There were four stainless-steel autopsy tables. Each held a block of blue gelatin. Each block was positioned against a machine. Each machine flashed a light every five seconds.
'We named her Dawn,' said Yamamoto.
They looked into the blue gelatin and there she was, her cadaver frozen and suspended in gel and cut crosswise into four sections.
'We were halfway through computerizing our digital Eve when the hadal came our way.' Yamamoto indicated a dozen freezer drawers along one wall. 'We put Eve back into storage and immediately went to work on Dawn. As you can see, we've quartered her body and bedded the four sections in gelatin. These machines are called cryomacrotomes. Glorified meat shavers. Every few seconds they cut a half-millimeter off the bottom of each gelatin block, and a synchronized camera photographs the new layer.'
'How long has it been here?' Foley asked.
It , not she, Branch noticed. Foley was keeping things impersonal. For his own part, Branch felt a connection. How could you not? The small hand had four fingers and a
thumb.
'Two weeks. It's just a function of the blades and cameras. In another few months we'll have a computer bank with over twelve thousand images. She'll end up as forty billion bytes of information stored on seventy CD-ROM disks. Using a mouse, you will be able to travel through a 3-D image of Dawn's interior.'
'And your purpose?'
'Hadal physiology,' Dr. Yamamoto said. 'We want to know how it differs from human.'
'Is there any way to accelerate your inquiry?' asked Thomas.
'We don't know what we're looking for, or even what questions to ask. As it is, we don't dare miss anything. There's no telling what might lie in the smallest detail.'
They separated and went to different tables. Through the translucent gel, Branch saw a pair of lower legs and feet. There was the place the trap had snapped her bones. The skin was fish white.
He found the head-and-shoulders section. It was like a bust in alabaster. The lids were half shut, exposing bleached blue irises. The mouth was slightly open. Working from the neck upward, the machine's pendulum was still at throat level.
'You've probably seen a lot like her,' Dr. Yamamoto spoke at his shoulder. Her voice was severe.
Branch cocked his head and looked closer, almost affectionately. 'They're all different,' he said. 'Kind of like us.'
He could tell she'd expected something coarse or stormy from him. Most people took one look at him and assumed he couldn't get enough of Haddie's blood.
The physician's voice softened. 'Judging by her teeth and the immaturity of her pelvic girdle,' she said, 'Dawn was probably twelve or thirteen years old. We could be way off on that, of course. We have nothing to compare her with, so we're simply guessing. Specimens have been very hard to get. You'd think after so much contact, so many killings, we'd be swimming in bodies.'
'That is odd,' said Vera. 'Do they decompose faster than normal mammal remains?'
'Depending on the exposure to direct sunlight. But the scarcity of good specimens has more to do with desecration.' Branch noticed that she did not look at him.
'You mean mutilation?'
'It's more than that.'
'Desecration, then,' said Thomas. 'That's a strong term.'
Yamamoto went over to the storage drawers and pulled out a long tray on rollers. 'I don't know, what do you call it?' A hideous animal lay on the metal, scorched black, teeth bared, dismembered, mutilated. It could have been eight thousand years old.
'Caught and burned one week ago,' she said.
'Soldiers?' asked Vera.
'Actually, no. This came from Orlando, Florida. A regular neighborhood. People are scared. Maybe it's a form of racial catharsis. There's this revulsion or anger or terror. People seem to feel they have to lay waste to these things, even after they've killed them. Maybe they think they're destroying evil.'
'Do you?' asked Thomas.
Her almond eyes were sad. Then disciplined. Either way, compassion or science, she did not.
'We offer rewards for undamaged specimens,' she told them. 'But this is about the best that comes in. This guy, for instance. He was captured alive by a group of middle-aged accountants and software engineers playing touch football at a suburban soccer field. By the time they got finished with him, he was a piece of charcoal.'
Branch had seen far worse.
'All around the country. All around the world,' she said. 'We know they're coming up into our midst. There are sightings and killings every hour, somewhere in metro and
rural America. Try to get a whole, undamaged cadaver in the lab, though. It's a real problem. It makes research very slow.'
'Why do you think they're coming up, Doctor? Seems like everyone has a theory.'
'None of us here has a clue,' Yamamoto said. 'Frankly, I'm not convinced the hadals are coming up in any greater numbers than they have historically. But it's safe to say that humans are more sensitized to the hadals' presence these days, and so we're seeing them more clearly. The majority of sightings are false, as with UFOs. A great number have been sightings of transients and freight riders and animals, even tree branches scratching at the window, not hadals.'
'Ah,' said Vera, 'it's all in our imagination?'
'Not at all. They're definitely here, hiding in our landfills, our suburban basements, our zoos, warehouses, national parks. In our underbelly. But nowhere near the numbers the politicians and journalists want us to believe. As far as invading us, come on. Who's invading who here? We're the ones sinking shafts and colonizing caves.'
'Dangerous talk,' said Foley.
'At a certain point, our hate and fear change us,' the young woman said. 'I mean, what kind of world do we want to raise our children in? That's important, too.'
'But if they're not appearing in any greater numbers than before,' argued Thomas,
'doesn't that throw out all the catastrophe theories we keep hearing, that a great famine or plague or environmental disaster is to blame for their coming among us?'
'That's one more thing our research may help answer. A people's history speaks through their bones and tissue,' said Yamamoto. 'But until we collect more specimens and expand our database, I can't tell you anything more than what the bodies of Dawn and a few of her brothers and sisters have told us.'
'Then we know almost nothing about their motivation?'
'Scientifically speaking, no. Not yet. But sometimes we – the staff and I – sit around and invent life stories for them.' The young doctor indicated her stainless-steel mausoleum. 'We give them names and a past. We try to understand how it must have been to be them.'
She touched the side of the cutting table with the hadal female's head. 'Dawn is easily our group's favorite.'
'This?' said Vera. But clearly she was charmed by the staff's humanity.
'Her youth, I guess. And the hard life she led.'
'Tell us her story, if you don't mind,' said Thomas. Branch looked at the Jesuit. Like Branch, he had a raw exterior that people misjudged. But Thomas felt an affinity for the creatures that was unfashionable at the moment. Branch thought it perfectly in character. Weren't all Jesuits liberation theologists?
The young woman looked uncomfortable. 'It's not really my place,' she said. 'The specialists haven't gone over the data yet, and anything we've made up is pure conjecture.'
'Just the same,' Vera said, 'we want to hear.'
'All right, then. She came from very deep, from an atmosphere rich in oxygen, judging by the relatively small rib cage. Her DNA shows a relevant difference from samples sent to us from other
