* * * * *

"I guess it did need a little more fabric softener, then," Brown said, waving a hand in the air to clear it of smoke, even as near solid wisps were trying to curl around his head and creep into his eyes. There was foam on the shoulders of his shirt and resting placidly in his hair, although he made no effort to wipe them away.

Tristian snorted, replacing the flashlight-like device back on his belt as he crouched down at the back of the washing machine, moving it forward a little so he could peek behind it. "They're getting smarter." A damp green shirt was draped across his back, while a pair of red socks was plastered to his legs. "They either hid a rear guard that I didn't notice, or doubled back to leave someone behind in case we returned."

Brown scanned the room in a tight circle, idly kicking a blue dress that lay crumbled on the floor as he did so. "Yeah," he said, his eyes narrowed as he searched the walls. One hand tapped quietly on the table that lay in the center of the bare laundry room, the walls now splattered with wet spots and looking like chips had been taken out of them. "Normally they don't think that far in advance. That kind of worries me. I don't like being confronted with variables I didn't expect."

"I thought this job was nothing but unknown variables." Tristian craned his neck around the machine, frowning and running one hand along the wall, as if trying to read Braille.

"Yeah, but we do our best to plan for them." He picked up a piece of what appeared to be underwear that had landed haphazardly on the table and did his best to try and fold it. "The hives are intelligent but instinctual, you can give them a good poke and they go ambling off in a different direction to where they won't bother anyone."

"I don't know, you did a good job at adjusting to the situation earlier." Tristian grunted as he used both hands to drag the machine further away from the wall, sliding into the space he created as best he could.

Brown laughed. "That wasn't too bad, eh? Perhaps the first counterstroke to a homicidal rinse cycle that the world has ever seen. Though I was really only doing that to buy you time, since you seemed to have your own problems."

Tristian shrugged. "You didn't have to worry, it was under control. A little water hasn't hurt me before."

Brown glanced up, frowning. "At least the ceiling stopped dripping. If any of it leaked into the floor upstairs, we'd have more questions than I'd like at this particular moment."

"You think anyone is going to be miss that shirt crammed up there?" With his head tucked between the machine and the wall, Tristian's voice was muffled.

Brown sucked at his teeth. "Judging by the style, I don't think the owner is going to miss it. I'm tempted to take it back to its own era so it can be among its own kind again. It must be terribly lonely around here." Tristian laughed again, his shoulder bonking against the metal. "Find anything back there?"

"No, but . . ." he levered himself backwards, rocking on the balls on his feet while still in a crouch. ". . . it's pretty dark. I may have to move this out further."

"Just use the . . ." Brown put both hands together like he was holding the handle of a baseball bat. "You know."

"That's not something I'd like to go swinging around in a tiny space. Besides, everything tinted a shade of red is just as bad as everything tinted a shade of dark." He started to wipe some sweat off his forehead when he stopped and stared at his sleeve. Slowly, he put the other hand inside and with a quizzical expression on his face drew out a long train of fabric. "It's been a really weird day," was all he said, partly to himself.

Brown put his hand flat on the table, spread his fingers slightly. He glanced toward the door and back at the table again. A steady drip from above was gradually creating a small pool of water, the edges constantly oozing out. Soap bubbles could be seen forming inside, rainbows are refractions only when see close up. "Tristian," he said, still staring down, "those two guys that we met before . . . what did you think of them?"

Tristian had gone back behind the washing machine, shifting it out a few more inches. "They seemed nice enough. Considering you practically regenerated in front of them, it was nice to not walk into two people screaming."

He scratched idly at the table. Sometimes it was possible to see all corners, even obliquely. "Yeah, they did take it in stride. I was kind of impressed by them, actually. I got the feeling they'd really understand our lives."

With a bang the machine shifted out another inch as Tristian worked his way in further. The noise covered his muffled curse. "I don't know about you, but they're certainly welcome to switch places with me."

Brown chuckled quietly, dipping his finger in the sudsy puddle and sketching quickly drying letters across the wood. He kept studying the lights, as if expecting them to be something other than what they were. "Think about it. In a sense, we're living their dreams. Excitement and adventure, saving lives on a grand scale. That's us."

"You're right, some days I forget about how epic we are," Tristian commented dryly. "I'm glad you reminded me."

Brown stepped away from the table, gesturing with one finger at the air. "No, seriously, Tristian . . . imagine these guys. Since they were kids they were probably into science-fiction, reading about alien planets and the possibilities of the future, collecting toys and games to try and capture a sense of what they thought was possible. I'm sure they got mocked all the time, by people who thought they were being ridiculous, who believed they'd never grow up."

"Well, no offense to them, but arranging your Superman action figures in a reenactment of the signing of the Magna Carta isn't going to instantly garner respect. Even if I thought the attention to detail was kind of impressive."

"You noticed that, too, huh?" Brown said with a snicker. "But seriously, look at us. We're the proof that they were right all along. That the silly movies and the comic books might actually have some truth to them beyond what the science journals say." He stopped, slid his hands into his pockets and looked down at the floor.

"So what do you want to do . . . should we take a picture with them?" Tristian sounded a bit confused at the prospect of it. "I think we need to be famous before we can start autographing things."

"I don't know, they built that monument to you out in the Kalstas Cluster."

"For being a mid-wife." The washing machine had stopped moving and there were sounds of tinkering being done behind the device, small clankings and scrapings cascading in arrhythmic time. Tristian had gone down on his knees, crawling a little further behind it.

