Tell me what you want me to do."
"You"re doing beautifully right now," George a.s.sured her after a speechless instant.
"Except if you can grow an arm, I imagine that will be useful."
"Now we know where we stand," said McCarty to Gumbs.
"Yes. Quite right."
"Major Gumbs," she said crisply, "you are opposite me, I believe?"
"Am I?" asked Gumbs doubtfully.
"Never mind. I believe you are. Now is Meister to your right or left?"
"Left. I know that, anyhow. Can see his eye-stalks out of the corner of my eye."
"Very well." McCarty"s arm rose, with a sharp-pointed frag-ment of rock clutched in the blobby fingers.
Horrified, George watched it bend backward across the curve of the monster"s body. The long, knife-sharp point probed tentatively at the surface three centimeters short of the area over his brain. Then the fist made an abrupt up-and- down movement and a fierce stab of pain shot through him.
"Not quite long enough, I think," McCarty said. She flexed the arm, then brought it back. "Major Gumbs, after my next attempt, you will tell me if you notice any reaction in Meister"s eye-stalks."
The pain was still throbbing along George"s nerves. With one half-blinded eye, he watched the embryonic arm that was growing, too slowly, under the rim; with the other, fascinated, he watched McCarty"s arm lengthen slowly toward him.
It was growing visibly, he suddenly realized, but it wasn"t getting any nearer. In fact, incredibly enough, it seemed to be losing ground.
The monster"s flesh was flowing away under it, expanding in both directions.
McCarty stabbed again, with vicious strength. This time the pain was less acute.
"Major?" she asked. "Any result?"
"No," said Gumbs, "no, I think not. We seem to be moving forward a bit, though.
Miss McCarty."
"A ridiculous error," she replied. "We are being forced back. Pay attention, Major."
"No, really," he protested. "That is to say, we"re moving to-ward the thicket.
Forward to me, backward to you."
"Major Gumbs, I am moving forward, you are moving back."
They were both right, George discovered. The monster"s body was no longer circular; it was extending itself along the axis. A suggestion of concavity was becoming visible in the center. Below the surface, too, there was motion.
The four brains now formed an oblong, not a square.
The positions of the spinal cords had shifted. His own and Vivian"s seemed to be about where they were, but Gumbs"s now pa.s.sed under McCarty"s brain, and vice versa.
Having increased its ma.s.s by some two hundred kilos, the Something-or-other meisterii was fissioning into two indi-viduals - and tidily separating its tenants, two to each. Gumbs and Meister in one, McCarty and Bellis in the other.
Next time it happened, he realized, each product of the fission would be reduced to one brain - and the time after that, one of the new individuals out of each pair would be a monster in the primary state, quiescent, camouflaged, waiting to be stumbled over.
But that meant that, like the common ameba, this fascinating organism was immortal, barring accidents. It simply grew and divided.
Not the tenants, though, unfortunately. Their tissues would wear out and die.
Or would they? Human nervous tissue didn"t regenerate, but neither did it proliferate as George"s and Miss McCarty"s had done; neither did any human tissue build new cells fast enough to account for George"s eye-stalks or Miss McCarty"s arm.
There was no question about it: none of that tissue could possibly be human; it was all counterfeit, produced by the monster from its own substance according to the structural "blue-prints" in the nearest genuine cells. And it was a perfect counterfeit: the new tissues knit with the old, axones coupled with dendrites, muscles contracted or expanded on com-mand.
And therefore, when nerve cells wore out, they could be re-placed. Eventually the last human cell would go, the human tenant would have become totally monster - but "a difference that makes no difference is no difference." Effectively, the tenant would still be human and he would be immortal.
Barring accidents.
Or murder.
Miss McCarty was saying, "Major Gumbs, you are being ridiculous. The explanation is quite obvious. Unless you are deliberately deceiving me, for what reason I cannot imagine, then our efforts to move in opposing directions must be pulling this creature apart."
