically see every detail, but it occurred to me that one detail could be missing.

Where was the power supply?

Sure, the robot had all sorts of mysterious parts, but nothing that seemed large enough to supply the energy to move something so massive… unless one mysterious part contained a fusion reactor. That seemed more than unlikely, but surely, the robot was intended to move.

Come to think of it, where was the thing’s CPU?

The sheet began fading in my mind, details growing fuzzy, so I regarded the dimming image as a whole. That’s when I caught on and mouthed the classic Oh My God. Could’ve sworn I didn’t twitch or wiggle, but Sunny turned toward me and said, “What’s so funny?”

Couldn’t help it, I cracked up. I tried to tell her why but couldn’t get the words out. After a minute, Sunny began laughing because I was laughing so hard.

“Shhh,” she warned me between giggles. “You’ll wake the boy.”

Tears still leaking from my eyes, I finally got some control. “I told you about trying to make that robot work.” The thought almost set me off again.

“Uh-huh. You and that Trader.”

I was merely grinning now. “Exactly. Your big-brained husband and an even bigger-brained Tsf spent pretty much the day on it. Kept putting it together and taking it apart. Followed the pictorial assembly instructions more than carefully. We were meticulous.”

“And?”

“We forgot something.” Another belly laugh got past me. “And we weren’t the first ones to make the mistake. A team of Tsf scientists overlooked the same thing.”

“So what did everyone miss?”

I told her and it was her turn to laugh. “That is funny,” she agreed.

My cheeks were tired from grinning so hard. “It just didn’t seem important at the time.”

In the morning, the same two cops chauffeured me to work, but this time they neglected to come in with me. My receptionist loomed behind his desk as usual, but no one else seemed to be around unless you count the docked cleaning robot.

“Good morning, L,” I said, walking up to his station.

He extruded a wad of tissue resembling a top hat circa 1800 on a thin stalk and waved it at me. “And a tip of the morning to you, Doctor.”

“That’s not—never mind. Is Deal-of-ten-lifetimes still here?”

The hat sank into nonexistence. “That is a near certainty. After you last departed, she resumed experimenting with robotics, then borrowed room six for a lengthy dose of gravity therapy. It seems she spent undue time yesterday operating under Earth conditions, and suffered some loss of bone density. The Tsf metabolism, if you aren’t aware, is considerably faster than yours or even mine.”

“Will she be okay?”

“She assured me so, but mentioned it would require some ten Earth hours and two meals before she could normalize.”

“Good enough.” I moved closer to L and lowered my voice. “In fact, her absence may come in handy. Have you seen Tad or Gara today?”

“Both. Is there purpose in your question?”

“I think they were avoiding Deal yesterday, and want to know why. At one point, our favorite Vithy was impersonating my shadow.”

“She does that well.”

I nodded my agreement. “Have you canceled any cancellations for today?”

“I have not commenced rescheduling.”

“Then I’ll try to see where Gara’s hiding.”

L extruded a thin limb and used it as a pointer. “Her office might be an appropriate location to begin your search.”

Taking his galactic wisdom to heart, I headed to my PT’s room and softly tapped on the door. Vithy lack eyes of any sort but come factory-equipped with a fantastically acute sense combining hearing and touch.

After the clinic had opened, I’d asked my employers to add a physical therapist and an analytical physiologist to my staff in case any alien patient proved to have physical problems. They brought me Gara, qualified on both counts.

“Come in, Al,” she said in the contralto voice she always adopted when we were alone. No doubt she’d known who was knocking from the sound of my footsteps. Being sightless, she didn’t turn when I entered, but I felt a delicate breeze on my face, which implied she’d used her multi-band sonar to check on my facial expression, muscular tension, and blood flow.

Gara was… positioned behind her acoustic DM, her tenebrous body extended into a rectangular, paper-thin diaphragm about my height and four feet wide. Her data manager was entirely external and a piece of technology that gave me goosebumps. It resembled a shallow circular tar pit suspended vertically in midair, a computer monitor as designed by Hewlett Packard Lovecraft. From the crisscrossing web of ripples in this oily pool, I knew that Gara was making sounds inaudible to humans and sensing her DM’s response in air movements too subtle to disturb a gnat.

“I’m so sorry,” she murmured, “that events recent have left you apprehensive. But I am grateful you are uninjured.”

“Thanks.” As usual when in Gara’s presence, I felt myself relaxing. She spoke by vibrating sections of herself, which allowed her to… heterodyne her own kind of tranquillizing entrainment into her speech. That’s one reason my human patients take to her with all the enthusiasm they never show for L and Tad. Lucky, because with the paucity of alien patients that have come our way, most of Gara’s work has involved traumatized humans needing physical as well as mental therapy.

Vithy don’t fit into your classic categories of animal, vegetable, mineral, or fungal. But if you had to choose one of the above, you might go for vegetable because they use photosynthesis to fulfill most of their energy requirements—only they process various sulfur compounds rather than carbon dioxide. Our atmosphere neither harms nor helps them, but their unique bodies can retain enough needed gasses to keep them fit for days at a time, and without even stinking up the place. Since any of my clinic’s controllable environments can duplicate the repulsive atmosphere of your choice, and since Gara’s office has plenty of south-facing windows, she can recharge at will.