"Hey, I thought the impromptu C-section was quick lateral thinking. It stopped the riot at least." Brown bent down and scooped up a still sodden pair of socks, examining them before casually tossing them over his shoulder. "No, I'm thinking we take one of them with us when we finish here."

There was a long silence and then Tristian slid out backwards. In one smooth motion he sat against the wall, legs curled up with one knee near his chest. "Are you serious?"

"Why not?" Brown shrugged, an open gesture. "I think they deserve something for helping out. And it'd be nice to show this stuff to people who appreciate it." He gnawed on his cheek, tapping on his teeth with one finger. "The only snag is we really only have room for one on the way back."

"Hm," Tristian replied, narrowing his eyes. "How are we going to decide which one to take? What do you think? I felt the shorter one with the glasses had potential."

Brown bit his lip. "Yeah. I think he really got it. The tall guy, what was his name . . . Sheldon? He seemed like a smart fellow but sometimes he was just using big words to impress us."

"And I think he'd just fall apart the first alien he saw, to be honest."

"Oh, absolutely. Total agreement here, Tristian." Brown clapped his hands together. "Well, I think that settles it, once we find them we'll-"

His sentence was interrupted by a commotion at the other end of the room. Slowly, he turned around to see Sheldon dashing into the room with stiff legged agitation, eyes wide and face scrunched in fury. Leonard was being dragged along behind him with his heels skidding along the floor, glasses slightly askew on his face.

"I will have you know," Sheldon sputtered, "that I have not one but two doctorates, I was the first fifth grader in my class to complete college, I came very close to constructing a nuclear reactor before my mother stopped me and I was the first person to even conceive of a string network condensate approach to resolving the black hole information paradox, so I will tell you, sir, that I have earned every right to use the biggest words that the English language allows and I will proudly use them regardless of your clearly limited capacity to understand them." He flushed, his face twitching as if swallowing something unpleasant and added, "If necessary I will make this very simple for you and use as few syllables as possible: I am much smarter than you, and I do not care if that makes you feel inadequate."

"Sheldon, Sheldon," Leonard laughed uneasily, getting a better footing and peeking around his friend. "Don't listen to him, he's just . . ." his face turned very serious, ". . . please don't let him stop you from taking me."

"Well, hello again, boys," Brown said, folding his arms over his chest and raising one eyebrow, ". . . eavesdropping are we now?"

* * * * *

"Well, of course we were," Sheldon sputtered, still having not shaken off the clinging debris of his own anger. "How else could we have heard your ridiculous assumption that-"

"If I said something to tick you off, it would draw you out of hiding?" Brown offered.

"Yes!" Sheldon responded. "Like we're a pair of idiots who would react emotionally to such a blatant falsehood aimed directly at our weaknesses." He laughed melodramatically, while Brown continued to regard him, his position not having budged an inch. "Why, an obvious plan like that would have to be-"

"-completely successful," Leonard finished, shaking his head morosely and walking toward the table. He leaned against it, pushing his glasses up and pinching the bridge of his nose.

"I believe you chess lads call that one mate," Brown noted with a smile.

"You weren't planning on taking us with you, were you?" Leonard asked, even though the slant of his expression suggested he already knew the answer.

"Trust me," Tristian called out from across the room, "it's not really that exciting. Go once and you'll appreciate a nature walk that much more."

"Leonard," Sheldon admonished. "Don't miss the point entirely here. As usual, you only see the surface of things while failing to note the delicate underlying mechanics of the actual structure." Turning to Brown, his face brightened as he said, "So since you were lying before, that means you truly recognize my superior intelligence?"

"Its vastness astounds me," Brown said dryly. Sheldon's smile only broadened, until he saw Leonard's sharp warning shake of the head and his expression faded into a more quizzical gaze.

"Joe," Tristian said, most of his body now back behind the washing machine. "You may want to come take a look at this."

With a swift pivot, Brown darted over to Tristian, practically climbing on top of the machine in order to see what the other man was trying to show him. Leonard and Sheldon silently exchanged sidelong glances and then together began to slide toward them as well, moving very quietly.

Tristian was wedged in between the wall and the washing machine, having contorted his body so that he was turned slightly toward them, his back bent and flat against it. The posture looked uncomfortable but he didn't appear ready to complain.

"I was poking around back here," he said, shifting his weight so he could more easily grab a handful of wires that were leading out of the rear of the machine, "since this seemed to be the center of the fun we experienced earlier."

Brown rolled his eyes. "Don't remind me. It's going to take forever to get the smell of detergent out of my nose."

Something about his tone caused Leonard to look around the room, to really look around the room for the first time. And at some point the familiar laundry room had stopped being so familiar. All the doors on the machines were wide open, gaping toothless jaws asking for sustenance that none of them could easily provide. Damp spots and water damage was evident all around the room, giving a speckled spotting to the wood and concrete, like a whale show had just gone on just beyond the walls and this was the splash zone. There was a distinct scent to the room that was a strange mixture of acrid smoke and boiled water crossed with the clean fresh odor of Tide.

There was also a neat hole drilled right through the front of the washing machine, the edges of it punched inward and blackened slightly.

"Sheldon," he whispered to his friend. "What happened here?"

The other man looked around the room with prim detachment. "Isn't it obvious?" he asked with some degree of knowing dismissiveness. "This is a war, and we're at the front lines." His eyebrows went up a little as his voice dropped. "And war is hell."

