text: Another sleepy morning in Clayton. Clayton is a small town. So small, the morning breakfast coffee shop, lunch deli, and late night saloon are all the same place. (Late night being 10:30pm weekdays, 11pm weekends.) I’m Benji. I own/run the aforementioned establishment, named (you’ll never guess . . .) “Benji’s”. It’s just after 10am, the vacation travelers passing through (well, when there are any), the farmers having done the morning’s chores, and the old retired gang, are the ones filling the establishment at the moment. All two of them today. The door chime rings, “Morning Joe.”, I say, “The usual?” “I’d hate to break tradition. Breakfast Tea, and throw a cheese danish in the microwave a few seconds, if you have one.”, Joe responds. Joe joins Roger and Anna at the bar. Roger and Anna are having coffee’s. Over the years, Joe’s almost turned me from a coffee person to a breakfast tea person. Not totally, but almost. Roger and Anna are updating each other with their children, now all moved away from Clayton. “So Roger, how’s the daughter?”, Anna asks. “Good, good. Well, some days are better than others. She loves being an obstetrician, bringing new life into the world. She’s got a real knack for knowing what they’re feeling, even when they’re too young to tell you anything. Some of it is training, but a lot is natural instinct. Thursday was hard for her. Lost two on the same day. One preemie, expected, that had been on the edge for a while, and one in the ER. Accidental overdose. Just a few seconds looking away, and it got into some cleaner the mother left out. Everyone was hysterical and heartbroken.”, Roger grimaces, “I’m afraid the same natural instinct that lets her know what they are experiencing, makes the pain of the losses even deeper.” “She’s able to cope with it though?” “Yeah, she still runs whenever she can to clear her head, and there’s a psychotherapist near the hospital that sees several of the staff. Try and help then deal with the losses, and keep their personal lives on track.” “How about Melinda?”, Roger asks Anna about her daughter. “Oh, she’s doing well. Still doing materials research at the MIT Nuclear Research Reactor. They irradiate isotopes for medical treatments, but lately she’s been testing new carbon nano-somethings for new reactor designs. They can’t generate power, but they can blast samples researchers send them, to see how they’ll stand up to the environments in a real power reactor. There’s a lot more to it than that. She’s tried to explain a few times, but that’s the most I ever get.” “Now, she’s done now right?” “Graduated? Right, she finished her Doctorate, and just stayed on as full time researcher for the university.” I look out the front window and see Doc Bradley passing by. “How about you Joe? Is Maxwell ready to scoop you off to his private island yet?”, Anna kids Joe. “No, not yet. He’s still working part time at the bar and grill in the Topeka, and part time managing his growing investments. Had a big positive hit on some tech stocks a year or so ago.”, Joe replies. “So he’s Day Trading?”, I ask. “No, he says not. There are too many rules about cashing out at the end of the day and such that go against his instincts. He describes himself as more of a Swing Trader. He’s searching for those stocks he can hold onto for two to three weeks, and then have a few days window to sell for a profit. Or the ‘cyclical's’. Oil Rigs are one of the best examples. They eat and eat and eat money for months, then BANG they’re producing and you get all the investment-time back and more so. Of course it’s not always a BANG, sometimes it’s a fizzle . . . The trick is knowing which companies will be more Bang than Fizzle, and he’s turning out to be pretty good at it.” Doc is just standing in front of the store now, one arm across his chest, bracing the other one he’s resting his chin on. I cup my hands around my mouth and yell “Hey Doc.” At the door. Bradley turns, and comes on in. Pulling up a seat at the bar between Joe and Roger. “Hi.”, he says quietly. Everyone is quiet a moment, seeing if Doc has anything to say to the group, as I slide over a cup of coffee. “Awful long look you have there Doc. What’s wrong?”, I ask. “Sarah and I, we’re . . . Aliens.”, he says. “Not the kind from Mexico I take it.”, Joe asks. “No, not the kind from