by Damon Knight
Then his time was up. A flicker of motion warned him, and he looked back to see a lumpy, distorted pseudo-hand clutching for his eye stalks.
Instinctively he brought his own hand 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 couldn’t 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 movements, trying to catch him off guard. A thick finger brushed the base of one eye stalk.
“Sorry about this, Meister,” said Gumbs’s voice. “No hard feelings in it, on my side. Between us (oof) I don’t fancy that McCarty woman much—but (ugh! almost had you that time) beggars can’t be choosers. Ah. 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 concentrating, he thought Bigger! Stronger! Longer! More arm!
The arm grew. Visibly it added substance to itself, it lengthened, thickened, bulged with muscle. So did Gumbs’s.
He began another arm. So did Gumbs.
All around him the surface of the monster was bubbling violently. And, George realised finally, the lenticular bulk of it was perceptibly shrinking. Its curious breathing system was inadequate; the thing was cannibalising 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 grass 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 Gumbs’s half-grown right fist pluck a long, sharp-pointed dead branch out of the grass. In the next instant the thing came whipping at his eyes.
The lip of the river bank was a meter away to the left. George made it in one abrupt surge. They 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’s voice, “that’s done me. 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?”
“I tell you I’m done,” said Gumbs pettishly. “Paralysed. I can’t move.”
They had fallen, George saw, onto a small boulder, 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,” he said, “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,” said 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 down 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 still 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 impatiently. “I may still be able to help Vivian.”
“Ah, yes. Afraid I was thinking about myself, Meister. If you don’t mind telling me—”
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.”
“Good Lord,” said Gumbs. “Stupid of me not to think of that. But look here, Meister, does that mean we were simply wasting our time trying to kill one another? I mean to say—”
“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,” said Gumbs. “Good Lord… 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 earth 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, Meister, 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 Gumbs 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 said, “you can do whatever you please.”
“But, dammit,” said Gumbs in an irritated tone, “that won’t do.”
“Why not?”
“Because,” said Gumbs, “they might find you.” His hands reached up abruptly, grasped a small boulder, and before George could stop him, pried it sidewise out of its socket in the earth.”
The larger boulder above it trembled, dipped and leaned ponderously outward. George, directly underneath, found that he could move neither forward nor back.
“Sorry again,” he heard Gumbs saying, with what sounded like genuine regret. “But you know the Loyalty Committee. I simply can’t take the chance.”
The boulder seemed to take forever to fall. George tried twice more, with all his strength, to move out of its path. Then, instinctively, he put his arms straight under it.
At the last possible instant he moved them to the left, away from the center of the toppling gray mass.
It struck.
George felt his arms breaking like twigs, and saw a looming grayness that blotted out the sky; he felt a sledge-hammer impact that made the earth shudder beneath him.
He heard a splattering sound.
And he was still alive. That astonishing fact kept him fully occupied for a long time after the boulder had clattered its way down the slope into silence. Then, finally, he looked down to his right.
The resistance of his stiffened arms, even while they broke, had been barely enough to lever the falling body over, a distance of some thirty centimeters… The right half of the monster was a flattened shattered ruin. He could see a few flecks of pasty gray matter, melting now into green-brown translucence as the mass flowed slowly together again.
In twenty minutes the last remains of a superfluous spinal cord had been reabsorbed, the monster had collected itself back into its normal lens shape, and George’s pain was diminishing. In five minutes more his mended arms were strong enough to use. They were
also more convincingly shaped and colored than before—the tendons, the fingernails, even the wrinkles of the skin were in good order. In ordinary circumstances this discovery would have left George happily bemused for hours; now, in his impatience, he barely noticed it. He climbed to the top of the bank.
Thirty meters away a humped green-brown body like his own lay motionless in the dry grass.
It contained, of course, only one brain. Whose?
McCarty’s, almost certainly; Vivian hadn’t had a chance.
But then how did it happen that there was no visible trace of McCarty’s arm?
Unnerved, George .walked around the creature for a closer inspection.
On the far side he encountered two dark-brown eyes, with an oddly unfinished appearance. They focused on him after an instant, and the whole body quivered slightly, moving toward him.
