by neetha Napew
“But—“
He did not give me time to frame another argument. He went down the steps, leaving me alone in the living room. I was as frightened as a child in an unlighted bedroom who sees shadows moving on his walls, and can see nothing that could make them. I fumbled along the wall until I found the light-switch for the living room. I flipped it up. Then back. Then up again. Nothing, except darkness.
I took my position by the living room door, where I could watch the cellarway and the porch outside without being forced to move back and forth from one vantage point to another. The snow outside would make a perfect backdrop against which to spot any movement. I shifted my eyes back and forth from one door to the other, waiting . . .
I heard Him step off the last riser onto the cellar floor. There was a very long moment of silence in which I could hear the cabin settling, the creak of its boards, the slight moan of the night wind, the brisk scratching sound of hard snow driven against the window glass. Then came the crashing noise that shook the floor and made me jump and almost turn to run.
“Hey!” I called.
He did not answer.
I strained my ears and could hear the sounds of combat of some sort. There was a shuffling sound of feet on ice, a slapping of flesh as if blows were being exchanged, the grunting and breathing of heavy exertion. But there were no screams or curses as you would expect, and the lack of them made the inhuman aspect of the battle all the more pronounced.
“Are you all right?”
Still no answer.
Except the grunting and shuffling and heavy breathing.
I started toward the cellar stairs, thinking I might help Him somehow, then had the prickly sensation in the back of my neck that the Hyde android had come in from outside while I had not been looking. I imagined I could feel His eyes on me, sense His straining fingers as He reached out to grasp my neck ... I whirled back to the door, ready to cry out, and saw that there was no one there. Just the same, I went back to the door and waited out the battle, hoping the Hyde mother body would succumb to the Jekyll android—though I had nothing to offer, but hope.
The sounds of battle suddenly changed. The shuffling and grunting ceased and were replaced by a harsh hissing noise that reminded me of air escaping from a balloon. I recognized that sound as the same the pseudo-flesh had made outside when the Jekyll android had burned it away from me. One or the other of them was burning the moisture out of its enemy’s flesh, turning it into dry, gray powder. “Are you all right?” I asked again.
Silence, but for the hissing.
“Hey!”
Hissing . . .
I looked over the snow fields, searching for movement, almost wishing I would see some, so that I would not feel as utterly useless as I did now. But there was nothing out there—just whiteness and coldness and wind.
Then the hissing ceased, and there were footsteps on the stairs. I sighed with relief, for I knew the Hyde mother body could not walk. It had to be my Jekyll android coming back. Or ... The thought came to me like a grenade exploding in front of my face. Or: the Hyde android, the one who had shot at me, and who had broken into my apartment, the one who had chased me through the tubeways of the Bubble Drop system . . . The Hyde android might have been down there when the mother body was destroyed through the Jekyll’s chain reaction in its molecular structure. The Hyde may have been waiting for the Jekyll. And, now that the fight was over, it could be either of them coming up those stairs . . .
XVI
For an eternity, for eons and eons, the footsteps sounded on the cellar stairs, rising slowly toward me. My hands trembled, so that the rifle would not remain steady, and I was sweating although there was no heat in the cabin. Frantically, I tried to think of some way to differentiate between the benevolent Jekyll android and the malevolent Hyde. They looked exactly the same, were of the same height and the same weight. Undoubtedly, they would walk the same, sound the same, gesture in the exact same way. There was only one thing . . . I would never forget the difference in their eyes. The eyes of the Hyde android were wild, rimmed with white all around, open wider than the eyes of the Jekyll android.
Then the cellar door pushed open wider, and an android entered the room. In the shadows, I could not see its eyes . . .
“It wasn’t quite dead,” the android said. “I finished it off.”
“Wait a minute,” I managed to say, my words hoarse and dry in my throat.
The android stopped, a dozen feet from me, still hidden by the shadows of the room. A swath of moonlight cut through a window and fell four feet in front of it, but where it now stood was in total blackness. “What’s the matter, Jacob?”
“I’m not sure about you,” I said, holding the rifle on it, my hands shaking, but my finger ready on the trigger.
“Not sure?” He started forward.
“Stop!”
He stopped. “Jacob, I don’t understand what you’re saying. It’s me. I’m not going to hurt you. The Hyde mother body is dead. Down there in the cellar. You want to go down and take a look? You want to prove it to yourself?”
“I’m sure the mother body is dead,” I said. “But how can I know if the Hyde android was also down there— and that maybe it defeated the Jekyll android I came with?”
“You think I’m the Hyde android? The one that chased you through the tubeways?”
“That’s right.”
He laughed and started forward, holding out His hands. He took two steps casually, then, as He was about to step into the swath of moonlight where I would be able to see His eyes, He leaped.
Unsteady as I was, I managed to fire the rifle and score a hit. The sound of the explosion in the room was like a thunderclap in a closet. The windows rattled, and my ears popped. The bullet must have ripped through His left shoulder, for He spun around like a top, clutching at it with His other hand, and went down in a heap. His fingers scrabbled at the baseboard as He tried to pull Himself up. I backed away from Him, until I was up against the doorsill. “You are Hyde, aren’t you?”
