Spielberg, Duchovny and Me

SPEILBERG, DUCHOVNY AND ME

By Tom Slattery I have never met Steven Speilberg or David Duchovny. Nor do they appear to have been involved in any of this. The title is in the spirit of Michael Moore's title "Roger and Me." And while their associate Don Jakoby is not in the title, he may have played a bigger part if indeed he played any part at all.

It is within the realm of probability that Don Jakoby had nothing to do with any of this. But Speilberg's Dreamworks Studios made a movie, and David Duchovny starred in it, and thus these two celebrities unknowingly and unawares bounded into my life.

The laws of probability allow for chimpanzees randomly pounding on computer keyboards to eventually produce an exact copy of Shakespeare's MacBeth. And therefore it seems possible that something like that could have happened to my copyrighted screenplay, and later short story "The Spore." It is not impossible that Don Jakoby came up with an extremely similar story to "The Spore" entirely on his own and Dreamworks later made it into a movie titled "Evolution" starring David Duchovny.

I am not accusing anybody of anything. Don Jakoby claims credit for both "original story" and "original screenplay" for "Evolution." I would merely like to talk to Don Jakoby to satisfy my curiosity about how he came up with story so remarkably similar to mine and did so years after I wrote it and copyrighted "The Spore." So far my efforts to find him, let alone talk to him, have failed. And not for lack of trying.

To save myself from a feeling of redundancy in telling my tale of woe, here is what I said and how I said it in a talk to the West Side Writers Group in July 2007, last summer.

"Copyright Protection and the Little Guy" A Talk by Tom Slattery to West Side Writers Group at Porter Library, Westlake, Ohio Saturday, July 21, 2007 I will mention some copyright law from the standpoint of a writer. I am not a lawyer, and please take none of this as any kind of legal advice.

Let me begin with this: Copyright Clause, US Constitution Article I Section 8 – Powers of Congress Paragraph 8 (The Congress shall have power)

To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries.

This text was placed by our country's founders smack in the middle of a list of powers of Congress to, for instance: collect taxes; create a national debt, print money, raise armies, provide a navy, and related items.

It was obviously felt to be extremely important to the whole structure of the country.

Congress's solution to this was to establish the patent and copyright offices.

And if we look around, a great amount of the wealth of the country is based simply on copyrights and patents.

Billion-dollar entities like General Electric, Microsoft, Pfizer, Viacom, Twentieth Century Fox, and so on owe their origins and their continued existence to either patents or copyrights, or both.

But if we look at the wording and ferret out the original intent, it was not to create this vast and almost unimaginable wealth. It was to give creative minds the fruits of their original thought, investment in learning and education, and creative labor in order to promote progress.

And it worked quite well. Just look at the progress since the end of the eighteenth century.

At the end of the eighteenth century when our present nation was founded, daily life had changed little since the founding of the first cities in Mesopotamia seven thousand years earlier.

People lived mostly in farm towns.

Commerce between them was with wagons moving on crude rutted dirt roads or by boats and ships on natural waterways.

People wore hand-spun, hand-woven, hand sewn clothes.

People lived in hand-built houses. Lighting was with candles or oil lamps.

Communication was by hand-carried letters using sail or oar-powered boats over those waterways or animal-pulled vehicles on those awful roads.

This one paragraph, the first ever to be included in a national constitution of government and then quickly copied by almost all nations, changed all of that. This one paragraph changed the way we live. It was a really smart move.

And note how the two different creative fields are joined in this paragraph.

Technology forces social change. We've all seen that. The invention of automobiles required traffic laws, for instance. Social change requires new rules and laws.

But these new inventions and new laws may have unforeseen consequences. And that is where writers come in.

Writers research and write nonfiction material that probes and questions new technology.

Writers also do a much more important thing. They create fiction that vicariously immerses readers in situations that new technology has the potential to create. They create metaphors around those situations that give us a shorthand of thought to deal with them.

We are now living twenty-three years after the year 1984. Orwell did not write the novel in 1948 to predict the future, he, like all writers, wrote it to present a possible future, and by doing so to prevent a bad and irreversible future.

The paring of protection for inventors and their inventions with protection for writers and their writings has thus permitted technological change and social change to move precariously forward.

But if we writers may be ever so slightly protected, we are not well protected at all. It may help us to have this protection out there. But one can wonder.

There was no copyright office in Shakespeare's day. Shakespeare got along perfectly well without it. You might say that most works created in those days were effectively works-forhire, the hiring party being the wealthy patron of the writer. My guess is that the inventor of the wheel was not afforded and patent protection, either.

No one could have done a better job than Shakespeare with Shakespeare's plays. So copyright protection did not motivate him. And the wheel probably would have been invented sooner or later, with or without patent protection.

What "securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right" has done is to create something new in history called intellectual property. Rather than depend on a patron, a writer or inventor can create a work, secure rights to it, and sell those rights. And those sold rights become salable in themselves. And whole industries have come into existence due to it.

Writers and inventors thus could feel that an investment of their time, energy, expensive education, and money might be worth the risk. And that created the boom in products of the mind that changed the world in 200 years from what it been for 7000 years to what it is now.

Ideas are not copyrightable or patentable. This is because the purpose of a copyright or patent is to get ideas and devices out there to be discussed and to promote progress. People get copyrights or patents for the purpose of making the invention or writing public. The

writer or inventor is protected by a legal document. He or she may then make the work public, in other words publish it.

But ideas are creative products, too. A person may invest considerable time, energy, and money in formal or informal study before an idea of how nature works, what drives a process, how forces balance, what a person might do, or many other ideas might become apparent.

Moreover, one may put energy, time, and money into tuning one's mind to be creative, to bring about a living, thinking, working environment conducive to creating.

Ideas may seem like they come from nowhere or from a muse. But they generally come from mental application, minds given resources to be freed up from drudgery and concerns of daily living, and years of learning and education.

Therefore ideas are valuable. Ideas change the world. Edison spent considerable time, energy, and money trying to find something that would work in a light bulb. It was on his mind constantly. And then one day the silliest of notions led him to a piece of burned sewing thread. It was a great idea of enormous value. I changed the world.

But Edison did not just tell people he had a good idea. He made a working device and then patented it. He made himself a bit of spare change from it, and we would not today have giant mighty umpteen-billion-dollar General Electric Corporation without it. But the patent rests on an idea.

Stealing of ideas is thus big business. Corporate espionage and countering it is billion-dollar business. And not only the ideas themselves are valuable. Corporate raiding of people known for good their ideas is big business.

A writer, therefore, is fully justified at being horrified that his or her idea was stolen. He or she cannot do much about it but be horrified. But it is perfectly justifiable for him or her to feel violated. Don't feel that there is anything improper about this feeling of being violated.

It's real. It's not a delusion. And it requires some sympathy from other writers and creative people.

Legislation and case law may yet find ways of protecting new ideas without stifling the exchange of ideas. Things seem to be moving toward it. For now, though, it just happens.

Ideas are usually not "stolen" as such. Information is bandied about in a certain timeframe and several people may put information together in similar ways to independently create highly similar or even identical ideas.

Nevertheless, the use of an idea by one person that happens to be the basis of a work by another can damage that work and make it less valuable. There is probably nothing we can do about it. It just happens.

As for instance, in 1985 and 1986 I wrote both the first-draft screenplay and the initial novel version of a story I titled Sinking Into Summer's Arms. It revolved around the idea that global warming could precipitate a new ice age.

I was a bit ahead of the times with this, and I had to use the term "greenhouse effect" because the term and concept "global warming" had not yet entered the popular vocabulary.

In 2002-2003, almost two decades later, Roland Emmerich made a film for 20th Century Fox titled The Day After Tomorrow. It revolved around the idea that global warming could precipitate a new ice age.

The two stories are vastly different. The only thing similar is the idea that global warming could precipitate a new ice age.

Emmerich's film was a considerable success. I saw it, and it was a rather decent film and story.

But it had the effect of diminishing the value of my novel, and especially screenplay, Sinking Into Summer's Arms. Although I had written my story almost two decades earlier, any submission of my novel, and especially screenplay, was tainted by the lack of that crucial novelty of the central idea. I probably cannot sell my story now.

As for Emmerich's film, it was just an idea whose time had finally come. As for my story, it was an idea too far ahead of its time.

Something a little closer to the point happened in the spring of 1991. In 1988 I had bought an old car for two hundred dollars and had driven around the country for background for a novel. I finished and copyrighted the novel, End of the Road, in 1989 and manufactured about a hundred copies of it myself.

The story revolves around a 110-year-old man being interviewed in a nursing home by students in the year 2050 about his drive around the country in a $200-dollar car in 1988. I later rewrote the story and set it closer to the turn of the century. Both versions are in the Cleveland Public Library.

In the spring of 1991 ABC-TV produced a short-lived television series My Life and Times.

It revolved around an 85-year-old man in the year 2035 being interviewed by students about his life and times at the turn of the century.

There seemed to be other similarities. I was peeved. I talked to a lawyer and I talked to their lawyer. What I found out was useful to me and perhaps to you.

It is very difficult for a "little guy" to take copyright infringement action against the "big guys." This is mainly because a copyright, unlike a patent, is only, as the name says, a right to copy.

If two people have the same idea and write close to identical stories completely independent of each other and then each copyrights his or hers, both of them legitimately own copyrights. Copyright infringement comes from copying someone else's copyrighted material.

Therefore a plaintiff has to show that someone copied, and to do that has to show that someone saw, or at least heard about, the allegedly copied work. The lawyers call it someone who had "access," as in, "show me the access?" And to do this usually requires the work of a detective to find and interview people. This can get expensive, way beyond the means of most "little guys."

Even if I could have afforded it then, it did not seem worth it to me. I even had my strong suspicions about who had the "access," something most writers probably will not know.

Something quite bizarre happened with another of my stories. May this never happen to any of you. This concerns my original screenplay and later (long) short story "The Spore" and a Dreamworks (Speilberg's now bought-out movie company) movie starring David Duchovny titled "Evolution."

It starts in 1985. (And if the strange story may strike you like something out of "The XFiles," I have to admit that I got the same creepy feelings.)

In the 1985 I had naively written a short science fiction screenplay that I hoped the new "Twilight Zone" television series might want. I copyrighted it, 9/16/1985.

"Twilight Zone" not only did not want it, the series failed after an all too short run. So I had a script that no one might want.

But a new science fiction series, "The X-Files," turned up a decade later, and I slightly rewrote it for them and copyrighted this version on July 26, 1996.

I have a record that I sent a copy of "The Spore" directly to the series producer, Ten-Thirteen Productions, on August 5, 1996, but have no record that I ever heard back from them. I then apparently tried to get it sold through an agent. In 1998 this attempt became, in itself, something like an episode out of the Twilight Zone. An article in an industry publication noted that the production company moved to Los Angeles. So I tried to wangle myself a big-name agent there.

On April 1, 1998, I sent him, at his agency, a copy of "The Spore."

A poor unknown writer dares not to bug a big Hollywood agent about progress in selling a work. So I waited a respectful almost month before I contacted the agency about progress on May 15, 1998. They said they would call back. They apparently did not. I called on May 22, 1998 (a Friday). When I called, they asked me to call back on Tuesday, May 26. When I called then, they asked me to call back in a few days.

I called them several times and got nothing definite. I called them on June 10, 1998. They said they would call back because they "were in the middle of stocking season." But they had apparently misplaced my script. My records show that I sent the second copy of "The Spore" to them on June 11, 1998 at a cost of three dollars. In my cover letter I noted that it was in a "blue cover in case you find the one I previously sent."

That copy had a red cover.

I called on July 7, 1998 and left a message inquiring about "The Spore" on their answering machine. I called on August 12, 1998 at 1:15 EDT. They said that they "will read it."

On November 30, 1998 I wrote to the Kaplan-Stahler Agency that I had not heard from anyone there about either copy of my script. On December 15, 1998 my records show that I wrote a letter to "Michael" to whom I had talked by phone the previous day. I had sent them a letter with a self-addressed stamped envelope. They had written me a cryptic note on the envelope with the agent's phone number on it, apparently a phone at Paradigm agency. I also scrawled in the margin that I called Paradigm on 4/28/99, whatever that may mean.

