Puzzle Pieces I

Tremors: The Subtext #16

by Setcheti

 

Rating: FRT:MV,MP,SLC

Disclaimer:  I don’t own Tremors, because if I did the series would STILL BE ON THE AIR.

 

Casey Matthews raised her head from the microscope she’d been peering into and sighed, pushing red-gold curls back out of her face and grimacing at more than the feeling of Perfection Valley’s pervasive dust in her hair.  “I can’t report this, Roger,” she said.  “I just…I can’t.”

 

Her assistant, Roger, left what he was doing on the other side of their lab and wandered over.  “Then don’t,” was his advice.  “No one said you have to.  And this has nothing to do with Mixmaster, nothing at all.”

 

“Not so far as we know, it doesn’t.  But it has something to do with something, I just don’t know what.”  She turned on the stool so she could look at him.  “Larry’s got it too.  Or a variation of it, anyway.  Something.”

 

Roger shrugged, raising one hand to scratch at a dust-itch in the short, dark beard that he affected.  “But we’re not out here to study ‘something’, we’re out here to study Mixmaster and its effects on the valley’s ecosystem.  Natural human variation from outside the valley isn’t our problem.”  He raised one eyebrow.  “So why don’t you tell me what the problem really is, Casey?  Because we’ve held back data before, and for less reason.”

 

“We’ve never held back what could be a major key to the mystery of human evolutionary development before!” she rebutted.  “When it was just Tyler I could pretend that it was just…a variation, a developmental glitch.  And no one really goes for serious PK work any more, so there was no reason research-wise for me to report it to anyone.  But Larry has the same variation, or at least a similar one…and he just happens to show up in Perfection and stick around, just like Tyler?  And the mutations don’t seem to want to kill him?”  She shook her head.  “I just…I just don’t know what to do!  If I report it…”

 

“Then those two men’s lives are over, and possibly everyone else’s who’s connected with them,” Roger finished for her.  “And if you don’t report it and it turns out to actually be something important, then whatever happens because we held back will be entirely on our heads.”  He folded his arms across his chest, cocked the eyebrow again.  “But you’re missing the third option, Casey.”

 

Her drooping head came up, but she still looked doubtful.  “We study it ourselves…and keep it quiet?”

 

“Exactly!”  Roger moved over to her, confidingly close, and put his arm around her shoulders.  “We do the research – and we get Cletus to help us.  Then if it all comes to nothing, no harm done.  But if it turns out to be too important to keep to ourselves…well, then we’ll have the preliminary research finished and ready to present, and also the possibility that we’ll have found more subjects outside of the valley to use as case studies.”  He gave her a little shake.  “See?  We can do our jobs, be ethical scientists and protect our friends.”

 

“I think…you might be right,” she agreed slowly.  “And it’s not like we haven’t kept quiet about Tyler Reed before, right?”

 

“Right.”  Agent Twitchell had briefed them about the permanent residents of Perfection before they’d ever set foot in the area, including the fact that Tyler was a closeted homosexual.  Roger separated from her – reluctantly, although Casey didn’t know that – and headed back across the lab to what he’d originally been doing.  “And it was Twitchell who told us to not to spread that information around, remember?”

 

Casey did remember, and she turned back to her microscope with a smile.  If she hadn’t known beforehand, her first meeting with Tyler wouldn’t have clued her in as to the former NASCAR driver’s sexual orientation; in fact, he’d played his part so well that she’d complimented him on it – discretely, of course.  She’d never spoken of what she knew directly, though, not until he’d told her himself that he was ‘out’ to the other residents of Perfection.

 

Still smiling, she took a digital photograph of the slide she’d been working with and then filed the slide itself back with the others, making a mental note that she needed to add Tyler’s cousin Malcolm to her database sometime in the near future – to have a record of his allergies, not necessarily because of the research just yet.  Setting up the parameters for the research project Roger had proposed was going to take plenty of time, getting started would take even more.  And until they had something concrete to support their suppositions about why El Blanco had attacked the Cyobactyl that had attacked Tyler…well, she and Roger couldn’t very well report a far-fetched and ultimately unsupported hypothesis to the government, now could they?  It just wouldn’t be professional of them.