The puudly would be relaxed and intent upon its business, engrossed in the budding forth of that numerous family that in days to come would begin the grim and relentless crusade to make an alien planet safe for puudlies… and for puudlies alone.
That is, if the puudly were here and not somewhere else. James was only a human trying to think like a puudly and that was not an easy or a pleasant job and he had no way of knowing if he succeeded. He could only hope that his reasoning was vicious and crafty enough.
His clawing hand found grass and earth and he sank his fingers deep into the soil, hauling his body up the last few feet of the rock face above the pit.
He lay flat upon the gently sloping ground, listening, tensed for any danger. He studied the ground in front of him, probing every foot. Distant street lamps lighting the zoo walks threw back the total blackness that had engulfed him as he climbed out of the moat, but there still were areas of shadow that he had to study closely.
Inch by inch, be squirmed his way along, making sure of the terrain immediately ahead before he moved a muscle. He held the gun in a rock-hard fist, ready for instant action, watching for the faintest hint of motion, alert for any hump or irregularity that was not rock or bush or grass.
Minutes magnified themselves into hours, his eyes ached with staring and the lightness that had been in him drained away, leaving only the hardness, which was as tense as a drawn bowstring. A sense of failure began to seep into his mind and with it came the full-fledged, until now unadmitted, realization of what failure meant, not only for the world, but for the dignity and the pride that was Henderson James.
Now, faced with the possibility, he admitted to himself the action he must take if the puudly were not here, if he did not find it here and kill it. He would have to notify the authorities, would have to attempt to alert the police, must plead with newspapers arid radio to warn the citizenry, must reveal himself as a man who, through pride and self-conceit, had exposed the people of the Earth to this threat against their hold upon their native planet.
They would not believe him. They would laugh at him until the laughter died in their torn throats, choked off with their blood. He sweated, thinking of it, thinking of the price this city, and the world, would pay before it learned the truth.
There was a whisper of sound, a movement of black against deeper black.
The puudly rose in front of him, not more than six feet away, from its bed beside a bush. He jerked the pistol up and his finger tightened on the trigger.
“Don’t,” the puudly said inside his mind. “I’ll go along with you.”
His finger strained with the careful slowness of the squeeze and the gun leaped in his hand, but even as it did he felt the whiplash of terror slash at his brain, caught for just a second the terrible import, the mind-shattering obscenity that glanced off his mind and ricocheted away.
“Too late,” he told the puudly, with his voice and his mind and his body shaking. “You should have tried that first. You wasted precious seconds. You would have got me if you had done it first.”
It had been easy, he assured himself, much easier than he had thought. The puudly was dead or dying and the Earth and its millions of unsuspecting citizens were safe, and, best of all, Henderson James was safe… safe from indignity, safe from being stripped naked of the little defenses he had built up through the years to shield him against the public stare. He felt relief flood over him and it left him pulseless and breathless and feeling clean, but weak,
“You fool,” the dying puudly said, death clouding its words as they built up in his mind. “You fool, you halfthing, you duplicate…”
It died then and he felt it die, felt the life go out of it and leave it empty.
He rose softly to his feet and he seemed stunned and at first he thought it was from knowing death, from having touched hands with death within the puudly’s mind.
The puudly had tried to fool him. Faced with the pistol, it had tried to throw him off his balance to give it the second that it needed to hurl the mind-blasting thought that had caught at the edge of his brain. If he had hesitated for a moment, he knew, it would have been all over with him.
If his finger had slackened for a moment, it would have been too late.
The puudly must have known that he would think of the zoo as the first logical place to look and, even knowing that, it had held him in enough contempt to come here, had not even bothered to try to watch for him, had not tried to stalk him, had waited until he was almost on top of it before it moved.
And that was queer, for the puudly must have known, with its uncanny mental powers, every move that he had made. It must have maintained a casual contact with his mind every second of the time since it had escaped. He had known that and… wait a minute, he hadn’t known it until this very moment, although, knowing it now, it seemed as if he had always known it.
What is the matter with me, he thought. There’s something wrong with me. I should have known I could not surprise the puudly, and yet I didn’t know it. I must have surprised it, for otherwise it would have finished me off quite leisurely at any moment after I climbed out of the moat.
You fool, the puudly had said. You fool, you half-thing, you duplicate…
You duplicate!
He felt the strength and the personality and the hard, unquestioned identity of himself as Henderson James, human being, drain out of him, as if someone had cut the puppet string and he, the puppet, had slumped supine upon the stage.
So that was why he had been able to surprise the puudly! There were two Henderson Jameses. The puudly had been in contact with one of them, the original, the real Henderson James, had known every move he made, had known that it was safe so far as that Henderson James might be concerned.
It had not known of the second Henderson James that had stalked it through the night.
Henderson James, duplicate.
Henderson James, temporary.
Henderson James, here tonight, gone tomorrow,
For they would not let him live. The original Henderson James would not allow him to continue living, and even if he did, the world would not allow it. Duplicates were made only for very temporary and very special reasons and it was always understood that once their purpose was accomplished they would be done away with.
Done away with… those were the words exactly. Gotten out of the way. Swept out of sight and mind. Killed as unconcernedly and emotionlessly as one chops off a chicken’s head.
He walked forward and dropped on one knee beside the puudly, running his hand over its body in the darkness. Lumps stood out all over it, the swelling buds that now would never break to spew forth in a loathsome birth a brood of puudly pups.
He rose to his feet.
The job was done, The puudly had been killed – killed before it had given birth to a horde of horrors.
The job was done and he could go home.
Home?
Of course, that was the thing that had been planted in his mind, the thing they wanted him to do. To go home, to go back to the house on Summit avenue, where his executioners would wait, to walk back deliberately and unsuspectingly to the death that waited.
The job was done and his usefulness was over. He had been created to perform a certain task and the task was now performed and while an hour ago he had been a factor in the plans of men, he was no longer wanted. He was an embarrassment and superfluous.
Now wait a minute, he told himself. You may not be a duplicate. You do not feel like one.
That was true. He felt like Henderson James. He was Henderson James. He lived on Summit avenue and had illegally brought to Earth a beast known as a puudly in order that he might study it and talk to it and test its alien reactions, attempt to measure its intelligence and guess at the strength and depth and the direction of its non-humanity. He had been a fool, of course, to do it, and yet at the time it had seemed important to understand the deadly, alien mentality.