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suspect, if it can navigate around in the dark like it did last week, it would figure out where we kept it, even if we locked it in the back of a truck.”
    “He’ll go nuts without any of his kind.”
    “Dogs and cats don’t go nuts, do they?” Warren asked. “And you cut school for a couple days.” He draped his wet shirt over a chair and leaned up against the refrigerator. “Don’t trust me with it, do you?”
    “Both of us can keep an eye on him better, since we know he wants to get away.”
    “Suppose it could run a vacuum pump? Weigh batch chemicals?” He sat down. “Having that creature here is weirder than having a nark snooping. What might it tell, if it got to the government or back to its people? Tom, I’ve got quite an operation under this house. You haven’t seen it in a while, have you?”
    “I make you lots of methane,” I said, “with the chicken shit. And you’ve bought a whole ton of cement.”
    “Couple tons,” Warren said. “Let’s take you down. I’ll set up the air-disturbance alarm in the outer rooms after you lock the alien in. Maybe it’s time you got in the family business, paid for your pet here. I need all the help I can get now.”
    “Are they squeezing you?”
    “Squeezing?” Warren grunted. “They sent me this, postmark Atlanta.” The photo was of a dead man, legs crushed. As I stared at it, Warren threw some switches in the kitchen. “Seen enough?” he said, taking the photo out of my hand.
    We went down the basement stairs—copper-clad rungs wired to 220-volt house current—knock anyone snooping dead off the rungs. In the basement, Warren climbed onto a small front-end loader and moved a section of the wall—not a false cement front, but a real cement-block section about three feet high. Behind the blocks was a tunnel.
    Warren and I crawled along in the tunnel and finally stood up in dark that smell medical, bitter. A switch clicked, and I saw retorts, a vacuum pump, and bottles of chemicals under one bare light bulb.
    Two huge props began turning, sucking the stale air away. I guessed he’d vented the bunker through a couple of old tobacco barns. He cut on another light, and the one we were under went out. Under the second light, I saw a pill-making machine, with its press lever and the pistons that squashed Warren’s illegal powders into aspirin-sized tablets like honest medicine.
    “That’s the tabber and the mill,” he said. He spoke of his equipment like it was some sexual woman. “Best pull on a dust mask in here,” Warren said, reaching for two on a rack beside the machine. Should have done it early, I thought, my heart racing, mouth just a bit dry. Warren’s eyes crinkled above his mask as though he were smiling.
    Then, after Warren pressed about fifty pills to show me how the machine worked, we walked back the way we’d come, lights dying behind us. When we got to the crawl tunnel, Warren took both masks and hung them up.
    “I’ve worked on this for fifteen years and no baby monster is going to threaten it. You get awful moral about drugs, but we’ve got expenses, mortgage, school for you later.”
    My head buzzed with a thousand questions, but they got tangled before I sent them out to my tongue. Finally, I managed to say, “But speed, Warren?”
    “Helps kids get through school,” he said, grinning at me. The grin dropped away instantly. “They buy it, whoever makes it. I’ll quit in two years.”
    “Will the Atlanta people…”
    “I’ll sell this, split your share, then we can settle somewhere better, California, Oregon.”
    I went to unlock the alien while Warren re-set the alarms, ran the juice through the ladder rungs again.
    “Warren,” I said, “please use the respirator down there. Over time, that stuff’ll drive you crazy.”
    “Over time, life’ll drive you crazy. If you gonna drop out of school for that thing,” he said, pointing a cold fried chicken leg at Alpha, “can you help me make quota?”
    “I’ll