Despite the wound, He got to His feet and stood swaying, looking at me with eyes that were now plainly in view in the swath of moonlight. Mad, wild, ugly eyes. He did not answer me. He did not have to.
I fired again. The impact of the slug knocked Him off His feet, backwards into a chair which He toppled over as He went down. He landed hard, bouncing His head on the bare floor, and laid there, motionless for a moment. Dead? It was possible that I had inflicted too great a wound for Him to heal. Perhaps too many internal organs had been ripped apart, and He had ceased to function before He could bring his recuperative powers into play. Then I heard something that cancelled that train of thought: the heavy, rapid beating of His heart . . .
I stood there, watching Him for a while, wondering what I should do. I was partly, surprised that I had been able to gun Him down so easily, even if He was the baser Hyde, part of the original mother body’s character. Still, He resembled a man, and it was a wonder that resemblance had not kept me from shooting. But as I listened to His heart, I realized He was healing Himself as He laid there, and I knew what I had to do. I stepped forward to put another bullet in His back at a point where it would shatter His heart.
When I was three or four feet from Him, I realized that He had changed, that He was no longer in the form of a human being. He had maintained the rough outline of a sprawled body, apparently to lure me closer, but He was in an amoeboid form like the other mother bodies, a blob of flesh with exterior veins and no human features. I remembered what the Jekyll mother body had told me: after the first android had worked out the metamorphosis from human form to amoeboid form, the android selves that came later could make the change almost instantaneously without going through the laborious intermediate steps. I back-stepped, trying to get out of His way. As I moved, I saw the quick movement of the growing pseudopod as it lifted out of the main flesh mass and came at me, rising over my head like the arm of Death.
I backed
into a hassock, fell over it, and rolled to the wall. The change of direction confused the pseudopod, and it smashed into the bare floor and groped around for a moment as if it could not quite believe I had avoided it. But I knew I would not avoid it again, or for long. It was more intelligent, faster, more sensitive. This was a one-sided fight, and we both knew it. I hunched against the wall and fired the rifle at the mother body. The slug tore through the gelatinous mass and out the other side, carrying a good hunk of tissue with it. The pseudopod that had been projected at me quivered, rippled as if in spasm, and drew back into the mother body to convalesce.
I got to my feet and started moving as carefully as possible toward the door which was ten feet to my right, I knew that if I made much noise getting there, the mother body would be alerted by the vibrations and snare me before I was halfway there. Still, the floor creaked under me, the beast sensed my flight, and a thick arm of flesh shot out and slammed into the wall inches before me, blocking the way.
I shot into the mother body to make it withdraw its arm, but it shivered, contracted, and kept the arm in place.
Trapped . . .
The arm turned and began to corral me back the way I had come, back into a corner formed by a heavy chair and the wall. Once in that corner, I would be unable to escape. I could crawl over the chair, perhaps, but I would most assuredly be snared before I had clambered beyond it. I was surprised, momentarily, at how clear and quick my mind was. In the presence of death, with fear sharper and greater than at any other time in my life, my senses had been honed to their sharpest edge. Then I felt the backs of my thighs touch the chair, and I knew there was absolutely nowhere else to go. The mother body would know that too. The pseudopod came at me, suddenly moving with the greatest speed.
What I did next was a small miracle. No, not really a miracle. It was the result of a natural function of the body. You hear about similar cases all the time in the newspapers and stats. A monorail slips off the track and falls to the earth with a full complement of passengers. A man’s wife is pinned in the wreckage. Without thinking, he lifts a ton or ton and a half of debris and heaves it off her, a feat he would never be able to perform if he were not ridden by the demon Fear. It is, of course, the result of an extra helping of adrenalin pumped into his system, not a supernatural act. To a lesser degree, I performed a similar feat when the pseudopod swept at my face. I whirled, grasped the chair and lifted it above my head. The chair only weighed fifty or sixty pounds—but it had been bolted to the cabin floor at each of its four legs. I had torn those bolts loose in one wrenching spasm of effort. I swung the chair, thrust it into the pseudopod. The amoeboid flesh curled around the chair, momentarily unaware that it had not grasped me. While it figured out the situation, I turned, got to the window, used the butt of my rifle to smash it open, and went through onto the porch, down onto the snow to the magnetic sled.
I started to get into the front seat, then stopped. If I left, nothing would have been gained. The Hyde mother body inside that cabin would go into the cellar —or remain where it was—and set up a food-seeking network, secure deer, wolves and rabbits, and begin to produce other android selves. The Jekyll mother body back in Harry’s cellar would not be able to come seeking it until it had produced androids of its own. Then they would be evenly matched, just where we had started less than an hour ago. No, the only hope for any of us was for me to go back in there and kill the Hyde mother body.
I didn’t relish that idea.
But I stopped trying to run. I turned back to the cabin.
At the doorway, the Hyde mother body was dragging itself outside.