"Yeah," Leonard replied, stretching the word out and inching away from his friend. Nearby, Brown had bent down so that his head was behind the machine as Tristian continued to explain.

"Most of the wires looked fairly standard," he was saying, tapping each one with a finger. "Until I got to . . ." without touching it directly he indicated a single black wire that snaked from the rear of the machine into the wall. ". . . this one here."

"What's so special about that?" Leonard asked, somehow managing not to flinch back when both men turned to regard him. "I mean, unless you don't want to tell me, that's really okay too." He started to back away and wound up bumping into Sheldon, who was leaning forward and staring curiously down, eyes narrowed.

"Two things," Tristian said, twisting so he could address the group. "The first thing I noticed is that it has no viable connection to the back of the machine . . ." his hand traced the path of it, "or the wall. It's fused completely at both ends."

"So it's new then," Brown said.

"Looks like it."

"Someone is stealing power from the washing machine?" Leonard asked and instantly again wished he hadn't spoken. The way they kept staring at him gave him a feeling that he hadn't experienced since his fifth grade teacher had wanted everyone to give a presentation on sports. The snickers when he called soccer "the game you play when you have no arms" should have told him it was going to be all downhill. That's what he got for taking the team's comments at face-value.

"Not quite." Tristian pinched the wire, taking a small piece of it between his fingernails. "Which is the second thing I noticed about. It's not really a wire, it's . . ."

With a sharp tug, he tore a small chunk out of the wire, like pulling out a stubborn hair. Casting the fragment aside, he lifted the wire up a little so that the lighting was a little better on it, tilting it toward them. But even from this distance Leonard could see what was happening.

A thick liquid was oozing out from the gap, slowly but inexorably.

"Some kind of hydraulic fluid?" Leonard ventured, part of him wanting to get a closer look at the substance but part of him wanting to run from the room screaming and hide under his bed. This was getting creepy. He had been hoping for an exciting episode of Star Trek and he was finding they were being cast as extras in The X-Files. And the extras tended to be the expendable ones. "Or maybe a type of oil?"

"No, it's organic," Brown said, stepping back to allow Tristian to get out from behind the machine, which the man did, wiping his hands together to clean them off. "Were you able to tell what's behind that wall?"

Tristian frowned. "There's definitely something back there but I couldn't tell, probably pipes of some kind." He started reaching for the device at his belt. "If you want, we can get in there and take a-"

"They can tap into the main electrical wiring for the building from there," Sheldon blurted out suddenly. Now all eyes were on him. Without even seeming to notice the sudden sustained attention, Sheldon continued, stepping past Brown and placing one hand on the wall. "A typical energy efficient washing machine can be somewhere between three and four hundred kilowatt-hours in terms of power usage. A model like this," he knocked on the metal, keeping his hand away from the smooth gash carved into the corner of it, "which was probably bought back when gas rationing was in vogue can probably use up to six hundred kilowatt-hour, drawing an incredible amount of energy that if not tapped into the main power line for the building would mean that every time someone decided to do their laundry, we would all be enjoying each other's company through the lovely ambiance of candlelight. Thus, instead of piggybacking off the breakers like every other bit of equipment in this building, whoever did the electrical wiring realized that they were running the mechanical equivalent of a tapeworm down here and patched it into the line that brings power from outside, reducing the amount of resistance on the line and ensuring that the local army-navy surplus store has a few more night-vision goggles in stock."

Brown looked puzzled. "A tapeworm? Wouldn't it be better to kill it than to give it even more electricity?"

Sheldon stared at him, his chin going up slightly. After a beat, he said, "Yes, but we like clean clothes. It's got us held hostage to its needs, I'm afraid."

Leonard stared at his friend almost sideways. "Sheldon, how exactly do you know all that?"

"I was attempting to run an experiment regarding the effects of nuclear radiation on common garden plants and to do so I needed a tokamak reactor. When attempting to siphon power off the line to kickstart it, I found that the majority of my energy was being diverted elsewhere. In tracing the source of the diversion, I found myself mapping out all the circuits in the building." He glanced toward the ceiling and a beatific smile came over his face. "If you stare at it just right, it looks not unlike a pony."

"Wait," Leonard said, "you tried to build a nuclear reactor in our apartment?"

"No," Sheldon said, with the patience of one speaking to a small child, "I tried to study the effect of radiation on garden plants. It just so happened that the experiment required a nuclear reactor. It's not like you can buy them off eBay."

"Plants . . . " something about that rang a bell to Leonard. "Oh my God . . . that's why you had all those flowers and potted plants in the apartment that week. I thought you were running a greenhouse."

"Don't be silly, during that time of the year with the tilt of the Earth we would barely get enough sun to even qualify." By this point Tristian had stood up, watching the exchange with a mixture of confusion and amusement.

"Should we stop this?" he asked Brown.

"Hold on," Brown said, waving a hand. "I made a bet with myself to see if either of them use a word that's more than eight syllables. Give it another minute."

"I gave one of those plants to Penny for Valentines Day!" Leonard nearly shouted, before realizing that he was shouting over something that was rather silly and taking a shrinking step back. At Sheldon's glare, he added sheepishly, "I didn't think you'd miss it."

Sheldon's gaze grew granite hard. "Then for your sake I hope that was one in the control group," he threatened in a near-whisper.

