‘That’s more like it!’ Agursky cried, feeling that he’d achieved something of a victory. ‘Your little plan didn’t work, so now let’s see you as you really are.’
Contact with the raw red pulp had triggered the thing’s hunger, ripped away its mask. In the face of instinctive urges it was incapable of keeping up the deception. Except … for all the time he’d spent with the creature, Agursky had never seen anything quite like this before. Its food was there and the thing from beyond the Gate knew it, but more than just hunger and blood-lust had been triggered. And again the scientist wondered: is it ill? Is it suffering? And if so, from what?
For as if the vibration of the tongue had been only the start of it, the catalyst, now the thing’s entire body was beginning to tremble. The human paleness of its protoplasm (Agursky could scarcely bring himself to think of it simply as ‘flesh’) was turning a slaty, almost leprous colour and tufts of coarse hair were sprouting everywhere. Limbs retracted, withering back into the main mass, and the vibrations of the whole began to come in regular, almost seismic spasms.
Watching it – fascinated despite himself, so that he was unable to take his eyes off it – Agursky’s lips drew back from his yellow teeth in a silent snarl of loathing. God, the thing resembled nothing so much as a vast, diseased placenta – with a head!
But its crimson eyes still glared at him, and even as he continued to observe it so the thing curled back its forked tongue to reach far back into its own throat. Its spasms became retching movements, until finally the creature coughed its tongue back into view. Balanced in the slightly upward curving fork was a quivering, misted-pearl sphere about as big as a small boy’s marble.
Agursky quickly stood up, went to the tank, crouched down and stared hard at the strange blob of matter in the creature’s gaping mouth. Whatever it was, he could see that it was alive! Its surface was aswim with a pearly film, but Agursky believed he could see rows of flickering cilia around its circumference, causing the sphere to turn vertically on its own axis where it rested in the fork of the thing’s tongue.
‘Now what – ?’ he started to say – but at that precise moment the creature thrust its head forward and its tongue uncoiled, hurling the pearly sphere directly at the scientist’s face!
Agursky automatically jerked back, went sprawling on his backside. A ridiculous reaction, for of course the creature could do him no harm while the thick glass of the tank separated them. That was where the shimmering blob of matter had landed, flattening itself to the glass wall and clinging there. But even as Agursky stood up and shakily dusted himself down, so the sphere was on the move.
It slipped down the inner wall of the tank, came to rest – however briefly – on the blood-slimed sand and pebbles. Then it resumed its spherical shape, floating like a pearly bubble on the film of blood. And with its myriad flickering cilia propelling it, it swiftly followed the stream back to its source beneath the feeder tube. Then, an astonishing thing:
Like a ping-pong ball riding a jet of water, the spheroid climbed the last thick trickle of gore to the tube’s inlet and disappeared inside. Frowning, jaw hanging slack, Agursky stepped to that side of the tank. The valves were still open, of course, and … it would be wonderful to isolate this thing, this – parasite? Is that what it was? Some parasitic creature inhabiting the alien’s body? Perhaps, but –
All sorts of ideas, words, were going through Agursky’s mind. He had likened the creature itself to a placenta in the moment before it coughed this thing up. Maybe the connection he’d made there hadn’t been too wild after all. The creature had seemed to undergo a sort of cataplasia, a reversion of its cells and tissues to a more primitive, almost embryonic form. Placenta, cataplasia, embryo -protoplast?
Egg?
Agursky turned off the valves and pump, pulled the trolley close and lifted the heavy lid of the food container. Inside, central on the bottom of the container, floating on a film of blood amidst a few lumps of red gristle and unidentifiable debris, the pearly sphere whirled in a blur of almost invisible cilia. Agursky stared at it and shook his head in bewilderment.