Again, what the chapter title says.


Chapter 5: Tour and Confirmation

Nick saw Judy’s ears come up and then turn her head a couple of inches to one side.

“Someone’s coming,” she said. “They’re running.”

A second later there came a knock at the front door.

“I’ll get it,” Nick said.

He and Judy, having awoke late in the day, were having a noon breakfast when that knock came. Nick opened the door and that cheetah runner was standing there. He held out some kind of rectangular box and, first, Nick appeared to gaze into it and then pressed both of his thumbs onto the surface. That done, the runner handed over a large thick envelope and left. Nick came back to the table and sat down. He opened the packet which had another one in it and then opened that one and extracted the contents. There were two cards that he looked at, then handed them over to Judy.

“Your new, maybe I should say updated, ID and security cards,” he told her.

The other item was a memory chip that he slipped into a slot on his laptop. He spent a few minutes looking at the screen, then returned his attention to Judy.

“Chief says he’s forwarded the data you gave to that team that came up with the robot duplicate of the alien. He figures it will take up to a couple of months for them to make the changes to match the new data,” he said.

“To keep the same weight, they’ll have to shorten it up some to compensate for the mass of the arms,” Judy commented. “And with more mass at one end they’ll have to rework how it moves to keep the sound it makes the same.”

Nick nodded in agreement.

Judy worked her way through the rest of her salad before she spoke again.

“Nick.”

“Yes?”

“Last night’s…dreams reminded me of something.”

“Oh? What is that?”

“In my panic, I kicked that thing with all the strength I had. Its body, or at least the part I made contact with, didn’t have any give to it like yours did. It was like kicking a rock boulder,” Judy said.

Nick thought that one over.

“Maybe it was wearing some kind of hard armor,” he ventured.

Judy, that ”I’m thinking this over” expression on her face, didn’t say anything for a bit.

“Or, it might have a hard shell, an exoskeleton like beetles do,” she said at last.

“Hmmmm, either way, that means they’ll have to shrink it down some more to make up for it. We’d better get over to the Chief’s office and pass this on,” Nick observed.

Then, his own inspiration hit him.

“Judy, last night, during our reenactment, you were clawing at my hands. Does that mean you did the same with the alien?”

“Why, yes. I was trying to rip its hands off of me or hurt it enough to make it let go of me. Didn’t work.”

It was her turn to watch the contemplative expression on her fox’s face.

“Up and at ‘um, fluff tail. We go to Bogo’s lair right now,” he said as he stood up.



“The Chief free?” Nick asked Howlverson.

“No one’s with him right now,” the feline fem said. “I take it you’ve got something urgent you want to tell him.”

“Yup.”

She thumbed the intercom switch.

“Chief, there’s a certain annoyance factor out here, with a bunny in tow, who says they have something to tell you.”

All of them heard the long suffering sigh from the speaker.

“Send them in.”

Once in the office, Nick had Judy repeat what she had told him about the alien’s hardness. Then they gave him their two ideas about it. Bogo scribbled it all down on a paper.

“It means….” Judy started.

“…that the robot team will have to do further modifications on the model they’ve made,” Bogo completed. “Have to make it smaller to compensate for the additional weight of an exoskeleton or body armor.”

“Hmmmmm, unless that armor is very light in weight,” Nick said, thoughtfully.

Bogo gave the fox a frowning look.

“I’ve read up on some of the latest armor developments. Recently, they’ve made the first prototypes of some hard plate armor that’s barely a couple of millimeters thick and a plate of it that could cover your entire torso would weigh, maybe, about three pounds. The stuff is good against any blade type weapon and, obviously, any fist punches or foot kicks directed against it,” Nick informed Bogo.

“You do so enjoy making life difficult, Wilde,” Bogo groused, after a short pause.

“That’s what I’m here for,” Nick said, with a grin.

“Out, damned fox! Take Miss Hopps on that tour and leave me be,” the buffalo said.

They were almost to the door…

“And Wilde.”

“Yes.”

“Your idea was confirmed early this morning.”


“What idea was he referring to?” Judy inquired once they were out of the building.

“I’ll tell you about it later. Right now, I’m taking you on a tour of some of the site labs to show you the fantastic wonders of our time that they have in them,” Nick said.

The “site”, as it was referred to, looked like a small nicely laid out college campus. One large building was set at each of the four corners with several smaller buildings (Bogo’s office in one of them) scattered about within the block. Two three story apartment buildings and a pair of dormitories provided most of the onsite housing with eight individual houses for visiting guests and dignitaries (Judy inhabited the second biggest one). Numerous broadleaf trees provided shade and there were two small ponds. Organizationally, the place fell under the Dept. of Energy and they did do a lot of research in that field. What the great majority of the mammals working there didn’t know was that hidden in their midst was the agency charged with keeping an eye on the abandon complex. After clearing the entry points, Nick took Judy into a room where a male otter was waiting for them. She was aware that he had eyes on her only as she and Nick walked up to him. The look he gave her made Judy feel like she was pinned down on a dissection board.

“Judy, this is doctor Michael Commbs. He’s head of the biosciences section of our little operation,” Nick introduced. “And doc…”

“Yes?”

His eyes never left Judy.