On September 1, 1999, Paradigm Agency sent me a letter under their letterhead. It was from the agent himself. In it he briefly told me that he had read my script and "it did not generate enough interest to pursue representation at this time."

In a letter dated October 12, 1999, and postmarked Los Angeles, October 12, 1999, Michael wrote to me that Paradigm could not consider my material because I "lived in Ohio."

I faxed this reply on October 15, 1999.

"Mike, I am having difficulty understanding this! I first contacted (the agent) at KaplanStahler Agency about (my script) titled "The Spore" on April 1, 1998, over a year ago. On request, I mailed no less than 4 copies of that script to (the agent) at either K-S or Paradigm -- because of misplacing or moving. In my call of April 6, 1999, this year, you said that (the agent) was "looking at it." Why did he do that knowing that the TV series did not take scripts on the open market?"

The venting, of course, got me nowhere. The year-plus effort on behalf of "The Spore" had cost me time and money. I Xeroxed the pages, assembled a mailing package, wrote new cover letters, took each copy to the post office on frustrating public transportation, and mailed them. And I waited. And to my amazement each new telephone receptionist said that they had gotten it, but lost it.

So I went through the previous routine of Xeroxing, packaging, cover letter writing, going to the post office on public transportation, and mailing it. My scant records, discovered this week in the process of sorting through my papers in advance of

moving sooner or later, show this. I mailed "The Spore" to the Kaplan-Stahler Agency on June 11, 1998.

One of the several different telephone receptionists told me that they had found one of the copies -- and here I do not lie and I do not embellish -- in the space above the ceiling tiles. I thought best not to inquire how it had gotten there.

Well, that was that. The whole process had gone on for more than a year. It was strange. I felt defeated. But there was nothing that I could do about it.

Mom, of course, shared my frustration about it. We exchanged theories, jokes, and denunciations for maybe months before we gave up on it and forgot about it. And even after that, over the years it would come up in conversation about other screenplays that I was writing or sending off.

And then in about 2005 or maybe early 2006 I sat down to watch a late-night science fiction movie made in 2001 titled "Evolution" on a non-major local channel. And to my amazement a story unfolded that was uncannily similar to my story "The Spore." I was more surprised than furious. But when I told Mom about all of the similarities, she was downright angry.

A year ago I began using Internet search engines to try to track down the screenplay, produced by Dreamworks, which had by then been sold to another Tinseltown movie behemoth, and the author who had claimed not only credit for the screenplay but for the original story, one Don Jakoby. But unlike many if not most personalities in the Hollywood scene, Don Jakoby seemed to have no real biography other than snippets of information from interviews and articles. And there were no authorized photographs of him. It seemed ever so slightly suspicious.

Naturally I related all of this to Mom. She was by then, last year at this time, looking very old and getting very tired very easily. But she always enjoyed sharing in my writing non-career, and this had evolved into an interesting saga in itself. She simmered at all of the seeming strange Hollywood goings-on. And it was while I was in the midst of this search that her health began to slowly slip. I slowly dropped the search, mostly because it was not leading anywhere and it seemed unlikely to get me anywhere wherever it might lead. Before I could get back to see what was going on with Jakoby, his claimed screenplay "Evolution," and all of the seeming secrecy, my mother died.

Mostly for her, I returned to sporadically searching for answers about Don Jakoby and the movie "Evolution."

My intention was only to find out, hopefully from Don Jakoby himself, how someone could come up with a story so similar in structure, characters, plot, and even location long after I had written mine. And yesterday I finally found a reference to his agent. So, mostly for Mom, I spent this blustery cold Sunday morning's church-time writing the following email and sending it to his agency.

April 15, 2007 Dear (Agency President), I hate to bother you with this. Apparently screenwriter Don Jakoby is one of your agency's clients. I am simply trying to locate an address for him in order to communicate with him.

My reason is this. There are a number of amazing similarities between his (credited) screenplay for the Dreamworks feature film "Evolution" and my short screenplay and later short story "The Spore."

I wrote a first draft short screenplay "The Spore" in 1985 and copyrighted it: copyright PAu 761-759 on 9/16/1985. Years later I considerably rewrote it and copyrighted it as "The Spore," copyright PAu 2-113-043, 7/16/1996. In 2000, I rewrote "The Spore" as a (long) short story text and included it in my self-published book of short stories OPEN 25 HOURS, copyright TX 5-445-579, granted November 22, 2000. This book has been listed on book sites on the Internet and available for purchase by the public as well as in some libraries since publication on September 7, 2000.

Please forgive me for all of these technicalities. I am not threatening any legal action. I merely felt a need to establish some credibility with you. And I only want to communicate with Don Jakoby about this matter.

Here are, in brief, some of the similarities between "The Spore" and "Evolution" so that you might understand my concern.

The plots and action of both stories begin with an impact of a meteorite near a town in the American desert southwest, in "Evolution" near Glen Canyon, Arizona, in "The Spore" near Winnemucca, Nevada.

As a result of representing Don Jakoby, someone in your agency may roughly know the story of Jakoby's screenplay "Evolution." So I'll keep this brief by focusing on "The Spore."

In "The Spore" I have a histology technician at the desert southwest town's local hospital out for a morning jog when the meteorite impacts near some railroad tracks. He hurries to it and sees that it seems to have brought primitive life forms with it because polyp-like organisms are growing on the steel railroad tracks. The polyps seem to perish rapidly so he hurries back to his histology lab with one of the polyp-like organisms.

As he begins to investigate it, the polyp-like organism evolves into a higher organism. When it consumes a scalpel, he hurries to get the hospital's X-ray technician involved in order to find out what happened to the scalpel. And my histology technician and X-ray technician thus begin to jointly engage in an effort very similar to the parts played by community college instructors Ira Kane and Harry Block in "Evolution."

In the process of evolving, the life form in "The Spore" attacks a laboratory computer and accesses the Internet and begins to rapidly process and ingest our planet Earth's information.

Similar to action in "Evolution," in "The Spore" the military cordons off the meteorite impact site and then finds the two hospital technicians who have a sample of the meteoritecarried life form and have begun an amateurish investigation of it. The military and civilian authorities invade the lab and confiscate the life form, by then clearly evolved into something higher in evolutionary development.

In "The Spore" the two technicians are effectively arrested and taken to a secret Nevada site designed for ultimate bio-war exigencies where an uncontrollable bio-war organism might have to be nuked.

In this secret facility, the extra-terrestrial organism in "The Spore" continues to evolve, much to the consternation of civilian and military observers. It is programmed to evolve when confronted with higher levels of technology.

Similar to the extra-terrestrial organism in "Evolution," the extra-terrestrial organism in "The Spore" evolves into an intelligent humanoid creature, and in doing so causes all the more concern, and then civilians versus military personnel conflict. The military, which controls the facility in "The Spore," decides unilaterally to nuke the now highly evolved extraterrestrial organism. In "The Spore" they do nuke it, fulfilling the organism's destiny.

There may be more similarities. I only saw Evolution" once, on late-night television. And I have only quickly skimmed over my story "The Spore" to recall from faded memory and verify the above.

It strikes me, though, as, if hopefully nothing else, an amazing coincidence, perhaps worthy of a science-fiction story in itself. I am naturally wondering how, years after I wrote my story, Don Jakoby came up with his story. I find it hard to believe that someone as well educated and creative as Don Jakoby apparently is would even think of plagiarizing someone else's story and effectively story structure, characters, and location. You may understand my interest.

Sincerely, Tom Slattery My experience with Tinseltown is that there will be some long delay before I get a reply, if I get one at all. But Mom would have been pleased that I stuck up for my rights as a writer. And there might be a possibility that this will smoke out a solution to a mystery that we had both shared with humor, frustration, and curiosity. I am afraid that there may be nothing terribly uncommon about this mysterious tale of Tinseltown USA. But in actuality I have come to regard it as so much water under the bridge now. I have never been able to sell any of my several screenplays, novels, or nonfiction books. It would ironically appear that my story "The Spore" is closer to the final movie print,

which was turned into a rather bad comedy, than Jakoby's claimed original serious science fiction story. And in that, forgive my delusions, I might loosely claim that I have had a movie made from one of my stories. And in that, Mom probably would have been pleased, if also simmering that I did not get paid for it.

I can only wonder. You writers know the writing process. I wrote all three versions right here in a converted former porch area of my mother's old cottage. The first version, 1985, was written just after I returned here from living in Europe for more than a year. I used an old Royal typewriter that I had found set out on the curb for the city rubbish collection.

It had been built in the 1920s, had beveled glass on each of its sides to view the mechanical workings, and from the complete lack of wear on the rubber cylinder and pristine keyboard keys had clearly never been used. I carried the heavy iron monster back here because it had a 12-point typeface, necessary for screenplays. And I believe that the first experimental screenplay that I wrote with it was "The Spore." Anyone who may have written plays of screenplays on mechanical typewriters may remember the pain of keeping the page-number sequence in order and the constant erasing or white-outing of typing errors.

By 1996, when I rewrote "The Spore" into a slightly different short screenplay, I had been working with an Emerson computer with a monochrome green screen for four years. I was using Enable word-processing software and the computer was set up on this stand that I made for it that would hold successive generations of new computers right up to the present one. Mom was by then eighty-eight years old, and I had been in this house every day and night for eight years. In some ways there was nothing else to do but rewrite it.

By 2000 I had a computer with a color screen and access to the Internet. A new version of Word Perfect software allowed me to easily convert the screenplay into story text.

Converting it allowed me to remove my almost novel-length science-fiction story "Norikaeru" from my short story collection Open 25 Hours and P.O.D self-publish it as a separate book, a short novel. I then inserted "The Spore" into the collection and published it in Open 25 Hours.

I had shared all the trials and triumphs of this with my mother. Her generation had faith that the U.S. government protected citizens with things like copyrights.

No less than the F.B.I might raid a student dorm at midnight to find culprits downloading copyrighted music owned by huge billion-dollar corporations.

But as for "securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings‌" That's another story.

There was a small silver lining to this. I complained about all of this to a screenwriter who has a website. He advised me to forget about it and write something else.

So I just finished a modernization of Mary Shelley's original end-of-the-world science-fiction story The Last Man. I shortened it and modernized the characters and geopolitical situation. I also modernized the title to The Last Human. I just posted it as a free ebook for anyone to read on the scribd site. You may want to skip over my long gabby introduction to the story and background on Mary Shelley. My modernization seems as scary as Mary Shelley's original novel. But that is also another story.

FULL TEXT OF MY SHORT STORY "THE SPORE" This is the text of "The Spore" just as I sent the manuscriptof short stories to the publisher of my book OPEN 25 HOURS. The text below lacks the final editing and proofreading of the story published in OPEN 25 HOURS, but is extremely close to it. In fact, since I unintentionally added several errors in the process of proofreading, this may be easier to read.

If you readers might be terribly curious, you could additionally rent or borrow the Dreamworks-produced and mind-bogglingly similar movie EVOLUTION, watch it, and reach your own conclusions. The Dreamworks movie was made decades after I wrote and copyrighted the first draft of the story below.

THE SPORE Hardly a reader alive does not know what X-ray technicians do. But some may not know what histology technicians do. They work with tiny sections of biological material. In hospital labs, they first “fix” human tissue to preserve it.

Then they process it for viewing in scanning electron microscopes, transmission electron microscopes, or optical microscopes. For the latter two, they slice tissue into ultrathin sections using microtomes and then use varieties of special stains to make microscopic cellular parts visible. There is an art to it as well as a specific science, and therefore histology technicians often have a greater creative flare and resulting curiosity than many technical people in our technical society.

It may or may not help to know that the word “angel” comes from the Greek word angelos, meaning “messenger.” Might there be technological angels in our technologically troubled times? What manner of beings might these be, and how well would some of us receive them?

This yarn was originally written in 1985 as a one-hour spec script intended for the short-lived revival of The Twilight Zone television series, but never produced. It was rewritten as a one-hour spec script intended for The X-Files in 1996, and again never produced. The reader may feel free to imagine X-Files characters, but David Mulder is not their Mulder, Gillian Scully is not their Scully, and Otis B. F. Skinner is not their Skinner.