What does she look like? That’s a hard one. Her body is essentially a collection of shapeable, elastic, purple nanotubes dark enough to appear black except in direct sunlight. Each tube is equivalent to one of our cells and L, who’s an encyclopedia about Tsf trading partners, tells me that the Vithy evolved as a gradual collaboration between individual tubes. L also mentioned, in the faintest whisper while Gara was helping a human patient in our smaller building, that some Pokaroll scientists consider Vithy to be colony creatures rather than individuals.

In a nutshell, they’re dark, very few molecules short of being two-dimensional when lying flat, and can take almost any shape. When it comes to making noises, they’ve got talent, even more so than L’s people. They can vibrate their bodies to produce sonic massages, ultrasound waves, or just to sing hello in six-part harmony.

I decided to be straightforward. “Gara, why were you avoiding Deal-of-ten-lifetimes yesterday?”

She curled into a semicircle. “My people have had much experience with Traders. We have found some to be untrustworthy rather.”

“I don’t get it. We’ve had a dozen Traders here since you arrived, but this is the first time you’ve… kept such a low profile.”

“This is the time first you have been exploded nearly.”

I could feel a developing furrow between my eyebrows despite Gara’s soothing influence. “What does that have to do with Deal?”

“A question excellent most. I am suspicious always of coincidences.”

I shivered involuntarily. “But they do happen.”

“Inarguably.”

“We humans have a saying,” I pointed out. “Correlation doesn’t imply causation.”

“Nor does lack of causation negate correlation. You may wish to know that this Deal has departed now her room.”

“You can hear her door open from here?”

“Easily.”

I left Gara’s office more troubled than when I’d entered—a first. And when I glanced down at the floor, my shadow was darker and more distinct than it should’ve been.

“With your incredible hearing,” I murmured, “why do you need to, um, shadow me?”

The darkness at my feet rippled. “It is one thing to hear, another to act if necessary.”

Gara’s office and the room Deal had commandeered were in separate corridors. Tsf can hustle when they want to, but Deal must’ve been feeling lazy this morning; she and I reached the reception area in a dead heat, just in time for us to get a glimpse of Tad’s back vanishing into the third corridor. But even without Tad, we had plenty of company.

A tall, heavyset man in a business suit that was the opposite of off-the-rack stood a respectful distance from L’s desk. A large leather briefcase dangled from his left hand. I’d never seen him before, but his two outriggers were my uniformed guardians Phillips and Braun. They didn’t look joyous.

Paying no attention to the aliens in the room, a trick tantamount to ignoring the proverbial elephant, the man turned toward me with a kind of slow pomp, his posture and the set of his face declaring a vast self-importance. “Doctor Morganson? My name is Skyler Penwarden, Jr. I am an attorney representing an association of your neighbors.” Staring at me with blue eyes obviously trying to be steely, he deigned to hold a hand out for a shake. His palm was so dry that he probably sprayed it with antiperspirant. I made a mental note to disinfect my own paw afterward. “May I DM you my business card?” he added.

“Why not?” I subvocally gave my DM permission to add his card to the stack but to accept no other transmissions from him. “How can I help you, Mr. Penwarden?”

He released my hand, opened his briefcase, and pulled out a ream of paper. “At the behest of my clients, I am prepared to initiate a civil suit against you. The particulars are contained in this brief, and I’d advise you to familiarize yourself with it immediately. After you do so, I would be willing to sit down with you, or with you and your attorney if you’d prefer, to discuss the possibility of settling this matter out of court.”

Had I ever heard anyone else use the word “behest” in real life? The lawyer handed over the so-called brief, and I gave him my finest sardonic look. “I assume this is Bradley S. Pearson’s doing?”

“He is one of the principals.”

“Uh-huh. Listen to me, Mr. Penwarden. As I keep telling Bradley, this sort of harassment doesn’t work. Washington, not to mention the entire UN, can’t afford to let this clinic close.”

The man’s lips insulted the entire concept of smiling. “Our litigation is not targeted at closing your clinic. Our purpose is to simply ensure that you will not profit financially from its operation. I see no reason why the authorities should object. Please study the brief, then contact my office. You have my card.”

“You’re wasting your time and mine. This is my work, and I’ll keep at it even if it doesn’t pay me a dime. At this point, I don’t need the money.” That was almost true; with a certain degree of penny pinching, I could’ve retired at that minute thanks to my bloated monthly salary.

Still, that bombshell failed to dent him. “Again, I advise you to study the brief. You will find that it is not merely your future earnings you may need to protect. I’ll expect to hear from you very soon.”

He wheeled around with the stately grace of a galleon, and I’m sure would’ve made an impressive exit if Deal hadn’t hopped forward and wrapped the end of one of her limbs around his upper arm.

“Hold up a sec, podner,” Deal clicked, the translation coming out in the exaggerated cowboy twang she’d abandoned yesterday.

Penwarden made a few sincere efforts to pull away before he gave up. He stared close-range at Deal, his face now suffused with an unattractive shade of red. “Release me immediately, Trader, or suffer serious legal consequences.” I had to hand it to the man: he looked a mere 30 percent scared and 70 percent pissed. In his shoes, I would’ve hit 90 percent on the fear meter and rising. Of course, I happened to be one of the few humans who knew just how lethal Tsf could be.

