If he crawled into camp in his present condition, it was a certainty that he would be shot at before any questions were asked, and only a minor possibility that narcotic gas would be used instead of a machine rifle.
No, he decided, he was on the right course. The idea was to get away from camp, so that he wouldn"t be found by the relief party which was probably searching for him now. Get away, bury himself in the forest, and study his new body: find out how it worked and what he could do with it, whether there actually were others in it with him, and if so, whether there was any way of communicating with them.
It would take a long time, he realized, but he could do it.
Limply, like a puddle of mush oozing over the edge of a tablecloth, George started down into the gully.
Briefly, the circ.u.mstances leading up to George"s fall into the Something-or-other meisterii were as follows: Until as late as the mid-twenty-first century, a game in-vented by the ancient j.a.panese was still played by millions in the eastern hemisphere of earth. The game was called go. Although its rules were almost childishly simple, its strategy included more permutations and was more difficult to master than chess.
Go was played at the height of development - just before the geological catastrophe that wiped out most of its devotees - on a board with nine hundred shallow holes, using small gill shaped counters. At each turn, one of the two players placed a counter on the board, wherever he chose, the object being to capture as much territory as possible by surrounding it com-pletely.
There were no other rules; and yet it had taken the j.a.panese almost a thousand years to work up to that thirty-by-thirty board, adding perhaps one rank and file per century. A hun-dred years was not too long to explore all the possibilities of that additional rank and file.
At the time George Meister fell into the gelatinous green-and brown monster, toward the end of the twenty-third cen-tury ad, a kind of go was being played in a three-dimensional field which contained more than ten billion positions. The Galaxy was the board, the positions were star-systems, men were the counters. The loser"s penalty was annihilation.
The Galaxy was in the process of being colonized by two opposing federations, both with the highest aims and princi-ples. In the early stages of this conflict, planets had been raid-ed, bombs dropped, and a few battles had even been fought by fleets of s.p.a.ceships. Later, that haphazard sort of warfare be-came impossible. Robot fighters, carrying enough armament to blow each other into dust, were produced by the trillion. In the s.p.a.ce around the outer stars of a cl.u.s.ter belonging to one side or the other, they swarmed like minnows.
Within such a screen, planets "were safe from attack and from any interference with their commerce . . . unless the enemy succeeded in colonizing enough of the surrounding star-systems to set up and maintain a second screen outside the first. It was go, played for desperate stakes and under im-possible conditions.
Everyone was in a hurry; everyone"s ancestors for seven generations had been in a hurry. You got your education in a speeded-up capsulized form. You mated early and bred frantic-ally. And if you were a.s.signed to an advance ecological team, as George was, you had to work without proper preparation.
The sensible, the obvious thing to do in opening up a new planet with unknown life- forms would have been to begin with at least ten years of immunological study conducted from the inside of a sealed station. After the worst bacteria and viruses had been conquered, you might proceed to a little cautious field work and exploration. Finally - total elapsed time fifty years, say - the colonists would be shipped in.
There simply wasn"t that much time.
Five hours after the landing Meister"s team had unloaded fabricators and set up barracks enough to house its 2,628 members.
An hour after that, Meister, Gumbs, Bellis and McCarty had started out across the level cinder and ash left by the trans-port"s tail jets to the nearest living vegetation, six hundred meters away. They were to trace a spiral path outward from the camp site to a distance of a thousand meters, and then return with their specimens - providing nothing too large and hungry to be stopped by machine rifle had previously eaten them.
Meister, the biologist, was so hung down with collecting boxes that his slender torso was totally invisible. Major Gumbs had a survival kit, binoculars and a machine rifle. Vivian Bellis, who knew exactly as much mineralogy as had been contained in the three-month course prescribed for her rating, and no more, carried a light rifle, a hammer and a speci-men sack. Miss McCarty - no one knew her first name - had no scientific function. She was the group"s Loyalty Monitor. She wore two squat pistols and a bandolier bristling with cartridges. Her only job was to blow the cranium off any team member caught using an unauthorized communicator, or in any other way behaving oddly.
All of them were heavily gloved and booted, and their heads were covered by globular helmets, sealed to their tunic collars. They breathed through filtered respirators, so finely meshed that - in theory - nothing larger than an oxygen molecule could get through.
On their second circuit of the camp, they had struck a low ridge and a series of short, steep gullies, most of them cloaked with the dusty-brown stalks of dead vegetation. As they started down into one of these, George, who was third in line - Gumbs leading, then Bellis, and McCarty behind George -stepped out onto a protruding slab of stone to examine a cl.u.s.ter of plant stalks rooted on its far side.