McCarty was evidently confused in her geometry. Let her stay that way - it would keep her off balance until the fission was complete. No, that was no good. George himself was out of her reach already and getting farther away, but how about Bellis? Her brain and McCarty"s were, if anything, closer together...
What was he to do? If he warned the girl, that would only draw McCarty"s attention to her sooner.
There wasn"t much time left, he realized abruptly. If some physical linkage between the brains actually had occurred to make communication possible, those cells couldn"t hold out much longer; the gap between the two pairs of brains was widening steadily. He had to keep McCarty from discovering how the four of them would be paired.
"Vivian!" he said.
"Yes, George?"
"Listen, we"re not pulling this body apart. It"s splitting. That"s the way it reproduces. You and I will be in one half. Gumbs and McCarty in the other," he lied convincingly, "If they don"t give us any trouble, we can all go where we please."
"Oh, I"m so glad!" What a warm voice she had...
"Yes," said George nervously, "but we may have to fight them; it"s up to them. So grow an arm, Vivian."
"I"ll try," she said uncertainly.
McCarty"s voice cut across hers. "Major Gumbs, since you have eyes, it will be your task to see to it that those two do not escape. Meanwhile, I suggest that you also grow an arm."
"Doing my best," said Gumbs.
Puzzled, George glanced downward, past his own half-formed arm. There, almost out of sight, a fleshy buljjp appeared under Gumbs"s section of the rim! The Major had been work-ing on it in secret, keeping it hidden . . . and it was already better- developed than George"s.
"Oh-oh," said Gumbs abruptly. "Look here, Miss McCarty, Meister"s been leading you up the garden path. Deceiving you, you understand. Clever, I must say. I mean you and I aren"t going to be in the same half. How could we be? We"re on opposite sides of the blasted thing. It"s going to be you and Miss Bellis, me and Meister."
The monster was developing a definite waistline. The spinal cords had rotated now, so that there was clear s.p.a.ce be-tween them in the center.
"Yes," said McCarty faintly. "Thank you, Major Gumbs."
"George!" came Vivian"s frightened voice, distant and weak. "What shall I do?"
"Grow an arm!" he shouted.
There was no reply.
IV.
Frozen, George watched McCarty"s arm, the rock-fragment still clutched at the end of it, rise into view and swing left-ward at full stretch over the bubbling surface of the monster He had time to see it bob up and viciously down again; time to think.
Still short, thank G.o.d - that"s McCarty"s right arm, it"s farther from Vivian"s brain than it was from mine; time, finally, to realize that he could not possibly help Vivian before McCarty lengthened the arm the few centimeters more that were necessary.
The fission was only half complete, yet he could no more move to where he wanted to be than a Siamese twin could walk around his brother.
Then his time was up. A flicker of motion warned him, and he looked back to see a lumpy, distorted pseudo-hand clutch-ing for his eye-stalks.
Instinctively he brought his own up, grasped the other"s wrist and hung on desperately. It was half again the size of his, and so strongly muscled that although his leverage was better, he could not force it back or hold it away. He could only keep the system oscillating up and down, adding his strength to Gumbs"s so that the mark was overshot.
Gumbs began to vary the force and rhythm of his move-ments, trying to catch him off guard. A thick finger brushed the base of one eye-stalk.
"Sorry about this, Meister," said Gumbs. "No hard feelings, you understand.
Between us (oof) I don"t fancy that McCarty woman much - but (ugh! almost had you that time) way I see it, I"ve got to look after myself. Mean to say (ugh) if I don"t, who will? See what I mean?"
George did not reply. Astonishingly enough, he was no longer afraid, either for himself or for Vivian; he was simply overpoweringly, ecstatically, monomaniacally angry. Power from somewhere was surging into his arm. Fiercely concen-trating, he thought Bigger! Stronger! Longer! More arm!
The arm grew. Visibly, it added substance to itself, it lengthened, thickened, bulked with muscle. So did Gumbs"s, however.
