The Enemy Within

Two Newcomer males are chasing two Newcomer females in an abandoned subway. One of the females makes a reference to the two of them being “unclean.” One escapes to the outside, the other stays behind. The one who gets to the outside tries to get help but no one will help her. One calls her a “filthy Eeno.”

The Newcomer girl ends up being shot by a tranquilizer from the pursuing males. A human woman accidentally hits her and she dies and the human woman wonders why no one around would help or even call 911.

At the police station a different Newcomer male is pregnant. George has been shot by a squirt-gun filled with salt water. Sikes tells George that Cathy is moving in with him that day. Albert asks George to help impregnate May, his “wife.” (It's a biological thing for the Tenctonese.)

George and Matt get called to the scene of the accident. George wants nothing to do with the girl who's been killed, though, calling her a “savage.” George evens says that “No Tenctonese should have to look at an Eeno.”

Matt accuses George of being a bigot but George claims he's not, that his feelings about Eeno's come from personal experience.

Meanwhile, the two Newcomers involved in chasing the dead girl have been tied up and thrown into a tunnel and something strange is coming after them.

Cathy is going to do the autopsy and has a human assistant. Something happens during the autopsy when some kind of gas or something is released from the dead body and the human dies.

Cathy explains that, on the ship, the Eenos disposed of garbage, corpses, biological wastes, etc. They were also cannibals.

At home George tells the family that he's going to help Albert and May have a child and Susan is against it. Very much against it.

Cathy tells Sikes that the Newcomer girl had been injected with something toxic and she didn't get it from just cleaning up hazardous wastes.

In the underground area the two tied-up Newcomers are dead, all fluids having been sucked from their bodies, and one of the living Newcomers mentions something about those who have oppressed the Eenos “...will fall on their knees before us.”

Susan is even madder at George over the possibility of his impregnating May.

Sikes finds out the girl worked at a waste disposal plant, so he and George go to check it out. Sikes and Cathy are having trouble adjusting to living together, and George and Susan are having more trouble in their marriage.

Some strange-looking thing called the “Queen Mother” is in the Eeno tunnel.

The other Newcomer girl that was with the one that was killed talks to Sikes. She tells him the girls like her are made pregnant and then their babies are taken away from them, and the woman who talked to Sikes at the plant was lying about other things, too.

Emily is at the station since it's a father/daughter day, but she gets mad at George when he treats the woman who was talking to Sikes badly. She calls her father a bigot.

George tells Albert and May that he won't be the father of their baby after all.

Emily tries to help the woman who talked to Sikes but Newcomers chase her and the woman and Emily gets hit with salt water. Emily is taken to the hospital after the guys get done with her and the woman.

George finally realizes he's been a bigot. George, Matt and Emily take the Newcomer Eeno into the desert to meet a group of other Eenos. The Eenos tell them about the “Queen Mother.”

Sikes is able to verify what the Eenos told them about underground tunnels. Sikes finds out Cathy has been staying at nights at a hotel. Later George and Matt investigate the tunnels. They run into Buck, who has been doing some investigating of his own, and they find eggs which are hatching a hybrid of a Newcomer and an insect.

George and Sikes are captured and one of the Newcomer Eenos tells them about their plans. The Eenos don't know about the eggs, though; they've been betrayed themselves. Buck is able to rescue George and Matt.

After some other events, with the Queen Mother being destroyed, the Bureau of Newcomer affairs agrees to help the Eenos from the plant and George overcomes his bigotry. Matt rents the apartment next to his so Cathy can have someplace to go when she needs to be alone.

Susan agrees to George being involved in having May's baby.

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This is an excellent story and (with one exception) is, as are many others, a mirror in which we can see our society. The Eenos represent the untouchable class in India, and the burakumin, or eta, class in Japan, and largely for the same reason, the outcasts having taken jobs involving death such as tanning hides, etc. To this day prospective spouses in Japan are often checked out very carefully, among other things to find out if they have any “burakumin blood” in their background. Once an outcast always an outcast is the way the matter works.

The exception? The Queen Mother. It might be a threat on a small spaceship, but in a city, much less a country, even a creature like that would be destroyed by the military with little trouble. I think it should have been left out of the script and some other kind of threat substituted.

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