by neetha Napew
“And I could just as easily kill you where you are standing,” He said. “There would be no necessity to have you in the cellar to kill you. Now quit this nonsense and come down here. You know damn well I would not harm you.”
It did not make sense. If it had not been Him, who had it been in the tubeways? I had seen the creature chasing me, had seen the face—and the feet that had changed into tough plates to trod down the sensory cilia. That had not been my imagination. I had the cuts and bruises to prove it had all really happened. Yet, somehow, and for some unknown reason, I believed Him now. He would not kill me. Surely, He was as good as He said. I opened the cellar door and went down the steps, turning the light on when I passed the switch.
He was in the same form as before, perhaps a bit larger. Although He had no eyes, but a prismatic ball set in a fold of flesh, I knew He was watching me intently. Although there were no apparent ears on His body, I knew He was listening. I stopped before Him, half expecting a death blow from a pseudopod, half hoping there really was some explanation for His recent behavior. “How did you know about my being chased? You say it wasn’t you, and yet—“
“You’re upset, Jacob. You’re not thinking. I read your mind when you pulled up outside, of course.”
“That doesn’t matter,” I said. “Let’s get on with it. If that wasn’t you back there in the tubeways, and if that wasn’t you that shot at me and broke into my apartment, who was it?”
He hesitated.
“It was you, wasn’t it,” I said.
“Not exactly.”
“Then tell me, damn it!”
“I’m trying to think how best to phrase it,” He said.
I waited.
Later He said, “It was the Devil, Jacob.”
“The Devil?” He was joking with me, I thought. He was leading me on, laughing quietly at me, getting me primed for the moment when He would strike me down.
“I am not going to strike you down!” He said, slightly exasperated.
“And I’m supposed to take you seriously when you tell me it is the Devil that has been chasing me, the Devil in your form?”
“Wait,” He said. He was quiet for a time, then spoke again, His tone designed to be even more soothing and convincing than usual. “I have made a mistake. I have been couching all of my explanations in terms that you would more easily understand. I implied that I was your God, thus letting you fall back on your standard religious theories. You are what—Christian? Jewish?”
“My father was Jewish, my mother Christian. I was raised by a Christian. If I am anything—and sometimes I have my doubts—I am a Christian. But I still don’t see what you are getting at.”
“Forget what I said about being God. Forget what I said about your being chased by the Devil.”
“Forgotten.”
“I’ll try to explain this in more realistic terms, with less emotional and romantic trappings than religious theories possess. First, it is true that I am the creature— or a facet of the creature—that created this universe, one of many universes. The why for this, I cannot convey to you. It is on an aesthetic level that you could not begin to conceive of. I wrought the matter of the universe, set into motion the patterns and laws and processes that formed the solar systems. I did not take a direct hand in the evolution of life, for the aesthetic values of creation are in the monumental forces of universe-making, not in the creation of life, which will happen anyway if you do a good job on the making of the universe itself.”
“You are saying that you are merely another living creature—admittedly on a different plane of existence— and that you created a universe where there was, previously, nothing.”
“Not just void,” He corrected me. “Chaos. The basic forces were there. I had but to enlarge upon them and order them.”
“I’ll accept that much,” I said. “I had already accepted the fact that you were God. This is only a variation.”
I sat down on the bottom cellar step, a little less apprehensive, but still not happy. “But why did you come to us? You’ve been content, you say, to let life develop by itself. You said you weren’t interested in the evolution of life, but only in the artistic value of ordering and setting the universe into motion.”
“I didn’t say I wasn’t interested. I just said that the evolution of life is secondary to the larger and more beautiful work of the universe in toto. Believe me, Jacob, there is much more of beauty in the singing of the galaxies, in the patterns of multi-galactic revolution and rotation, than there can ever be in the life of a single creature, even a creature with the intelligence of your species. But your species, after all, is a part of my creation. To ignore it would be tantamount to not caring about the exactness of my creation. For example, a painter may do a hundred-foot mural, a thing of grand scale. But that does not mean that he will not be exasperated if only one square inch of the canvas is ineptly done. He will, instead, be more concerned with that single badly done square inch than with the entire hundreds of square feet that are done well.”
I thought a moment. “You are saying, then, that man, my species, is that flaw on your great canvas, that one square inch that somehow did not turn out right.”
“No,” He said. “You are not even equal to one- square inch in this universe. There are many races that have evolved into flawed species. When I am finished here, I will go to other places. Indeed, other facets of me are working on other races at this very moment. Remember, what you see before you is only a small fragment of me, less than one millionth of my sum personality and power.”
He was not leading me on. What He was saying should have struck a false note, should have seemed unreal, but it was delivered with such assurance and in such a level tone that I knew what He said was perfectly true. “But why enter our world in the form of the android? That seems so roundabout.”
“Try to picture me, Jacob. I am not just big, not just huge, but vast. Only part of my intellect, part of my life power, can be introduced into your world at once. Otherwise, the balance of this arm of the universe would be upset. And even this minor part of me is not easily insinuated into your world. It must assume a living presence, yet it would not be possible to contain it in a human child. The nerves, the brain cells, would burn out if I tried to house my life power in human flesh.”