"Okay, so it's safe to say that this . . ." Brown reached past Tristian and yanked the black wire out of the wall. It flopped to the ground with a rubbery spasm and immediately began to leak more of the thick fluid. ". . . doesn't need to be here." He stepped back, putting his hands on his hips. "But the damage is probably already done. Damn."

Interlacing his fingers, Leonard stared around the room. "It looks like you guys already did a lot of damage." Squinting harder, he suddenly realized that what he had thought was a splotch of paint on the wall was really a sweater that had become fused to the brick.

"Yeah." Brown grimaced as he spoke. "Sorry. That kind of stuff tends to happen more often than we'd like."

"What exactly is going on here?" Leonard asked, a combination of impish glee and utter fear running through him. On the one hand, he was thrilled that apparently aliens really did exist and that it was quite possible he would run into them, which would certainly give him bragging rights at the next Clyde Tombaugh Appreciation Society meeting. But, conversely, the prospect of marginally hostile aliens running around the building didn't excite as he thought it would, probably because scenes from Alien kept replaying in his head over and over. Especially the scene where it came out of the air shaft.

"I thought we explained this already." Brown seemed distracted, rummaging around in his pockets. "You've got aliens in your building and we're trying to get rid of them."

"But you haven't explained why," Leonard shot back, choking down the rising sense of frustration. "What the hell would aliens want to do in a laundry room and why would they be running wires from the washing machine into the building itself?"

"Perhaps it's because they heard that the water around here gives all newly washed clothing the fresh scent of a spring meadow," Sheldon said in a singsong voice.

"Shut up, Sheldon." It was a bit harsher than he had intended but his patience with this was eroding rapidly. Leonard had never liked to think of himself as a man used to a routine, after all, he was a scientist and if science was about one thing it was taking what we knew and recreating it into fresh theorems and ideas. But too many shocks to his paradigm were starting to get him a bit frazzled. It also bothered him that Sheldon, perhaps the most anal-retentive person he knew, was not only comfortable with all this but seemed to be enjoying it. "Listen, I don't think it's too much to ask for some kind of explanation."

"It's too early," Sheldon pointed out, maddeningly calm. "If this was an episode of Doctor Who, we would have to get attacked at least twice before the Doctor would finally get a chance to explain the aliens' abilities before coming up with a clever solution to put a stop to their schemes."

"Sheldon . . ."

Brown sighed, massaging his eyelids tiredly with two fingers. "Okay, boys, you want an explanation, you can-"

Just then the lights overhead flickered, drenching the room briefly in slow motion strobe. A noise not unlike a backwards run moaning could be heard distantly, perhaps even below their feet.

"Uh-oh," Tristian said, staring up. As if in response, the lights clenched again, compressed like cancerous irises before returning to a newly sharp brightness. Leonard swore he saw tiny flecks of dirt swimming along in the pools of incandescence overhead, playing hopscotch in the filaments. But that was nuts. This whole situation was nuts.

Brown was already moving. "You can hear it as we go along!" he shouted as he ran out of the room, digging even deeper into his pockets. Tristian was past them in a flash, barely stirring the air as he dashed by. Seconds later the twin heartbeats of their rapid footsteps could be heard receding.

Leonard took two nervous steps forward. "Wait," he said, stepping up his stagger to a sprint. "Does this mean we're on your team now?"

"Don't push it!" a voice came floating back to them but Leonard was also on the stairs, taking a flying leap that got him up two whole steps, swaying but managing not to fall on his face. Then he was gone as well.

Sheldon, left behind, watched this all placidly, putting his palms together and drumming his fingers against each other. "Ah," he said, "that's more like it. Now we're right on schedule."

Then with a howling flare, the lights in the room were suddenly extinguished.

Sheldon broke into a stiff-legged jog.

* * * * *

"As I explained already, Nirtorian hives are generally peaceful in temperament." Brown had taken the stairs nearly three at a time, catching up with Tristian easily. Now the two of them were at the front doors to the building, Brown having taken out a small beeping device that was shaped not unlike a jump drive and running it along the seams in the glass doors. Outside the world looked frozen, not in the winter sense but in the extreme brightness of an overexposed photograph, the flash that came and made everyone stop moving, even for a split second. "They have physical bodies, but those are pretty weak." He was speaking quickly, sliding down to the floor with the device tight against the door. "The big thing with them is that they have a physiology with an intense affinity for electricity."

"Like an electric eel?" Leonard ventured, bending down with his hands on his knees to catch his breath. This was a bad time to try and figure out if he had asthma or not. Tristian was lingering by the stairs, leaning against the corner but occasionally glancing up, head tilted as if listening for anyone coming down.

"Sure," Brown quipped, standing up and putting his hand against the door to rattle it just a little. "If a clan of electric eels lived in your outlet." In a blur of motion he dashed to the next door, tapping the device against the hinges and then checking it as if searching for readings. Shaking his head, he rapped the device against the palm of his hand and ran it along the door again. "Their home planet has only a small level of background electricity, just enough to keep them able to sustain themselves. But they have this tendency to latch onto passing spaceships, since when you're used to hanging out with scraps and a veritable feast comes along, hell, go for the feast. Most of the time the crew realizes it before things get too far and normally it's not a problem. Put them back where they belong and off you go." He rattled the doors, then stepped back and folded his arms over his chest to regard the entrance.

"In this case, they must have not been paying attention and didn't pick up on it until they were too far out. So they just dumped them in the first place they passed by. Which happened to be here." He grinned, "Lucky you."

"Since when are we on a trade route?" Tristian asked.