These are my characters in my story

The Spore

By Tom Slattery Hospital histology laboratories smell of xylene, alcohol, and acetic acid. Histology technicians are low in the medical-technical hierarchy. X-ray technicians are more highly regarded and paid better, but are still technicians.

Nevertheless, histology technicians like Andy Huber and X-ray technicians like Jean Cooper have scientific training, and they are as curious about the world as anyone else.

Huber, a slightly paunchy forty-six-year-old man hung up his white lab coat, opened his histology lab door to the corridor of the Winnemucca All Saints Hospital in Winnemucca, Nevada, switched off the lights, and went out. All went black on the lab benches, microtomes and other histology lab equipment, microscopes, various reagents, and the laboratory hood for working with noxious and hazardous reagents. He shut the door marked HISTOLOGY LAB and ambled down the corridor.

He stopped at the X-ray lab just down the hall and looked in. A large standard X-ray machine stood in the lab’s center. A portable X-ray device on wheels was against the wall nearby.

Jean Cooper, a twenty-seven-year-old woman fresh out of college and internship, hung up her white lab coat, switched off the X-ray lab lights, and went out.

She closed the door marked X-RAY DEPARTMENT as Huber stood by.

“Good night, Jean,” he said.

“Good night, Andy,” she replied.

Both wished that some excuse might come along to enhance their employment relationship and perhaps expand it into something more, but both turned and went silently in opposite directions down the corridor.

Both went home, cooked prosaic lonely suppers, watched dull television programs, and went to bed early to be fresh for work in the morning.

If destiny might play a part in an excuse that could bring them together in a more meaningful relationship, it was in the form of an asteroid slowly tumbling and drifting through space for countless eons until it became trapped in the clutches of the Earth’s gravitational field and began an acceleration into inevitable collision with the planet.

In the early morning twilight over Winnemucca it arrived as a fiery arc splitting the clear dawn sky.

Huber, in cheap running sneakers and a gray gym suit, and with his ever-present cellphone attached because he had to be on-call at the hospital, was out for his usual morning run and crossing the silent lonely railroad tracks stretching out into the Nevada desert hills when he saw it Cooper had just shut off her alarm and rolled out of bed. She did not see the track in the sky, but she saw the bright flash of the impact explosion and then heard the loud cannonlike boom.

Huber stopped startled as the meteorite impacted, exploded, and then illuminated the horizon far down the tracks. He braced himself for the cannon-like report, but it was not near as bad as he expected. For a second he just stood there, astounded, anxious. Then concern and curiousity took over, and he ran down the tracks toward the impact.

When he got to the faint glow in the early morning half-darkness — out of breath — a small crater still smoldered. He stood for a second gazing at it.

Then he crouched at the crater, scooped dirt near it, sifted in his hand reflectively. He stood, ambled toward the tracks, and was shocked and astounded to see cyst-like white polyps beginning to grow on the steel rails.

Huber strolled along the tracks. Aghast, he observed a half-dozen rapidly growing white polyps. And a quick look around told him that they were growing only on the steel rails. He drew a quick conclusion that the polyps had something to do with the meteorite impact. He drew another that whatever they were, they did not eat flesh or anything else organic. They liked to chomp on steel.

He frowned puzzled, crouched cautiously, and examined largest cyst-like polyp closely. It was growing, and as it grew, it was either consuming the steel or dissolving it. As he watched and studied it, cautiously, without making any physical contact, it began to deflate, to shrink.

The polyp collapsed into a motionless puddle, leaving a gap in the railroad track of dissolved steel. He looked up and down the tracks. Tiny new polyps grew. Large older ones deflated, shrank, became puddles, left dissolved sections of rail, gaps in the track.

From running by those tracks every morning for ten years, he knew that a scheduled freight train was due in less than a half hour. He glanced at his wristwatch. Jean Cooper would be up and getting ready for work.

He grabbed his cellphone, punched-in Jean Cooper’s number. When she answered, he spoke in an agitated but composed voice that hospital people who deal constantly with emergencies use and recognize in one another. And all the while, he kept glancing anxiously at polyps on rails. He was alarmed about the polyps themselves and additionally about the gaps in the track that were about to cause a life-threatening derailment. “. . . dissolved. Well, just say a meteor hit and the track is damaged. Stop the train,” he told Jean.

He listened with growing impatience while she questioned him about the cyst-like polyps.

“I don’t know whatinhell they are, Jean,” he said in that hospital emergency tone.

“Better call somebody.”

He listened anxiously and eying the polyps while she asked him who she should call.

“I don’t know. I don’t have a phone book. CDC maybe. Army. FBI. Better get someone over here.”

He listened to her concern about his safety, and calmed himself to answer her in a reassuring tone.

“Other than eating steel, they don’t seem to be a threat.”

He listened to her reminding concern about the train being derailed.

“Yeah. First thing, call ‘em and stop the train! I’m going to take a sample to the lab.”

He listened to her worries about him and the things that seemed to be from outer space.

“Yeah, I’ll be careful,” he told her. He quickly hung up to let her set the various emergency processes into action.

He clips his cellphone to his elastic belt and ambles to the edge of the nearest track.

Two polyps, now disintegrated into grayish puddles, had completely dissolved the steel rail. A small section of rail was left in between. And a tiny new polyp was beginning to grow in the center of it.

These things did not last long. If he, or anyone, was going to find out what they might be, he had to act fast. He looked around, found a dirty discarded piece of plastic bag, picked it up, and hurried to the section of rail.

Even as he bent over the section of rail that was now completely cut off from the rest of the track, he could see that the new tiny polyp was beginning to grow. Using the dirty plastic bag fragment to keep his hands from coming into contact with section of rail with the polyp on it or the cyst-like polyp itself, he carefully picked up the slightly heavy steel rail segment.

After getting a good grip on it and securing it in as comfortable a hold as he could without risking actually touching it, he broke into a steady-paced run toward the hospital, pushing himself just a little more than he might have done under more normal circumstances.

It took him ten minutes to get to the Winnemucca hospital. Out of breath, he struggled to get the door open without touching the rail or polyp. He stopped at the door labeled HISTOLOGY LAB and had a slightly bigger problem because he had to unlock it.

Carefully holding heavy steel rail section and its polyp in one hand, he unlooped the chain with its house, car, and lab keys from around his neck and got the door open. ++++++ It had been daylight for some hours in the Eastern Time Zone. In the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover building in downtown Washington, D.C., Skinner, a tall balding fifty-something head of a special section set up to cover uncommon investigations, sat at his desk in swivel chair listening to a telephone crammed up against his ear while he fingered the frames of his eyeglasses.

He hung up the phone and looked up as Scully entered. Gillian Scully, an attractive thirty-something FBI agent and licensed osteopathic physician wearing a red dress suit was quickly followed by David Mulder, an athletic thirty-something FBI agent and dropout from the late stages of long-gone hippie culture. He looked uncomfortable in a blue suit, white shirt, and dark green necktie with a bright yellow UFO emblazoned on it.

Skinner did not offer Scully or Mulder chairs, nor did he wait for them to sit in one.

“Meteorite,” he barked. “Winnemucca, Nevada. Appears to have carried in primitive life forms.”

Scully assumed her best professional skeptical frown. “That’s almost impossible . . .”

Skinner pedagogically pointed his forefinger at her. “Key word is ‘almost.’ Anyway, you and Mulder get out there. If it’s not a hoax, could be big problems.”

“Anybody in charge?” Mulder asked.

Skinner took off his glasses and wiped his brow. “Nuclear Emergency Search Team,” he told them. “White House’s idea.”

Scully could not help looking astonished. “Nuclear Emergency Search Team?”

Skinner shrugged and held out his hands. “Headquartered in Las Vegas . . .” He took a deep breath and then glared reproach at Scully and Mulder. “What do you want them to do? Call Professor Mack at Harvard? We don’t have a contingency force for extraterrestrial emergencies.”

“Group in Nevada makes sense,” Mulder offered. “But what about our secret nonexistent Air Force Base out there?”

Skinner sneered a cynical smirk. “They’re in. But as you said, they don’t exist.” He glanced at his wristwatch. “Anyway, get out to Andrews. Plane’s waiting.” ++++++ Huber went into his histology lab cautiously carrying the rail fragment with the now much larger and growing polyp. He had seen the others wither, die, and turn to gray puddles all too quickly. And he was in a hurry to get a handle on this one before it did.

He placed the rail section on lab bench by the keyboard and external modem-phone of his lab personal computer. He rushed to put on his white lab coat over his running outfit.

Then he reached into a half-open drawer and pulled on two latex surgical gloves.

That done, he grabbed a magnifying glass from the top of the black lab bench and examined the polyp.

Under the magnifying glass, the surface of the polyp had a textured surface. But there was nothing remarkable about it.

He put the magnifying glass down beside it. Nearby there was a new stainless steel scalpel fastened into a standard metal-alloy handle. He had set it out the previous night to be ready for work in the morning, work which always involved trimming biological specimens in preparation to processing them.

He picked up the scalpel, but hesitated. Mixed feelings and cross purposes to one another raced through his mind. He did now want to harm what might be a living entity from outer space. But he had seen these living entities die and quickly become gray puddles, losing whatever histological structure they may have had. It would wear on his life and his soul if he did not use his lab facilities to obtain a section of this specimen, biologically fix it, and get and stain sections for microscopic viewing before it was too late.

He advanced the scalpel toward the polyp. Then he hesitated. He swallowed, placed the sharp scalpel blade against the surface of the polyp, and made a slight experimental slice on the skin of it. If it were sensitive and showed pain or any reaction, he intended to stop. It showed nothing. He gulped and made an incision.

The polyp sucked the scalpel from his hand and ingested it!

Huber stood stunned and looked at it aghast.

“Hoe-LEE . . .” he shouted to the empty laboratory as he stepped back.

The polyp suddenly expanded, not much, but enough. Huber now knew he had a problem. He jumped back.

“JEEZ!” he shouted even louder to the empty lab.

Amazed at himself for not running as fast as he could out the lab door, he stood studying the polyp with awe and apprehension.

Behind him, the half-open lab door creaked on its hinges as it was pushed all the way open.

Jean Cooper, still struggling to put on her white X-ray technician lab coat, burst in.

“Police cordoned off the whole area,” she said in a voice strained with anxiety.

“National Guard’s been called in.” Then she saw the polyp. Her jaw dropped. She shoved her whole arm into pointing at it. “That’s . . . One of them?”

Huber extracted himself from a state of shock. He exhaled a scared snort and nodded. “Just swallowed a scalpel!”

Cooper’s processes of garnering realization registered the implication a long second after the words reached her ears.

She gaped at the polyp. “Swall . . .”

Huber recomposed himself and assumed a take-charge stance and attitude. He wheeled around to face Cooper.

“Quick!” he shouted. “Get the portable X-ray. See what it’s doing to the scalpel. I’ll keep an eye on it.”

Cooper blinked a confused hesitation. But she had similar scientific training and as much curiosity as Huber. She hurried out and toward the X-ray lab.

Huber kept a wary eye on the polyp. He heard her run down the corridor. Then he heard her wheeling the portable X-ray machine back toward his lab.

Cooper wheeled in the portable X-ray machine. Huber said nothing, and she put it up against the lab bench adjacent to the polyp and the personal computer. She nodded at the polyp and looked at Huber.

“It didn’t do anything,” he told her.

While Huber stepped to get himself ready to move the steel rail section and polyp under the X-ray apparatus, she grabbed the machine’s electric cord and plugged it into a wall socket. “We should tell somebody . . .”

“I agree,” he interrupted. “But let’s see if it just swallowed it, or if it’s digesting it.”

Cooper stayed as safe a distance back as she could and gulped. “Okay. Don’t touch it, though. I don’t want it to swallow you.”

Huber grasped the rail section with the now much larger polyp clinging to it. “See, I’m only holding it by the rail.”

As he lifted the rail section, the polyp began to slide on it. He hastily got it over the X-ray machine. The polyp slid onto the X-raying platform and landed with a solid dull clunk. It was no longer a polyp. It had begun to have some solidity.

Huber looked at it and shook his head. “Funny. The other things melted and dissolved the rails. This one didn’t. And firmed up.”

Cooper was anxious to get this phase of research over with and get out of there.

“Okay. Anyway, it’s ready. Let’s get your X-ray and then get somebody over here.”

