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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.
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