Brown shrugged. "Damned if I know, unless it was a Flotesti run. I thought the Comouts were monitoring all movement in and out of the system, thanks to their natural xenophobic paranoia. Not that they'd tell us if they found anything. During those last shenanigans the only message I got was Oh, things are as normal as ever, except for the fleet of ships containing murderous alien invaders hovering outside our city. But we've got it under control. So who knows how someone got close enough to let the hive loose here."

"How is that even possible?" Sheldon asked, emerging from the stairwell. "Considering the sheer amount of telescopes and satellites we have scanning the night sky at every possible second, not to mention hordes of amateurs pursuing their own adorable little experiments, any moving object that cannot be readily identified is going to be posted on six different astronomy message boards and analyzed within an inch of its spectroscopic life."

"He's right," Leonard pointed out. "Remember when the Red Shift Conglomerate found that asteroid last year? Major_Ursa4 claimed it was just a smudge from a damaged plate and got into that pitched fission war with PulsarPal53."

"Oh yes," Sheldon replied. "It was finally settled when DoubleGRox swooped in with a radical application of Kepler's Third Law that proved once and for all we were staring at a truly heavenly body."

"DoubleG rocks?" Brown asked, a bit hesitantly.

"Galileo Gallilei," said Leonard, with a hint of exasperation. "Of course."

"Yes, do try to follow along, please," Sheldon added primly.

"And now you're saying a spaceship swung by this planet and dropped off a whole bunch of aliens?" Leonard gave a short laugh of disbelief. "We're just supposed to believe that?"

"You don't have to." Brown went back again, balancing on his heel with one leg lifted slightly off the ground. "But let me put it to you this way. Not that long ago, we fought an entire war out on the edge of this solar system. I watched explosions blossom like silent flowers in barren meadows, lights expanding so brightly that it would tear the darkest velvet and men ejected out into space to quickly achieve a graceful and frictionless slow ballet. Not a single person down here noticed." His voice became serious as his leg went back, poised and balanced. "You can stare at the sky all you want, you can cut it up into little sections analyzing each and every bit of it until your eyes are worn out. But what I've found most about people is that if they're not expecting it . . ."

His leg shot out, connecting solidly with the door, hard enough to create a loud bang that caused Leonard and Sheldon to jump and the glass to bulge outward. The door stayed put, however, not giving any sign that it had just experienced any attempt at trauma. ". . . they just don't see it coming," Brown finished. He stood there, tapping the floor lightly with the ball of one foot, almost consumed with nervous energy. The lobby stayed silent, not even the distant clattering of someone taking too many heavy steps across their apartment ringing out. The echoes of the strike fell as disintegrating wings.

Then he pivoted and headed toward the stairs. "Come on, I'll explain the rest of the story on the way back to your place."

"Excuse me?" Leonard ran to the base of the stairs even as Brown was already halfway up the first flight. Tristian slid away from his corner and began to follow, trying to give the two of them a comforting smile. "What did you just do to the door?"

"Sealed it," Brown shot down as he rounded the corner. "Let's try to finish with one topic before we move on to the next, hm?"

"We need to keep everyone inside until this is over," Tristian explained, shooting his partner a look at his back that the other man didn't notice. "

"You're using the quarantine protocols then?" Sheldon asked from the rear of the group. When Leonard gave him a surprised stare, he added, "It's standard operating procedure for situations like this. You saw how they handled ET."

"Ah, I suppose," Tristian replied. "I really didn't think we had a name for it. I like to think of it more as just keeping everyone out of harm's way."

"But we're all trapped in here," Leonard protested. "With aliens."

"Not just aliens." Brown's voice was coming from the next floor, at least a flight of stairs ahead of them. "Aliens who are freed from their . . . oh no you don't you little bastard-"

There was a pinging, searing echo from up ahead of them and abruptly Tristian stopped moving, throwing one arm out to prevent Leonard and Sheldon from progressing. Sheldon swallowed and stared straight ahead while Leonard silently debated going back to the lobby, curling up in a ball and wishing this would all go away. Brown wasn't talking anymore and around the corner everything had gone silent. It struck Leonard how narrow the stairwell was, all those times they had tried to shove bulky objects up the heights, and how if anything came barreling down, there would no time to get out of the way. Or run. Their accumulated delta-v's would not be enough. Here, Newton was not on their side.

Tristian's hand started to reach for the object at his belt. "Joe . . ." he called out, with an even insistence. The enclosed zone caught his voice, tried to damp it down to the same dull color of the paint.

A light cough was suddenly heard. "We're clear," Brown called down. His voice sounded separated, like an interrupted telegraph, or a sickly modem.

Tristian motioned for the two of them to stay put, something Leonard had no trouble agreeing with. The man crept up the stairs, one hand still at his waist, carefully poking his head around the corner. There was a stiffness in his shoulders, less tension than an apt readiness.

A second later, he waved for them to follow. Sheldon went easily enough, practically bouncing up the stairs with a giddiness that Leonard rarely saw his friend possess. Not since Blu-Ray players had come out had he seen Sheldon like this. He wanted to stop him and ask what the hell this sudden interest was all about but there was hardly a moment to catch his breath.

He found Brown standing against the elevator door, eyeing the long corridor with its rows of apartment doors. Tristian was standing a few feet forward, hands on his hips. The area was empty and the only sounds were the ambient bangings of old pipes and distant lives. Each floor was exactly like the others, which Leonard used to find comforting but now was making him feel like he was trapped in a Moebius strip, running along the curve without ever reaching his destination.