She slid an x-ray photographic plate into the machine and pressed an indented circular green plastic button. The timer emitted a telltale buzz while the machine’s X-rays penetrated the specimen.

With professional deftness from much practice, she pulled out the exposed plate, waved it at Huber with an elated smile, and hurrying out of his lab to develop it in hers.

“See you in a few minutes. Get the hell out of here if it moves,” she shouted from down the corridor.

Huber stepped back from the portable X-ray machine and watched the thing that had once been a polyp and was now something more substantial and complex.

After a minute, the thing suddenly altered color. He retreated a step. His nerves were getting maximally frayed, but both his curiosity and his macho anxiety about appearing too afraid to Cooper kept him from fleeing. He watched warily while color and texture of the thing changed several more times.

He was asking himself why he was standing there watching this when the thing began to etch and dissolve the surface of the X-ray machine on which it was lying. He stopped asking himself and just stood stunned and gaping.

And while he was standing and gaping, the thing produced a snail-antenna-like pseudopodium and these snail-like antennae began to slowly and exploringly extend toward the x-ray machine electronics. Whether from fascination or from fear, Huber did not even try to move.

He watched in horror and bewitchment while the thing’s new pseudopodiumantenna attached itself to the X-ray machine’s electronics casing. While he watched, he could hear Cooper’s echoing footsteps running down the corridor. He thought of saying something. But anything he might say would scare her off. And if they were to find out anything, they would have to work together.

Cooper ran into the Histology Lab panting and waving her X-ray film. “I’ve got it.

Your scalpel’s gone. It’s digested.”

Huber held up his hand to warn her to stop behind him. He registered the information she had given him. It fit with what he had been seeing. He only shook his head and nodded toward the thing.

Its antennae were suctioning onto the x-ray machine electronics casing.

Cooper let out a gasp. “What’s . . . Oh-god, it’s . . .”

Huber turned to her with a puzzled expression. “Polyp incarnation completely gone?”

She held the X-ray film up toward the fluorescent lights on the ceiling. Huber frowned as he looked at it. There was indeed nothing inside the thing. The scalpel must have been absorbed and digested.

Cooper shook with a great shiver that went up her spine. “It’s . . . evolving!”

The thing extended a third and larger snail-antenna-like pseudopodium and began to crawl like a snail toward the Personal Computer.

Seeing where it was heading, Huber hit the modem switch to open a line and call outside. “Time to call someone.”

“Who?” Jean asked in a voice filled with fear.

“Nine-one-one?”

“Go for it!”

But as Huber was about to speak, the thing’s snail-antenna-like pseudopodium engulfed computer modem and phone.

Cooper and Huber retreated several steps.

The antenna dissolved through the computer casing and entered the electronic components.

The computer screen turned on. The Internet was accessed. Then massive amounts of nonsense gibberish began to flow down the screen as if some enormously high-speed information processing beyond the capacity of the screen to display it might be taking place.

But sometimes something would become momentarily intelligible. The screen showed fragments of text: Constitution of the United States of America; a recognizable fragment of a Shakespeare drama; a well-known physics formula; a mockup DNA molecule.

Cooper and Huber both shuddered. “It’s absorbing everything on the Internet,” she gasped while gaping in disbelief.

The screen showed: an ancient cuneiform clay tablet, ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics, an ancient Mesopotamian ziggurat, Egyptian pyramids, Greek Acropolis, Roman arch, European cathedral, ancient Chinese temple, modernistic skyscraper.

“It’s studying us,” Huber murmured.

The computer screen showed: a space shuttle taking off, astronauts in space walk.

“Everything about us,” Cooper added.

The screen showed a map of the globe, pinpointing cities. Then communications links between them were diagramed.

The screen changed. Cooper and Huber saw flashes of WW II battle scenes, a nuclear mushroom cloud, nuclear devastation of Hiroshima, fully armed state-of-the art jet fighter taking off, a Gulf War smart-bomb blasting a structure.

The screen seemed to scroll silently on and on.

They could make out glimpses of polluting smokestacks, polluting car exhausts, dead fish floating in a polluted body of water, a computerized map of ozone depletion over the Antarctic.

The awesome silence of several minutes was broken by a clatter and shouting of armed men running down the corridor in combat boots. Cooper and Huber wheeled around to see the first of several men, a captain in full battle dress fatigues and packs pointing his nasty-looking automatic rifle at them.

“Halt. Don’t move a muscle,” he barked.

Three SWAT-appearing fully armed and battle-dressed personnel burst into the Histology Lab right after him. None, however, pointed weapons at Cooper or Huber. That was clearly the captain’s prerogative.

“Stay right where you are,” he told them.

Two more men entered the lab. Both wore blue business suits with white shirts and unassuming neckties. One, a forty-something gentleman with balding straight blond hair, had a plastic name tag on his suit coat breast pocket. It said ELLISON. The other, a thirty-something gentleman with curly dark brown hair had O’HARA on his.

Ellison motioned to the captain to move his weapon away from Cooper and Huber.

The captain did so, but remained ready to point if back and fire if he had to.

Ellison gave an introductory wave of his hand toward O’Hara. “O’Hara and I are from the Nuclear Emergency Search Team in Las Vegas.”

“We were what was available,” O’Hara added. “President called. We scrambled.”

The captain pointed to the thing with three antennae half embedded into the computer, the screen of which continued to ultra-rapidly scroll as if digesting huge amounts of data.

“Take a look at this, sir,” he directed.

As the rapid gibberish scrolled, sometimes intelligible fragments would appear. They saw a crop-spraying plane, a hand spraying aerosol can, a human hand pouring a beaker in a laboratory, complex human-made organic molecules, a hive of dead bees.

Ellison turned from looking at the screen to a puzzled glare at Cooper and Huber.

“You want to fill us in?”

“We think it accessed the Internet,” Huber told him of the obvious.

O’Hara wheeled around to the captain and barked an order. “Unplug it! Bring the front-end loader. Get this thing, computer and all, to The Pit.”

Ellison waved his forefinger at O’Hara, then at Huber and Cooper, then at himself.

“We’ll be right behind you in the Command Helicopter.”

Ellison picked up his cellphone and barked in some commands. O’Hara grabbed it and added his own thoughts.

The Swat-like military men and Ellison and O’Hara escorted Cooper and Huber to one of two waiting camouflage-painted Humvees. The captain got into the driver’s seat.

Ellison motioned to Cooper and Huber, and they got into the back and sat. He and O’Hara then got in. Guards carefully loaded the whole X-ray unit containing the thing into the back of the other Humvee. They drove off fast, but carefully.

The captain headed out right behind them. O’Hara kept a close eye on the thing all the way to the Winnemucca High School football field, where two helicopters were waiting for them.

The guards nervously and cautiously loaded the thing into one helicopter and got in with it. It immediately took off and headed south.

Ellison and O’Hara wasted no time in escorting Cooper and Huber into the other one. And it took off and followed the other.

Huber and Cooper could not help be in awe of the Nevada landscape from the air.

But they could not forget the thing in the other helicopter, either.

“Where are you taking us?” Huber asked Ellison.

“I’m not at liberty to say,” Ellison answered.

“That thing?” Cooper asked while pointing to the other helicopter.

“You mean that thing on ahead?” O’Hara asked.

“With those guys pointing their guns at it?” Cooper snorted with sarcastic humor.

“This is no laughing matter, lady,” Ellison said.

O’Hara’s jaw tensed and his mouth curled into a snarl as he looked at the two hospital technicians. “Do you two have any grasp of the enormity of the problem your fooling around has caused?” he asked. “You didn’t have the faintest idea what you were doing.”

“And I suppose you do!” Huber barked back.

“Yeah. The all-wise, all-knowing government with its vast data bank on outer space life forms and how to deal with them,” Cooper snorted with sarcasm.

“No comment,” O’Hara responded sourly. ++++++ A Lear Jet painted with a corporate logo to conceal the nature of emergency federal missions had taken off from Andrews Air Force Base near Washington, D.C. and was heading toward Winnemucca. Inside it, Scully and Mulder sat as comfortably as they could manage in passenger seats.

Its copilot, dressed in an Air Force uniform, opened the cockpit door, took a deep breath as if to soften the bad news, and then held his hands out to indicate that there was nothing that the crew could do about it.

“Visual landing. Might be a little rough,” he said. “Air Traffic Control system’s spouting gibberish. Plane’s instruments are getting bizarre.”

After years on X-files investigations, Mulder sensed that the plane’s instrument difficulties were part of a larger problem.

“Just here?” he asked.

“Looks worldwide,” the copilot answered. “But radio communications are starting to go down. Don’t know for sure.”

He gave them a shrug and a wave, reentered the cockpit door, and shut it.

Scully frowned to Mulder. “Do you think . . .”

“Exactly what I’m thinking,” he interrupted her.

From training and experience with similar emergencies, the military crew landed the plane smoothly at Winnemucca Airfield. It helped that it was broad daylight.

The plane taxied to a rusting galvanized steel hanger. A late model red SUV had peen parked by it, waiting and ready for Scully and Mulder. They hopped into it, Mulder in the drivers seat. Scully punched in a code on the vehicle’s computer-map, and a road map of Winnemucca came up, meteor impact area circled in red. Mulder glanced at it and drove off in the blazing desert sun.

At the railroad tracks, a television news crew fretted and videotaped along the acideaten-through rails. Uniformed military personnel amble around. They had cautioned and shooed away most curiosity seekers earlier and had little to do now.

A scholarly-appearing man in an out-of-place gray suit, white shirt, and red necktie, whom many might recognize as the Secretary of the Interior, accompanied a network television news anchor in a loud casual sport shirt and gray work slacks holding a microphone. It was a poorly kept political secret that the Secretary of the Interior had a PH.D. in biochemistry and had spent five years as head of the Centers of Disease Control before being appointed.

He and the news anchor both looked down and casually examined the dissolved sections of rails and oil-like puddles around them while a tough-looking and obviously veteran female cameraperson videotaped.

Scully and Mulder opted to look on and see what they might learn.

The network news anchor gave the scholarly-looking man his best and most practiced serious look. “So you’re certain the things are all dead? There’s no threat to anyone now or in the future?”

The Secretary of the Interior did his best to exude panic-countering appearance of scholarly calm and government power. “Well I can’t say with absolute certainty. We’ve never seen anything like this before. But it certainly appears that they’re all dead.”

“And the puddles?” the news anchor pressed.

“Inert. Some strange chemistry, but nothing that would appear capable of replicating or doing harm.”

“So it’s basically over?”

“In the interest of public safety, we’ll keep the area cordoned off, keep a close watch on it and study the phenomenon further. But there is no need to panic. The situation is completely under control.”

Scully and Mulder looked at the television crew’s monitor screen. It cut to a close-up of the nationally known coanchor, obviously in New York. But the screen went into a frenzy of interference swatches and squiggles, periodically cutting into and cutting-off the view.

And they knew that it was the same interference that had forced the plane’s crew to use visual landing skills.

But some information and images had been transmitted both ways. The monitor cut back to the news anchor in the field at Winnemucca.

“Well, thank you, Mr. Secretary,” he said. “Now back to our newsroom.”

The news crew ceased its videotaping.

Scully and Mulder approached the news anchor and Secretary of the Interior. They both flashed their wallets with FBI ID. Scully took the initiative of the introduction.

“I’m Agent Scully. This is Agent Mulder.”

Mulder pointed to the TV monitor. “Getting an awful lot of interference.”

“Yeah. Just started,” the news anchor told them. “They can’t get us very well, either.”

“All the traffic lights in Reno are screwed up, too,” the Secretary of the Interior said in his off-the-record voice.

Scully motioned to the railroad tracks and puddles. “Could it be from this?”

The Secretary of the Interior shook his head. “Don’t see how. These puddle-things are completely inert. I’d say dead, but I can’t say for sure about alien life cycles.”

Mulder waved his arm to indicate the tracks. “How did the things dissolve the steel rails?”

The Secretary of the Interior smiled kindly at the intelligent inquiry coming from a member of the nations federal police establishment. “Good question. Literal alchemy.

Transmuted iron into chlorine, made hydrochloric acid. Acid buildup in their systems eventually killed them. Almost as if they were programmed to self-destruct.”