Deal was immune to the lawyer’s glare. “I reckon you can fergit that shet. I’m what they call a dip-la-mat in these here parts and got am-munities. But I just gotta check on if I was hear’n you right. Was you figgerin’ to get yer mitts into the doc’s well-earned nest egg?”

Penwarden was one tough cookie, but the steel in his eyes was rusting fast. “That depends on how reasonable Doctor Morganson can be. I’m sure we can work something out. Let me go. Please.”

Deal relinquished the man’s arm and Penwarden immediately scooted to the clinic’s exit. The cops became the second line of geese following their migrating leader. At the door, I thought the lawyer might turn and deliver some new legal threat, but he was gone before his small flock had caught up.

“This,” I said, shaking the document in my hand, “I don’t need. Are any of your people lawyers?” I asked Deal.

“We have not evolved past an occasional necessity for arbitration, Doctor.” The sagebrush twang had gone. “But our arbitrators do not use our legal system as a bludgeon.”

How nice for you, I thought, walking over to the reception desk. “L, would you mind tucking these papers away for now?”

L extended a pseudo-hand, took the brief, opened a desk drawer with another temporary hand, and put the vile thing out of sight. “The myrmidons,” he complained, “continue to be rude, and that barrister…” he paused to give me time to admire the latest addition to his vocabulary, “behaved no better. Not one of them spoke to me even though I invited conversation most politely!”

“That is strange,” I commiserated.

Deal reclaimed my attention by gently tapping my shoulder. “After you departed yesterday,” she said, “I essayed a few more experiments with the robot.”

Had she figured it out? “What kind of experiments?”

“I tried constructing it from the middle of the instructions rather than what we assumed was the beginning, and in many other sequences. My results were even less successful than all previous efforts. When fully reassembled, the machine failed to intone your name even once. If the Hoouk sent us this item as an intelligence test, I must tilt my gondola in disgrace.”

I tried to reclaim the excitement that came with last night’s breakthrough, but the day had killed my mood. I had so much on my mind: the pending lawsuit with attending hassles and fees, a possible bomb attack on my loved ones, and Gara still attached to my feet at the heels and matching my every step. Shake it off, Al, I told myself, remember what you tell your patients. Do you want your anxieties to run your life, or you?

“I may know how to fix the robot.” Perhaps not the most tactful way to put it after Deal’s IQ self-evaluation.

The Trader made a popcorn popper’s worth of clicks, which the translator simplified to a single, astonished “What?”

The humor of this worked its way though my funk. “You’re going to kick yourself when I tell you. Or should I say punch yourself?” I suppose Tsf limbs could swing either way.

“I am eager to proceed with this proposed auto-mutilation. Please instruct me immediately!”

I smiled and meant it. “If you wouldn’t mind, could we have another joint session with Cora first? Then we’ll have the whole day free.”

“Certainly. This will provide a chance for me to cultivate patience, a sadly undernourished animal in my emotional farm.”

After our time with Cora, a note-for-note repeat of yesterday’s initially promising and then disappointing performance, Deal led the way to the robot at a pace that made me trot to keep up. I wasn’t in any such rush. In fact, I was feeling a distinct reluctance for my theory to be tested.

Back in Frankenstein’s Cyberlab, machine parts lay cleverly organized all over the floor. Fine. We needed to start from scratch.

“Would you care to reveal your idea now?” Deal asked.

“Not yet. I’m trying to build suspense.”

“Humans can be surprisingly cruel. What is our next step?”

“Reassembly for the umpteenth time. Exactly the way you first did it.”

Deal aimed a platoon of eye-cilia toward me. “And you expect a different result?”

“We’ll see. Put it together as fast as you like.”

Practice, plus not having to wait for me to follow the action, allowed the Trader to work with such blistering speed that the robot almost seemed to implode into existence.

“And now?” Deal asked when she was finished and the robot had said my name three times.

“Now look at the instructions again. What do you see at the center?”

She regarded the sheet for a time. “No more than what stands before us.”

“Really? What’s that next to the robot?”

“Nothing significant. Only the empty boxes.”

“The stacked empty boxes.”

Deal neither moved nor clicked for so long that I wondered if she was hunting for a tactful way of informing me that my idea had already proved worthless. But even a psychiatrist can’t read facial expressions on someone without a face. Maybe an expert on sea anemones would’ve had better luck.

“So maybe the crates are external DM components of some kind,” I explained unnecessarily. “And they need to be in contact to work. An obvious notion, I guess.”

“It is obvious now. We Traders perceive incalculable potential in developing a relationship with the Hoouk and have grasped this overture by them with all limbs. So I find it maddening that so many Tsf scientists have scrutinized these instructions and overlooked the possibility you’ve suggested. Could I offer the excuse that the filled boxes were unwieldy in normal gravity and thus it seemed reasonable to leave each on the floor? No, even I find that unconvincing. Doctor, you are either a being of singular intellect or we Traders are more mentally limited than I had envisioned.”

I shook my head. “Thanks for the praise, I think. But let’s not pat me on the back quite yet.”

“Experimental verification! Easily done.” Before she’d even finished her sentence, Deal had put the boxes into a neat vertical pile.

The effect was dramatic, and by God, totally unexpected. The robot just stood there as always, but color-shifting neon streaks danced across its torso and it emitted a hive-buzzing like a gigantic step-up transformer. And those changes were trivial compared to what happened to the boxes. They spun around individually to differing orientations and then merged like hot wax into a single translucent body that glittered from within. Its final overall shape reminded me of my Hoouk patient on the Parent Ship. Only this thing was three times larger, fully inflated, and seemed to crackle with power.

