“I don’t know,” Parrol said. “I haven’t paid him any attention since I dumped him there. He doesn’t seem to have moved. I expect dragging him in through the shore swamps on the last stretch didn’t do him much good.”
Nile went over to the pilot, reached for his wrist, announced after a moment, “He’s alive, anyway. I picked up some dope in the lab office. I’ll give him a shot to make sure he stays quiet until the police come for him. Any immediate plans for Ilium Weldrow?”
“No,” Parrol said. “I was hoping we’d find him still here. I would have enjoyed seeing his face when we walked in on him. But we’ll leave him to Fiawa. Let’s get out our reports and get the show on the road.”
Nile brought a dope gun out from under her cloak, bent briefly over the pilot with it, replaced it and joined Parrol at the communicator. He was feeding the cards into the telewriting attachment.
“They’re for Dabborn at Narcotics,” he said. “I used his personal code. I’ve warned him there may be a leak in the office and that if he tries to talk to me from there, the higher-ups in the nidith business could get the word immediately and take steps to avoid being implicated. We’ll talk to Fiawa at his home. He and Dabborn can get together then and work out the details of the operation.”
Nile nodded. Parrol turned on the communicator, dialed a number. The connection light went on immediately. He depressed the transmission button on the telewriter.
A woman’s voice said quietly, “Message received. Do you want to wait for a reply?”
Parrol remained silent. Some ten seconds later, the connection light went out.
“Dabborn’s secretary,” he said. “So he’s in the office. Now let’s get our chief of police out of bed, and things should start moving.” He flicked out the cards, dropped them into a disposer, dialed another number.
It took Fiawa about a minute to get to the communicator. Then his deep, sleep-husky voice announced, “Fiawa speaking. Who is it?”
“For a man,” Machon observed, “who’s just put in seven weeks in the hospital—too deathly ill to see visitors—you seem remarkably fit!”
Parrol grinned across the dinner table at him.
“I had a few visitors,” he said. “Dabborn and Fiawa dropped in from time to time to let me know how they were coming along with the nidith operation.”
“They’ve done a bang-up job of rounding up the Agenes gang!” the secretary of the Ranchers Association assured him. “A couple of the big shots just might get off. The rest of them are nailed down!”
“I know it—and I’m glad I’ll be there as a prosecution witness.” Parrol hesitated, added, “Strictly speaking, neither Nile nor I have been ill. We were extremely uncomfortable for a while, but we could have received visitors any time after the first two weeks in the hospital. But Nile insisted no one should see us until we were ready to be discharged, and except for talking to Dabborn and Fiawa I’ve gone along with her in that. I think I can tell you about it privately now. She’s prepared a paper for her xenobiological society covering the whole affair, and the paper will be out in a few weeks. But I warn you Nile still wouldn’t want the details of our experience to become general knowledge.”
“Don’t worry—I can keep my mouth shut,” Machon told him. “Go ahead.”
“Well, I’ll give you Nile’s theory. It seems essentially correct. There’s that fraya-chalot symbiosis pattern. Temporarily it’s a complete symbiosis in every sense. The fraya has to be adapted to underwater living for a short period each year, then readapted promptly to surface living. And the frayas are pseudomammalian. Their bodies are no more capable of rearranging themselves suddenly to such a drastic extent than the sea beef’s or our own.”
“Wait a minute!” Machon said. “The way I got it, you did adapt—fantastically! You and Nile literally turned into sea hags, didn’t you?”
“We did—but we didn’t actually change. The chalot was building on to what was there. What we had to do was supply material for it to work with. In other words, we ate. When the changes are of a minor kind, you get hungry. When they’re major ones, you find yourself periodically ravenous. The chalot builds its structures and maintains them. It has to be fed, or the structures collapse. If you don’t supply it with extraneous food, it starts in on your body reserves. We found that out. You feel you’re starving to death fast, which probably is exactly what would happen if you did nothing about it. So you eat compulsively.
“The chalot has to accomplish two things with its host animals. It has to enable them to get down into the fire forests and live there a time so they can eat the adult chalot plants and release the seeds of the plants by doing it. And it has to avoid killing or injuring the host, so the host can come back next year and repeat the process. It does nothing directly to the host body unless it has to draw on it for food. It turns itself into body supplements which combine with the host body to perform various functions. It’s an unstable unit, but it’s a unit which can exist for a while on the bottom of the ocean trenches.
“It remains a unit only as long as there is chalot around to keep it up. The frayas feed on the adult plants in the rifts, and they retain their underwater form throughout the breeding season. Then they’ve cleaned out the current crop of chalot and come back to the surface. The sea beef that got out into the Continental Rift here remained underwater breathers and feeders only for the days it took the cloud of chalot spores that had originated in the Tuskason Rift to pass through on the Meral. There are no chalot plants in the local fire forests, so up the beef came again. They were pretty plump animals when they were brought in, weren’t they?”
“Yes,” Machon said. “That fire forest diet didn’t hurt them any. In fact, they seem to have thrived on it. But what they’d put on was mostly fat.”
