Conversations with his family helped, but he didn’t want to overdo that. It wasn’t just a question of the emotional toll on them. The more contact he had with his family, the more chance there was for someone to find out something. A chance comment by his children, a conversation overheard, a hack of the phone system, a fishing expedition by some news crew eavesdropping on the homes of random miners… Ivan smiled to himself. Most paranoid wins. He was certainly leading that race, these days.

Ivan needed to be seen as human. As a victim, not as a dangerous alien thingamabob. Revelations about alien mind parasites, involuntary actions, and spontaneous mental imagery probably wouldn’t help his cause. So, caution. He wouldn’t do anything to endanger his family, but that didn’t mean he was going to volunteer to get tossed under the bus.

“Mr. Pritchard?”

Ivan looked up. It was Dr. Narang. She was one of the good ones. Too many of the doctors looked at him and just saw a specimen. He’d given up on trying to engage those individuals in any kind of conversation.

He was struck once again by her beauty, and even more by her casual lack of concern about it. Judy was like that.

The thought of his wife brought a stab of anxiety, and he forced himself to shift mental gears.

“What’s up, Dr. Narang?”

“We need another scraping, if you don’t mind.”

“You’ve already gone through the last batch?”

Dr. Narang shrugged on the other side of the glass. “Many of our tests are destructive. And we’re being aggressive to try to get as much information as possible. So, yeah, we go through them pretty fast.”

“Okay, Doc, no problem.” Ivan got up and put his arm in the sleeve that they’d set up. There was a snap, and he felt a bite. Dr. Narang looked at something below the window level, and said, “Good. Done. That doesn’t hurt too much, does it?”

Ivan shook his head. “Things don’t hurt, generally, not in the same way as before. It’s more like data. I know it’s pain, I know it means damage is occurring and I should do something, but It doesn’t have the same urgency.”

Dr. Narang smiled. “There’s a documented form of brain damage that produces that particular result, but I doubt it’s the same thing.”

She sat down at the console, leaned forward, and rested her chin on her hands. “Do you feel different? In any specific, large-scale way? You must notice something?”

Ivan thought for a few moments. “Well, I’m not sleeping anymore, but you knew that. That part is really weird. I keep realizing with a start that it’s past my bedtime or something, but I’m not sleepy.” He grinned. “I’m going through my computer courses a lot faster. A twenty-four-hour day does have its upsides.”