". . . give them credit, they're learning quickly," Brown was saying. In one hand he was clutching a pointed device, much like the one he had whipped out in their apartment to threaten the light. His other hand was pressed to the side of his neck, and his breathing was coming with a steadiness that sounded forced.

"Did it give you any kind of warning at all?" Tristian took a few more steps into the corridor, keeping diligently close to the center. The lighting wasn't great but he seemed to be angling for a smattering of dirt on the floor.

"Other than lunging for my face?" Brown moved his hand away, wincing, and adjusting his shirt so that the collar covered part of it. Just before he turned away, Leonard thought he caught a glimpse of a rapidly fading burn mark on his skin, pointed like the flame tail of a jet, or a fractal gone horribly sharp. "Nope. But I will say, it's certainly taking the guesswork out of things."

"Wait." Leonard, against his better judgment, rushed forward to join Brown and Tristian. Sheldon came forward more curiously, hands lightly pressed to his legs, his head tilted to the side and examining the area they were all standing around. "You keep acting like these things are dangerous. Are they?"

"Lost on an unfamiliar world, surrounded by sights and sounds totally unlike those of their home, perhaps irritated by a different gravity and an atmosphere that might be caustic to their very respiratory system . . . they're probably disoriented and confused, forced to lash out like a wounded animal." Sheldon bent down, running his long fingers along the floor. Him and his obsession with dirt, Leonard thought wearily. "It's like that time when the Sailor Moon convention accidentally walked into the Klingon Jeopardy contest that was going on."

"Oh, right," Leonard said, laughing despite himself. Drawing himself up, he said in a deeper, mock serious voice, "I'll take 'tlhap DoH vo' jIH' for five hundred, Alex." He chuckled again, only to find Brown staring at him strangely.

"And you got the phrasing right," Brown whispered, shaking his head in what Leonard hoped was admiration but probably fell a bit short. "But we should probably get going before-"

"It's amazing," Sheldon said, tracing a circle on the floor around a dark spot. "The disintegration here is total." Finally paying attention, Leonard saw that what he had initially assumed was merely a smudge turned out to be a scattering of soot, the edges of it fanning out away from them, as if a small pile had been blown over by a strong wind and then smeared about. Sections of it seemed embedded in the floor, so that all the scrubbing in the world was about to remove it. The stretched outline of it suggested something to Leonard, common and familiar that he was yet unable to place.

Sheldon looked up at Brown, with the analytical slant to his face that he sometimes got when working on some theory on his laptop until two in the morning, when he would literally forget what time it was. "This has all the classic signs of an energy discharge, a phased laser blast designed to discorporate and reduce whatever the beam touches to mere particulates through the use of molecular separation and heat."

"I'm glad you're familiar with the theory," Brown quipped back.

"When I was six I had designed a large working version, but the heat from it had fused the grass in our backyard to glass. I had to tell my mother that I had planted special seeds so that we could have an endless supply of sliding patio doors." He folded his hands together and stood up. "Sometimes she still asks me how that business is going."

"You shot someone in the hallway?" Leonard asked, leaping back nearly a foot, his eyes locked on the device that Brown was still holding. The laser gun, he found himself thinking, trying not to think about how irrational that sounded outside of a Star Trek casting call.

"Sort of," Brown said, stuffing the perhaps-gun back into his pocket. "Don't take this the wrong way but I really don't want to discuss this right now with you guys."

"But, hey . . ." Leonard don't know what it was about his voice that stopped Brown was darting further up the stairs but he stopped regardless. Which was at the point where words almost failed him. "If it's not safe, aren't you going to give us weapons?"

"He didn't shoot a person," Sheldon commented, staring almost straight down at the smudge pattern. "The blowback array is all wrong for a human being. It looks more like a . . ." he twisted his mouth curiously, ". . . like a waffle iron, oddly enough."

"You're not getting weapons," Brown insisted. "And we aren't discussing this."

"In all fairness, Leonard, they probably didn't bring enough for everyone . . ." Sheldon turned to Tristian. "Although we haven't seen you with a weapon yet."

Tristian just shook his head wordlessly.

"You just shot someone," Leonard insisted, even as Brown kept walking toward the stairs, relentless as runaway inertia. Why the hell wouldn't he listen? He had friends in here, he had a friend that might be somewhere inside. And he didn't know where she was. "And we're in a building full of people that you just prevented everyone from escaping from."

"Not completely," Sheldon pointed out. "The windows are probably still viable and depending on the floor, the level of descent and the terminal velocity, a person statistically might have a-"

"Shut up," Leonard snapped, finally striding forward to grab Brown by the arm before he reached the stairs. "This isn't fair, what you're doing. We have to evacuate the building."

"No, we don't," Brown replied casually, casually snapping his arm to free it from Leonard's grasp and going up another step. "Now let's stop wasting time-"

Something broke in Leonard then, a creeping helplessness that needed some kind of outlet, the kind of equation that stared at him from the board for days, when every variable checked out, when every proof had been postulated, when every constant was maintained and it still didn't balance. "Dammit, what is wrong with you?" He grabbed Brown's arm, rougher this time, hearing a little voice in his head frantically tell him what a terrible idea that was. "I've got a friend who-"

That voice got much louder a second later when Brown, in a motion so smooth it made a yawn seem frantic, suddenly turned, twisted his arm and the next thing that Leonard knew, he was up against the stairwell wall, with Brown's hand tightly clutching a handful of his shirt. The man's eyes were cold and calm and very serious. And so very close. The light above was bent somehow so that his shadow seemed to be casting him.

