"Jesus," she said again. "Must be something."

He wiped his eyes with a corner of the flannel bed sheet. "Yup."

5

Edward Shaw swirled the spoon in the cup of coffee and stared at the glass port mounted at head level in the sealed chamber door. He had slept soundly during the night. The chamber was as quiet as the desert. The clean white walls and hotel-style furniture made it reasonably comfortable. He could request books and watch anything he wished on the TV in one corner: two hundred channels, the chamber supervisor informed him.

By intercom, he could speak with Reslaw or Minelli or Stella Morgan, the black-haired woman who had given him permission to call from the grocery store in Shoshone, seven days before. In other rooms, Minelli had told him, were the four Air Force enlisted men who had investigated his call and seen the creature. All of them were undergoing long-term observation. They might be "in stir" for a year or more, depending on . . . Depending on what, Edward was not sure. But he should have known the creature would mean enormous trouble for all of them.

The threat of extraterrestrial diseases was sufficiently convincing that they had submitted to the rigorous two-day round of medical tests with few complaints. The days since had been spent in comparative boredom. Apparently, nobody was quite sure what their status was, how they should be treated or what they should be told. Nobody had answered Edward's most urgent question: What had happened to the creature?

Four days ago, as they were being led to the sealed chambers by men in white isolation suits, Stella Morgan had turned to Edward and asked, conspiratorially, "Do you know Morse code? We can tap out messages. We're going to be here for a long time."

"I don't know any code," Edward had answered.

"It's okay," an attendant had said from behind his transparent visor. "You'll have commlink."

"Can I call my lawyer?" Stella had asked.

No answer. A shrug of heavily protected shoulders.

"We're pariahs," Morgan had concluded.

Breakfast was served at nine o'clock. The food was selected and bland. Edward ate all of it, at the recommendation of the duty officer, an attractive woman in a dark blue uniform with short, bobbed hair. "Any drugs in it?" He had asked the question before; he was becoming boring, even to himself.

"Please don't be paranoid," she said.

"Do you people really know what you're doing?" Edward asked. "Or what's going to happen to us?"

She smiled vaguely, glanced to one side, then shook her head no. "But nobody's in any danger."

"What if I start growing fungus up my arm?"

"I saw that one," the duty officer said. "The astronaut turns into a blob. What was its name?"

"The Creeping Unknown, I think," Edward said.

"Yeah. 'Creeping' or 'Crawling.'"

"Goddammit, what will you do if we actually get sick?" Edward asked.

"Take care of you. That's why you're here." She didn't sound convinced. Edward's intercom panel buzzed and he pushed the tiny red button below a blinking light. There were eight lights and eight buttons in two corresponding rows on the panel, three of them live.