Parrol said wryly, “Uh-huh! Mostly fat . . . Nile and I picked up a load of the spores in one of the ranch farms here and probably another one in the water beyond the shelf. The spores added waterbreathing equipment to our systems but nothing else, until we had to go down in the Tuskason Rift. We needed a complete change then and got it. We turned into the chalot’s human deep-water variant—sea hags—on the way. But we stayed sea hags only a few hours because the spores we’d originally absorbed here were being used up in maintaining the change structures, and there was no live chalot left in the Tuskason Rift to replace them.
“The chalot evidently has had genetic experience with a wide variety of hosts. The fraya is the only native host left, but Nandy-Cline was swarming once with pseudomammals of that class. We can assume that many of them had a similar symbiotic relationship with the chalot the fraya still has, because the adaptations the chalot performs vary with the species and are according to the needs of the species. The sea beef really showed much less change than the fraya does in its underwater form.
“On the other hand, the change from an air-breathing human to a deep-water sea hag is an extremely radical one. The chalot went all out on us, and at intervals during those hours we had to eat ravenously to give it what it needed to maintain the form. Lord, how we ate!
“And then we were up on the surface again and began to change back. Nile didn’t mention it at the time, but she suspected what was happening when she saw the manner in which we were changing back.”
“Yes?” said Machon.
“Fat,” Parrol said. “When all that elaborate, dense chalot structure which keeps you alive and in action under a thousand feet of ocean begins to break down, it’s converted into fat—the host body’s fat! That’s lovely if you’re a fraya. For them, it’s a kind of bonus they get out of their relationship with the chalot. They don’t have to eat for a month afterwards. In the sea beef it wasn’t too noticeable because the chalot hadn’t added too much to them to start with.
“But Nile and I—!”
He shook his head. “I won’t drag in all the grisly details, but Dr. Tay had to use plastiskin to hold us together. Literally. We were monstrous. He had us floating in tanks and kept
whittling away at us surgically for the first ten days. After that, he figured a crash diet would see us through. It did, but it’s taken almost two months to get back to normal—and it wasn’t more than two weeks ago that Nile would let even me see her again.
“She’s got that old figure back now, but her vanity’s still hurt. She’ll get over it presently. But if anyone happens to smile when they mention something overweight—like sea beef—to her for another month or so, my guess is they’ll still be inviting a fast fist in the eye.”
RESEARCH ALPHA
The aim of the experiment was only to make a superhuman. It succeeded far beyond that goal!
I
Barbara Ellington felt the touch as she straightened up from the water cooler. It was the lightest of touches, but quite startling—momentary, tiny flick of something ice-cold against the muscle of her right arm at the shoulder.
She twisted quickly and rather awkwardly around from the cooler, then stared in confusion at the small well-dressed, bald-headed man who stood a few feet behind her, evidently awaiting his turn for a drink.
“Why, good afternoon, Barbara,” he said pleasantly.
Barbara was now feeling embarrassment. “I . . .” she began incoherently. “I didn’t know anyone else was near, Dr. Gloge. I’m finished now!”
She picked up the briefcase she had set against the wall when she stopped for a drink and went on dong the bright-lit corridor. She was a tall, lean-bodied girl—perhaps a little too tall but, with her serious face and smooth, brown hair, not unattractive. At the moment, her cheeks burned. She knew she walked with wooden, self-conscious stiffness, wondering if Dr. Gloge was peering after hex, puzzled by her odd behavior at the water cooler.
“Rut something did touch me,” she thought.
At the turn of the corridor, she glanced back. Dr. Gloge had had his drink, and was walking off unhurriedly in the opposite direction. Nobody else was in sight.
After she’d turned the comer, Barbara reached up with her left hand and rubbed the area of her upper arm where she had felt that tiny, momentary needle of ice. Had Dr. Gloge been responsible for—well, for whatever it had been? She frowned and shook her head. She’d worked in Gloge’s office for two weeks immediately after she’d been employed here. And Dr. Henry Gloge, head of the biology section at Research Alpha, while invariably polite, even courteous, was a cold, quiet, withdrawn character, completely devoted to his work.
He was not at all the kind of man who would consider it humorous to play a prank on a stenographer.
And it hadn’t, in fact, been a prank.
From Dr. Henry Gloge’s point of view, the encounter with Barbara Ellington in the fifth floor hallway that afternoon had been a very fortunate accident. A few weeks earlier he had selected her to be one of two unwitting subjects for Point Omega Stimulation.
His careful plans had included a visit to her bedroom apartment when she was not there. He had installed equipment that might, be of value later in his experiment. And it was not until these preliminaries were accomplished that he had headed for the steno pool, only to find that Barbara had been transferred out of the department.
Gloge dared not risk inquiring about her. For if the experiment had undesirable results, no one must suspect a connection between a lowly typist and himself. And even if it were successful, secrecy might continue to be necessary.
Gloge chafed at the delay. When on the fourth day of his search for her he suddenly recognized her walking along a hallway fifty feet ahead of him, it seemed as if fate was on his side after all.
