The Sergeant returned at noon with some lunch, as promised, and the three physicists reported their total lack of success in learning anything new.

"Well, it was worth a try," the Sergeant replied. "We'll hold onto them a little longer, in case they do remember something. Tell the truth, we didn't really expect to get much out of them but we had to try."

"Have the others had any more luck?" asked Vencent.

"They're still examining the victims," the Sergeant replied. "I was just about to go ask them."

"Mind if we tag along?" asked Robinson.

"I don't see why not. They're in the hospital over there."

The first thing they noticed as they entered the modified portacabin was the smell, like rotten apples. A sickly sweet miasma that hit them in the face like the heat from an oven. Jeffcott actually staggered back, bumping into Robinson who stared at him accusingly until the smell hit her as well, making her wrinkle her nose in distaste. "God!" She exclaimed. "What's that?"

"Not decaying fruit," Jeffcott answered, feeling sick. "Decaying people. Still want to go in?"

"The others wore these," said one of the soldiers on guard, pointing to a box of face masks on a table beside the door. There was a bottle of pot pourri oil next to it. "Put a few drops of oil on the mask," said the soldier. "Then breathe through it. They say it helps."

They did so. The smell of the oil was thick and cloying, but in a different way and it seemed to cancel out the reek of the dying people inside. With the smell now manageable, they went in.

Every window was open to its widest extent in an attempt to let in some fresh air, to no avail. Everyone inside was wearing masks, from the soldiers standing guard to the nurses attending the patients. Even the patients themselves were wearing masks, although the smell seemed to be exuding from their skins rather than exhaled breath. They were all nude, so that every detail of what the anomaly had done to their bodies was clearly exposed to the horrified eyes of the visitors.

"They couldn't give them the dignity of a blanket?" said Duffy in outrage.

"They're prone to internal bleeding," said a nurse, overhearing. "A major artery can rupture just like that, without any warning. If we don't see the bruising in time to open them up and tie it off, they're dead. Trust me, though. Modesty is the last thing on their minds at the moment.".

The nearest patient was a young asian-looking man, probably in his thirties. Once handsome by the look of him with a toned, muscular body, but now that body was swollen and distorted by black, cankerous growths as if lumps of coal had been inserted under his skin. Some of them moved and pulsated in rhythm to his heartbeat, which was displayed on a monitor at the head of his bed along with all his other vital statistics. He was awake and staring up at the three new visitors in horror, fully aware of what was happening to him and terrified by it. There were restraints around his wrists and ankles as if he'd tried to escape some time in the past, but now he was just lying there as if resigned to his fate.

Seeing him made Jeffcott's body quiver with a kind of primal fear, as if what he had was contagious and he might catch it just by breathing the same air as him. His eyes were reluctant to look at him. They kept sliding off his body as if they had a mind of their own and wanted to get away. At the next bed a nurse was taking the blood pressure of a twenty something black woman. For a moment the nurse's eyes met his and Jeffcott had a brief glimpse of the same fear that he was feeling. The same... Revulsion. Yes, that was the right word. No matter how sympathetic and civilised they wanted to be, no matter how much they wanted to be enlightened and compassionate, they were revolted by these poor people. The nurse wanted nothing more than to get out of there and leave someone else to look after them. It didn't matter who. Anyone.

The realisation sickened him. That wasn't the kind of person he wanted to be. He got a grip on himself, therefore, and made himself approach the black woman. He made myself look into her eyes, and she looked back at him with a look of such horror, such suffering, that he almost lost control of himself and ran. Instead, he made himself reach out and take her hand where it was strapped to the side of her bed. For a moment the nurse reached out to try to stop him. He wasn't wearing surgical gloves. Then she backed away, though. What these people had wasn't contagious. Jeffcott had no more chance of catching something than if it were the hand of any healthy person. Apparently they weren't worried about him giving her something. No bug he might be carrying could possibly make her condition worse.

The moment their hands touched her fingers clamped painfully tight around his. Her hand was hot and damp with perspiration, but there was something else. For a moment Jeffcott thought he could feel something moving under her skin, as if there were worms squirming around between the bones and tendons of her fingers. He jerked his hand back in shock, but her grip was so tight that he wasn't able to break contact and a moment later he was glad for that when he saw the look of infinite gratitude in her eyes. It made him relax his hand and squeeze her fingers back. The feeling of movement intensified but so did her look of gratitude and a tear rolled down her lumpy, distorted cheek.

"What's your name?" Jeffcott asked her.

She tried to reply, but it cost her a great effort to form words and so the nurse answered for her. "Teresa," she said, staring at him with wonder as if he'd put his hand into an open flame. "Teresa Kelly."

Jeffcott looked down at the black woman. "Hang in there Teresa," he said. "You're in good hands. You're going to be all right."

Her fingers tightened harder around his. Her mouth worked as she again struggled to speak. He waited patiently for her to form the words. "No," she said at last. "I'm not."