“But the android is suitable?”
“Because I can shape it,” He said. “I can restructure it like putty. The android’s flesh is quite different, as you know, from real flesh. I can adapt its nervous system to contain my life energy. It was the only door into your world that I could find.”
“And so you came to us through the android. Why?”
“As I have said before, to help you. You have not evolved along standard lines. Most species, at your race’s age, would be able to control its body, its aging. Most species would be immortal and nearly invulnerable. I have come to see that you develop as you should have.”
“And when you have finished that?”
“I will leave. Your section of the creation will be finished. There will be no reason to remain. The painter, after having perfected his mural, does not spend the rest of his life returning to it each day to check how well the paints are weathering. I do not insinuate that this analogy of me to a painter is fully accurate, but it is the closest explanation I can give you.”
“One more thing, then,” I said.
“The Devil we spoke of earlier, the android that has come to harm you.”
“Yes.”
“I have explained to you,” He said, “that I am not actually a God as you would think of one, but a living creature, as yourself, who is much, much more complex than you will ever be, and who lives on a higher plane of existence than you can ever reach. As with any living creature, my personality is compounded of various strains, from good and kindness to what you would term wickedness and evil. Any given part of my personality is composed of equal parts of all these various characteristics. The day following
your arrest, the “evil” part of this tiny facet of me, enclosed in this android mother body, split from the good part, and entered the second android self I made. Before I realized what had happened, he was gone and out of my reach.”
“Jekyll and Hyde,” I said.
“Yes. I read that back at the laboratory. It is much like the infamous Hyde, this other android that is now out of my control.”
“What could I do?” I asked. I could not quite see how I, a mere mortal, could assist a creature of His dimensions. It was like a man asking a polywog for help against a stampeding herd of cattle.
“The android that attempted to kill you,” He said, “was most likely manufactured by the Hyde android that I created and which escaped from here three days ago. I believe the Hyde android found a place, perhaps nearby, where it could hide and develop into a mother body capable of creating more Hyde androids. The first one, it sent to kill you—or at least to harass you into making an attempt to return here and destroy me. That last is likely.” ‘
“Wait a minute,” I interrupted. I was thinking about the pseudopods that had come out of the earth and had engulfed that white-tailed deer. I explained what I had seen, and He waited for me to finish, though He must have read my mind ahead of me and must have known what I would say.
“I have a similar method of trapping game,” He said. “But it does not extend nearly as far as a mile. I believe you have found our Hyde.”
“Now what?”
“I can send this other self I have created to destroy the Hyde mother body. Unfortunately, I have taken time to extend my game-catching network and have not created more than this single android. And the Hyde android, of course, which we are seeking.”
“I’ll accompany it,” I said. “I might not be much help, but at least there will be two of us.”
“Thank you, Jacob.”
“Do we start now?” I asked.
“Now,” the mother body said.
The android walked up the stairs with me to where I had dropped the guns. I picked them up now. “How will we kill it?” I asked.
“I have better ways than any weapons you could find, Jacob,” He said. “Let’s go.”
We went out into the cold and the whipping snow . . .
XV
I should have felt some tremendous elation, I suppose. I had found out that He was, after all, everything that He claimed to be, that He did want to help mankind, that He was going to be a great benefit to us. I was standing on the threshold of a revolution, the likes of which the world had never before seen, and I could not summon up enough excitement to make a dog wag its tail. Perhaps it was because, in showing me what wonders lay ahead for Man, He had also shown me that Man was, in essence, a very small portion of things, a piece of a painting by a being so far superior, so much his intellectual master, that he could never hope to understand the real basis upon which the universe turned. One day, Man would reach the end of his explorations, and there would be nowhere else to go. This alone would not be so bad, but he would also have to cope with the understanding that there was more beyond what he knew, more than he could ever hope to grasp. The quitting would not be what hurt Man. It would be the knowing that he had quit before absolutely everything had been conquered.
The only emotion I felt as we boarded the sled was fear.
Hyde, after all, was every bit as formidable as the good part of His personality. A very deadly creature . . .
The android climbed in behind me, did not bother buckling himself in. After all, He was not prone to fatal accidents, not with a healing system that would patch up a torn artery or vein in seconds. I switched on the field, felt the sudden bouyancy as it hummed to life. The wheel trembled under my hands—or was it my hands that trembled? I put the sled in gear, tramped on the accelerator, and took it down the snowy slope, around the sharper rises, toward the edge of the woods around which I would have to navigate. In a few minutes we were moving in behind the cabin, near the spots where the pseudopods of the Hyde mother body had leaped out of the ground and had brought down the deer. I slowed, eased-off on the accelerator, and coasted to within fifty feet of the cabin, stopped the sled altogether, and shut down the magnetic field. With the motor oft, I knew for certain that it was my hands that trembled, not the wheel.
“You walk behind me,” He said.