“…you can get that idea out of your head. You don’t lay a paw on her unless she consents and even then you don’t get to do anything to her unless I consent!”

“Nicholas, I need some more blood and tissue….”

The fox brought his right arm up even with his neck and then slashed the edge of his flattened hand across his throat.

“Not happening, Commbs!”

A look to her right and Judy saw that hard unyielding look on Nick’s face.

“Nick! Biological stasis for Maker’s sake! I ran her blood sample through all of the age check tests. She hasn’t aged one day in the 61 years, four months, and 19 days that passed before you brought her out! That process would solve a tremendous amount of space travel problems! No need for a lot of life support or trip supplies for journeys to Ares and other planets and moons. And that’s just the bare beginning!” the small mustelid plead.

“Then you’ll do better concentrating your energies on the material that put her in that state than on her,” Nick almost growled. “And speaking of which, we’re here to see what you’ve got so far on said material.”

The otter’s beseeching expression held for a few more seconds then it changed.

“What? A grown mammal and he’s pouting?!” Judy thought.

“Well, we’ve managed to get a lot of testing done but that’s going to come to an end pretty soon,” Michael said.

“What? Why’s that?” asked Nick.

“Come with me and I’ll show you.”

They trailed him into the lab where he led them to a table that had four glass topped boxes sitting on it.

“Have a look,” Commbs said, waving a paw at the boxes.

They did.

“What the hay?!” Nick exclaimed.

In each of those containers was, presumably, a piece of the cocoon material he had brought up out of the complex. The material, all of it, had had a textured silver color. What the fox had before him was four pieces of blackened fabric (for lack of a better term) that was maybe half as thick as it originally had been and had lost at least a quarter of its original size.

“What’s happening to them?” the tod asked.

“Best guess is that they’re rotting away. We noticed the deterioration five days ago. Each of those boxes is sealed up air tight to keep oxygen out,” the scientist explained. “This one…”

He touched the leftmost box.

“…is a near pure helium atmosphere. This one is nitrogen, that one’s argon, and that one is Xenon. They’ve been sealed up in there for four days.”

He looked up at Nick.

“None of it is helping slow, let alone stop, the deterioration. We’ve immersed that one big piece you brought in liquid helium, the coldest stuff we’ve got, to try to save it.”

Commbs shook his head.

“As far as we can determine, it’s wasting away just as fast as these are. In another few days, a week at the most, it’ll all be dust, if not less.”

There was a genuine, even heartfelt, note of sadness in the otter’s voice.

“Have you found anything out about it, yet?” Judy asked.

“We’ve been working fast to do as many tests and scans and such as we can before they’re all gone. As such, we haven’t had the time to do any remotely in depth analysis at this time.”

He looked up to both of them.

“There is one thing we have noticed about its structure. And that is that it strongly resembles spider web silk.”


Nick took Judy to another section of the building where he “introduced” her to a large and rather intimidating looking machine. The biggest part of it was shaped like a squat barrel that lay upon its side. That ‘barrel’ had a diameter that was at least five times her height. There was a cylindrical hole, about one and a half times her height, she estimated, in the middle that ran parallel with the unit’s outer walls. Through that opening was a long flat surface that had to be a table.

“Judith L. Hopps, meet our magnetic resonance imaging machine,” he said. “This friendly, as long as you don’t have any metal on or in you, monster uses magnetic fields to see inside of one’s body. With today’s computers and the software they contain, the images it can make of any part of, or the whole, body is flat out fantastic.”

With that, he had one of the techs show her a number of images of scans they had taken of a mammal. Judy was awed at the incredibly minute details that were caught. She got to see a heart beating and she could even see the slight flexing of the outgoing arteries with each beat. An equally astonishing images of lungs as someone breathed. And ‘slice’ images of a brain that showed structures and shapes in minute detail. Then, they “zoomed in” and all of that detail became mind bogglingly insane. It was then that she thought of something.

“Nick, did they put me through this thing?”


He nodded.

“We needed to get the scans in order to, among other things, determine if you had any internal injuries. And, yes, these are your images. And there’s another reason I’ve brought you here to see these.”

He directed the tech to call up the scans of Judy’s waist.

“Because of the ‘stasis’ you were in it meant that any injuries, great or small, you received 61 years ago were still there. While doing that reenactment yesterday I thought of something and included it in the report I sent out to the Chief. He acted on it and confirmed that my idea was correct.”

Nick told the tech to zoom in slowly on that bunny waist.

“Judy, that thing held you in a pretty tight grip, a hold that is tight enough to leave some bruising. Your panicked thrashing around magnified it.”

The tech stopped zooming in and then tapped a couple of keys and the image change. On the outsides of her waist was a sharp edged looking pattern. She could easily make out the outline of three digits that averaged four inches in length (the middle one was the longest of them, about a third of an inch longer). The tech shifted the image so that they were looking at her back and sure enough, there was the outline of what had to be an opposing thumb that was about three inches long and surprisingly broad, almost two inches wide. The tech zoomed in some more and that was when Judy saw the hairline break that ran down the middle of that….

“Two thumbs?” she questioned.

“Looks like it,” said the tech.

“You called it, Fluff. Except for the double thumb, you were right on all of it,” Nick said.