Vivian’s eyes had been brown; George remembered them distinctly. Brown eyes with heavy dark lashes in a tapering slender face… But did that prove anything? What color had McCarty’s eyes been? He couldn’t remember for certain.
There was only one way to find out. George moved closer, hoping fervently that the something meisterii was at least advanced enough to conjugate, instead of trying to devour members of its own species…
The two bodies touched, clung and began to flow together. Watching, George saw the fissioning process reverse itself: from paired lenses the alien flesh melted into a slipper shape, to an ovoid, to lens shape again. His brain and the other drifted closer together, the spinal cords crossing at right angles.
And it was only then that he noticed an oddity about the other brain: it seemed to be lighter and larger than his, the outline a trifle sharper.
“Vivian?” he said doubtfully. “Is that you?”
No answer. He tried again; and again.
Finally:
“George! Oh dear—I want to cry, but I can’t seem to do it.”
“No lachrymal glands,” George said automatically. “Uh, Vivian?”
“Yes, George.” That warm voice again…
“What happened to Miss McCarty? How did you—I mean, what happened?”
“I don’t know. She’s gone, isn’t she? I haven’t heard her for a long time.”
“Yes,” said George, “she’s gone. You mean you don’t know? Tell me what you did.”
“Well, I wanted to make an arm, because you told me to, but I didn’t think I had time enough. So I made a skull instead. And those things to cover my spine—”
“Vertebrae.” Now why, he thought dazedly, didn’t I think of that? “And then?” he said.
“I think I’m crying now,” she said. “Yes, I am. It’s such a relief. And then, after that, nothing. She was still hurting me, and I just lay here and thought how wonderful it would be if she weren’t in here with me. And then, after a while, she wasn’t. Then I grew eyes to look for you.”
The explanation, it seemed to George, was more perplexing than the enigma. Staring around in a vague search for enlightenment, he caught sight of something that had escaped his notice before. Two meters to his left, just visible in the grass, was a damp-looking grayish lump, with a suggestion of a stringy extension trailing off from it…
There must, he decided suddenly, be some mechanism in the something meisterii for disposing of tenants who failed to adapt themselves—brains that went into catatonia, or hysteria, or suicidal frenzy. An eviction clause.
Somehow, Vivian had managed to stimulate that mechanism—to convince the organism that McCarty’s brain was not only superfluous but dangerous—“poisonous” was the word.
Miss McCarty—it was the final ignominy—had not been digested, but excreted.
By sunset, twelve hours later, they had made a good deal of progress. They had reached an understanding very agreeable to them both; they had hunted down another herd of the pseudo-pigs for their noon meal; and, for divergent reasons—on George’s side because the monster’s normal metabolism was grossly inefficient when it had to move quickly, and on Vivian’s because she refused to believe that any man could be attracted to her in her present condition—they had begun a serious attempt to reshape themselves.
The first trials were extraordinarily difficult, the rest surprisingly easy. Again and again they had to let themselves collapse back into amoeboid masses, victims of some omitted or malfunctioning organ; but each failure smoothed the road; eventually they were able to stand breathless but breathing, swaying but erect, face to face—two protean giants in the fortunate dimness, two sketches of self-created Man.
They had also put thirty kilometers between themselves and the Federation camp. Standing on the crest of a rise and looking southward across the shallow valley, George could see a faint funereal glow: the mining machines, chewing out metals to feed the fabricators that would spawn a billion ships.
“We’ll never go back, will we?” said Vivian.
“No,” said George soberly. “They’ll come to us, in time. We have lots of time. We’re the future.”
And one thing more, a small thing, but important to George; it marked his sense of accomplishment, of one phase ended and a new one begun. He had finally completed the name of his discovery—not, as it turned out, anything meisterii at all. Spes hominis:
Man’s hope.
AN EYE FOR A WHAT?