Deal caught on fast. “It appears we’d envisioned the components reversed, Doctor. The ‘robot’ must be an energy generator and DM controller, while the boxes have become the actual automaton. As you surmised, the system remained inoperative until it was complete.”

I swallowed hard. “Just tell me what this system is for.”

The controller in robot disguise joined the conversation. “Doctor Alanso Jose Morganson.” Its usual opening and closing gambit, but this time, it wasn’t finished. “In gratitude for your assistance to one of our travelers stranded and distressed far from our native galaxy, and to further our association with your employers, our siblings in trade, the wondrous and excellent Tsf who found and rescued our lost traveler, we have sent this energy servant poised before you. In one of our primary languages, we name such artificial entities dhothigon, a name you are welcome to adopt at no cost. Or you may discard it and substitute a term of your own. It is our intention for this dhothigon to be a boon in your life.”

“Ah. Thanks. Very kind of you. Um, you don’t happen to have an operator’s manual for dhothigon?”

The controller didn’t reply. Maybe it had used up its quota of words for the year.

I turned toward Deal. “You know what I find most amazing about all this?”

“Certainly. That the Hoouk would understand Tsf perspective enough to know that we would regard a gift to you as a sign of respect to us?”

“That’s… not quite what I meant. What boggles my mind is that creatures living in another galaxy seem to have mastered English.”

“I would hardly say ‘mastered.’ I found the controller’s statements verbose and awkwardly constructed. But Doctor, Hoouk knowledge of your language is readily explained. They use data management techniques similar to those employed by Tsf and to a lesser degree, humans. After we opened communications with these beings, we granted them limited access to our language files. I leave it to you to make the logical inference.”

I gave Deal a puzzled stare. “Why are you being so coy? Did you Traders, or did you not, share your knowledge of English with—”

“I should not have essayed my small evasion. The truth is that Hoouk protocols interfaced with ours so successfully that our DM systems automatically granted them full access to our files. As to English, the Hoouk helped themselves, but despite the failure of our constraints, they probed no further than our language data. We take this as a strong indication of their good will.”

“Wait. Are you saying their DM technology is so damn good that it broke through Tsf firewalls?”

“I would phrase it in less violent terms, but essentially yes.”

“That’s scary.”

Deal waved a few limbs around in a graceful way possibly intended to be reassuring. “Why?”

“Doesn’t it worry you that creatures from God knows how many light-centuries away have such an incredible grasp of… communication possibilities they can program their systems to even interact with yours, let alone mesh so completely?” Whoops. Phrased that way, the Tsf had basically done the same thing with us. “I mean without years of monitoring your media.”

“It does not, although I would expect their adroitness to dazzle you considering the present limitations of human cybertechnology. Still, a logical basis exists for any effective DM design providing some measure of universality. And advanced communication skills are prerequisite for inter-species trading.”

If Deal were really that sanguine about the security breach, she wouldn’t have been embarrassed to admit it.

“You’d know best,” I said. “But if I understand what you told me, Hoouk protocol networked with yours so well that your DMs interpreted its download demands as internal requests.”

“Just so. Still I fail to understand why the matter upsets you.”

“You really don’t get it? If your firewalls failed, what chance do mine have? I have all sorts of confidential information on my system. Patient files, personal notes, debit card PIN—”

“You are seeing predators where only shadows wait,” she said in a series of unusually loud clicks, and I had to stop myself from glancing down at the darkness at my feet. “What possible danger,” she added more quietly, “could ensue from this Hoouk creation accessing even your most personal data?”

“Beats me. That’s the problem. Maybe this isn’t true for you, but in my life, it’s been the stuff I don’t know that’s bitten me the hardest.”

Deal aimed a few more visual cilia at the dhothigon. “There, you make a firm point. Your experience is not entirely outside mine in this regard. I suggest we explore your measure of control over the situation.”

“I’m not sure what you—oh. You mean give the controller some orders and see if it salutes?”

“I will answer yes, but tentatively since the translation of your words was highly ambiguous.”

Being unsure which one to talk to, the controller or the “energy servant,” I addressed my entire audience. “I hereby name this dhothigon, um, Thoth. Thoth, will you obey me?”

Thoth had nothing to add to the conversation.

“Try an instruction,” Deal advised.

“Okay.” I pointed to one corner of the room. “Thoth, move over there.” No response, but perhaps the Hoouk hadn’t programmed the thing to understand pointing or even got the point themselves. “Thoth, come closer to me.” Another failure to communicate. I eyed the controller. “Tell me what this servant is supposed to do.”

Deal and I both jumped a little when the controller answered. “Your Thoth has one hundred and twenty possible configurations comprising variations on five basic functions, which are to serve, defend, protect, entertain, or instruct. You can select only one function at a time.”

“How do I select a function or know which configuration does what? And what’s the difference between defending and protecting me?” For that matter, how was it supposed to entertain me? Put on a red nose and big floppy shoes?

Again, I got the silent treatment.

Deal burst into rapid clicking. “Doctor! Thus far the controller has only responded to a direct order.”

My assessment of Tsf intelligence inched up, while my opinion of my own went the other way. I eyed the metal contraption and applied a voice my wife mistakenly refers to as “bossy.” “Tell me how to switch Thoth to its instructive function.”