"Listen to me," he said, it wasn't an option so much as a necessity. "Because I want to be very clear on this. Nobody is going to die, nobody is going to get hurt. We're here to make sure that doesn't happen. I won't let it happen."

Tristian was at his side suddenly with a subsonic rustling, the kind you didn't hear until it was already too late. "Joe, let him go. He has a right to be scared."

"I'm not scared," Leonard said, wondering when someone had cranked the heat up so high. "I was just . . . being the voice of reason."

Sheldon leaned in, studying his friend with lidded eyes. "He's scared," he commented to Tristian. "Judging by his breathing rate, his pulse is probably easily in the triple digits, his fight or flight reflex is no doubt in the middle of a very spirited coin toss over what to do and extrapolating from the rather amusing anecdote his mother once told me about an encounter with a bear costume at summer camp, in extremely stressful situations he's prone to wetting his-"

"That's enough, Sheldon."

Brown glanced over to Tristian and met his friend's eyes before finally letting his gaze linger on Leonard for another few seconds. Then with a flick of his wrist he let him go, leaving Leonard to sag back against the wall, hands fumbling at his chest and doing their best to smooth the fault line wrinkles now embedded in his T-shirt.

"We try to evacuate and it'll be a mess." Brown was standing near the opposite wall, astride two steps and with his forearm resting against the wall. His voice had gone level but the sparked ferocity that had been evident earlier was gone. "It would just be confusion and impossible to coordinate without causing a mass panic. And if the hive decides to do anything during the process, we're screwed. We can't risk them leaving the building. No, it's best if everyone stays put." He looked over to Leonard and smiled comfortingly. "They'll be safe, I promise. All of them."

"You have friends here?" Tristian asked.

Leonard could only nod. Sheldon looked ready to comment but for once Leonard's stern glare got through to him and he kept quiet.

Licking dry lips and mentally reciting a Fibonacci sequence to keep himself calm, he said to Brown, "You . . . you never finished explaining why they're dangerous."

"I didn't, did I?" Brown absently tapped the device against his palm. He hopped down the last few steps so that he was back on the level floor, half-pacing and half-meandering. "I said before, a Nirtorian hive has an affinity for electricity. In the right conditions they can shed their physical bodies and exist inside currents." He had reached the dark spot on the floor, staring down at it with a tight-lipped expression, silently cajoling it to explain. "That's what they did here. And that wouldn't be a huge problem except they appear to have gotten inside the main grid for the building." The slick black tube stretching from the washing machine to the wall came to mind suddenly, and the small tearing noise it had made when Brown had ripped it from the wall. Like wet hair being yanked from taut skin, flailing as it looked for the missing connection.

"That's bad," Leonard offered, not sure if he wanted to make that a question or not.

"Well, theoretically," Sheldon said, "once inside the main grid, they would have access to the entire building and everything connected to it."

Brown snapped his fingers. "The nerdy guy gets right on the first try."

"Thanks." Sheldon looked extremely pleased with himself. Then just as quickly the delight drained from his face. "Wait, the person who comes up with the correct theory before anyone else is generally the first person to be horribly killed." He started looking up and down and to either side in sharp turns of his head, alert for impending danger.

"Don't worry." Brown patted him on the shoulder reassuringly. "In this line of work, the first person to be killed is generally the first one who does something stupid. And there's an easy way to keep from doing something dumb."

Sheldon looked at him, his Adam's apple bobbing as he swallowed. "Chart all the potentials and rank them accordingly?"

"No." Brown let the word slide out patiently. "You listen to what I say. I'm the professional. It's really that simple."

Tristian tapped Leonard on the arm. "Come on, let's go back to your apartment and we can figure it out from there. Hanging out in the hallway is just going to make people suspicious."

"No, hold on." Just saying it made his legs unsteady and he had to put one arm out on the wall to keep from toppling over. He hoped the quaver in his voice wasn't as blatantly evident as it sounded to his ears. "When they're in the electricity grid, what can they do? If they're just impulses racing along wires, why do you need to get them out so quickly?"

"Because I don't think they're going to stay in the grid," was all Brown said.

". . . uh-wuh . . ."

Both Brown and Tristian drew themselves up sharply, the latter darting across the hallway like a logarithmic shortcut. "Joe, did you . . ."

"Yeah." The word was barely spoken. Brown began to walk across the floor, heel to toe, not even creasing the floorboards with a creak. "Get them upstairs, Tristian. Now." It was feathers dropped on a placid lake, puckering without noise.

". . . wuh, uh, wuh-wurr . . ."

"What is that?" Leonard whispered, moving closer to Tristian. Sheldon merely watched the whole scene, as upright as an obelisk.

Brown continued to walk down the hall, his head turning from left to right, scanning for the source. He was a black-clad punctuation mark, a sliver of wound string dancing in sinuous straightness. Looking for the sound.

". . . er-ah, wuh, ah wurr uh . . ."

The sound.

". . . wuh ay air . . ."

The sound that was coming from behind the door of apartment 3G.

Leonard felt his pulse quicken, the air around him reeling in its own stillness. "What is that noise?" The question begged for an answer that reeked of normalcy. "It's just someone snoring. Just a . . . little sinus problem and we should probably go before they wake and notice us all standing in the hallway." He noticed that Brown had palmed his pointed device again, the one that he suspected wasn't exactly a doorstop. "Armed."