Mexico.”, Bradley looks ahead. Joe snaps his fingers behind Bradley’s back, and holds out his flat hand to Roger. “Yeah, yeah, I’ll bring you the $20 tomorrow.”, Roger says. “Pffft, like you’ll remember.”, Joe snorts and draws his hand back. Bradley looks at Roger, Anna, Joe, then me. “You mean you knew?”, he asks me. “’Knew’, no we didn’t ‘know’. But there were strong suspicions.”, I wipe drops of spilled coffee off the wooden bar. “You and Sarah have both been here too long, and still look too young. Heck, my father used to call you ‘Ole Doc Bradley’. That, and some of the people in town you’ve saved over the years. We always wondered if you knew a few things the local doctors didn’t. And you’ve had such a range of knowledge, whether it’s battling a flu outbreak, farming, or fixing microwaves and TV’s, you just had a strange depth and breadth of knowledge.” “After all these years, why tell us now?”, I shrug. “It’s Sarah,” (Doc’s wife) “she’s dying.” Everyone sits their cups down and turns to the Doc to listen. “I didn’t know she was sick.”, Anna asks for the group. “She’s been sick the entire time you’ve known us. I’ve just been able to keep it at bay. But time is running out.” Joe put a hand on Bradley’s shoulder, “You’ve treated us all for decades. Seen us inside and out. What’s wrong with Sarah?” “It’ll be hard to explain. There’s no word for it here.”, Doc looks up at me, then back at the coffee cup I’ve just passed to him on the counter. “You know back in the old West days, when they’d talk of people having Tuberculosis leaving New York, or Chicago, or somewhere, and going to Arizona for their health? It’s like that for Sarah. Only, we didn’t come from New York, and it’s not TB.” “Chemical sensitivity to something in the atmosphere. We can live to be near 1300 earth years, under good conditions. But Sarah was looking at only two more years back home. Coming here, the different atmosphere got rid of eighty percent of the problem, but I still had to give her treatments from the ship every few months to keep it fully at bay. The Uranium core fell below drive system levels decades ago, so we can’t leave, but it was still enough to irradiate the Thorium . . . which I used for her treatments. She was doing so much better, I thought she would last another hundred and seventy five years, and let us pass at around the same time. But the Uranium has totally depleted now, and the last of the Thorium is dropping below usable levels. I can’t keep up the treatments.” Roger and Joe both have their hands on Doc’s shoulders now. “So you need Thorium?”, I ask. Doc harrumphed, “No. I HAVE Thorium. I have TWO fricking TONS of fertile Thorium, but it needs to be irradiated into U-233 to power the isotope generator, and the core Uranium has depleted, so I can’t irradiate the Thorium again.” “Two tons? How much does depleted Thorium go for?” “Depleted, raw out of the ground? About $150 per ounce.”, Bradley says, resting his elbows on the bar, and putting his face in his hands. I grab the calculator from behind the bar, place it on the counter. “So”, glasses down on my nose, I’m mumbling out loud while punching numbers, “2 tons, times 2000 pounds per ton, times 16 ounces per pound, times $150 per ounce is . . .”, pressing the last numbers and squinting at the display, “$9.6 million in Thorium.” “How much of it do you need irradiated to treat Sarah to finish your lives together?” “About ten percent.”, Bradley moves his hands back to the coffee cup, and looks up at me. “So”, punching again, “ten percent irradiated and returned to you, and ninety percent of $9.6 million is an $8.64 million ‘gift’ for some company or organization to do the irradiating and keep the whole thing on the down-low.” “Anna,”, I pause, “. . . just how well does Melinda get along with the people where she works?”, I ask. “Way ahead of you.”, Anna says, having placed her phone on the bar, dials and puts it on speaker-phone. “Hi Mom.”, Melinda answers, “Is everything OK, you don’t usually call during the day?”, sounding worried. “No your father and I are fine. I just needed to ask you something. You remember Doc Bradley that did your emergency appendectomy don’t you?” Melinda giggles, “You mean the one that everyone at Benji’s thought was an Alien? Yeah why?” “Yeah, it’s funny you should mention that . . . “, Anna says.