If he lost the Hybrid Project, then the only access mankind would have left to extraordinary technology would be observation of the aliens’ activities in their labs in Dulce.

Would the same senators who had just killed his hybrids tolerate the idea of human-alien hybridization, and the wholesale theft of human sexual material that went along with it?

On any given night, the aliens extracted sperm and eggs from five or six hundred people. Using directed magnetic fields, they first turned off a subregion of a subject’s hippocampus called the subiculum, which prevented the brain from gathering memories of the experience. They extracted eggs from women via needle extraction. They forced erection and ejaculation in males by the use of electrostimulation of the superior dorsal nerve of the penis.

Then the victims were returned to their beds—or not. The stresses involved killed some. A tiny smattering of them, generally with novel configurations of the hippocampus, did remember what happened to them and formed a noisy but generally discounted subculture of “alien abductees.”

If the senators discovered that their stories were true, all hell would break loose. The White House would become involved. There might be military action against Dulce, that incredibly precious resource. Worse, if the aliens were attacked, the consequences would, to say the least, be unpredictable.

They were enormously experienced. They had done this before on other worlds. They were experts. But they were also easy to anger and gruffly impatient. They handled their human subjects with rough indifference and had left a scar of buried trauma across a large cross-section of mankind everywhere in the world, and in particular in the United States.

Worse, fundamentalists were on the committee, three of them, and their belief was that the only intelligent creatures in the universe were angels, demons, and man, and that only the demons moved through space in conveyances, which angels did not need.

So they would conclude that the aliens were demons, and he could hardly imagine where that might lead.

Gamma reappeared. “Doctor, I’m hearing your breathing and it’s unsteady. I’d like to listen to your heart.”

She could easily hear him breathing from the ready room down the hall, she had the hearing of a canine. She also had something close to a dog’s sense of smell, they all did. So she was not saying it, but she could certainly smell his fear.

“Thank you, Gamma.”

She came closer to him, then pulled up a chair and sat almost knee to knee. How beautiful she was, with the feminine form dictated by her skeletal structure, and the subtle softening that female chromosomes had given to her hard features.