“That operation is currently forbidden.”

I’d often read something similar on my 3DVD screen when trying to bypass the damn ads. “Why? I mean, tell me why!”

“You have configured Thoth in an aggressively protective mode that entails special security features.”

As I was getting that interesting news, flashing red letters appeared in the upper part of my vision to provide more of the same: DOWNLOAD IN PROGRESS; SIGNIFY YES IF A FILE-BY-FILE READOUT IS DESIRED.

Not good. I tried shutting down the system. When that failed, I subvocalized “yes” and watched the data zip by far too fast to actually read. But it wasn’t quite the hyperdrive blur I’d feared, so the interface had some sort of bottleneck. Latching onto that one buoy of hope, I whipped my DM ring off my finger and threw it across the room. Even that didn’t stop the theft.

“I assume there is purpose to your unusual behavior?” Deal asked.

Could be I snarled a little. “My DM just let me know that it’s lying down and purring while something is stealing my private files.” If there’s one thing I hate, it’s when my most paranoid fears come true.

“I suggest you address the controller.”

“Right. Hey, controller, stop that download right now!”

“That operation is currently forbidden.”

Perfect. “Then tell me what you’re looking for.”

“Thoth seeks information concerning threats to your wellbeing.”

How about Thoth itself? “Tell me what it will do if it finds any threats.”

“Your servant will protect you.”

That didn’t sound so bad at face value, but this was another face I couldn’t read. “How? I mean, tell me how.”

“The means depend on the threats.”

Deal speared my ring with the tip of one limb and silently offered it back to me. Just as I put it back on my finger, the bizarre form of my unhired protector drifted toward the doorway. I couldn’t tell how Thoth propelled itself, but its movement was snail-smooth and rabbit-fast. Like an idiot, I leapt sideways to block the servant’s exit and banged into Deal, who was being an idiot in the opposite direction. Thoth pushed us aside gently, but with a strength even a Tsf couldn’t resist, and headed into the hallway without bothering to use the open door. The macramite wall shattering made a noise that put Wednesday’s explosion, by comparison, into the appropriate-for-church category.

Deal and I just looked at each other for a moment; macramites are incredibly tough when linked and no amount of electromagnetic muscle could’ve given Thoth enough traction to break the wall. But the floor was covered with tiny Vapabondi machines already scrambling to reassemble themselves. I had time for one bitter thought along the lines of et tu, physics? before a second horrific CRUNCH ahead got me stumbling over the slippery backs of macramites to follow my supposed servant. I only fell twice.

Deal, being far more sure-limbed than any middle-aged human psychiatrist, reached the reception area ahead of me and clicked so loudly the translation was a shouted, “Stop that entity!”

I leaped over a second carpet of macramites where Thoth had taken out the corner of another wall in time to see L spring through the air like an Art Nouveau rocket, the massive jumping leg he’d extruded trailing behind. He hit Thoth with a force that would’ve knocked a house off its foundations, but the Hoouk creation didn’t even quiver. Impossible. L expressed tentacles and tried to latch on. Thoth flicked one ineffective-looking mini-limb and the little push hurled my receptionist across the room to smash into his own desk. Tad, likely drawn by all the noise, galloped in from one of the east-wing corridors but braked fast after spotting the glittering monster.

“L?” I bellowed. “You all right?” His silence scared me more than Thoth did.

My faithless servant scooted past Tad, who’d courageously jumped out of the way. Then the shadow at my feet gathered itself up and flowed forward.

“Gara! Stop!”

I was already too late. She’d pooled herself around Thoth’s… feet or whatever it had and her blackness turned shiny. The old banana-peel-on-the-floor routine, I thought. That won’t work; this bastard rolls its own traction.

Sometimes I hate to be right. The bastard glided effortlessly over my PT and crashed through the outer wall, but at least Gara seemed unhurt in the process. Bathed in morning sunlight, Thoth slowed to a slow but relentless crawl; its body grew a few feet taller, its internal glitter flared into blinding coruscations. Nothing could’ve looked more dangerous.

I turned my head and my knees felt weak from relief. L had begun to stir. Then I noticed something that shoved a fresh icicle up my spine. Although the broken walls were already partly rebuilt, I could trace the line of damage. It was dead straight, aimed north by northeast and pointed directly at a certain house on the next street ahead, the residence of one Bradley S. Pearson. A sliver of Brad’s gray shingles peeked at me from between two homes across from the clinic, as did a hint of the ocean farther beyond.

By stealing my personal files, Thoth could access every conversation I’d had since my last data-dump, six months ago. Something told me my alien Frankenstein’s experiment would soon give Bradley, or more probably his widow, something truly worth suing about. This was shaping up to be a very bad morning for both Mr. Litigious and me.

“L,” I called. “Are you hurt?”

“Not significantly.”

“Good!” I turned to my supposed security officer. “Tad, that nightmare outside is a kind of robot. If you’ve got any Vapabondi super-weapons tucked away, get them. Now listen, everyone! Looks like our wall-breaker is just, um, moseying along now, maybe to soak up a few rays. I’m praying we’ll have enough time to figure out how to stop it.”

“Why should we?” Tad asked.

A bad moment for Tad to suddenly get interactive, but par for her course. “Deal and I have learned that it’s been programmed to… handle anything threatening me. So it’s heading toward the thing that’s threatened me most often.”