Scully looked down the partially destroyed railroad tracks. “It’s all over now?” she asked hopefully.

The Secretary of the Interior beckoned, strode off to the side, and thus forced Scully and Mulder to talk with him out of range of the news anchor and television crew.

“Not quite over,” he said in a low voice bordering on a whisper and with a touch of exasperation. “The local hospital histology technician took one to his lab. It somehow survived.”

“It there now?” Mulder asked.

The Secretary of the Interior looked to make sure that the TV crew was out of hearing range, then shook his head. “Nuclear Emergency Search Team. With SWAT team types. Hauled it — and the histology and x-ray technicians — off. I am not at liberty to say where.”

“You know or you don’t know where?” Scully asked The Secretary cleared his throat. “Let me put it this way. I know where, but I don’t know exactly where.”

Mulder threw up his hands. He knew the routine. “Come on, Scully,” he said.

They walked glumly and silently back to their bright red SUV. He opened the car door, sat on the front seat with his legs dangling toward the ground, and yanked out his cellphone.

At the other end of the phone conversation, Skinner paced back and forth in his office in the Hoover Building in downtown Washington.

“Okay. You didn’t get this from me. I think it’s a nuclear test site. Write this down.”

He fumbled through some papers on his desk.

At the Winnemucca end of the conversation, Mulder turned to Scully and said, “Write this down.” Scully pulled out a notepad. Mulder relayed it to her. “Coordinates: thirty-seven degrees two minutes north. Hundred sixteen degrees six minutes west.”

At the Washington end of the conversation, Skinner shrugged to the empty office as if Mulder and Scully might be able to see him from thousands of miles away. “All I know,” he said into his phone.

In Winnemucca, Mulder snapped off his phone. “Get in,” he told Scully. Going to see two hospital technicians and an alien blob.”

Scully got in. It was late afternoon, and they were getting a late start. The red SUV drove off and headed south.

Their first obstacle was still in the city at a crossroads with a traffic signal. The signal kept chaotically changing, red, green, yellow, red, green, yellow . . .

Mulder slowed. Another car whizzed past on the cross road, close to hitting them.

Mulder checked traffic, goosed the gas peddle, and rubber peeled off on the pavement as the SUV dashed across to the opposite side.

It took a second for Scully to recover. “Most traffic lights are now computer synchronized,” she said, mostly to calm herself.

“Something’s fouling up the software?” Mulder asked.

“All of it. Everything,” Scully nodded as the car sped south past desert sagebrush on a two-lane highway.

“Could pretty much shut down the whole planet.”

“We’ve got to get to that surviving blob.”

They drove through the Nevada sage-desert. The sun setting to their left swept away the daylight colors. Clear bright stars began to twinkle into the night.

Scully tried the car radio, but only got static. “I get antsy when I get this much out of touch with the world.”

Mulder looked out at the lonely desert night. “Desert makes you feel even more cut off.”

“Yeah.”

Traffic was sparse, and they were relieved every time a pair of headlights whizzed by. If they were denied radio contact with what might be happening in the world, at least the world to the south was no worse affected than where they were coming from.

After some hours, Mulder pulled the car over onto the macadam berm and stopped.

He switched on the inside light, and Scully and he checked their Nevada map.

“Just up ahead. Here,” Scully pointed.

Mulder pulled the SUV out onto the highway and drove to an intersection of a dirt road. He turned right and followed it out in the middle of nowhere for another twenty miles.

Scully kept a pencil flashlight on the map.

“Okay, here,” she said.

Mulder pulled the car into the sagebrush, and the SUV jerked and bounced through a desert landscape of it until it reached a barbed-wire, razor-wire fence. Mulder stopped the car, shut off the lights.

Both of them carried bolt cutters as they got out.

They worked fast. Their bolt cutters met at a last cut-through, and they pushed away a section of fence to create a hole large enough to drive a car through.

They knew that they had set off alarms and would not have much time. They rushed to the SUV, jumped in, and Mulder drove it through the hole in the fence.

They drove bouncing and pummeling over rough sagebrush terrain. Overhead they could see distant bright dot-like eyes of searchlights on an approaching helicopter and hear the staccato flop-flop-flop of its blades.

“Should be almost there,” Scully said anxiously.

“I’ll slow down. We’ll bail out,” Mulder said. “Okay?”

“Okay.”

The car slowed but continued in its bouncing forward motion. Its doors opened.

Scully and Mulder rolled out onto the dirt and sagebrush. The SUV continued forward.

They got up. The SUV continued on and disappeared over a rise.

“You okay?” Mulder asked as he dusted off his jeans and plaid shirt.

“Fine,” Scully assured him as she dusted off her jeans and gray work shirt. She pointed to the southwest. “Should be this way.”

They trudged off. The helicopter crew fell for their ruse. It approached in the direction of their moving SUV, by then close to a half mile northeast of them.

They glanced back from time to time as they hurried to the southwest. The helicopter approached where the slowly moving car would have been and hovered over it.

Then they could see a searchlight striking the bright red and still moving SUV and staying fixed on it.

An extremely loud loudspeaker squawked on, obviously from the helicopter. “You are trespassing on government property! Stop the car!”

The helicopter flew ahead of the moving SUV, keeping its searchlight on it.

“Stop the car immediately!” the loudspeaker voice boomed.

The driverless SUV continued over sagebrush terrain with the searchlight on it.

“Stop the car immediately! We are authorized to use lethal force!” the loudspeaker boomed.

The SUV continued moving with helicopter searchlight remaining trained on it.

Scully and Mulder increased the pace of their run through the sagebrush, but could not help looking back at the drama between the armed helicopter and the empty SUV. “Stop the car and get out! We will open fire if you do not stop the car,” the loudspeaker boomed.

The SUV continued moving, now considerably farther to the northeast.

“You have ten seconds,” the loudspeaker boomed. “Stop the car or we will open fire.”

The SUV continued bouncing toward the northeast in the light of the searchlight.

The helicopter plainly repositioned itself toward the front of the vehicle, ready to fire.

“Nine, eight, seven, six, five, four, three, two, one. Last warning!” the loudspeaker said.

Scully and Mulder, now getting out of breath from running, could not help looking back when they heard bursts of machine gun and small cannon fire.

They both witnessed the SUV erupting in a ball of flaming explosives and gasoline that lit up the night sky across the sagebrush desert. The helicopter hovered near it while armed troops leaped out.

They did not look back again as they hurried across the Nevada sagebrush.

Scully and Mulder ran past the rusted hulk of a 1950s automobile. There was a concrete bunker up ahead, and that seemed to be the spot that fit the coordinates that had been given them. They ran to it. Rusted steel plates covered its door and two windows.

“This it?” Mulder asked, as much to himself as to Scully.

“Must be,” she answered anyway.

They heard the helicopter motor rev-up and the sound of it taking off. Their ruse must have been discovered. Time was running out.

Mulder hit his shoulder with a hard dull thud against the rusted steel plate covering the door. “Doesn’t budge,” he grunted.

Over the rise the searchlight of the helicopter began to scan in a methodical search pattern.

Scully pointed to it. “Not much time.”

Mulder motioned exasperated to the bunker. “This can’t be it. Place hasn’t seen a human being in years.”

“Wrong!” said a voice that broke the desert air from behind them and caused them to literally jump. They wheeled around and saw an armed officer.

“Just looking in the wrong place,” he told them while keeping his gun trained on them.

Two other battle-dressed SWAT-type military personnel had their guns aimed at Scully, Mulder. The third, the armed officer, holstered his and stood relaxed and looking them over.

“We’re FBI agents,” Scully said.

The armed officer exhaled a resigned sigh. “I guessed. I’m going to have to ask you to turn over your weapons. Regulations.”

He watched as Scully and Mulder carefully removed their FBI-issue automatics.

They reluctantly handed them to the officer.

“Thanks,” he said. He deftly put one in each of his fatigue side pockets, then turned to the other two soldiers. “They’re okay. Put the guns away.” He turned again to Scully and Mulder. “I’m Carl. Follow me and keep quiet.”

He headed toward the rusted automobile hulk. Scully and Mulder followed him. The other two soldiers followed the three of them.

The helicopter continued its search pattern, getting closer with each sweep.

“Aren’t you going to call off the helicopter?” Mulder asked Carl.

“Not ours. Air Force,” he replied.

“They might have killed us,” Scully said.

“Military training,” Carl told them.

“Friend or foe. Nothing else between,” Mulder observed.

“Yeah,” Carl said. “And tend to overreact. One reason we’d rather not reveal things just yet.”

They reached the hulk of the old car. Scully noted to herself that it was what was left of a Hudson Hornet.

“Who are you?” she asked Carl.

He momentarily ignored her and pointed an object that looked like a TV-remote or garage-door-opener remote at the rusted car hulk. “Nuclear Emergency Search Team,” he finally answered her.

Scully and Mulder quickly gathered that the car hulk concealed the entrance to the site they had been searching for. The hulk of the car raised up until a giant concrete plug under it had extended past the opening. Now they could see an air shaft access under it.

Carl motioned to the other soldiers. “These aren’t soldiers or a SWAT team.

Everyone here has a Ph. D. in physics. We’re set up to combat nuclear terrorism.”

“Not a whole lot in your physics books about alien life forms,” Mulder observed.

Carl involuntarily nodded and then wiped his brow. “And boy, do we have a problem!”

There was a steel ladder leading down into something deep and terribly dark. There was no doubt in Scully’s or Mulder’s minds that they would have to climb down it.

At the top of the ladder was a small intercom box. Wires led downward from it.

These guys did not want to take chances on interception of radio-wave messages.

Carl tapped a button on the tiny intercom and spoke into it. “Bringing two guests.”

The scratchy voice at the other end inquired, “FBI agents?”

“That’s them,” Carl said. He flicked off the switch.

“Expecting us?” Scully asked cynically.

“Call it scientific extrapolation,” Carl told her. He positioned himself on the first several ladder rungs to start climbing down the shaft. “Come on. Hope you’re in shape for a long climb.”

“Don’t you have an elevator?” Mulder asked in a sarcastic tone.

Carl pointed due south before he began climbing down. “Site entrance has one.

Quarter-mile. Air Force guards check everything. In or out. Don’t want them meddling, overreacting — just yet.”

Scully glanced over at the helicopter getting even closer in its search sweeps and the dull glow of their still burning SUV in the background. “Know what you mean,” she snorted.

Carl disappeared down the shaft. “Careful,” he warned them. “Long way down. I’ll turn on some lights as soon as the cap’s back on.”

Mulder lowered himself to the shaft and began climbing down. Scully followed. The soldiers started down, one by one. There was a creaking sound as the old rusted car mounted on the concrete plug began to move and reseal vent entrance.

Scully, ten or fifteen feet down, looked up and saw the stars disappear as the circular dark concrete plug slowly eclipsed them.

After Carl heard the telltale snap and clink of the plug resealing itself, he flicked on a row of faint neon night lights that ran in a string down to a distant base of the shaft an enormous distance below.

When they had all reached bottom, Carl opened a steel door into a vanilla-painted corridor with a polished green vinyl floor. On both sides of it were doors to offices and labs.

Carl led Scully and Mulder down the corridor and motioned to its walls as they walked. “It was built to assemble experimental tactical nukes.”

“Something went wrong . . . Big pop way down here. Nothing telltale released,” Mulder observed in his characteristic cynical tone.

Carl nodded that he had hit it on the head. “If we get a homemade nuke, we’ll probably bring it here. Take it apart.”

“Carefully,” Scully added.

“Carefully,” the Nuclear Emergency Search Team officer agreed. “If we cannot handle it, one of our nukes has been placed down here to blow their nuke.”

“Why not just dynamite it?” Mulder asked.

“Considered it,” Carl replied. “But it would leave a radioactive mess of reusable fissionable material. We’d have to seal it off, post warnings for millennia.”

They reached a door. Carl opened it. A large and well-equipped underground laboratory met their eyes.

So did the persons of O’Hara, Ellison, Cooper, and Huber. They all looked at one another.

Jean Cooper knew who Carl was and who his soldiers were. But she did not know who the two newcomers were. And for the most part she did not care. Nor did Huber. These were just two more new people and not likely to offer them any answers or hope of getting out of there.

“How long are you going to keep us here?” she asked O’Hara sourly.

