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paused for a minute. “How long until we get to that beacon?” he asked.
“Eighty days,” I replied. “I’ll make it, somehow at least that far.”
He was silent again for a while, thinking hard. Finally he said, “No you won’t. You’ll bleed to death first. And the ship will take me back to base, where I’ll be a good zoo animal for somebody. I can’t operate your gadgets, you know. Besides, what am I to eat? We’ll starve first anyway.”
I thought hard through the pain, trying to see a hole in his logic, but I couldn’t.
He was right.
“So what do we do?” I asked him. “Go back to Moses? You know we can’t. And I can’t break an L-jump once committed.”
“I think we turn up the heat,” he said calmly.
“We don’t know what that will do,” I objected. “I may have killed the virus. On the other hand, it may be programmed to make us do things.”
He stood there a few seconds more, then said the words I most hated in all the universe, even more now because they were so very, very true.
“We have no choice,” he said.
I ordered the heat turned up slowly, to give us at least a chance to return to the freeze condition quickly if necessary.
I felt the heat flow, and it was wonderful. The temperature climbed slowly in the cabin and, as it did, I was tense, looking for nasty influences or signs of change.
There ‘were some of the latter. The color-sense returned intermittently at first, then it came on full. But that didn’t help muchjust made George a blue tinged with the hue of concern mixed with that of tenseness, probably like my own color. It showed clearly that the virus was still very much alive.
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“Feel any strange urges?” I asked him cautiously, still in too much pain to tell anything myself.
“I’m feeling hungry,” he replied. “And a hell of a lot more comfortable. That’s all.”
I chuckled. George was already picking up my bad habits. The preacher was doing some mild cussing.
“I’m going to increase the humidity,” I told him. “Temperature’s Patmos norm now, near as I can tell.”
I brought the humidity up to a level that would be stifling to a human but seemed normal to us.
“Blood flow’s slowing,” George noted.
I could feelfeel the pain subsiding, had tingling in areas which only moments before had been seas of pain.
“Feeling a little sleepy,” I told him. “The repair gang’s in all right.”
“Go ahead,” he urged. “I’ll stand watch over both of us.”
I slept.
Unable to look at my chronometer, I had no idea how long I’d been out, but the sleep must have been very deep. When I awoke, I felt excellent, refreshed. There was no pain, although I could feel caked blood on my fur.
I looked around. George had finally succumbed, and was snoring soundly nearby. I let him sleep.
I didn’t feel any different, I thought, checking my-self. Just well again. And hungry.
Or was I different.
The question didn’t disturb me as much as it should have, I suppose. I’d already faced it thenight? before.
The body felt comfortable, normal. I tried to remember being in my human form, yet although the memory was all there, it didn’t seem me, really. It was like looking back at someone else, some strange creature I’d once known and befriended, perhaps even liked.
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I looked over at George, sleeping peacefully, scanning him slowly.
He looked normal to me. He was people.
An effect of the virus? I wondered. No, probably not. I recalled people living on a hellhole of a world only theoretically Terraformed. The smell in the atmosphere, while not harmful, was revolting. I had to wear an air mask. But the peopleborn there, bom with that smell as a part of their normal existence hadn’t even noticed it. Even the old-timers, bom off-world, had adapted.
I’d seen cold worlds where temperatures I could hardly bear were normal, where people lived and loved and worked without a thought. Man had colo-nized a hundred such worlds, most of them very different from the world he’d come from. Even EarthI recalled the extremes of climate and altitude that they’d said was there. People who always lived near the poles on the ice cap. People who lived at elevations so high that other men couldn’t even breathe comfortably.
We adapt. That’s why man has survived and spread and dominated.
We adapt even to another form, I thought. Take to it as if it were our own.
If / felt this way, what of George? How long had I been nonhuman? Three months? Four? For him, it was twenty years, twenty years removed from humanity.
I took a look at the strangely and cruelly formed alien creature sleeping over there, and I knew that I was an alien, too.
The virus was an analog of a mechanical computer, of course. It had been programmed and it would fol-low in that program. Even here, cut off completely from Moses’ influence, it continued to do its job. And with that realization came the added knowledge that, if Moses were destroyed as he must be, I would spend the rest of my very long life as this creature.
Or would it be a long life? I wondered suddenly.
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What were we to eat for this tripand back? No grass and tubers here. I considered our predicament for a moment. How would we have eaten on Moses’ ship? Would I have ferried soil and seeds up there? The place had been cleared out, and he needed organic material to work with.
Suddenly, curiously, I had to go to the bathroom. It was the last thing I neededto get emptierbut I sighed and rose, trying not to make a clatter with my hooves as I went downstairs to the head.