His weight was only a little more than twenty kilograms on this planet, and the slab looked as if it were firmly cemented into the wall of the gully. Just the same, he felt it shift under him as soon as his weight was fully on it. He found himself falling, shouted, and caught a flashing glimpse of Gumbs and Bellis, standing as if caught by a high-speed camera. He heard a rattling of stones as he went by. Then he saw what looked like a shabby blanket of leaves and dirt floating toward him, and he remembered thinking, It looks like a soft landing anyhow ...
That was all, until he woke up feeling as if he had been pre-maturely buried, with no part of him alive but his eyes.
Much later, his frantic efforts to move had resulted in the first fractional success.
From then on, his field of vision had advanced fairly steadily, perhaps a meter every fifty minutes, not counting the times when someone else"s efforts had inter-fered with his own.
His conviction that nothing remained of the old George Meister except a nervous system was not supported by obser-vation, but the evidence was regrettably strong.
To begin with, the anesthesia of the first hours had worn off, but his body was not reporting the position of the torso, head and four limbs he had formerly owned. He had, instead, a vague impression of being flattened and spread out over an enormous area. When he tried to move his fingers and toes, the response he got was so multiplied that he felt like a centipede.
He had no sense of cramped muscles, such as would norm-ally be expected after a long period of paralysis - and he was not breathing. Yet his brain was evidently being well supplied with food and oxygen; he felt clearheaded, at ease and healthy.
He wasn"t hungry, either, although he had been using energy steadily for a long time. There were, he thought, two possible reasons for that, depending on how you looked at it. One, that he wasn"t hungry because he no longer had any stomach lining to contract; two, that he wasn"t hungry be-cause the organism he was riding in had been well nourished by the superfluous tissues George had contributed.
Two hours later, when the sun was setting, it began to rain. George saw the big, slow-falling drops and felt their dull im-pacts on his "skin". He didn"t know whether rain would do him any damage or not, but crawled under a bush with large, fringed leaves just to be on the safe side. When the rain stop-ped, it was night and he decided he might as well stay where he was until morning. He did not feel tired, and it occurred to him to wonder whether he still needed to sleep. He composed himself as well as he could to wait for the answer.
He was still wakeful after a long time had pa.s.sed, but had made no progress toward deciding whether this answered the question or prevented it from being answered, when he saw a pair of dim lights coming slowly and erratically toward him.
George watched them with an attentiveness compounded of professional interest and apprehension. Gradually, as they came closer, he made out that the lights were attached to long, thin stalks which grew from an ambiguous shape below -either light organs, like those of some deep-sea fish, or simply luminescent eyes.
George noted a feeling of tension in himself which seemed to suggest that adrenalin or an equivalent was being released somewhere in his system. He promised himself to follow this lead at the first possible moment; meanwhile, he had a more urgent problem to consider. Was this approaching organism the kind which the Something meisterii ate, or the kind which devoured the Something meisterii? If the latter, what could he do about it?
For the present, at any rate, sitting where he was seemed to be indicated. The body he inhabited made use of camouflage in its normal, or untenanted state, and was not equipped for speed. So George held still and watched, keeping his eyes half closed, while he considered the possible nature of the approach-ing animal.
The fact that it was nocturnal, he told himself, meant noth-ing. Moths were nocturnal; so were bats - no, the devil with bats, they were carnivores.
The light-bearing creature came nearer, and George saw the faint gleam of a pair of long, narrow eyes below the two stalks.
Then the creature opened its mouth.
It had a great many teeth.
George found himself crammed into some kind of crevice in a wall of rock, without any clear recollection of how he had got there. He remembered a flurry of branches as the creature sprang at him, and a moment"s furious pain, and nothing but vague, starlit glimpses of leaves and soil.
How had he got away?
He puzzled over it until dawn came, and then, looking down at himself, he saw something that had not been there before. Under the smooth edge of gelatinous flesh, three or four pro-jections of some kind were visible. It struck George that his sensation of contact with the stone underneath him had changed, too. He seemed to be standing on a number of tin points instead of lying flat.
He flexed one of the projections experimentally, then thrust it out straight ahead of him. It was a lumpy, single-jointed cari-cature of a finger or a leg.
II.
Lying still for a long time, George Mcister thought about it with as much coherence as he could muster. Then he waggled the limb again. It was there, and so were all the others, as solid and real as the rest of him.
He moved forward experimentally, sending the same mess-ages down to his finger- and-toe nerve-ends as before. His body lurched out of the cranny with a swiftness that very nearly tumbled him down over the edge of a minor precipice.
Where he had crawled like a snail before, he now scuttled like an insect.
But .how? No doubt, in his terror when the thing with the teeth attacked, he had unconsciously tried to run as if he still had legs. Was that all there was to it?
George thought of the carnivore again, and of the stalks sup-porting the organs which he had thought might be eyes. That would do as an experiment. He closed his eyes and imagine them rising outward, imagined the mobile stalks growing, growing ... He tried to convince himself that he had eyes like that, had always had them, that everyone who was anyone had eyes on stalks..