“Depends,” he told her.

“On what?” Huber asked.

“Whether you’re contaminated,” Ellison told them. “Whether you’ve done something to keep this thing alive that we don’t know about. Deliberately or accidentally.”

And with that, he turned his attention to a negative-pressure chemistry and radiation hood. All the others followed his eyes.

Behind the shatterproof glass in it was the now somewhat larger and somewhat formed evolving-throbbing thing that had once been Huber’s polyp on the railroad track fragment. The section of rail, the x-ray machine, and the computer were also under the hood, but it was now less firmly attached to these.

Spotlights glared on it. Two video cameras continuously recorded it. Other instruments had been set up to monitor and record scientific data.

O’Hara nodded to the faintly throbbing thing while studying Scully and Mulder.

“You no doubt heard about it. That’s our baby.” He motioned to Cooper and Huber. “And our two fine hospital technicians, Andy Huber and Jean Cooper.”

It was obvious that Ellison and O’Hara knew who the FBI agents were. Carl saw fit to introduce them to Cooper and Huber.

“These are FBI agents Scully and Mulder,” he said as if it were to get it off his chest Ellison gave Scully and Mulder curt nods. “More or less expected you.”

“Eventually, if not now,” O’Hara added.

“So it seems,” Mulder added sarcastically.

Scully motioned her hand toward the thing under the chemistry hood and nodded to Huber. “You found it?”

“Yes, mam,” he responded.

Mulder looked at Cooper and Huber. “The rest are all dead. Why is this one alive?”

Cooper poked a finger at Huber. “Maybe because it ate his scalpel,” she said nervously.

Scully frowned. “Ate his . . .”

Huber interrupted. “I started to take a section out of it. To look at under the microscope. When I cut in, it pulled the scalpel out of my hand and ingested it.”

“Scalpel was steel like the railroad tracks,” Ellison offered.

“But a high carbon alloy blade. Alloy handle,” Scully corrected.

“We have a theory: Programmed spores,” Mulder put in. “If conditions are met, they respond, evolve. If not, they self-destruct.”

“When he sliced into it with a high-tech scalpel, programming told the thing something intelligent was examining it. It evolved to the next level.”

“It completely digested the scalpel,” Huber told them for whatever help it might be.

“Nothing showed up on the X-ray,” Cooper added.

“You X-rayed it!” Scully said “That probably triggered something.”

Huber nodded agreement. “Then it began eating the X-ray machine. At least the electronics.”

“It went after the computer next,” Cooper told them.

“Modem attached?” Mulder asked. He Scully, Mulder exchanged knowing looks.

“Linked to the Internet,” Huber nodded. “Quick access to exotic new pathology images and diagnoses.”

Scully sighed. “So that’s how it got worldwide.”

Mulder turned to O’Hara and Ellison. “Computer generated controls worldwide have collapsed.”

Ellison pursed his lips and clenched his jaw. “We know. Communications are in shambles.”

“We more or less guessed why,” O’Hara added.

“But what’s the damn thing up to?” Ellison asked rhetorically. “Takeover?”

“Extortion?” O’Hara asked to put the question on the table. “Wants fifty percent of our global water?”

“Let’s not give it any ideas,” Huber cautioned.

“Maybe you better keep quiet,” Ellison told him testily. “You got this started.”

Huber flashed him an angry and affronted glare. “Nothing you would not have done yourselves.”

“Boys, let’s not fight,” Scully told them.

“I just had a scary thought,” Mulder said. “What if it learns nuclear firing codes, launches atomic Armageddon?”

“We called the president,” Ellison responded.

“Before communications went completely down,” O’Hara added.

“Ours should be disconnected now,” Ellison continued.

“But we don’t know about the Russians, British, French, Chinese, Israelis, Indians, Pakistanis, or others, if any,” O’Hara appended.

“So far, so good, though,” Ellison said with a glance heavenward, or at least toward the half mile of solid rock above them.

Mulder motioned toward the thing in the hood. “Okay if I go in closer?”

“Be our guest,” O’Hara told him.

Mulder stepped forward, looked into the hood at the faintly throbbing purple-gray blob inside. It looked like a primitive sea creature, perhaps a mollusk without its shell.

He turned to the others and pointed to the hood window. “Mind if I raise it?”

Ellison looked at O’Hara. They both thought about it for a second. O’Hara nodded his consent. Ellison turned to Mulder and nodded his, but while he waved a cautioning finger.

“Okay,” he said. “Just for a second.”

Mulder raised the hood window. He leaned over and looked closely at the faintly throbbing blob. He moved his head slowly above it and squinted while closely examining its surface.

It was bland. It did not tell him anything. He wanted to understand the thing, what it was, what it might be up to.

He reached in and cautiously touched the thing with his forefinger. Scully’s jaw dropped.

“Mulder!” she shouted.

The thing reacted to the touch by changing color. Mulder stepped back, closed the hood window.

The small group watched in both fascination and horror as the thing suddenly extended four octopus-like “legs.”

Mulder retreated another two steps as a single octopus-like “eye,” emerged on it.

Somewhere in back of him there were several groans of outright fear and horror and a shuffling of feet stepping backwards.

The thing’s eye scanned the room. Carl stepped up beside Mulder, drew his handgun, pointed it at the hood, looked down its barrel, and kept it directed at the thing.

“What do you think?” he asked Mulder and the others. The implication was clear.

Should he fire off a shot at it?

“Don’t shoot!” Mulder hollered.

“Might be programmed to respond in a way we really don’t want,” Scully added urgently.

“Don’t shoot unless one of our lives is threatened,” O’Hara ordered.

“Agent Mulder, you better step back here,” Ellison told him.

Mulder did what he was told and stepped back to rejoin the group.

“It’s observing us,” Scully noted as the thing’s eye kept looking at them, individually and as a group.

“Maybe we should try communicating,” O’Hara offered.

“Any ideas how?” Mulder asked.

The nine onlookers, including Carl’s two men, shifted restlessly, exchanged helpless, hopeful looks.

The thing erupted into changing again. It emitted an opaque purplish gas inside the hood and obscured everyone’s view. Everyone reacted with horror. Several screamed. All gaped. But if there was horror, there was also fascination and awe.

By the time that the hood exhaust cleared the gas, a silvered humanoid form sat wrapped in a fetal position. The silvered humanoid straightened up. To Scully and Mulder, it appeared like something similar to the Cop Super Terminator in “Terminator Two.” It lifted the glass hood window amid gasps of horror. Carl glanced back at Ellison and O’Hara to see if he should shoot. They shook their heads.

The thing climbed out and stood on the green vinyl floor.

Except for Carl, who had crouched into a firing position and was keeping his gun trained on the humanoid, the others retreated toward the lab door in apprehension.

The silvered humanoid stood on the floor next to hood studying all the others.

“Please do not fear,” it said in a tinny computer-artificial sounding voice.

“Be cool, Carl,” Mulder told the officer holding his gun on it.

The silvered humanoid’s face contorted as if to reform its voice apparatus. It held up its hand in peace.

“I am only a messenger,” it said. “I mean no harm.”

“Messenger from whom?” Scully asked.

“A civilization long dead,” it answered.

“And why should we believe this?” Ellison asked.

“Your problem. Not mine,” it told him.

“Okay, what’s the message?” Mulder asked.

“Peril,” it answered.

“Peril? From what?” Scully asked.

“You,” it told her.

It grasped a loose computer cable. The computer screen lit up.

“Your nature,” it added.

On the computer screen, in very rapid succession, the nine onlookers saw: first, Swirling hot gasses coalescing into sun and planets, then rain, thunder, and lightning on lifeless volcanic planet, proto ocean, then graphic of molecules forming DNA, replicating, then pre-Cambrian sponge-like creatures, then fossil trilobites, then graphic of a fish-like proto-amphibian crawling up on land, then a carnivorous dinosaur attacking herbivorous dinosaur, then a saber-tooth tiger attacking primate.

It pointed to the computer screen. “All your type planets develop similarly. The intelligent species, like yourselves, is a surviving species.”

More images flashed across the computer screen. It showed ape-like creatures battling one another — one picks up femur-bone, uses it as a weapon, then proto-humans stab at each other with spears, then fur-clad humans firing arrows from bows, then an ancient Middle East bronze sword and chariot battle, then Iron Age Roman soldiers battling an enemy, then knights in armor and crossbows, then primitive cannons firing at a castle wall, then armies using flintlock rifles firing at each other.

The silvered humanoid pointed like a college instructor at the computer screen.

“Intelligence becomes a survival factor for individuals and groups.” It hesitated for effect and looked around the lab. “But only if accompanied by ethical social improvement!”

The computer screen began flashing another series of images. The group saw cuneiform section of Hammurabi’s laws, then an ancient Middle East judge holds court, then an ancient robed priest halts human sacrifice by another priest, then an ancient Egyptian priest worships idol while other priest shakes head, gestures to the wide outdoors, spirit above, then medieval types hold parliament, then a familiar scene of American revolutionaries holding Constitutional Convention, then two modern scenes of the U.S. Congress and the British or Canadian Parliament.

“Without ethical social improvement,” it said, “technological achievement ultimately turns self-destructive, even suicidal.”

It motioned to the screen. The group saw swastika banners and Nazi parade, then Nazi planes bombing, then concentration/extermination camp horrors, then bombed-out Berlin.

The silvered humanoid relaxed like a college instructor prior to taking questions, but with a final comment. “Intelligent species at your stage of technological development have reached the primary critical juncture: you have arrived at a capacity to totally self-destruct

— by nuclear war, runaway environmental disaster, or ethical development stagnation leading to one, the other, or both.”

Mulder started to raise his hand like a student, then stopped himself. “The spore from which you grew was programmed to identify that level of technology?”

“Encapsulated and scattered by the billions to spring to life when conditions were met,” the silvered humanoid told him. “A gift from a civilization so ancient that your planet was not yet formed.” It pointed to the computer screen as if with an invisible remote, its pointing finger obviously activating it.

The screen flashed an image of Planet Earth against the blackness of space.

“That is all you have,” it told them. “Against an emptiness so vast that it is beyond the reach of your minds to fully grasp.”

On the screen, the Earth diminished in size as if retreating through space.

“Your species population is approaching the limit of the biosphere to sustain it,” it said.

The screen showed a real-proportion graphic of the extremely thin layer of airbiosphere surrounding the Earth. It pointed to the very thinness of the layer of biosphere. “A genetic engineering mistake could create one single organism that would replicate and bring about irreversible disaster.”

The others saw an expansion of views that illustrated thinness and delicacy of the biosphere.

“All you have is an extremely thin layer of carefully balanced biosphere surrounding a molten-cored hunk of dead rock hurtling through infinite space,” it said. “You need to protect it with all your hearts and minds and resources.”

Scully did raise her hand as if in class.

“Point noted,” she said. “I have a question: how did you transmute iron into chlorine?”

“Point apparently less than fully understood at your level of technology,” it answered her. “If you could do that it would mean you knew how to convert matter into pure energy.”

“We do,” Ellison blurted out. “You seem to know about our atomic bombs.”

The silvered humanoid shook its head admonishingly. “Converts only a small portion.” It held its thumb and forefinger at a gap of less than a quarter inch to signify a small amount. “Convert this much matter to pure energy. Just this much. You could blow up one of your cities. Imagine how difficult it would be to stop a terrorist.”

O’Hara, who like Ellison was a nuclear physicist, immediately grasped the meaning.

“Point well taken,” he said.

The silvered humanoid lowered its head, admonishing slightly. “Taken, but I’m afraid not well. Terrorism exists due to your sluggish social-ethical progress. Social inequalities. Economic inequities.”

“We know,” Ellison replied.

“Do you?” the silvered humanoid shot back. “Your planet’s few billionaires have more combined income than the total incomes of the poorest half of your whole population.”

“Causes terrorism?” O’Hara frowned with his question.

“A factor!” it snapped back. “Resultant illiteracy, fear of the future. Fear to question religious and political authority. Suicidal at your primitive stage to have knowledge to change matter into pure energy.”

Just then the laboratory door burst open.

In charged three armed and uniformed Air Force officers, a general, a colonel, and a major, all waving machine-pistols.

The silvered humanoid pointed to the small invading force. “Evidence to support what I just said!”