He began another arm. So did Gumbs.
All around him the surface of the monster was bubbling violently. And, George realized, the lenticular bulk of it was perceptibly shrinking. Its curious breathing system was in-adequate; the thing was cannibalizing itself, destroying its own tissues to make up the difference.
How small could it get and still support two human tenants?
And which brain would it dispense with first?
He had no leisure to think about it. Scrabbling in the gra.s.s with his second hand, Gumbs had failed to find anything that would serve as a weapon. Now, with a sudden lurch, he swung their entire body around.
The fission was complete.
That thought reminded George of Vivian and McCarty. He risked a split-second"s glance behind him, saw nothing but a featureless ovoid mound, and looked back in time to see Gumb"s half-grown right fist pluck up a long, sharp-pointed dead branch and drive it murderously at his eyes.
The lip of the river-bank was a meter away to the left. George made it in one abrupt surge. Their common body slipped, tottered, hesitated, hands clutching wildly - and toppled, end over end, hurtling in a cloud of dust and pebbles down the breakneck slope to a meaty smash at the bottom.
The universe made one more giant turn around them and came to rest. Half- blinded, George groped for the hold he had lost, found the wrist and seized it.
"Oh Lord!" said Gumbs. "I"m hurt, Meister. Go on, man, finish it, will you? Don"t waste time."
George stared at him suspiciously, without relaxing his grip. "What"s the matter with you?"
"Paralyzed. I can"t move."
They had fallen onto a small boulder, George saw, one of many with which the river-bed was strewn. This one was roughly conical; they were draped over it, and the blunt point was directly under Gumbs"s spinal cord, a few centimeters from the brain.
"Gumbs, that may not be as bad as you think. If I can show you it isn"t, will you give up and put yourself under my orders?"
"How do you mean? My spine"s crushed."
"Never mind that now. Will you or won"t you?"
"Why, yes," agreed Gumbs. "That"s very decent of you, Meister, matter of fact. You have my word, for what it"s worth."
"All right," said George. Straining hard, he managed to get their body off the boulder. Then he stared up at the slope down which they had tumbled. Too steep; he"d have to find an easier way back. He turned and started off to eastward, paralleling the thin stream that flowed in the center of the watercourse.
"What"s up now?" Gumbs asked after a moment.
"We"ve got to find a way up to the top," George said im-patiently. "I may still be able to help Vivian."
"Ah, yes. Afraid I was thinking about myself, Meister. If you don"t mind telling me, what"s the damage?"
She couldn"t still be alive, George was thinking despondently, but if there were any small chance- "You"ll be all right," he said. "If you were still in your old body, that would be a fatal injury, or permanently disabling, anyhow, but not in this thing. You can repair yourself as easily as you can grow a new limb."
"Stupid of me not to think of that," said Gumbs. "But does that mean we were simply wasting our time trying to kill one another?"
"No. If you"d crushed my brain, I think the organism would have digested it and that would be the end of me. But short of anything that drastic, I believe we"re immortal."
"Immortal? That does rather put another face on it, doesn"t it?"
The bank was becoming a little lower, and at one point, where the raw ground was thickly seeded with boulders, there was a talus slope that looked as if it could be climbed. George started up it.
"Meister," said Gumbs after a moment.
"What do you want?"
"You"re right, you know - I"m getting some feeling back already. Look here, is there anything this beast can"t do? I mean, for instance, do you suppose we could put ourselves back together the way we were, with all the - appendages, and so on?"
"It"s possible," George said curtly. It was a thought that had been in the back of his mind, but he didn"t feel like discussing it with Gumbs just now.
They were halfway up the slope.
"Well, in that case," said Grumbs meditatively, "the thing has military possibilities, you know. Man who brought a thing like that direct to the War Department could write his own ticket, more or less."
"After we split up," George offered, "you can do whatever you please."
"But dammit," said Gumbs in an irritated tone, "that won"t do."
"Why not?"