Surely, something was happening.
George opened his eyes again and found himself looking straight down at the ground, getting a view so close that it was blurred, out of focus. Impatiently, he tried to look up. All that happened was that his field of vision moved forward a matter often or twelve centimeters.
It was at this point that a voice shattered the stillness. It sounded like someone trying to shout through half a meter of lard. "Urghh! Lluhh! Eeraghh /"
George leaped convulsively, executed a neat turn and swept his eyes around a good two hundred and forty degrees of arc. He saw nothing but rocks and lichens. On a closer inspection, it appeared that a small green and orange larva or grub of some kind was moving past him. George regarded it with sus-picion for a long moment, until the voice broke out again: "Ellfff! Elffneee!"
The voice, somewhat higher this time, came from behind. George whirled again, swept his eyes around- Around an impossibly wide circuit. His eyes were on stalks, and they were mobile whereas a moment ago he had been staring at the ground, unable to look up.
George"s brain clattered into high gear. He had grown stalks for his eyes, all right, but they"d been limp, just extensions of the jellylike ma.s.s of his body, without a stiffening cell-structure or muscular tissue, to move them. Then, when the voice had startled him, he"d got the stiffening and the muscles in a hurry.
That must have been what had happened the previous night. Probably the process would have been completed, but much more slowly, if he hadn"t been frightened. A protective mech-anism, obviously. As for the voice- George rotated once more, slowly, looking all around him. There was no question about it; he was alone. The voice, which had seemed to come from someone or something stand-ing just behind him, must in fact have issued from his own body.
The voice started again, at a less frantic volume. It burbled a few times, then said quite clearly in a high tenor, "Wha.s.s happen"? Wheh am I?"
George was floundering in enough bewilderment. He was in no condition to adapt quickly to more new circ.u.mstances, and when a large, dessicated lump fell from a nearby bush and bounced soundlessly to within a meter of him, he simply stared at it.
He looked at the hard-sh.e.l.led object and then at the laden bush from which it had dropped. Slowly, painfully, he worked his way through to a logical conclusion. The dried fruit had fallen without a sound. This was natural, because he had been totally deaf ever since his metamorphosis. But he had heard a voice!
Ergo, hallucination or telepathy.
The voice began again. "Help! Oh, dear, I wish someone would answer!"
Vivian Bellis. Gumbs, even if he affected that tenor voice, wouldn"t say, "Oh, dear."
Neither would Miss McCarty.
George"s shaken nerves were returning to normal. He thought intently, I get scared, grow legs. Bellis gets scared, grows a telepathic voice. That"s reasonable, I guess - her first and only impulse would be to yell.
George tried to put himself into a yelling mood. He shut his eyes and imagined himself cooped up in a terrifying alien medium, without any control or knowledge of his predica-ment. He tried to shout: "Vivian!"
He went on trying, while the girl"s voice continued at inter-vals. Finally she stopped abruptly in the middle of a sentence.
George said, "Can you hear me?"
"Who"s that? What do you want?"
"This is George Meister, Vivian. Can you understand what I"m saying?"
"What-"
George kept at it. His pseudo-voice, he judged, was a little garbled, just as Bellis"s had been at first. At last the girl said, "Oh, George-I mean Mr. Meister! Oh, I"ve been so frightened. Where are you?"
George explained, apparently not very tactfully, because Bellis shrieked when he was through and then went back to burbling.
George sighed, and said, "Is there anyone else on the premises? Major Gumbs?
Miss McCarty? Can you hear me?"
A few minutes later two sets of weird sounds began almost simultaneously. When they became coherent, it was no trouble to identify the voices.
Gumbs, the big, red-faced professional soldier, shouted, "Why the h.e.l.l don"t you watch where you"re going, Meister? If you hadn"t started that rock-slide, we wouldn"t be in this mess!"
Miss McCarty, who had a grim white face, a jutting jaw, and eyes the color of mud, said coldly, "Meister, all of this will be reported. All of it."
It appeared that only Meister and Gumbs had kept the use of their eyes. AH four of them had some muscular control, though Gumbs was the only one who had made any serious attempt to interfere with George"s locomotion. Miss McCarty, not to George"s surprise, had managed to retain a pair of functioning ears.
But Bellis had been blind, deaf and dumb all through the afternoon and night. The only terminal sense-organs she had been able to use had been those of the skin - the perceptors of touch, heat and cold, and pain. She had heard nothing, seen nothing, but she had felt every leaf and stalk they had brushed against, the cold impact of every rain drop, and the pain of the toothy monster"s bite. George"s opinion of her went up several notches when he learned this. She had been terrified, but she hadn"t been driven into hysteria or insanity.
It further appeared that n.o.body was doing any breathing and n.o.body was aware of a heartbeat.
