In fact, he couldn’t think how to go about it. Perhaps if he caged them and had them flooded with high-speed machine-gun bullets, they would eventually take so many rounds that they would die. He could probably burn them, but that was too ghastly to contemplate.

“Thank you, Gamma. Return to the ready room.”

“I’ll be back in one hour to check on my patient.”

“Very well.”

She turned and left his office, her stride fast and aggressive. How much had they surmised about the contents of the letter? he wondered.

Everything, was his first thought. Their new intelligence scores were well beyond the level of human genius. The reason was that their brains were as capable as human brains of accessing and comparing information, but their memories were biomechanical. Unlike neurons, memristors did not lose what they stored, not ever, and they could store hundreds of times more memories than humans.

He needed to get to Palo Alto and confer with Emma. He couldn’t defy the committee, not because he didn’t have the power, but because if he did, they would investigate, which would inevitably lead them to Dulce and the aliens, and that could not be allowed.

The Senate Intelligence Committee had an absolute right to access every secret that the United States possessed. So Dulce was hidden from them illegally. If they found out about it, they would expect to be told everything. But that would have unpredictable consequences. Maybe the aliens would leave, taking with them the most valuable technological resource that this country or any country had ever possessed. Their planet was 90 million years older than Earth, their civilization at least 5 million years old. They were here attempting, with his help and the help of a whole scientific infrastructure, to create versions of themselves that could live on Earth. The Hybrid Project had come about as a side effect of what Tom had learned from them, and from the use of old equipment of theirs that they had given him as surplus.

They were themselves such a complicated mixture of biological and mechanical parts that it was impossible to classify them either as living creatures or as machines. The sounds they made, their movements, their thought processes, were startlingly precise. Over the generations, they had enhanced themselves, in effect designing themselves beyond natural evolution, and he believed that this was the next step for mankind, also. We could take control of our own evolution. What he had learned could be pushed into the broader human genome, and mankind could leap ahead into a new kind of being.

This was also why he cherished generations one and two, because they would form the prototype for the new man.

But the senators said no, and the senators had the power. “Stop the future,” the eternal cry of the ignorant and the fearful.