He looked at the nurse and saw confirmation in her eyes. There was no hope for this woman. None at all. Not for any of them. The doctors were only keeping them alive as long as possible so they could learn something about what was happening to them, but sooner or later they would lose the fight. Teresa knew that. She could feel it in her own body and Jeffcott could feel it as well. Holding her hand was like holding the hand of a corpse, complete with maggots squirming through the dead meat.

Teresa's strength was almost gone, though, and the effort of gripping his hand drained what was left of it. Jeffcott felt her fingers loosen and pulled his hand free, resisting an urge to wipe it on his trousers. The nurse was staring at him as if he were a superhero. Jeffcott moved away, suddenly feeling self conscious.

He went to where Duffy and Cathy were talking to Summers and Gruber. "What's happening to them?" he asked.

"They've got no idea," said Mark Summers. "There's no infection, no radiation damage. No cancer. Somehow, some of the cells of their bodies have reverted to an embryonic state."

"Embryonic stem cells," Dennis Gruber added, his eyes shining with a fascination that he was trying to hide out of respect for the patients. "Thousands of them in each patient. All busy doing what embryonic stem cells do. Create embryos."

They stared at each other in shock. "You mean, with arms and legs and eyes?" asked Jeffcott.

"More like random lumps, each containing several types of tissue," the doctor replied. "Fat, bone, glandular tissue, muscle. The glandular tissue is secreting hormones more or less at random, that's part of what's killing them, and the muscle tissue is twitching. That's what's creating the sensation of movement in their bodies."

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

"And some of the embryonic stem cells are busy creating more embryonic stem cells," Mark Summers added. "You perform surgery to remove one pseudo-embryo and a dozen more spring up to take its place."

"Their only hope seems to be chemotherapy," said Dennis Gruber. "Treat the pseudo-embryos like cancer. Use drugs that kill rapidly dividing cells. All it's doing so far, though, is slowing the progress of the disease. Prolonging their suffering."

"Maybe it would be kinder to just let them go," Robinson ventured hesitantly.

"I hate to sound callous and uncaring," said Dennis Gruber, "but the longer we can keep them alive, the more we can learn. We need living patients to study, to do tests on. And the things we could learn about normal human development... You learn the most when you observe how things go wrong. The implications for teratogen research, neural tube defects for example, could be beyond imagining."

"For those of you who don't know," said Mark Summers, "my colleague here is the world's foremost authority on embryonic birth defects. No doubt the reason he was brought here."

"It's a fascinating field," said Gruber, his eyes shining. "A simple ball of cells gradually organising itself into a human being with all its tissues and organs. Who wouldn't be fascinated? And now, the chance to examine these people... You could learn more here in a day than in a month of normal research." He stared at the nearest patient with an almost hungry expression.

"These are human beings, human suffering, you would be profiting from," said Robinson, looking disgusted.

"To prevent more suffering in the future," the doctor pointed out. "One sympathises with these people, of course, but if you get too attached you lose the clinical objectivity you need to get the work done."

"Can we continue this discussion outside?" said Duffy, who was looking green, as if he was about to throw up. "The smell..."

He didn't wait for a reply but hurried to the door, throwing it open and dashing down the steps to the hot tarmac of the road. Robinson and Jeffcott followed, pulling their masks off and sucking in the fresh, clean air, breathing deeply as if to remove every trace of foul corruption from their lungs.

"God!" said Robinson, looking guilty at the speed of their exit. "Those poor people."

"And we're going in there," said Duffy, wiping his forehead with a handkerchief. "Where they went."

"With protection." said Rahul Bhatt. Jeffcott turned to see that he, Sarah Bright the linguist and Lucy Dennings the psychologist were crossing from another portacabin in which they'd been studying their dossiers. "They say it'll protect us from what happened to them," the mathematician added.

"Are they sure of that, though?" asked Duffy. "Maybe it only slows it down. Maybe what's happening to them will happen to us."

"We either go in there and try to stop it," said the mathematician, "or run away and wait for it to catch up with us. Even if we're on the other side of the world it'll find us sooner or later if it keeps growing."

"I'm still not convinced that it will keep growing," Duffy replied, though. "Have they measured how fast it's growing? Maybe it's slowing down."

"It's growth has remained constant for the last five days," said Captain Mase, coming to join them. "One hundred and forty eight point three seven three metres per hour. Before that it was around one hundred and thirty metres per hour. If anything, it's speeding up."

"So what happened five days ago?" asked Robinson, suddenly looking interested.

The Captain could only shrug his shoulders helplessly, though. "Have you seen enough?" he asked. "We'd like you to go in as soon as possible. Every hour you wait is another hundred and fifty metres you'll have to walk."

Dennings and Bright exchanged a fearful glance. "You seem to be including us in that question," said Dennings.

"We'd like all eight of you to go in," the Captain confirmed. "Along with Sergeant Boyd-Rochfort and a dozen of his men."

"But why? What possible good would a psychologist and a linguist be in there?"

"We're worried there might be mental effects as well as physical ones. A psychologist will know what to look out for. If anyone starts behaving strangely you can send them back out again while being alert for possible section eights."