“Mr. Pearson,” L said, using Bradley’s obnoxious voice.

“Right. And I doubt the robot is planning to negotiate. Ideas, anyone?”

“Certainly,” Deal proclaimed with a single, confident snap. “The controller must be disabled. I suggest that you and I along with the Vithy do what we can to impede the robot’s progress. Meanwhile the Pokaroll, who has witnessed the disassembly procedure, should attempt to dismantle the controller. Your surprising Vapabond can assist.”

Surprising? No time to ask. I glanced outside. Judging from Thoth’s increasing speed, I guessed it had nearly finished sunbathing. Worse, Phillips and Braun, my guardians parked on the street, were sliding out of their patrol car, weapons already drawn. I ran out the direct way, through the wall’s new hole, just beginning to self-heal.

“What is that thing?” Phillips yelled to me.

“Tell you later. Put those guns away, for God’s sake!” Considering Thoth’s Aggressive Protection mission, I figured nothing good would happen if it got the impression the cops were targeting me. And if the cops actually fired? While I was damn sure bullets couldn’t dent a Hoouk energy servant, that didn’t mean the robot wouldn’t shoot back somehow.

The cops lowered their .38s, maybe thanks to the panic in my voice, but they didn’t holster them. Bad mistake. Thoth stopped dead. A lenslike protrusion emerged from its glittering torso, pointed exactly between the two officers. I’m no sprinter, but would’ve surely broken some world record that day, if I’d run that fast on my own. Instead, a textured shadow slid under my feet and flowed in the direction I was running like a super-speed moving walkway. I reached my destination so quickly that I stumbled trying to avoid overrunning the spot. But I got there in time.

The little lens-bubble took one peek at Dr. Human Shield before sinking back into Thoth’s body and I trusted that this danger, at least, was over.

“Thanks,” I murmured to Gara, now appearing as a deep purple haze, and she gave me a don’t-mention-it sort of wriggle. Unfortunately, my latest feeling of relief had a minuscule half-life. Two smaller bubbles zoomed out from Thoth, whipped around me, and settled on the cops’ foreheads. Officers Phillips and Braun didn’t just stop moving, they seemed to congeal. For a second, I was terrified that they’d been frozen stiff, and would shatter when they fell over. And they did fall when I couldn’t reach them fast enough, but they didn’t even crack. The robot started off again, still aimed at Pearson headquarters. “Gara, we can’t do anything here, but I’ve got to get to Bradley’s house before that monster does. Can you carry me that far?”

I could barely hear her response. “Sorry, Al. I’d need to recharge first.”

“But I can manage that small task,” Deal said. I hadn’t realized she’d gotten close enough to overhear. “If you wouldn’t find it beneath your dignity, Doctor?”

“Hardly. Let’s go! What should I do?”

“Enjoy the ride.” With those cheery words, Deal wrapped limbs around my waist and legs, then hoisted me surprisingly high into the air and took off, bounding across the street as if Earth’s gravity was on coffee break. I didn’t much enjoy the experience, but had to admit that Deal got the job done.

She put me down outside Bradley’s back door and I barged in.

Bradley S. sat at his kitchen table gluing snips of colored veneers to a rectangular board. He looked up at me with the ire of a man interrupted mid-marquetry and uncharacteristically let me have it, both barrels. “Knock much?”

Normally, I find that particular TV-dialog-meme annoying, but today my attention was elsewhere. “Brad, you’re in danger! Run out your front door and keep running. Hurry!” Deal squeezed into the kitchen as I was talking.

Bradley stared at the Trader for a second too long and then it was too late. Four glittering claws smashed through the sheetrock behind me and then pulled most of the wall out accompanied by an ear-splitting concerto of snaps, crunches, squeals, and bangs. Thoth glided through the newborn dust cloud and over the pile of fresh rubble. It brushed past Deal and tenderly pushed me aside. One of its many claws elongated into long serrated pinchers that opened wide and began closing around Bradley’s thin neck. I’d never seen anyone look so terrified, and even though it wasn’t my neck in the alien guillotine, my blood turned to gel.

And time seemed to freeze. Each tick of the oversized clock mounted on one undamaged kitchen wall came slow and far apart. Dust motes lazed in the morning light streaming though Thoth’s remodeling project. The big hole tugged at my attention. My supposed protector hadn’t smashed into the house in its usual modus operandi; it had pulled the wall out. Why? Because I stood on the other side and would’ve gotten hurt. That insight told me what to do, or at least what to try…

“THOTH! If you kill this man, I will also die.” I had to believe the robot would understand me even if it wouldn’t obey me in its current mode. And I was counting on its protective programming.

Thoth didn’t release Bradley, but its pincher didn’t close. My neighbor gazed at me with eyes that were too scared to plead, and I did my best to convey a reassurance I didn’t feel. The impasse stretched on and there seemed no safe way to break it.

Then, for the first time, Thoth proved that it could speak. “You will not die when Bradley S. Pearson dies.” Its voice had a gelatinous tremolo but an ice-cold edge—murder in aspic.

The pinchers closed just enough to squeeze Bradley’s neck without breaking the skin. Brad made a nearly noiseless whimper and I felt sweat run down my back. “You’re wrong! Killing him will destroy my reputation and career. The guilt will make me kill myself.”