George would have liked nothing better than to continue this discussion, but the other three were united in believing that what had happened to them after they got in was of less importance than how they were going to get out.
"We can"t get out," said George. "At least, I don"t see any possibility of it in the present state of our knowledge. If we-"
"But we"ve got to get out!" Vivian cried.
"We"ll go back to camp," said McCarty coldly. "Immedi-ately. And you"ll explain to the Loyalty Committee why you didn"t return as soon as you regained consciousness."
"That"s right," Gumbs put in self-consciously. "If you can"t do anything, Meister, maybe the other technical fellows can."
George patiently explained his theory of their probable re-ception by the guards at the camp. McCarty"s keen mind de-tected a flaw. "You grew legs, and stalks for your eyes, accord-ing to your own testimony. If you aren"t lying, you can also grow a mouth. We"ll announce ourselves as we approach."
"That may not be easy," George told her. "We couldn"t get along with just a mouth.
We"d need teeth, tongue, hard and soft palates, lungs or the equivalent, vocal cords, and some kind of subst.i.tute for a diaphragm to power the whole busi-ness. I"m wondering if it"s possible at all, because when Miss Bellis finally succeeded in making herself heard, it was by the method we are using now. She didn"t-"
"You talk too much," McCarty interrupted. "Major Gumbs, Miss Bellis, you and I will try to form a speaking apparatus. The first to succeed will receive a credit mark on his record. Commence."
George, being left out of the contest by implication, used his time trying to restore his hearing. It seemed to him likely that the Whatever-it-was meisterii had some sort of division of labor built into it, since Gumbs and he - the first two to fall in - had kept their sight without making any special effort, while matters like hearing and touch had been left for the late-comers. This was fine in principle, and George approved of it, but he didn"t like the idea of Miss McCarty"s being the sole custodian of any part of the apparatus whatever.
Even if he were able to persuade the other two to follow his lead - and at the moment this prospect seemed dim - McCarty was certain to be a holdout. And it might easily be vital to all of them, at some time in the near future, to have their hearing hooked into the circuit.
He was distracted at first by muttered comments between Gumbs and Vivian - "Getting anywhere?" "I don"t think so. Are you?" - interspersed between yawps, humming sounds and other irritating noises as they tried unsuccessfully to switch over from mental to vocal communication. Finally McCarty snapped, "Concentrate on forming the necessary organs instead of braying like jacka.s.ses."
George settled down to work, using the same technique he had found effective before. With his eyes shut, he imagined that the thing with all the teeth was approaching in darkness - tap; slither; tap; click. He wished valiantly for ears to catch those faint approaching sounds. After a long time he thought he was beginning to succeed - or were those mental sounds, unconsciously emitted by one of the other three? Click. Slither. Swish. Sc.r.a.pe.
George opened his eyes, genuinely alarmed. A hundred meters away, facing him across the shallow slope of rocky ground, was a uniformed man just emerging from a stand of black vegetation spears. As George raised his eye-stalks, the man paused, stared back at him, then shouted and raised his rifle.
George ran. Instantly there was a babble of voices inside him, and the muscles of his "legs" went into wild spasms.
"Run, demit!" he said frantically. "There"s a trooper with-"
The rifle went off with a deafening roar and George felt a sudden hideous pain aft of his spine. Vivian Bellis screamed. The struggle for possession of their common legs stopped and they scuttled full speed ahead for the cover of a nearby boulder.
The rifle roared again. George heard rock splinters screech-ing through the foliage overhead. Then they were plunging down the side of a gully, up the other slope, over a low hum-mock and into a forest of tall, bare-limbed trees.
George spotted a leaf-filled hollow and headed for it, fight-ing somebody else"s desire to keep on running in a straight line. They plopped into the hollow and crouched there while three running men went past them.
Vivian was moaning steadily. Raising his eye-stalks cautiously, George was able to see that several jagged splinters of stone had penetrated the monster"s gelatinous flesh near the far rim. They had been very lucky. The shot had apparently been a near miss - accountable only on the grounds that the trooper had been shooting downhill at a moving target - and had shattered the boulder behind them.
Looking more closely, George observed something which excited his professional interest. The whole surface of the monster appeared to be in constant slow ferment, tiny pits, opening and closing as if the flesh were boiling ... except that here the bubbles of air were not forcing their way outward, but were being engulfed at the surface and pressed down into the interior.
He could also see, deep under the mottled surface of the huge lens-shaped body, four vague clots of darkness which must be the living brains of Gumbs, Bellis, McCarty - and Meister.
Yes, there was one which was radically opposite his own eye-stalks. It was an odd thing, George reflected, to be looking at your own brain. He hoped he could get used to it in time.
The four dark spots were arranged close together in an almost perfect square at the center of the lens. The spinal cords, barely visible, crossed between them and rayed outward from the center.