"Why are they still here, Tristian?" Brown hissed. He was closing in on the door, the arm holding the weapon bent, the laser held close to his chest.

"What are you doing?" Leonard asked, somehow dodging Tristian's grab. Brown was at the door now, ignoring everything else. "That's someone's apartment, you can't go in there."

". . . wun ayr arr eh . . ."

"You should at least knock first," Sheldon said.

"No, he shouldn't, he should get away from-"

"Right," was all Brown said, and he kicked the door in, moving so fast that the crash of it banging open barely had a chance to settle before he was going in, the wood splintering at the edges, the doorknob tilted crazily and the door itself swinging open rapidly to bounce against the wall. All the damn elementary laws of motion.

"Oh my God, stop-" Leonard shouted, hearing the busted door like the time he had dropped an entire tray of test tubes in lab, the way the tinkling of the broken glass had seemed to go on forever, until every person in the room had heard it and started staring. Any second all the other doors would open and everyone would be standing out in the hallway, the two of them and a pair of lunatics trying to break into someone's apartment. But like the falling rockets in a world of skewed Doppler effects, by the time you heard the noise coming it was already too late. He called out, but gravity had already drawn it down.

Except. Brown did stop.

". . . wurrrrr hairrr . . ."

In the doorway he was standing, as if afraid to cross the threshold. Leonard somehow found himself right behind him, just to the right of his shoulder. With the angle of the broken door and Brown in the way, he could only see a little bit of the room, the lopsided triangle that all the sides together made. It looked like a lot like his apartment, the basic shape of the room. The only piece of furniture he could make out clearly was an end table.

That's where the sound was coming from.

". . . woonneeee ehharrrr . . ."

Not from the table itself, but from the small walkie-talkie like device resting on it. A baby monitor, Leonard thought, remembering seeing the box for one in Penny's apartment as a gift when a friend of hers had a baby shower. Sheldon had offered to rig it up so that it would have video as well and perhaps even play clips from YouTube, until Penny had to patiently explain that it was just fine the way it was, and the baby didn't need to use it to browse message boards or watch videos. Leonard still swore that Sheldon almost went out and bought one himself, just to see if he could do it. Sadly, he probably would have helped. It had only been a matter of soldering a few wires, really.

". . . ehharrr wuhhhhh arrrrrrr . . ."

"It's just broken," he heard himself say. "There's probably a . . . a short in it somewhere and it's just . . . it's feedback." Brown didn't answer, keeping his eyes fixed on the monitor. "Isn't it?"

"You wanted to know what the problem was," Brown said and his voice was so quiet, the sound of paper being slid under a crack, scribbled with news that you needed to know. If only you thought to look down. If only you just thought to look. "Why it was bad if they got out of the grid."

". . . wah wah wheeerrrrrrr . . ."

That sound. It wasn't feedback. The noises were repeating too much, the same basic raw phrases being recycled over and over again with only mild variations. He had heard this type of thing before. At the lab? No. During one of the game nights? No, that wasn't right either. Where?

". . . wher wher wheeerrrreeeee . . ."

And then it hit him. That same friend of Penny's, months later, had somehow gotten her to watch her baby. But Penny had to go for an audition and somehow convinced Leonard to stay with the baby for a few hours. It hadn't been so bad, he put the kid right next to Sheldon and told him that the mom wanted him to get an early start on his physics education. He was two hours into an explanation of how to reconcile special relativity with nonrelativitistic fluid equations before he realized that the kid had been asleep for most of it.

But before he had taken that nap, the kid had been babbling away. Making all sorts of small child noises, the kind that any infant makes when trying to mimic their environment. Elementary aspects of learning behavior.

It was exactly the sound the monitor was making.

". . . wheeerrreeeeeee . . ." There was a sudden cough and burst of static. "Whereee . . . arreee . . ."

"Because they can get out. And get into anything else." Brown took a step into the room.

". . . arree the ruh-ruhah, rest . . ."

"Anything connected to it." From behind Leonard felt Tristian grab him by the arm, rougher this time. The view started to slide away, even as Brown started to raise the arm holding the device, pointing it at the monitor.

". . . wherrr areee t-uh the resttt . . . cuk-can feeeelll them . . ."

"Anything."

". . . anddd yooouuuuu . . ."

"Get them out of here," Brown ordered. "Even if you have to break their legs to do it."

"Won't be necessary," both of them said at the same time, even as Tristian started to drag them down the hallway back toward the stairs. Brown was turned sideways now, his arm held out stiffly.

". . . can seeeee yooooouuuu . . ."

"We'll meet you back at the apartment," Tristian shouted, practically flinging them up the stairs. The room was out of view but Leonard could see hear the voice in the monitor, creeping down the hall like escaped carbon dioxide gas.

". . . annddd youoooo . . . youooouu woooontt beeee abbleeee toooo . . ."

A low keening whine started to build up from nowhere. Leonard, despite himself, started to scramble up the stairs, the lifts now something unfamiliar and insurmountable suddenly, a mountain that he had all the wrong equipment for.

". . . toooooo stoooopppp usssssssssss-"

He cast one last look back to see a flash suddenly burst from the doorway, a new sun being laid in a fusion knotted egg. And then he could see nothing else because he had already thrown himself around the corner of the landing, charging forward on his hands and knees as fast as the residual air resistance would allow.