“I will prevent your self-destruction.”

Despite that excellent rebuttal, the pinchers didn’t tighten further. So maybe the Hoouk had a fairly broad definition of protection. “You can’t save my reputation.”

Thoth responded to my counterargument by doing nothing, a big improvement from what I was afraid it would do. But before I could let myself breathe again, Deal offered a few clicks of advice.

“I suspect, Doctor, that your servant is temporarily engaged in weighing the potential harm to your status resulting from this man’s demise against the harm he intends to inflict on you.”

Deal’s message came through perfectly: Any moment now, Bradley would lose his head.

Once again, something seemed to clog the gears of time as fear whipped my thoughts into clarity. “Don’t hurt him, Thoth!” I ordered for whatever good it might do as I took off running through the big hole, over the rubble, and toward the clinic. Dismantling the controller was Bradley’s only hope, and obviously L and Tad weren’t having much luck.

Halfway across the street, I gasped. Not only because I was out of breath. In my mind, a dozen scraps of information snapped together, forming a picture I hadn’t even suspected existed. My Volvo exploding, Tad saving me, the video-feed showing no one planting a car-bomb, Tad apparently avoiding Deal, Deal calling Tad “surprising,” three shattered macramite walls, and even Cora’s months of unresponsiveness added up to one stunning revelation. A truly disturbing revelation, but one that might provide a tool to save Bradley.

The frozen cops were stirring, although in slow-mo. They didn’t seem hurt. In the distance, I heard sirens and guessed they were headed this way.

The front wall had nearly healed, so I had to use the door to enter the clinic, but barely broke stride sprinting toward the room with the controller. I’ve seen some really weird things in my life, but the scene within that room beat them all. L had sprouted a forest of tentacles tipped with built-in wrenches, screwdrivers, hammers and whatnot, and was twisting, prodding, and banging on the controller like an army of insane mechanics. Meanwhile, Tad occupied herself with barehanded tugging and prying. All this hyperactivity was accomplishing zilch.

“Stop!” I shouted over the racket. “L and Tad, join me in the hallway, quick.”

I doubted Tad would obey, but L grabbed one of her arms with an extruded vice and tugged her out of the room. I slapped the wall-plate and the door swished closed.

“Have you stopped the robot?” L asked.

I kept my voice below a murmur. “Not exactly. We’ll have to do that from this end.”

“A glorious idea. How?”

I turned to glare at my insecurity officer. “Tad, do you have any of that explosive left? The stuff you used on my car?”

Dead silence for a moment. “You know it was me?”

“I’m positive.” She’d broken her routine to accompany me to the parking lot and reacted too quickly and perfectly to what she’d claimed was the “scent” of a bomb. Also, a team of macramites, too small to be noticeable on a video feed, could’ve easily carried the alien C4 to the car in minute batches. And who would be better at controlling Vapabondi macramites than a Vapabond? “I even know why you did it.”

To make me trust her, to allay any suspicions I might be developing about her.

“If you’ve got any explosive left, get it now,” I ordered in a nearly silent shout. “Hurry!”

You wouldn’t think that something resembling a cross between an ape, a walrus, and an armadillo could look sheepish, but Tad managed the trick. Then she demonstrated that it was also possible to slink away while running. She was much faster than I’d expected.

“You believe a detonation will disable the controller?” L whispered.

“God, I sure—wow! She’s back already. Guess we’ll find out.”

Tad carried a large, clear jar half full of what looked like crushed ruby dust and held it out for me to inspect.

“How do you detonate it?”

She answered by pulling out a small gadget with a miniature antenna on one end. She held this device to her mouth and mumbled something. Then she put the thing away and placed one of her sausage fingers on the nearest wall. A tiny moving strip of ivory appeared on the finger, marched across Tad’s shell, and worked its way down the arm holding the jar. I moved closer, but still could barely distinguish the individual shells of the parading macramites. A few seconds later, the ivory strip abandoned Tad to bury itself in the ruby dust.

“Will self-ignite at command,” Tad offered.

Useful little buggers. “How fast can they work?”

“We should leave room first.”

“Yeah. Okay, you stay right here and give your little pals the go-ahead as soon as L gets back here and I’ve got the door closed again. L, you’re the speed-king here. I’ve got a hunch you’d better get the job done fast.”

“You wish me to place the explosive near the controller?”

“On it. That jar should balance on one of its shoulders. Can you do it?”

“Easily.”

“Good. Everyone ready?” I hated to count on Tad, but had no choice.

And she came through for me, pulling out her little toy again as L reconfigured himself into a low-slung torpedo with six legs and two long arms ending in enough spaghetti-like fingers for a gallon of carbonara sauce. He gently took the jar and bushed the opening-plate with a spaghetti strand.

“I am ready now,” he said, zipping into the room so quickly that for an instant, I could’ve sworn he remained in the hallway.

Then he was. As the door zipped closed, I heard the controller say, “The operation you are attempting is forbidden.”

“Now, Tad.”

An incredible crash came from behind us, from the reception room, not the place I wanted to hear a bang.

“NOW, Tad! NOW!”

Like a sped-up, stop-action demon, Thoth came charging at us just as some giant fist seemed to punch the world. The force knocked me off my feet, which probably saved my life as five empty but hard boxes flashed through the space that my head had occupied an instant earlier. L caught me in midair and set me on my feet. I think someone was talking, but at that moment my ears were on vacation.

