determination. His team would also work on the Evans sisters to determine if there was a physiological reason for their depression. Meanwhile, I would get with the psychoanalysis team and begin questioning Mr. Tolson. We also needed to know if any of the other patients from the site were hearing voices.
Dr. Karen Gibbs is a combination psychologist and psychiatrist for OSI. She and I met with Mr. Tolson and talked with him for several hours. His conversation was along the same lines as earlier. He could just barely make out the voice in his head, and it was still reassuring him.
Afterward I asked Dr. Gibbs, "What do you think?"
"I need to analyze the tapes in more detail."
"All I want to know at this point is if he's delusional, making all this up, or what."
"Yes," she responded evasively.
"Well, get me the report stat."
I headed back to the lab to checked in with Dr. Spencer. As I passed by a window, I saw that it was already dark out. I must have been working for 14 hours straight. I’d missed both lunch and dinner, but I wasn’t hungry. I found Dr. Spencer still in his lab. "Are you having any luck?"
"No. I've tried to take samples from the growth, but every time a sample is taken, it disintegrates so rapidly that no real analysis can be performed. We tried to save the samples by freezing them in liquid helium and by encapsulation, neither of which worked."
"Where have I heard that statement? Okay, what about the initial MRIs of Ruth Evans before the growth began to break down?"
"Here, take a look." The images showed the growth, but the internal aspects of the growth were not clear. The images were ultimately inconclusive. "By using optic fibers with high magnification, we have determined that there are tens of thousands of micro-fibers originating from the growth and spreading throughout the body. We have not been able to determine what the fibers do to the host, nor by what mechanism they do whatever they do.”
Now I had voices in my head, saying things like, "What is going on?", "What are you doing?", and "You are really underpaid." I had to go to bed; because I was so tired my brain was beginning to shut down. I knew I needed to eat, but I was too tired to go foraging. “Doctor, I need to get some sleep, and I suggest you do the same. We can pick this up in the morning.” Now I was hungry, but sleep was the higher priority. The lab had a room with several beds in it for just this sort of thing. I managed to find one that was empty and passed out for what little remained of the night.
Events began moving faster the next morning. First off, Ruth Evans died during the night. I felt very bad; I had met her a number of times and found her very nice. The examining team, even after the autopsy, could find no physiological reason for her demise. It was almost as if she willed herself to die. Of course, there had to be a connection to the growth that we accidentally destroyed, but there were no indications in the pathology that the growth had done anything to harm her system after it began to disintegrate. There seemed to be little hope for her sister as well, but she was hanging in there. We now knew we were dealing with something that was potentially lethal.
The next big news was that the voice in Mr. Tolson's head was now coming in loud and clear. Dr. Gibbs, Dr. Spencer, I, and a few other medical experts decided to sit down with Mr. Tolson and have the conversation that would change our view of the whole situation.
The meeting was held in one of the conference rooms in our medical building, so that Tolson would not have to leave the restricted area. The room had no windows and was only furnished with a metal table with a dozen uncomfortable chairs around it. It was very clean, smelled slightly of ammonia, and was painted a light blue. When I entered the room, Drs. Gibbs and Spencer were already seated at the table. Karen’s blonde hair was disheveled, which considering her fastidious nature, was unusual, and she had circles under her eyes making her looking older than her actual age of 33. The expression on her face was inscrutable. Dr. Spencer also looked exhausted, but his expression was clearly worried. Two other medical experts that I recognized as working with the team came in after me. I was the only one not wearing a lab coat and nametag, so I seemed out of place.
Tolson came into the room accompanied by an orderly. He was wearing the green pajamas typical of hospitals and a large smile. The contrast of his almost jovial demeanor with our collective troublesome looks was rather stark. He sat down in the chair opposite our little group and the burly orderly stood directly behind his chair.
I saw no reason to work up to this slowly, so I started the questioning, “Mr. Tolson, who or what is talking to you?"
Tolson answered calmly. "They call themselves, in our language, the 'Civilli.' They have come from a star system many light years from Earth. Due to a mishap on board their ship, they were forced to land here. They had to alter their form and take up residence in a human host or perish. They had no choice, and there was no way to communicate with humans until they had reached this stage."
"It seems strange that a being capable of traveling between stars did not have a way of communicating with humans."
Mr. Tolson said, "The mishap with the ship destroyed all means of communications."
I asked, "How many of them are there?"
"Fifty originally. We are not sure how many survived, since we have not been able to contact them telepathically yet. We have to reach a certain stage of development before we can communicate."
Roger didn’t miss Tolson’s shift to the use of the word “we” instead of “they.” "Does the alien's consciousness reside in the gray mass attached to the host's diaphragm?"
"That is correct."
"Two have been destroyed during an MRI."
There was a long pause, and then he said, "That is regrettable. We had tried to warn you how sensitive we are to radiation. How are the two hosts doing?"
"One is dead, and the other is close to death."
"We had no way of determining how the death of one of us would affect the host."
"Obviously negatively." It was like talking to a translator since we would ask a question and wait for the answer, admittedly a very short wait, but it was clear there was a period when Mr. Tolson would be receiving a message before speaking. The discussion continued for several more hours, and we asked a number of questions concerning the effect of the alien’s presence in the human body and the mechanism by which it survives.
Mr. Tolson's voice said, "Our presence greatly improves the health of the host by utilizing the human body's natural defenses and safeguards; it's basically self-preservation. The specific details of how this is done are beyond your present understanding." This was true, since our best scientists had been unable to determine how it was done. "We can communicate with our host by a combination of telepathy and flagella and are aware of everything the host does." We later came to believe they received the sensor inputs through the flagella and the thoughts telepathically.
Dr. Spencer asked, "Mr. Tolson, how do you feel?"
"I feel great and, aside from the uncomfortable feeling of having a voice in my head, I seem to be the same person both physically and mentally."
We did not ask the voice many questions about what they were doing here, how they got here, and other questions concerning space travel. I think all of us felt somewhat stupid asking this type of question, since we still did not believe we were dealing with aliens, and most of the people in the room were medical types. We finally called it quits and asked Tolson to return to his room, so we could have a discussion among ourselves.
After Tolson had left, I spoke up first, "I think it is safe to say that none of us believed we were dealing with an alien life form, but there are a few things that we are at a loss to explain. A number of things it said are medically correct, and wouldn’t be known by Mr. Tolson. There were even some things that you doctors were not aware of that will need to be checked."
Dr. Spencer replied, "Let me show you two EEGs of Mr. Tolson: one taken right after he came to the med-center, and
one from early this morning." Even to an untrained medical person like me, the EEG had obviously changed. The brain waves had altered significantly.
I asked Dr. Spencer, "What could cause this change? If there is another entity in Mr. Tolson with an intelligence, would there be two of each type of brain wave?"
"To answer your first question, there are some diseases and conditions that can change brain patterns, but we have established that Mr. Tolson does not have any of them. And, as to your second question, there is no precedent for this type of thing, so how in the hell would I know? The only thing I can say for sure is that the brain wave pattern that Tolson has now is different from what he had earlier—and different from anything I've ever seen."
We spent the rest of the day discussing the possibilities and what actions we should take now. It was late by the time we broke up, and I went to my temporary office to download the meeting notes to the department’s executive assistant who would format them into a report for Mr. Clark. I told her I would pick up the report and deliver it myself tomorrow morning. I went back to my cot and passed out instantly.
When I finally dragged myself out of bed the next morning, I took a shower and dressed in clean clothes for the first time in days, I had had some clothes brought in from my apartment. Then I called to get a status report from the