When he and Steve went in, Dale was there ahead of them, going through the photos they’d taken earlier in the day. Jack and Dave showed up together a couple of minutes later. For the next little while, people passed stacks of pictures back and forth.

“What’s the scale on these critters?” Dave asked.

“They aren’t as big as a centaur made from a horse and a person would be, but they’re bigger than we are,” Jerry said.

He eyed the prints with an odd, almost touristy, fascination. They reminded him of where he’d been and what he’d seen, yes. But they were also what he’d remember of all that, because they were permanent and stable while what went on inside his head was subject to change without notice.

The higher-ups flipped through the photographs of the kitchen?/laboratory? and the messroom fairly fast. They were much more interested in the shots that showed the aliens and the clear domes encasing them. And you’re not? Jerry asked himself. Himself had no good answer.

“Kind of convenient for us that one of them didn’t make it. Gives a notion of how they’re put together we couldn’t get from just outside views,” Jack said. Just when Jerry thought that was the most cold-blooded thing he’d ever heard in his life, the security director spoke again, in musing tones: “I wonder if they have souls.”

Since Jerry wondered the same thing about people, he stayed quiet. But he reminded himself that nobody ever was all of one piece. He supposed that might even be true of Richard Nixon, however little he cared to admit it.

Dave pointed to a yellow oval inset into the base of one of the cabinets. “They all have this, I think,” he said. “And yellow seems to be an important color with them, the way red is with us. If we gave one of those things a poke…”

Jerry had had the same thought. Now he downplayed it as much as he could: “We don’t want to try anything till we know more.”

“Agree. One way or another, we won’t get a second chance,” Steve said. Jerry nodded. They might kill the aliens, and then there’d be none. Or they might give them back control of their spaceship, and then there might be no more humans.

“Sure, sure.” Dave nodded, too. But he sounded less convinced than Jerry wished he would have. Am I just being paranoid? he wondered. But are you paranoid when they’re really after you?