I looked around. Both L and Tad appeared unhurt and even the walls seemed undamaged. I walked over to lift one of the boxes that had been part of Thoth a few moments before. I put it down and hoisted another, then a third. Damn. Color me stupid.

Deal bounded into the hall with Gara right behind in her spherical rolling form.

“Bradley?” I asked and only heard my own voice through a bit of bone conduction.

I could see Deal’s cilia snapping, but had to point at my ears while shaking my head. Then the obvious occurred to me and I switched on one of my DM’s “accessibility” functions.

“Say that again, please,” I asked.

This time when Deal spoke, the translated words scrolled across my field of vision: “Your neighbor is healthy save for whatever mental trauma remains. The robot released him and departed at a speed that makes me suspect it of possessing some form of interstellar propulsion. I perceive that you have succeeded in reverting Thoth to its original state.”

“Thanks to L and… the Vapabond here. Deal-of-ten-lifetimes, may I introduce you to my patient, Coratennulagond? She’s been pretending to be the security officer your people hired for me, Tadehtraulagong.”

Deal hopped nearer to the party in question and stared at her with scores of eye-cilia. “So! I’d been informed a female2 had been assigned to you, Doctor, bringing a troubled female1 along. When I saw that your patient was the wrong subgender, I assumed my information was faulty. Now the discrepancy is explained.”

Along with plenty of other things, such as “Cora” being so unresponsive for so long. While Tad and Cora had been on their way to Earth, something had gone very wrong and the psychotic Vapabond had gained the upper grasping member.

“How do you intend to rectify the situation?” Deal asked.

I studied the Vapabond. “We’ll get the real Tad off whatever meds this one’s been feeding her to keep her torpid. But as for you, Cora, I believe this crisis has done you some good. I’d even say you’ve just had a breakthrough. This is the first time since we met that you’ve acted in a completely responsible way. If we work together, I’ll bet we can get your mind clear and strong. Are you willing?”

“You are not angry with me?”

“A doctor doesn’t get mad at the patient.” I was lying, but admitting my real feelings would help no one.

“Then I am willing.”

“Great. But let’s not include bombs as part of your therapy. And speaking of bombs…”

I slapped the nearby wall-plate, exposing the room that had contained the recent blast. The floor was littered in machine parts, but none of them appeared broken or bent or even singed. Impressive metallurgy. The controller had fit together like a Chinese puzzle, so I’d guessed that a powerful explosion would break whatever electromagnetic or chemical bonds had come into play after the system was finally activated. Good thing it had worked because I didn’t have a backup plan.

“We will not,” Deal said, “be assembling this device again. Or piling boxes.” My ears were beginning to recover; I could hear her clicks, faintly.

“Probably not, but I think I know where we went wrong.”

“Tell me.”

“The empty boxes look identical, but they don’t weigh the same. I bet if we stacked them from heaviest to lightest, Thoth would come to life in a far more… amenable form. Remember the controller telling us that the servant has one hundred twenty possible configurations? That’s how many different ways there are to stack five boxes if you ignore the issue of which side goes where: five factorial. Simple statistics. A clever person would’ve examined the empty boxes and noticed the weight discrepancy, and a logical person would’ve first made a pile with the greatest stability. The Hoouk overestimated me.”

Deal remained silent for a moment. “As for me, I find you difficult to overestimate. We Traders owe you much for the trouble our incomprehension has caused. How may we best repay you?”

I turned toward Cora. “This whole structure is made of your tiny machines. Could they tear themselves down and rebuild the place somewhere else?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent.” I faced Deal again. “I’m about to get drowned in lawsuits, and the trouble is that Bradley and my other neighbors are right. This institution is dangerous. Got an idea that might save my gluteus maximus without the Feds stepping in again and getting me even more resented. I’d like to keep treating my human patients in the Cabin—that’s what we call the small building behind this one—but I want to relocate the main part of the clinic.”

“To somewhere distant?”

“Not so far away that it takes me hours to commute from home, but a place that’s isolated from people.”

“Your desires appear to conflict. Do you have a location in mind?”

I grinned. “No, but you don’t expect me to solve every problem, do you?”

Something about the way Deal tilted a few of her limbs gave me the impression she grinned back. “Then I may have a solution although it might mean that this structure could not simply perambulate to the new position.”

“Perambulate!” L crowed, no doubt eager to rush to the nearest dictionary.

“Tell me,” I asked Deal.

“We are presently not far from one of your large oceans. With Tsf environment control, I see no reason why your clinic shouldn’t be repositioned some distance out to sea.”

I just stood there for a moment, blinking. “You mean floating?”

“I mean deep underwater. Surely your neighbors would be satisfied, and we would supply you a submersible vehicle for the short commute. Or would you prefer a sky clinic?”

And that’s basically the story. Oh, I could blab about the subsequent meeting with Smith, Jones, and assorted tons of other officials, but even I’m getting sick of hearing my voice. Besides, you’ve got the answer you were looking for. So don’t let those wheels fool you, Pastor. Now you know exactly why I have to drive to work in a submarine.

(EDITOR’S NOTE: Al’s adventure with his earlier patients was recounted in “Doctor Alien,” January/February 2009.)

Content

Doctor Alien’s Five Empty Boxes
by Rajnar Vajra