I
On his way across the wheel one morning, Dr. Walter Alvarez detoured down to C level promenade. A few men were standing, as usual, at the window looking out at the enormous blue-green planet below. They were dressed alike in sheen-gray coveralls, a garment with detachable gauntlets and hood designed to make it convertible into a spacesuit. It was uncomfortable, but regulation: according to the books, a Survey and Propaganda Satellite might find itself under attack at any moment.
Nothing so interesting had happened to SAPS 3107A, orbiting the seventh planet of a G-type star in Ophiuchus. They had been here for two years and a half, and most of them had not even touched ground yet.
There it was, drifting by out there, blue-green, fat and juicy—an oxygen planet, two-thirds land, mild climate, soil fairly bursting with minerals and organics.
Alvarez felt his mouth watering when he looked at it. He had “wheel fever”; they all did. He wanted to get down there, to natural gravity and natural ailments.
The last month or so, there had been a feeling in the satellite that a break-through was coming. Always coming: it never arrived.
A plump orthotypist named Lola went by, and a couple of the men turned with automatic whistles. “Listen,” said Olaf Marx conspiratorially, with a hand on Alvarez’s arm, “that reminds me, did you hear what happened at the big banquet yesterday?”
“No,” said Alvarez, irritably withdrawing his arm. “I didn’t go. Can’t stand banquets. Why?”
“Well, the way I got it, the Commandant’s wife was sitting right across from George—”
Alvarez’s interest sharpened. “You mean the gorgon? What did he do?”
“I’m telling you. See, it looked like he was watching her all through dinner. Then up comes the dessert—lemon meringue. So old George—”
The shift bell rang. Alvarez started nervously and looked at his thumbwatch. The other men were drifting away. So was Olaf, laughing like a fool. “You’ll die when you hear,” he called back. “Boy, do I wish I’d been there myself! So long, Walt.”
Alvarez reluctantly went the other way. In B corridor, somebody called after. him, “Hey, Walt? Hear about the banquet?”
He shook his head. The other man, a baker named Pedro, grinned and waved, disappearing up the curve of the corridor. Alvarez opened the door of Xenology Section and went in.
During his absence, somebody had put a new chart on the wall. It was ten feet high and there were little rectangles all over it, each connected by lines to other rectangles. When he first saw it, Alvarez thought it was a new table of organisation for the Satellite Service, and he winced: but on closer inspection, the chart was too complex, and bes
ides, it had a peculiar disorganised appearance; Boxes had been white-rubbed out and other boxes drawn on top of them. Some parts were crowded illegibly together and others were spacious. The whole. thing looked desperately confused; and so did Elvis Wemrath, who was en a wheeled ladder erasing the entire top right-hand corner. “N panga,” he said irritably. “That right?”
“Yes,” a voice piped unexpectedly. Alvarez looked around, saw nobody. The voice went on, “But he is R panga to his cousins and all their N pangas or bigger, except when—”
Alvarez leaned over and peered around the desk. There on the carpet was the owner of the voice, a pinkish-white spheroid with various appendages sprouting in all directions, like a floating mine: “George” the gorgon. “Oh, it’s you,” said Alvarez, producing his echo sounder and humidometer. “What’s all this nonsense I hear—” He began to prod the gorgon with the test equipment, making his regular morning examination, It was the only bright moment of his day; the infirmary could wait.
“All right,” Womrath interrupted, scrubbing furiously. “R panga to cousins—wait a minute, now.” He turned with a scowl, “Alvarez, I’ll be through in a minute. N panga or bigger, except when…” He sketched in half a dozen boxes, labeled them and began to draw connecting lines. “Now is that right?” he asked George.
“Yes, only now it is wrong panga to mother’s cousins. Draw again, from father’s cousins’ N pangas, to mother’s cousins O pangas or bigger… Yes, and now from father’s uncles’ R pangas, to mother’s uncles’ pangas cousins—”
Womrath’s hand faltered. He stared at the chart; he had drawn such a tangle of lines, he couldn’t tell what box connected with which. “Oh, God,” he said hopelessly. He climbed down off the ladder and slapped the stylus into Alvarez’s palm. “You go nuts.” He thumbed the intercom on the desk and said, “Chief, I’m going off now. Way off.”