Mangled Meat Read Free Page A

up. But we gotta keep it together. We got our jobs to do. You got men out there shit-scared. They’re counting on you.”
    His CVC turned toward me. Through the glex visor, I could see his blank eyes in the light. “Since I was a little kid,” he droned, “I always thought that this would happen someday. But it was just a fantasy, you know? Some kids fantasize about being president, some kids fantasize about seeing an alien.... Man, this is fucked up.”
    The tone of his words wrapped me up. “Seeing...a what?” I said. But now I guessed his point. We knew there must have been something inside this ship, however long dead. What else could it be but an “alien?” A “spaceman?” Something every man, woman, and child in the Federate had thought about, dreamed about, but something, by now, that nobody really believed in anymore. Like afterlife, reincarnation, spirituality. Just myths now. Mankind in the 23 rd century no more believed in spacemen than they believe in Santa Claus.
    Yung’s voice cracked like tinder. “Take a look, civvie,” he said.
    I let my light follow his gaze. Some kind of a molded object rose from the floor, something like a chair, and sitting in that chair was the victor’s obvious pilot.
    ***
     
    An ecstatic chaos filled the plat, everyone running around like meth-freaks. Time seemed to stand still. The OAC ordered most of the crew to analyze the victor. As for the dead pilot, of course we couldn’t analyze him until we got his suit off. That was my job: to decorticate the pilot, so to speak. To remove his environmental suit and extract the body for digigraphics and autopsy.
    We’d moved the body to the medcove, lain it out on an exam table under the lumes.
    “Twenty-one May, 2202,” I said into the mission recorder. “Jonsin, Dugliss, FOS 95C20 decortication technician for mission survey on DSP-141. The Operational Analysis Computer has ordered me to attempt to extract the body of the victor’s apparent operator for analysis and archives indexing. For this record, the victor’s operator will be referred to as VO from here on...”
    Oh, damn. Some story teller I am, huh? I forgot to tell you what the guy looked like. Humanoid and bipedal. Two pronating arms, two pronating legs, and a head. Each hand showing four fingers with three phalanges, and an opposable thumb. One hundred and forty-six point four pounds via specific earth gravity, and seventy-one inches long in extremis. For all intents, it was a guy in a spacesuit with a general surface anatomy similar to ours.
    But it was still an alien, and it was the ev-suit that kept reminding me of that. Same color, same hue as the ship: a flat silver-black. To the touch, the material felt like something polycron or cloth, but if you pressed down on it, it wouldn’t give at all. I tried a particle vise on the right thumb and nothing happened. The vise broke at 750,000 psi. But if you grabbed the hand, you could bend the fingers in their natural direction. Same with the rest of the body. The suit was pliable...but then again, it wasn’t.
    The head was the weirdest part. Not a helmet, nothing like what you would think of as utility headgear. Just a bullet-shape extending from the shoulders. No visor, no visual ports, no bumps where the ears should be. Just imagine dipping a doll in wax enough times that only the basic shape remained.
    This was my company for about the next seventy-two hours. First thing I tried was a standard scan of the suit, same way I’d scan a bug before cutting it open. But this was no bug. X-rays, V-rays, triax tomography, nuclear-resonance scans—all negative. And it was no big surprise that, like the victor, the VO’s suit showed no signs of any sort of opening. No zipper on this spaceman. And I tried touching the suit, like I’d touched the ship, but...no such luck.
    The only way to see what was inside was to do what I did best. Cut it open.
    I didn’t sleep for days; I only ate when the OAC ordered me to. I