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perhaps?”
    “We don’t know how that would affect Bub’s unique anatomy.”
    “How about a cigarette at least? A last meal?”
    “He had Cap’n Crunch,” Andy offered.
    “You gentlemen are more than welcome to perform the last rites, if you wish,” Sun said.
    Again, Andy caught the faintest hint of a smirk.
    “Sacrilege,” the Rabbi said. But he approached the sheep and held its head, speaking a few words of Hebrew.
    “Perhaps Bub can be trained in the ways of shohet,” Andy said. “Then he can eat according to shehita.”
    If Shotzen was impressed by Andy’s knowledge of his people’s tongue, he didn’t show it. Instead the chubby holy man shook his head in disagreement. “Bub won’t eat kosher meat. He’s trefah, a blood drinker.”
    The rabbi went back to his seat. Sun walked the sheep to the Red door. Father Thrist refused to look.
    “Rabbi Shotzen says that prayer every time we feed Bub a sheep,” Sun told Andy when they entered the Red Arm.
    “It wasn’t a prayer. The rabbi simply apologized to the sheep, because it wasn’t going to be killed by a proper butcher, according to the Jewish laws of slaughtering animals humanely.”
    Sun punched in the code for the first gate, and Andy made sure he noted the five digit number. The titanium bars swung open, but the sheep didn’t want to budge.
    “She smells him,” Sun said. She took a black swatch of cloth from her coat pocket and slipped it over the animal’s eyes. “They’re calmer when they can’t see.”
    With some firm tugging and a sniff of cereal, the sheep moved forward.
    “You’re a vet, you’re supposed to take care of animals. Doesn’t this bother you, marching one off to death?”
    Sun sighed. “Have you ever eaten a hamburger?”
    “Sure, but…”
    “Bub’s a carnivore, like a lion, like a shark, like you and me. As much as everyone around here is shocked by Bub’s eating habits, if they ever visited a slaughterhouse they’d be a thousand times more repulsed.”
    “But you’re a vet.”
    “I’m a vet who eats hamburgers. I also spent six months in Africa studying lions.”
    Andy said hello in four African tribal languages.
    She wasn’t impressed.
    They came to the second door, and Andy punched in the numbers on the panel. Nothing happened.
    “Two different codes,” Sun said. “You can’t have a secret government compound without security overkill.”
    The sheep tried to bolt at the sound of the heavy door clanging open, but Sun had a tight grip on the reins.
    Andy stopped at Red 14 and grasped the door handle but he didn’t turn it right away. The moment stretched.
    “You don’t have to go in,” Sun said. “I just needed you to help in Orange 12.”
    She was giving him a graceful way out, but he knew her opinion of him would drop even further if he took it.
    Andy turned the knob and entered.
    The smell hit him again, heady and musky, almost making Andy gag. This time the room wasn’t empty. Standing among the medical equipment was a man in a lab coat. He was tall and intense looking, with a thin line for a mouth and wide expressive eyes. His hair was light gray, short and curly. Andy put him at about forty, but he could have gone eight years either way.
    “Oh good, feeding time,” the man said.
    “Dr. Frank Belgium, this is Andy Dennison,” Sun said. “He’s the translator.”
    “Good good good, we’re in need of one. Attack the mystery from all angles, the more the better. Yes yes yes.”
    “Frank’s a molecular biologist.” Sun said it as if that was explanation for Dr. Belgium’s weird speech patterns and birdlike movements. “How’s the sequencing going, Frank?”
    “Slow slow slow. Our boy—yes, he is a boy, even though there isn’t any evidence of external genitalia—his bladder empties through the anus, like a bird. He has 88 pairs of chromosomes. We’re looking at over 100,000 different genes, about quadruple what humans have. Billions of codons. Even the Cray is having a hard