"People pretending to be affected so they'll be sent out," said Mark Summers. The Captain replied with a nod.

"And what about a linguist?" asked Bright.

"We just want to cover every eventuality," the Captain told her.

"Bullshit!" spat the linguist, striding forward to glare up into his face. "What haven't you told us?"

The Captain looked embarrassed as if afraid he would be ridiculed. "This comes from high up," he began. "The same people who insisted that we choose people based solely on their ability, regardless of gender. I would have preferred a purely male expedition..."

"Why a linguist?" Bright pressed.

"Some of the first victims were in the anomaly for several hours," the Captain explained. "This was before we realised how dangerous it was. They died shortly after coming back out, but before they died..."

"They began talking gibberish," Bright speculated. "Right?" The Captain nodded. "I'm guessing someone thought it might be a language," Bright continued. "A demonic language perhaps. Christian fundamentalism runs strong in this country. One of your superiors is a devout Christian and thinks they were possessed by demons."

"As I said, these orders come from high up. I can only obey them."

"Brain damage," said Bright, speaking as if explaining to a child. "They were probably suffering a form of aphasia in which they lose the ability to communicate effectively. No need to invoke religious, superstitious nonsense."

"What if it's not nonsense?" Duffy put in suddenly. "What if it wasn't demonic possession but an attempt by a non-human entity to communicate?"

Jeffcott felt a familiar sense of exasperation coming over him. "Vince," he said. "Not this again. Please."

"What not again?" asked Mark Summers.

"Vincenf Duffy is a brilliant physicist," said Jeffcott, wanting to be diplomatic. "A leader in his field. A true genius. No-one doubts that, but some of his ideas tend to be a little..."

"Some of our results at CERN can best be explained if our universe is brushing closely against another," Duffy interrupted brusquely. "This isn't fantasy or superstition but a clear, cold analysis of the facts."

"So you think that aliens in that other universe are trying to talk to us?" said Mark Summers.

Some of the others were trying to hide smiles. Jeffcott only felt pity for his colleague. The man was indeed a genius. He deserved better than to be mocked and ridiculed. The man had expressed a theory. A theory that could be tested by further experiments carried out in the future. If the results of those experiments supported his theory then great. If not, then the theory would be abandoned and Duffy himself would be the first to publicly denounce it. That was how science worked, not by condemning an idea right off the bat simply because it sounded silly. Personally, Jeffcott thought it would take a hell of a lot of evidence before his ideas, which even his closest aupporters admitted did sound unlikely, gained greater acceptence. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, as he remembered someone saying once. He forget who.

Bright wasn't smiling, though. She was staring around at the others, her wide, frightened eyes fixing on one of them after another in search of someone who would come to her defence. "So I have to risk my life," she said, "to talk to aliens? Or perhaps demons? The guy had brain damage. He was talking gibberish. I'm not going to risk my life for that."

"She's right," said Jeffcott, taking a step forward. "She doesn't need to come with us. The likelihood of her talents being needed in there are..." He become aware of Duffy staring at him. He ploughed on regardless. "...are vanishingly small. We're just going in to stop the anomaly. If there are aliens in there, the next expedition can talk to them."

Jeffcott had enough self honesty to wonder whether he was motivated to take her side by the desire to gain the gratitude of an attractive woman. He thought he was sincerely concerned for the safety of another human being, but both his ex--wives had accused him of being attracted to other women, that being part of the reason his marriages had ended. It was true that he liked looking at beautiful women, he admitted to himself. He like it the same way he liked looking at beautiful sunsets. He liked to stroke the hair of a beautiful woman, to feel the softness of it. He like to stroke rabbits as well, for the same reason. That didn't mean he wanted to have sex with the rabbit. So yes, he told himself confidently. He supported Bright because he genuinely saw no reason for her to risk her life with the rest of them. There was no other reason.

"My orders are that all eight of you are to go in," said the Captain, though.

"And if we refuse?" asked Duffy. This got him the grateful look from Bright that she hadn't given Jeffcott, who felt an irrational sense of jealousy.

"We are under martial law, as you know," said the Captain. "Anyone who refuses to obey orders will be placed under arrest and will remain in confinement until the state of martial law is lifted. If it ever is."

"A prison cell might be better than what happened to those poor souls in there." Bright hooked a thumb back to the portacabin outfitted as a hospital. A couple of the others were nodding, Jeffcott saw. Rahul Bhatt as well as Duffy, and he noticed that his own knees were quivering more than a little as well. Whose wouldn't?

The Captain didn't look unsympathetic, but he had his orders and they could all could see that he would follow them. He seemed to have enough leadership skills to know that barking orders to civilians could be counterproductive, though. Maybe a less direct route would be more effective. "While you're thinking it over," he said therefore, "why not come and see the equipment we've prepared for you? Even if you decide not to use it, you might still have some words of advice for those brave enough to go."

He strode off towards an open area that had been left between the assembled vehicles. The two doctors followed after him, and after a moment's hesitation the rest of them did as well.