I took ammunition out of my pocket and loaded the rifle to its full eight-shot capacity. Then, walking to the porch steps and going to the top of them, I aimed into the mass of pink-tan flesh and fired. Once. Twice. Three times.
The Hyde mother body jerked, rolled backwards. Chunks of it laid behind it, dead, but the main mass sealed the wounds and tried to recover.
I fired the other five bullets into it, then quickly reloaded.
The mother body had pulled away from the door and was six feet inside. I walked to the doorway and pumped four more shots into it. It flopped around now, moved away from me as swiftly as it could. It was trying to get to the cellar steps. I moved around it and fired the other four shots into it, making it move into the living room instead. It was obviously quite badly hurt, for the holes were not healing as quickly now. Some of them seemed not to be healing at all. Some of the veins had been punctured and had let loose quantities of blood. It had sealed those off and redirected the blood flow, but the loss had still weakened it. I was wounding it faster than it could recover.
While I reloaded, my fingers steady now, the mother body moved deeper into the living room, seeking escape and finding none. When I slipped the eight shells into the rifle chambers, I was left with only three more in my pocket. I would have to bring all of this to an end with eleven shots. With what I had in mind, it was just possible—just maybe. I slammed the gun together and fired four times into the mass of flesh, aiming for the largest, pulsating veins. I hit them twice. Blood spurted up, then settled to a steady flow. I turned and ran into the kitchen, hoping the place was stocked the way it was intended to be.
I scurried about, flung open cupboard doors on all sides until, at the next to the last place to look, I found what I wanted. There was a lantern and a gallon can of kerosene, a box of matches. Even in this modern day and age, a generator had been known to break down. The ancient lantern would come in handy at such times. Besides, it helped preserve the illusion that those living in the cabins were roughing it; it was a conversation piece to show their friends when they came up for a weekend.
I took out the matches and the kerosene and hurried back into the living room. It occurred to me, as I went through the door between rooms, that the mother body might be waiting for me. Luckily, it was still concerned with getting itself in shape. Crossing toward it, I fired two more bullets into it to keep it busy, then opened the can of kerosene and poured the contents over the thing. It did not like the burning fluid and wriggled to get away from it. I stepped back a dozen feet, struck a big kitchen match on the side of the matchbox, and threw it onto the Hyde mother body.
The flames burst up like a crimson blossom.
The Hyde mother body stood on end, rippled up into a tower of flesh. It began attempting to change itself back into the android form, but could only half form the legs and arms and head of a humanoid creature. The mass pitched forward, writhing.
I fired the last two shots into it, got the other three bullets from my pocket, loaded, and used those too. The fire was intense, catching the wooden floor and curling away to the walls and ceiling. In a moment, the place would be an inferno. I went to the door and looked back. The Hyde mother body was considerably smaller. It seemed to be cracking apart, trying to separate itself from those parts already hopelessly destroyed by fire and bullets. But the flames closed in more relentlessly. At last, I went out into the night and boarded my sled, confident that the schizoid split of His personality had been rectified. Jekyll lived, back in Harry’s cellar. Hyde had been done away with. I started the sled and took it back up the slope, back to tell the Jekyll about our success.
I stopped outside the cabin, got out, leaving my guns.
I went up the steps, across the porch, into the living room.
The lights were still on.
“Congratulations,” He said.
“How—“
“I read your mind, Jacob.”
“Of course,” I said. I would have to get used to that, have to learn to accept the fact that He knew what was going on inside my head every bit as well as I did.
“We can go ahead now. I have defeated myself and am free to proceed.”
“One thing,” I said. “I’m curious. When you have changed us, will we have the ability to read each other’s minds?”
“Yes,” He said.
“But what is t
hat going to do to the world?”
“It will be difficult at first—“
I went down the cellar steps. “I would imagine!”
“But remember that your intellects will increase in every way. You will not merely receive new abilities and retain your old, more savage outlook on things. You will be able to learn to accept mind reading as a natural part of life.”
“The death of language,” I said, suddenly startled by this implication.
“That’s correct,” He said. “There will be a single, universal language, the telepathic language of the mind.”
I sat down on the steps.
“Come closer,” He said.
“What now?”
“What we have been fighting for, what we have been looking forward to. What you kidnapped me from the laboratory for. What we ran and hid for.”
I stood up and went to the pulsating mass of the Jekyll mother body, realized that I could drop the identifying tags now that the Hyde creatures had been destroyed. “I’m afraid,” I said, feeling a tinge of my old inferiority complex, “that I am just a little too dense to get your meaning.”
“It’s time,” He said.
He touched me.
His flesh was cool, but not unpleasant.
“It’s time to begin,” He said. -
My flesh tingled.
His pseudopods thinned down and His flesh entered my body, reached into my cells, up my spinal column . . .
“You will be the first,” He said.
. . . into my brain . . .
“The first of the new race of man,” He said.
“You are changing me,” I said.
“Yes.”
Tingling, burning, turning inside me. . .
“I am changing you, Jacob. I am changing you at last . . .”
XVII