When I got there, I discovered another problem. The head was small; obviously. It needed only to be a little place to sit. For a man to sit.
I just didn’t fit into it. For one thing, even getting myself in ass-end first, I couldn’t get over the seat. My rear aimed down between my legs.
The pressure was becoming unbearable, as it does when you gotta go and have to hold it, and I looked around anxiously for some place to put it. I was still considering my problem when nature forced the is-sue, and out it came onto the floor, loads of it.
When finished, I turned and looked around, as animals sometimes do. Using the implanted instincts of the virus, I did what all Choz do, and spread it out thinly until it covered quite a space. Stopping to think, I considered that this was going to be a messy tripor would be, if we had any food to make more waste.
Maybe we did, I thought suddenly. The probe still held the original soil sample, that part of it not used in analysis. There would also be the inevitable grass containing its tiny seeds. Virus-controlled, it grew al-most overnight, replenishing what the Choz of the field consumed the previous day.
Again the effort took some work. I had to operate controls not designed for me in order to lift the probe core to the plastic, vacuum-insulated viewing case. I knew it was there, heard it click in despite not be-ing able to sound it. Now I just had to get it into this
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atmosphere, into the ship proper. This was a problem, since the case was designed to keep it out.
I hammered at it with my foreleg, but it only went ‘thump, thump, thump against the hard plasticine bub-ble. First of all, I could only lift my forelegs, and they bent only inward. No pressure could be exerted by them except when weight was on them.
The run! I thought suddenly. Those big, powerful rear legs with a kick that could propel me many me-ters across the plains in one leap!
I turned, aimed as best I could, and, bracing my-self on my forelegs, kicked hard. Again! Again! And
again! The noise woke George, who called out to me in
concern.
“No problems!” I assured him, hoping that was true.
I told him what I was trying to do.
Back at it again. Kicking blind, I bent in a good deal of the side as well, but I didn’t care if a few cabinets I could no longer use got smashed. Suddenly I had it, heard it crack and shatter. I turned, and the probe stood exposed among shattered bubble fragments. It was partially open, so no
problem there.
George came down, and the two of us struggled to get the big ball, now open slightly on invisible hinges, out and onto the floor. Dirt and some grass fell out. The pinkness was almost too much, but, with willpower, we managed to get the stuff to my fertilizer
patch.
The release of tension being what it was, George had the same problem as I had had and added his fecal matter to the field.
We spent an agonizing day and night, consumed with hunger, checking on the patch constantly. Nothing else was on either of our minds. We could see that the virus was still there, and that it knew its job. Some of it, too, would have been in our fecal matter, and it would, we hoped, know our need.
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The process began, accelerated, and became fascinating to watch.
The material grew all right, forming a patch of pink on the floor, but not nearly enough for the two of us. As we watched, it increased its growth even more, developing at speeds far beyond anything normal, dy-ing, falling, and providing nurse material for new growth.
The virus was doing to the little sample what it had done to change mespeeding up cellular division to an enormous rate, using the new organic matter to create more.
“Where does it get the energy to do that?” I wondered.
“From the lights,” George replied. “Just like our plants get it from the sun. It takes that radiated energy and converts it to matter. We’re going to eat again, Bar!”
I was watching my former bedroom and lounge be-come a jungle.
“Yeah,” I replied, still glum. “So now how do we stop it?”
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Stopping the process proved easy. I could still control the lights and their intensity. When we’d spread the humus around and gotten a pretty good patch growing, enough to feed us and some left over, I turned down the lights. The growing slowed. Without that en-ergy, the virus could do only so much.
Some experimentation established the proper light level. We had to get water to the plants, of course, but that proved fairly easy. We just cooperated in working the washbasin, George holding the tap down. I would then lap up the water but not swallow it, and spit it over as much of the field as I could. I kept the humidity at almost maximum so the soil remained reasonably moist.
And, as the days went by, we helped by fertilizing our own field.
To human, civilized minds this all might sound grotesque, disgusting. But we were starving, for one thing, and, for another, we were not human and we were close to the earth. All of this was a normal and necessary part of existence.
Only four days out I started feeling strange. First, there was the additional motion in the vicinity of my stomach; occasionally I would feel bruised down there. Then, too, I seemed weaker than normal, much more so than could be explained by past injuries.
I mentioned it to George and he laughed.
“Sure! You’ve just been working and worrying too much to notice or remember. Look, scan my pouch.”
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I did, and it seemed enlarged and irregular. On impulse I did the same to myself. Yes, what I’d feared was a growth was there, only this was the first time I’d noticed that George’s condition matched my own.