The general was obviously furious at Ellison and O’Hara. He waved his free hand furiously at them. “Thought you’d pull a little secrecy game on us?” he shouted angrily. He thrust a pointing finger at the silvered humanoid. “Who or what is this?”

The colonel’s military mind grasped much of the unfolding events. “That thing you had mutate?” he barked.

The general himself now grasped what had taken place. And it made him furious. He glared at Ellison and O’Hara and stuck his jaw out in their faces.

“This borders on treason!” he shouted. “You know what that thing’s done?

Worldwide computer virus! Communications in havoc!”

“It’s harmless,” Mulder asserted.

The General wheeled around to face him. “Harmless! I don’t know where you’ve been, boy. But the whole snortin’ world’s a mess out there. This thing’s damn dangerous.”

“It is being restored,” the silvered humanoid said. He turned to Ellison, O’Hara. “If you had not unplugged the computer, everything would be normal now. It was done for credibility, in conjunction with a message now on your Internet.”

The colonel’s jaw had dropped when the silvered humanoid began talking in perfect American English. “It talks!” he finally said.

The general waved off the colonel’s apparent incompetence. He glared for a second at the silvered humanoid.

“What message?” he asked.

O’Hara answered for it. “Peril.”

The general glanced at O’Hara in disgust and recklessly waved his automatic weapon. “I’m not going to take any more of this horse manure!” He asserted his jaw toward the silvered humanoid. “What are you doing here? And what do you want from us?”

“I am a messenger,” it answered.

“This is getting us nowhere fast,” the colonel said.

“I agree,” the general concurred.

He pointed his free hand’s forefinger at the silvered humanoid. “You’re obviously a threat to the whole human race. To the whole planet.”

It shook its head admonishingly. “Sad to say, you’re the threat.”

The general glared at it. “You trying to confuse me with double talk?”

“Maybe it’s already doing something to addle our brains,” the colonel advised.

The general offered him a terse military nod of agreement. “Good point. If it can disrupt the world’s communications . . .”

Scully pointed to the general, the colonel, and the major. “It’s not doing that. You came down here addled. And with an attitude.”

Mulder motioned toward the silvered humanoid. “This . . . being came here to help us sort out some serious things.”

The colonel, who had taken courses in brainwashing, exchanged looks with General, pointed to Scully and Mulder. “Maybe it’s already gotten to them.”

The general nodded acknowledgment. He turned to Mulder and Scully. For a second he looked them over. “I’m going to have to regard you as ‘contaminated.’” He motioned to Cooper and Huber. “You, too.”

O’Hara held up the palm of his hand in a stop-this-is-enough sign. “Now wait a minute . . .”

“General, this is getting ridiculous,” Ellison told him.

The colonel recklessly waved his automatic weapon in front of Ellison and O’Hara.

“Either of you touch that thing?”

O’Hara frowned and looked at Ellison, who shook his head negative. “No. Why?” The colonel motioned with his weapon to them. “Get over here behind me!”

“We don’t take orders from you,” Ellison snarled.

The general aimed his gun at Ellison. The major aimed his at O’Hara. The general glanced down at his machine pistol and back at Ellison and O’Hara. “I’m sure you recognize this authority. Now move!”

Carl raised his weapon.

O’Hara and Ellison shook their heads, held out their right hands in a stop signal, and waved him off. He half lowered his gun.

O’Hara turned to the Air Force officers. “General . . .”

The general did not let him finish. He waved his gun to indicate a spot behind him.

“Get! I’ve taken an oath to defend this country and its Constitution against all enemies. And that’s what I am in the process of doing. You tinker-toy boys stick to disarming big firecrackers. This is way over your heads. I’ll shoot if I have to.”

O’Hara and Ellison reluctantly ambled behind the general, colonel, and major. Carl, however, remained in place and ready to raise his gun.

“When I get upstairs,” Ellison said, “I’m calling the Secretary of Defense.”

The general wheeled around, glaring. “I just got through talking to the President. He has declared this a national emergency situation and granted me discretionary powers.”

“Where does that leave us?” Mulder asked.

“Right where you are,” the general snarled with a military sneer.

“You’re not going anywhere until we regain control of the situation,” the colonel told him.

Scully nodded at the silvered humanoid. “Meaning gain control of . . .”

“Correct,” the general snapped back.

The silvered humanoid pointed to the general. “According to my programming, you have begun processes leading to my departure.” It motioned toward Scully, Mulder, Cooper, and Huber. “Is it necessary to detain these people here?”

The general’s expression became a sneer he reserved for military enemies whom he had cornered. “Going back to tell your buddies about us so they can invade?”

“You intend murder?” the silvered humanoid asked him.

“Murder is defined by civil law,” the general told it. “In war, a soldier has to make hard choices.”

“This isn’t war!” Mulder yelled.

“If it’s not, it sure comes damn close,” the general barked back.

“War?” Ellison asked amazed. “Now, General!”

The general looked back at him, amazed at his gullibility. “This thing has its mits in all our communications, disrupted everything run by a computer anywhere in the world.”

“Civilization’s literally turning into chaos as we speak,” the colonel added. “God knows what it may do next.”

The general was an Air Force Academy grad. With a good education, he was not without a tinge of regret, and his voice reflected it.

“I have my responsibilities,” he said. “We have to act while we’re still capable.”

“So you’ve decided to murder it?” Scully asked.

The silvered humanoid shook its head at Scully. “When I spoke of murder, I was not referring to my being.” It turned to the general. “As anticipated on planets at your stage of ethical development, your military decision completes my programmed task.” It motioned to Cooper, Huber, Scully, and Mulder. “But let these people go with you.”

The general made a visible point of ignoring it. Motioning with his gun, he urged his and the nuclear officers toward the steel door. “Come on. Let’s go.”

O’Hara and Ellison reluctantly moved toward the steel door. Carl’s armed Nuclear Emergency Search Team men, who had sworn to protect them, were relieved to see them complying. Unlike Carl, they had been assigned to live in the barracks and knew the colonel and general well.

The colonel and the major covered their retreat with weapons trained on the silvered humanoid, Huber, Cooper, Scully, and Mulder.

Carl hesitated. His sworn loyalties were to his bosses, Ellison and O’Hara. His men had made their decision and were on their way out with the Air Force officers. By rights, he should join them and leave with them. But he had grave concerns.

O’Hara looked at the general with astonishment. “You intend to detonate . . .”

Ellison also knew that the general intended to denote the nuke. He gave him a mixed pleading and puzzled look. “But why those four innocent people?”

The general responded by literally pushing O’Hara and Ellison through the doorway.

“Cannot risk their being contaminated,” he said as he pushed. “We’re dealing with too many unknowns. I’ll take full responsibility.”

“The hell you will!” Carl shouted. He cocked and aimed his automatic. “Stand right there, General. Don’t move.”

The colonel and the major clicked back the safeties on their weapons and aimed them at Carl.

The general gave Carl a disgusted look. “Be sensible.”

The colonel turned to Ellison and O’Hara. “Order him to put the gun down. If there’s a firefight in here, bullets’ll be ricocheting all over.”

The silvered humanoid interrupted and pointed to the general. “Be sensible yourself, General. Let those people go with you. Quarantine them if you feel it’s necessary.”

The general gave it a huff and a military snarl. “Awfully anxious, aren’t you! What’d you do? Plant something in them? Erupt into more of your kind?” He nodded to his Air force officers and Ellison and O’Hara and took a cautious step toward the door. It was obvious that his intention was to get as many personnel past the steel door as possible before the potential firefight erupted. “Come on. Move.”

Carl aimed his gun directly at the general. “Hold it right there, General!”

The colonel poked his gun in Ellison’s ribs. “Order him to put the gun down!”

“Shoot him, Carl!” Ellison yelled.

The Nuclear Emergency Search Team officer fired. The general, however, had anticipated it and dove. The bullet hit him in the leg. The forward motion of his dive carried him to the floor near the steel door.

The major returned a burst of machine pistol fire at Carl, missing him as he hit the floor and rolled for cover.

The major fired a burst at the silvered humanoid. The bullets splattered small pieces of the silvered humanoid like liquid mercury. Those pieces instantly coalesced, reformed into solid humanoid body again.

The colonel shot his automatic weapon as cover as he reached for the general and dragged him out the door.

A ricocheting bullet from that machine-pistol burst struck Huber in the hip. He dropped in pain.

Scully rushed to Huber, followed by Cooper.

The major dragged the general through the doorway while the colonel physically fought a free-for-all with Ellison and O’Hara, managing at last to bodily muscle them through the doorway.

Carl took a last shot at the steel door as it slammed shut. The bullet ricocheted right back and hit him in the leg.

Mulder charged at the door, tried it, but failed to open it.

He turned to the others. “Now what do we do?”

The main concern was Huber. He was bleeding badly.

Scully turned to the silvered humanoid. “Can’t you do something?”

“My programming was not for any specific life form,” it said. “But I learned some of your anatomy and surgery from the Internet.”

It stepped over, crouched, and pressed its silvered hand into Huber’s wound. Its hand moved as if forming into surgical instruments inside Huber’s bleeding wound. The profuse bleeding ceased.

It looked up at Scully. “I temporarily tied off the artery. You’ll have to get him to a hospital.”

It moved quickly to Carl, crouched, and looked at his wound.

Mulder looked at Scully incredulously. “Hospital! We’re about to be baked in a nuclear explosion.”

The silvered humanoid inserted a hand into Carl’s wound and stopped the bleeding.

When it was sure that the Nuclear Emergency Search Team officer would be okay, it turned to answer Mulder.

“You’re leaving the way you came,” it told him.

A loud Onk-Onk warning sound filled room and continued on, never stopping.

A large cylinder slowly descended from the ceiling.

Carl, wincing in pain, pointed to it.

“That’s the nuke. We’ve got five minutes.”

Scully threw up her hands. “Thirty stories to ground level. Even without the wounded we couldn’t make it.”

Mulder looked at the silvered humanoid. “You can disarm it.”

“My programming forbids,” it told him.

“Forbids!” Cooper yelled. “Well then what are we going to do?”

Scully glared at the silvered humanoid. “Why in heaven does your program . . .”

“Necessary to my future,” it told her.

“Forget it,” Mulder told Scully. He looked puzzled at the silvered humanoid. “How do you plan to get us out of here?”

“You flee nuclear Hell in a hatbasket,” it told him. “Come on. Show me the way up.”

Carl pointed. “On the other side of that door. Sealed shut now.”

The silvered humanoid went to the steel door, flattened itself against it. The door was sucked, absorbed into the humanoid’s silver body. It turned to the others, nodded to Carl.

“Okay,” Carl said. “Follow me.”

He struggled up, limped painfully toward the doorway.

Amid the continuous onk-onking of the warning signal, all filed through the corridor, Cooper and Scully helping wounded Huber, Carl managing painfully to keep himself moving.

They reached the vent shaft that Scully, Mulder, and Carl had come down.

Carl pointed up. “Thirty stories. Not much time.”

The silvered humanoid looked up, sized up the shaft.

It extended its right hand. A plastic material extruded from its fingers. The plastic material wrapped around and around and began to weave into a large basket.

The final strands of extruded plastic wrapped around the top of the huge basket.

The silvered humanoid picked up wounded Huber, placed him in the basket.

It picked up the wounded Carl, placed him in the basket.

“Okay, get in!” it said to the others.

Carl waved his hand briskly at the silvered humanoid. “The old car at the top is attached to a giant concrete plug. Weighs tons.”

“We’ll take care of it when we get there,” it told him.

It hoisted the basket full of people over its head.

With the basket on top, it began a hyper-rapid climb up the shaft, perhaps even at supersonic speeds.

The onk-onk warning sound grew increasingly distant, but was always audible.

At the top, the silvered humanoid eased itself around to the top of the basket.

“Don’t drop this,” Cooper said softly. “Long way back down.”

The silvered humanoid braced itself against the tunnel wall, struggled to push upward. All of them could see it straining.

The concrete plug did not budge. The silvered humanoid ceased, looked at the others as if worried.

Scully looked at it, frantic. “You can’t?”

“I can,” it told her. “Different method.”

It strained again and gave a twisting motion. The concrete plug began to budge.

The silvered humanoid pushed up, twisted. The concrete plug pushed upward in a twisting motion.