As the girl paused at a water cooler, he came up behind her. Quickly, he made sure that no one else was in view. Then he drew the needle jet gun and aimed it at her shoulder muscles. The gun carried a gaseous compound of the Omega serum, and the only sign of a discharge, when he fired it, was a thin line of mist from the needle end to her skin.
His task then accomplished, Gloge hastily slipped the Instrument into the holster inside his coat and buttoned his coat.
Barbara, still carrying her briefcase, presently came to title offices of John Hammond, special assistant to the president of Research Alpha, which lay on the fifth floor of what was generally considered the most important laboratory complex on Earth. Alex Sloan, the president, was on the floor above.
Barbara paused before the massive black door with Hammond’s name on it. She gazed possessively at the words Scientific Liaison and Investigation lettered on the panel. Then she took a small key from her briefcase, slipped it into the door lock and pressed to the right.
The door swung silently back. Barbara stepped through into the outer office, heard the faint click as the door closed behind her.
There was no one in sight. The desk of Helen Wendell, Hammond’s secretary, stood across the room with a number of papers on it. The door to the short hall which led to Hammond’s private office was open. From it Barbara heard Helen’s voice speaking quietly.
Barbara Ellington had been assigned to Hammond—actually, to Helen Wendell—only ten days before. Aside from the salary increase, part of her interest in the position had been the intriguing if somewhat alarming figure of John Hammond himself, and an expectation that she would find herself in the center of the behind-the-scene operations of Scientific Liaison and Investigation. In that, she had so far been disappointed.
Barbara walked over to Helen Wendell’s desk, took some papers from her briefcase, and was putting them into a basket when her eye caught the name of Dr. Henry Gloge on a note in the adjoining basket. Entirely on impulse—because she had seen the man only minutes before—she bent over the paper.
The note was attached to a report. It was a reminder to Hammond that he was to see Dr. Gloge today at three-thirty in connection with Gloge’s Omega project. Barbara glanced automatically at her watch; it was now five minutes to three.
Unlike most of the material she handled, this item was at least partly understandable. It referred to a biological project, “Point Omega Stimulation.” Barbara couldn’t remember having heard of such a project while she was working under Dr. Gloge. But that was hardly surprising—the biological section was one of the largest in Research Alpha. From what she was reading, the project had to do with “the acceleration of evolutionary processes” in several species of animals, and the only real information in the report seemed to be that a number of test animals had died and been disposed of.
Was the great John Hammond spending his time on this sort of thing?
Disappointed, Barbara put tot report back into the basket and went on to her own office.
As she sat down at her desk, Barbara noticed a stack of papers which hadn’t been there when she had left on her errand. Attached to them was a note in Helen’s large, dear handwriting. The note said:
Barbara,
This came in unexpectedly and must be typed today. It obviously will require several hours of overtime. If you have made special arrangements for the evening, let me know and I’ll have a typist sent up from the pool to do this extra work.
Barbara felt an instant pang of possessive jealousy. This was her job, her office! She definitely did not want some other girl coming in.
Unfortunately, she did have a date. But to keep an intruder from taking her place in John Hammond’s office, even if only for a few hours, was the more important matter. That was her instant decision, needing no second thought. But she sat still a moment, biting her lip; for that moment she was a woman considering how to put off a male who had a quick temper and no patience. Then she picked up the telephone and dialed a number.
For some months now, Barbara had settled her hopes for the future on Vince Strather, a technician hi the photo Jab. When his voice came on the telephone, she told him what had happened, finished contritely, “I’m afraid I can’t get out of it very well, Vince, so soon after starting here.”
She could almost feel Vince absorbing the impact of the denial she was communicating; she had discovered quickly in their brief romance that he was trying to
move her towards premarital intimacy, a step she was wholly determined not to take.
She was relieved now, when he accepted her explanation. She replaced the receiver, feeling very warm toward him. “I really do love him!” she thought.
It was a few moments later that she suddenly felt dizzy.
The feeling was peculiar, not like her usual headaches. She could feel it build up, a giddy, light swirling which seemed both within and without her, as if she were weightless, about to drift out of the chair, turning slowly over and over.
Almost simultaneously, she became aware of a curious exhilaration, a sense of strength and wellbeing, quite unlike anything she could remember. The sensations continued for perhaps twenty seconds . . . then they faded and were gone, almost as abruptly as they had come.
Confused and somewhat shaken, Barbara straightened up in her chair. For a moment she considered taking aspirin. But there seemed no reason for that. She didn’t feel ill. It even seemed to her that she felt more awake and alert.
She was about to return to her typing when she became aware of a movement out of the comer of her eye. She looked up and saw that John Hammond had paused in the doorway of her little office.
Barbara froze, as she always did in his presence, then slowly she turned to face him.
Hammond stood there, staring at her thoughtfully. He was a man about six feet tall, with dark brown hair and steel gray eyes. He seemed to be about forty years old and he was built like an athlete. Yet it was not his appearance of physical strength but the fine intelligence of his face and eyes that had always impressed her during the ten days since she had been assigned to his office. She thought now, not for the first time: “This is what really great people are like.”
Complete Short Fiction (Jerry eBooks) Page 164