The Hub: Dangerous Territory by James H. Schmitz

“Don’t worry—I can keep my mouth shut,” Machon told him. “Go ahead.”

“Well, I’ll give you Nile’s theory. It seems essentially correct. There’s that fraya-chalot symbiosis pattern. Temporarily it’s a complete symbiosis in every sense. The fraya has to be adapted to underwater living for a short period each year, then readapted promptly to surface living. And the frayas are pseudomammalian. Their bodies are no more capable of rearranging themselves suddenly to such a drastic extent than the sea beef’s or our own.”

“Wait a minute!” Machon said. “The way I got it, you did adapt—fantastically! You and Nile literally turned into sea hags, didn’t you?”

“We did—but we didn’t actually change. The chalot was building on what was there. What we had to do was supply material for it to work with. In other words, we ate. When the changes are of a minor kind, you get hungry. When they’re major ones, you find yourself periodically ravenous. The chalot builds its structures and maintains them. It has to be fed, or the structures collapse. If you don’t supply it with extraneous food, it starts in on your body reserves. We found that out. You feel you’re starving to death fast, which probably is exactly what would happen if you did nothing about it. So you eat compulsively.

“The chalot has to accomplish two things with its host animals. It has to enable them to get down into the fire forests and live there a time so they can eat the adult chalot plants and release the seeds of the plants by doing it. And it has to avoid killing or injuring the host, so the host can come back next year and repeat the process. It does nothing directly to the host body unless it has to draw on it for food. It turns itself into body supplements which combine with the host body to perform various functions. It’s an unstable unit, but it’s a unit which can exist for a while on the bottom of the ocean trenches.

“It remains a unit only as long as there is chalot around to keep it up. The frayas feed on the adult plants in the rifts, and they retain their underwater form throughout the breeding season. Then they’ve cleaned out the current crop of chalot and come back to the surface. The sea beef that got out into the Continental Rift here remained underwater breathers and feeders only for the days it took the cloud of chalot spores that had originated in the Tuskason Rift to pass through on the Meral. There are no chalot plants in the local fire forests, so up the beef came again. They were pretty plump animals when they were brought in, weren’t they?”

“Yes,” Machon said. “That fire forest diet didn’t hurt them any. In fact, they seem to have thrived on it. But what they’d put on was mostly fat.”

Parrol said wryly, “Uh-huh! Mostly fat . . . Nile and I picked up a load of the spores in one of the ranch farms here and probably another one in the water beyond the shelf. The spores added water-breathing equipment to our systems but nothing else, until we had to go down in the Tuskason Rift. We needed a complete change then and got it. We turned into the chalot’s human deep-water variant—sea hags—on the way. But we stayed sea hags only a few hours because the spores we’d originally absorbed here were being used up in maintaining the change structures, and there was no live chalot left in the Tuskason Rift to replace them.

“The chalot evidently has had genetic experience with a wide variety of hosts. The fraya is the only native host left, but Nandy-Cline was swarming once with pseudomammals of that class. We can assume that many of them had a similar symbiotic relationship with the chalot the fraya still has, because the adaptations the chalot performs vary with the species and are according to the needs of the species. The sea beef really showed much less change than the fraya does in its underwater form.

“On the other hand, the change from an air-breathing human to a deep-water sea hag is an extremely radical one. The chalot went all out on us, and at intervals during those hours we had to eat ravenously to give it what it needed to maintain the form. Lord, how we ate!

“And then we were up on the surface again and began to change back. Nile didn’t mention it at the time, but she suspected what was happening when she saw the manner in which we were changing back.”

“Yes?” said Machon.

“Fat,” Parrol said. “When all that elaborate, dense chalot structure which keeps you alive and in action under a thousand feet of ocean begins to break down, it’s converted into fat—the host body’s fat! That’s lovely if you’re a fraya. For them, it’s a kind of bonus they get out of their relationship with the chalot. They don’t have to eat for a month afterwards. In the sea beef it wasn’t too noticeable because the chalot hadn’t added too much to them to start with.

“But Nile and I—!”

He shook his head. “I won’t drag in all the grisly details, but Dr. Tay had to use plastiskin to hold us together. Literally. We were monstrous. He had us floating in tanks and kept whittling away at us surgically for the first ten days. After that, he figured a crash diet would see us through. It did, but it’s taken almost two months to get back to normal—and it wasn’t more than two weeks ago that Nile would let even me see her again.

“She’s got that old figure back now, but her vanity’s still hurt. She’ll get over it presently. But if anyone happens to smile when they mention something overweight—like sea beef—to her for another month or so, my guess is they’ll still be inviting a fast fist in the eye.”

The Demon Breed

Chapter 1

As the pain haze began to thin out, Ticos Cay was somewhat surprised to find he was still on his feet. This had been a brutally heavy treatment—at moments it had seemed almost impossible to control. However, he had controlled it. The white-hot sensations, which hadn’t quite broken through with full impact into consciousness, faded to something like a sullenly lingering glow. Then that faded too. His vision began to clear.

Cautiously he allowed himself to accept complete awareness of his body again. It was still an unpleasant experience. There were sharp twinges everywhere, a feeling of having been recently pierced and sliced by tiny hot knives; the residue of pain. The lasting damage caused by one of these pain treatments to the human nervous system and sensory apparatus was slight but measurable. The accumulative effect of a series of treatments was no longer slight; and there had been over twenty of them during the past weeks. Each time now, taking stock of the physical loss he had suffered during the process, Ticos wondered whether he would be forced to acknowledge that the damage had spread to the point where it could no longer be repaired.

However, it hadn’t happened on this occasion. His mind was fogged over; but it always was for a short while after a treatment. Reassured, he shifted attention from his internal condition to his surroundings.

The big room had come back into focus. Most of it was dark because the demons had cut out all but a central section of the ceiling illumination. There remained a pool of light which enclosed most of the long worktable against which he leaned and the raised platform twenty feet away, from which they were watching him. The shelves and walls beyond, the rows of biological specimens, the arrays of analyzing and recording equipment, were in darkness.

Ticos Cay looked about, taking it in, drawing the trappings of reality back around him. He looked last at the demons.

“You succeeded again in avoiding the feeling of pain?” asked the small one of the three.

Ticos considered. The identity of the small demon was still blurred but coming clear. Yes, his name was Koll . . . the Great Palach Koll. One of the most influential among the leaders of the Everliving. Second in command of the Voice of Action. . . .

Ticos admonished himself: Be very careful of Koll!

He made a sound between what might have been a muttering attempt to speak and a groan. He could have replied immediately. But it wouldn’t do to think foggily while being interrogated—and particularly not while being interrogated by Koll.

The three stared silently, unmoving. Their skins, harnesses and other equipment gleamed wetly as if they had come out of the sea only minutes before entering the room. Which might be the case; salt water was the demons’ element, and they became sick and uncomfortable if they remained too long away from it. The one to the right of Koll held a device with a glowing blue eye. When the glow brightened, a pain treatment was about to begin. The one at the left of Koll had a weapon trained on Ticos. These two were squat heavy creatures hunkering on muscular hopping legs. Ticos had been obliged to watch one of their kind wrap his arms around the rib cage of a man and crush the man slowly to death without apparent effort.

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