“Get up, Bob!” he said. “For the love of God, get up!”
It was late afternoon and the last rays of the sun were streaming through
the tent flap. Kemper’s face was haggard. It was as if he’d suddenly grown
old since I’d seen him less than twelve hours before.
“They’re encysting,” he gasped. “They’re turning into cocoons or
chrysalises or…”
I sat up quickly. “That one we found out there in the field!”
He nodded.
“Fullerton?’ I askecl
“We’ll go out and see, all five of us, leaving the camp and animals alone.”
We had some trouble finding it because the land was so flat and featureless
that there were no landmarks.
But finally we located it, just as dusk was setting in. The ball had split
in two – not in a clean break, in a jagged one. It looked like an egg after
a chicken has been hatched. And the halves lay there in the gathering
darkness, in the silence underneath the sudden glitter of the stars – a
last farewell and a new beginning and a terrible alien fact.
I tried to say something, but my brain was so numb that I was not entirely
sure just what I should say. Anyhow, the words died in the dryness of my
mouth and the thickness of my tongue before I could get them out.
For it was not only the two halves of the cocoon – it was the marks within
that hollow, the impression of what had been there, blurred and distorted
by the marks of what it had become.
We fled back to camp.
Someone, I think it was Oliver, got the lantern lighted. We stood uneasily,
unable to look at one another, knowing that the time was past for all
dissembling, that there was no use of glossing over or denying what we’d
seen in the dim light in the gully.
“Bob is the only one who has a chance,” Kemper finally said, speaking more
concisely than seemed possible. “I think be should leave right now. Someone
must get back to Caph. Someone has to tell them.”
He looked across the circle of lantern light at me.
‘Well,” he said sharply, “get going! What’s the matter with you?’
“You were right,” I said, not much more than whispering. “Remember how you
wondered about a defense mechanism?”
“They have it,” Weber agreed. “The best you can find. There’s no beating
them. They don’t fight you. They absorb you. They make you into them. No
wonder there are just the critters here. No wonder the planet’s ecology is
simple. They have you pegged and measured from the instant you set foot on
the planet. Take one drink of water. Chew a single grass stem. Take one
bite of critter. Do any one of these things and they have you cold.”
Oliver came out of the dark and walked across the lantern-lighted circle.
He stopped in front of me.
“Here are your diet kit and notes,” he said.
“But I can’t run out on you!”
“Forget us!” Parsons barked at me. “We aren’t human any more. In a few more
days…”
He grabbed the lantern and strode down the cages and held the lantern high,
so that we could see.
“Look,” he said.
There were no animals. There were just the cocoons and the little critters
and the cocoons that had split in half.
I saw Kemper looking at me and there was, of all things, compassion on his
face.
“You don’t want to stay,” he told me. “If you do, in a day or two, a
critter will come in and drop dead for you. And you’ll go crazy all the way
back home – wondering which one of us it was.”
He turned away then. They all turned away from me and suddenly it seemed I
was all alone.
Weber had found an axe somewhere and he started walking down the row of
cages, knocking off the bars to let the little critters out.
I walked slowly over to the ship and stood at the foot of the ladder,
holding the notes and the diet kit tight against my chest.
When I got there, I turned around and looked back at them and it seemed I
couldn’t leave them.
I thought of all we’d been through together and when I tried to think of
specific things, the only thing I could think about was how they always
kidded me about the diet kit.
And I thought of the times I had to leave and go off somewhere and eat
alone so that I couldn’t smell the food. I thought of almost ten years of
eating that damn goo and that I could never eat like a normal human because
of my ulcerated stomach.
Maybe they were the lucky ones, I told myself. If a man got turned into a
critter, he’d probably come out with a whole stomach and never have to
worry about how much or what he ate. The critters never ate anything except
the grass, but maybe, I thought, that grass tasted just as good to them as
a steak or a pumpkin pie would taste to me.
So I stood there for a while and I thought about it. Then I took the diet
kit and flung it out into the darkness as far as I could throw it and 1
dropped the notes to the ground.
I walked back into the camp and the first man I saw was Parsons.
“What have you got for supper?” I asked him.