Abe stepped closer. “Talk sense, Mare. For God’s sake, you’ll be committed.”
“When Menchen died, Abe, you told me you couldn’t understand. You can understand if you will only let yourself. Your weight estimates on the dragons are incorrect. The dragons are weightless, for they are not formed of matter. The life forms on this planet are composed of what we call abstract ideas. The dragons are truth— Truth. Truth personified. Through them, you can understand why.”
“He’s insane.”
“And there are other life forms here we haven’t seen. The dragons were the only ones trying to contact us, to break down our shelter. There is an opposite life form living in the ground. We thought those desert holes were caves, but they are not. There are worms that burrow miles beneath us and fester. The worms are Hate. Hate personified.”
Someone reached forward to grab him. He struggled and fell.
Miles below the sands, a long, caterpillar thing glowed momentarily and turned over.
The floor shook. Almost gleefully, the mob descended and covered Mario Dante until black swallowed and consumed him as he muttered lastly—”Ellen.”
Upstairs, the pair of discarded spectacles clamped to his head, Holden Twain stepped forward into the outside world, a blaster on his hip, determined to seek out every cave, every wormhole. . . .
A THIRD HAND
There seem to be two factions within the science fiction firmament these days, one which argues that the “traditional” sf story is the best that a writer can produce, the other saying the “traditional” form is a waste and that we must all advance into the avante-garde areas which “mainstream” fiction adopted years ago. It is an interesting battle to watch among science fiction fans, but for someone who sits on the fence post (like me) it is exasperating. Those who would condemn all advancement of style in the field are unrealistic—as are those who refuse to acknowledge the very fine storytelling qualities of “traditional” sf. Most often, I attempt to mix the two, and I think “A Third Hand” is a prime example of this. The hero, Ti, is a “new wave” hero as far as we can type a “new wave” hero. He is not a strong, brave, galaxy-cruising, square-jawed WASP, but a crippled, hung-up little guy with problems outside of his plot. But the story follows traditional patterns, a linear form. Except, perhaps, for the very end. Read the last sentence twice. Think about Timothy, and see what the story becomes for you. . . .
timothy was not human. Not wholly. If one included arms and legs in a definition of the human body, then Timothy did not pass the criteria necessary for admission to the club. If one counted two eyes in that definition, Timothy was also ruled out, for he had but one eye, after all, and even that was placed in an unusual position: somewhat closer to his left ear than a human eye should be and definitely an inch lower in his overlarge skull than was the norm. Then there was his nose. It totally lacked cartilage. The only evidence of its presence was two holes, the ragged nostrils, punctuating the relative center of his bony, misshapen head. There was his skin: waxy yellow like some artificial fruit and coarse with large, irregular pores that showed like dark pinpricks bottomed with dried blood. There were his ears: very flat against his head and somewhat pointed like the ears of a wolf. There were other things that would show up on a closer, more intimate examination, things like his hair (which was of an altogether different texture than any racial variant among the normal human strains), his nipples (which were ever so slightly concave instead of convex), and his genitals (which were male, but which were contained in a pouch just below his navel and not between his truncated limbs). There was only one way in which Timothy was remotely human, and that was his brain. But even here, he was not entirely normal, for his IQ was slightly above 250.
He had been a product of the Artificial Wombs, a strictly military project which intended to produce beings usable as weapons of war, beings with psionic abilities that could bring the Chinese to their knees. But when such gnarled results as Timothy rolled from the Wombs, the scientists and generals connected with the project threw up their hands and resigned themselves to more public condemnation.