We got out of the sled.
“We have two things to worry about,” He went on. “One, the mother body. It is immobile and offers us the smallest problem. It is set in its present form and cannot change to escape. Two, there is the Hyde android it has created. It may not be anywhere in the area, as far as that goes. It may still be back in New York, trying to find you. But if it is here, in this area, it may try to circle around behind us while we are at work on the mother body. Remember, as soon as the mother body knows we are here, the Hyde android will know as well, for they are one and the same organism.”
I nodded. I was listening to what He said, yet I felt as if I were in a dream, as if none of this could really be happening to me.
We started for the house.
The snow here was only half a foot deep, for the wind had scoured the knoll upon which the cabin rested, carrying away the other few feet that had originally been deposited. There were even patches where the hard, bare earth was exposed. Fleetingly, I thought how much easier that would make things if we had to turn tail and run . . .
We were no more than a dozen feet from the front steps of the little house when I felt the ground tremble beneath me. At first, I thought of an earthquake, then quickly remembered what I had seen the Hyde mother body do to that white-tailed deer. Abruptly, there were pseudopods of pink-tan jelly flesh springing up around the Jekyll android walking before me. He turned, as if looking for a way out, then raised His hands to defend Himself. At that point, my view was cut off, because a second group of the slimy tentacles leaped up on all sides of me—quivering, swaying columns of shapeless flesh. I had been carrying my rifle in ready position, the pin-gun tucked in an open pocket where it could be reached easily, if the need arose not to be lethal. I dropped to one knee, raised the rifle, and fired into the fleshiest of the pseudopods. The blast tore a chunk of the flesh loose and sent it spiraling away, presumably to land in the snow, where it would wither and die, separated from the healing influences of the Hyde mother body. The pseudopod hesitated, drew back, then started down again, apparently more anxious than before to have me. I fired again, ripped all of the head of the false arm loose with that blast. But it was too late now. The other tentacles dropped onto me, melting together and encasing me in a digestive vacuole.
I tried to pull on the rifle trigger again, but the false flesh had poured over me like cement, had engulfed me so thoroughly that I could not move my fingers. I could not lift my arms to bring the rifle into a firing position that would not blow off my own foot.
Trapped . . .
I felt a strange, prickly wetness on my face, the sensation of dampness against my clothing. For a moment, I could not imagine what was happening, and then I understood in a flash of horrible insight. The first of the digestive enzymes were seeping out of the vacuole wall. My face would be the first to dissolve under the strong acid. My clothes would rot, fall away, and the rest of my body would be prey to the mother body’s juices.
I screamed. It came out as a dead, muffled sound. Like a child crying in his blankets . . .
I struggled against the rubbery flesh, tried to kick and squirm my way out of its death hold, but I soon found out why the deer had been unable to escape. The cloying, sticky-cold pseudo-flesh was glue-like and could not be shaken off.
I felt vomit rising in my throat, tried to force it back down. There was no time for upchucking now, no time at all. There was only time to think, think, think like crazy. Or, maybe, there was only time to die . . .
I screamed. But when I opened my mouth, the pseudo-flesh crept into it, sour tasting. I tried to spit it out, could not manage that. I gagged and realized
I was going to suffocate before I could be dissolved by the enzymes. At least, I thought, that is something to be thankful for.
Then, abruptly, the vacuole broke open, split back like a speedpod ready to spill its inner fruits. A cold draft of Alaskan air blew across my face, drying the enzymes before they could do more than set my flesh to burning with a pimpled rash. I had cursed the cold of Cantwell before. Now I blessed it. It was infinitely more preferable to the sticky, warm closeness of the digestive vacuole. The false flesh began to shrivel around me, wrinkle and draw away as if I was unpleasant to touch. Or taste. In minutes, I was lying free, the flesh curled about me like burned paper, gray, dry and powdery.
“That was close,” He said, bending over me and offering me a hand.
“What—“
“The Hyde could have done the same thing to me if it had thought of it first. I simply used my fingers to reach inside its body and start minor molecular changes. Once I started the process, it continued, a chain reaction that coursed back to the mother body along the line of the pseudopod.”
“You mean the Hyde mother body is already dead?”
“We’ll see,” He said.
I followed Him up the porch steps and into the house. The door was unlocked, and a window in it was broken out. We searched the upstairs rooms, were satisfied there was nothing there, nothing like a dead mother body, then went to the cellar door. He opened it and looked down the stairs into what must have been a cellar, almost identical to Harry’s. We could not see it, for it was in pitch darkness. He reached for the light switch, flipped it on. Nothing happened.
We stood there, looking down into the dark. Deep, ugly dark . . .
“It’s dead,” I said.
“We have to be certain.”
“You said there was a chain reaction.”
“There was.”
“Then it would have died.”
“I’m going down,” He said. “I have to be sure, and there is no way to check it out except to go look. You stand guard here, in case the Hyde android is somewhere about. If you see it, don’t try to be a hero. Shout. I may be reading your mind, and I may not, so give me vocal warning.”