They all could see light from above the plug. Then the basket of people suddenly slipped down.

The silvered humanoid grabbed it. The plug came down again.

The silvered humanoid reached and threw the plug upward. It flew out of the shaft.

Bright daylight streamed in.

The silvered humanoid grabbed the basket in a throwing grip. “No time. Have to throw. Nice meeting you people.”

“Aren’t you coming?” Mulder yelled.

“Programming calls,” it answered. “Time’s about up. Have a nice day.”

The silvered humanoid hurled the basket up and out through the shaft opening.

Scully, Mulder, Cooper, Huber, and Carl felt themselves flying through the air a dozen feet above the desert sagebrush and jostled around in the impromptu giant basket. The sudden brightness of Nevada desert daylight hurt their eyes.

The basket landed less with a jarring thud than a series of scraping skids skipping across the dry desert dirt and scrub sage a good fifty yards from the rusted hulk of the ancient Hudson Hornet on the concrete plug. The plug was now sealing the shaft. The silvered humanoid had obviously resealed it and probably had returned below.

Above the ground they could hear the distant onk-onk of nuclear detonation warning sirens warning people on the surface.

As the basket skidded to a halt, Cooper, Scully, Huber, Carl, and Mulder bounced and shook. For a split second they exchanged stunned, jarred looks.

Carl glanced at chronometer-wristwatch. “Two-and-a-half minutes. Run for it.” He pointed a direction and waved a sweep of his arm. “Whole area’s going to heave up, collapse ten stories.”

They climbed quickly out of the basket, Scully and Cooper helping bloodied Huber, Mulder helping bloodied Carl.

Scully got on one side of Huber, Cooper on the other. Half dragging the half-limping Huber, they headed across Nevada sagebrush.

Carl wrapped his arm around Mulder’s shoulder. Half dragging the half-limping Nuclear Emergency Search Team officer, Mulder headed after the others.

None looked back. All concentrated all their efforts into getting as far from the underground ground-zero as they could across the rough sage-strewn Nevada desert before the nuke detonated.

Scully, Huber, and Cooper panted and gasped near exhaustion. Huber’s pain looked unbearable as he was partly dragged and partly limped in rapid motion.

Mulder was about out of breath. Carl winced with excruciating pain and gasped for breath.

As the seconds ticked away and they continued their frantic flight to some seeming nowhere on the desert landscape. Carl, Mulder, Scully, Huber, and Cooper looked about totally exhausted as they dragged, plodded, limped, and half-ran across the Nevada sagebrush and rough dry dirt.

Carl and Mulder fell farther behind. Carl looked totally exhausted and was in excruciating pain.

“No use,” he told Mulder while panting and gasping for breath. “Go on. Leave me.”

Mulder gave him a hard tug forward. “Come on. We’ll make it.”

Ahead of them, Scully, Huber, and Cooper struggled ahead.

Carl caught a glimpse of something familiar on the desert landscape. “I think we’re going to make it,” he gasped.

A second later, the underground nuclear explosion lifted an area of desert landscape the size of a small city. An awesome circular area of earth heaved upward.

Then the circular area of earth collapsed, imploded distantly below ground level.

Then the spectacular earth movement caused an enormous dust cloud.

The dust took minutes to clear well enough to see blurred dust-covered shapes.

Dusty, dirty Cooper, Scully, Huber, Carl, and Mulder coughed up dust at edge of a cliff that had been instantly created by the underground nuclear explosion crater.

Carl coughed and pointed in the opposite direction of the epicenter. “Road’s that way.”

They all started, plodding and trudging more slowly and methodically, for it. Scully and Cooper continued to help wounded Huber. Mulder continued to help wounded Carl.

The earth beneath them began to rumble. Hunks of desert turf fell over the newly made cliff. They exchanged looks of fear of this new unknown.

All turned to witness a giant mushroom growing in an enormously loud rumble out of the center of the nuclear detonation crater. It was not the mushroom cloud of a nuclear explosion. It was an enormous mushroom, five stories high and growing like in a time-lapse video.

They gasped in amazement. The mushroom continued to grow, now ten stories high, now fifteen, now twenty.

It reached above the scattered small white desert clouds and into the blue sky. It swayed, wavered, then fell sideways across the crater with a crashing thud.

Scully, Mulder, Huber, Cooper, and Carl watched its whole drama in total stunned silence. They could only gape.

And its drama continued. As if they were its spores, small rocklike pellets shot rocket-like skyward from the underside of the fallen giant mushroom. As they shot heavenward, they sounded like Fourth-of-July fireworks-launching sounds.

Scully, Cooper, Huber, Carl, and Mulder still could not bring themselves to say anything. As the mushroom launched its final spore-pellets with rocket-like whizzing zinging sounds, they shook their heads and shared amazement.

“Its spores,” Scully broke the silence.

“Maybe one of them will land on a planet like ours some day,” Mulder added.

“A billion years from now,” Scully said wistfully.

Out across the new crater, the giant mushroom was melting into a giant brown puddle.

The puddle began to boil away.

The puddle boiled away to nothing, leaving the shattered center of the detonation crater as normal as a nuclear detonation crater could look. There was no trace of the mushroom or any of its rocket-pellet spores.

They could not look long. They had to get Huber and Carl to a hospital. They began heading toward the road again, Scully and Cooper helping bloodied Huber, Mulder helping bloodied Carl.

After twenty minutes of desperately fatiguing effort, they reached a narrow dirt road.

Carl pointed toward the nearest habitation, and the five of them struggled down the dusty road in the blazing desert sun.

Mulder happened to look back. In the distance came a small cloud of dust caused by an unknown vehicle.

“Stop. Look,” he said.

They saw a beat-up ranch pickup truck approach. They stopped. Cooper and Scully let Huber drop to the road in a seated position. Carl continued to lean on Mulder’s shoulder and watch.

The battered dark green decade-old pickup truck pulled up beside them. A weathered Nevada rancher, a masculine-looking woman in her 60s or 70s wearing ranch work clothes leaned out the cab window.

Scully pointed to Huber and Carl. “Got two badly hurt people. Can you get them to a hospital?” “’Course!” the woman told her. “Lay ‘em in the back. I’ll drive careful.”

The rancher got out of the pickup as if to be of help. But all she could do is watch while Mulder, Scully, and Cooper helped Huber and Carl into the pickup truck bed.

“You musta got caught in it,” she said. “Nuke-boys used to give us warnings.

Thought they were all done setting them damn things off.”

Scully, Cooper, and Mulder climbed into pickup truck bed.

“Thought for a minute I saw a mushroom cloud,” the woman rancher continued.

“You don’t think they’re back to pollutin’ the atmosphere?”

“Maybe it was the dust,” Scully told her.

“Dust, heck!” The rancher slammed the tailgate. Mulder was about to say something, but she raised a hand and cut him off.

“I know. I know. I’ll drive carefully, slowly,” she said. She went around and got into her pickup truck. It started off down the Nevada dirt road. ++++++ Huber was treated and released from the hospital that day. The Department of Energy, partly in an effort to soften the inevitable lawsuit, saw fit to fly him and Cooper back to Winnemucca in a DOE Lear Jet. Cooper then saw fit to take care of Huber at his home there.

Carl’s wounds were worse, but not life-threatening. The hospital kept him for observation.

Scully and Mulder rented a red SUV like the one that the Air Force had destroyed and drove back to Winnemucca to gather and sew up loose ends and complete their paperwork.

At dusk of the evening that they completed it, they headed out in the SUV to get supper. As it turned out, the closest place was a honky-tonk pizza joint three blocks from their motel.

They pulled into the gravel parking lot. Insects buzzed. Neon flashed.

Scully and Mulder, in business suits, got out and walked to the door.

A sign in the window of the door read: SPECIAL — MUSHROOM PIZZA. BUY ONE, GET ONE FREE. Mulder turned to Scully. “Care for a mushroom pizza?”

Scully shook her head. “You know, Mulder, suddenly I’m not hungry.”

“Then let’s take a drive into the desert.”

“Better idea.”

They got into the SUV and headed for the edge of town. Twilight dimmed to dark.

The clear desert sky filled with bright stars.

Miles out past town, Mulder pulled off the road. They got out and stood gazing at the most ordinary yet most awesome spectacle of billions of giant nuclear-burning balls of gas millions and billions and trillions of miles out into deep dark vast stretches of space.

“Beautiful,” Scully said.

“Yeah. You have to wonder . . .”

A shooting star shot silently across the still starry sky.

“Do you think anyone will listen to the messenger’s message? Scully asked.”

“Some,” he answered. “Maybe even enough.”

END. short story format Bay Village, Ohio May 20, 2000 Books by Tom Slattery: 1. End of the Road

By Tom Slattery ISBN 0-595-15902-8 / Paperback Kent State University students interview a 110-year-old man in a nursing home in 2050 about his drive around the USA at the turn of the century in a $200 car.

2. The Goddess of Love and the Angel of Death

By Tom Slattery ISBN 0-595-10070-8 / Paperback Begun as a modernization of the Adam and Eve story, this novel eludes to nudity and pornography, but is not in any way a porn novel. It is a love story about a nude model and a nude stripper who are thrust into the world of art, attempt to become successes in it, but succumb to tragedy. In the end their art becomes more of a success than they ever would have dreamed.

3. Immodest Proposals Through the Pornographic Looking Glass

By Tom Slattery ISBN 0-595-15974-5 / Paperback This is a nonfiction work exploring pornography from its historical beginnings and questioning its impact on the modern world.

4. Norikaeru

By Tom Slattery ISBN 0-595-15248-1 / Paperback This is a short science fiction novel playing with crossing dimensions and largely set in a dimension where the American Revolution failed because Thomas Jefferson had a horse-and-buggy accident at a critical time in its beginnings.

5. Open 25 Hours Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Ghost Stories

By Tom Slattery ISBN 0-595-14022-X / Paperback This is a collection of science fiction and ghost short stories by Tom Slattery. It contains "The Spore," a science fiction yarn not without some satire that is remarkably similar to the much later movie "Evolution" starring David Duchovny.

6. Preshrunk Ponderings and Rumpled Rememberings

By Tom Slattery ISBN 0-595-16349-1 / Paperback .

This small book is a collection of largely autobiographical essays around technology and social change.

7. Sinking Into Summer's Arms

By Tom Slattery ISBN 0-595-09673-5 / Paperback This is a short science fiction novel that opens with the discovery of a body of a Neanderthal in a rapidly melting Alpine glacier in the early 21st century. The body is secretly taken to a lab in the Netherlands, but the group of scientist there become entangled in a plot to assassinate the new United Nations Secretary for Global Warming.

Simultaneously this United Nations Secretary learns that global warming is about to precipitate a new ice age. The Neanderthal does play a part, but not what one might expect.

8. The Tragic End of the Bronze Age A Virus Makes History

By Tom Slattery ISBN 0-595-12146-2 / Paperback This is a nonfiction book centering on the author's apparent discovery of the initial smallpox pandemic that wiped out bronze-age civilization in the mid-twelfth century BC. In addition, the politics and economics of comparatively rare tin ore, the strategic mineral of the Bronze Age, similar to the strategic mineral petroleum today, are explored.

9. In the Year After Mom Died

By Tom Slattery To be published in 2008 by iUniverse.com as a paperback book.

This nonfiction book is a mix of biography of a woman born in the early years of the twentieth century who lived into the twenty-first century and additional autobiography of her son. A very famous American author and a moderately famous American author in the family had minor influences on their lives. But mostly it is a book about dealing with grief after the death of a loved one.

AS FREE E-BOOKS POSTED ON THE INTERNET 10. The Last Human

by Tom Slattery This novel that modernizes Mary Shelley's 1826 novel The Last Man, complete posted on scribd.

11. Forethought

by Tom Slattery This is a full-length one-act stage play modernizing Prometheus Bound by Aeschylus, complete play posted on scribd 12. Kennedy Assassination: Oswald as Manchurian Candidate

by Tom Slattery An original theory on the assassination of President Kennedy that suggests Oswald may have been a subject in the CIA's MK/ULTRA programs to create an unknowing assassin or an unknowing patsy for an assassination. Rogue CIA personnel may have used data to control Oswald. Complete short e-book posted on scribd